Russia Invades Ukraine. Again

POSTED BY: captaincrunch
UPDATED: Tuesday, September 15, 2026 15:53
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SIGNYM

Thursday, February 23, 2023 5:32 AM (P)

The neocons thought they had a "no fail" plan to collapse Russia. One year later, the plan still hasn't succeeded despite the neocons successively doubling down, like any obsessed gambler.

The neocons should take some advice from Kenny Rogers

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake

SECOND

Thursday, February 23, 2023 7:27 PM (P)

United West, divided from the rest: Global public opinion one year into Russia’s war on Ukraine

Citizens in China, India, and Turkiye prefer a quick end to the war even if Ukraine has to concede territory. People in these non-Western countries, and in Russia, also consider the emergence of a multipolar world order to be more probable than a bipolar arrangement.

A year after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, there is little doubt the war is a turning point in world history. The conflict has challenged Europeans’ most basic assumptions about their security, brought the spectre of nuclear confrontation back to their continent, and disrupted the global economy, leaving energy and food crises in its wake.

Yet while Russia’s aggression is an event of global significance, people in different parts of the world have experienced and interpreted it in diverse ways. According to a former national security adviser to the prime minister of India, “for many parts of the globe, a year of war in Ukraine has done less to redefine the world order than to set it further adrift, raising new questions about how urgent transnational challenges can be met.” In contrast to opinion in the West, people in many non-Western countries appear to believe that the post-cold war era is finished. They do not expect the next international order to be characterised by polarisation between two blocs led by the United States and China; instead, they see as more likely a fragmentation into a multipolar world.

The key findings of a new multi-country global poll indicate that, a year since Russia’s war on Ukraine began, the US and its European allies have regained their unity and sense of purpose. But the study also reveals a wide gap between the West and the ‘rest’ when it comes to their desired outcomes for the war and differing understandings of why the US and Europe support Ukraine. The poll took place in December 2022 and January 2023 in nine EU countries and Great Britain, and in China, India, Turkiye, Russia, and the US (the CITRUS countries, to use the shorthand of the University of Oxford’s Europe in a Changing World project). Its results suggest that Russia’s aggression in Ukraine marks both the consolidation of the West and the emergence of the long-heralded post-Western international order.

The new consensus among European governments is that only a Ukrainian victory will stop Putin’s war. Although significant numbers of European citizens still wish the war to cease as soon as possible, the poll appears to show a clear trend over the last year towards preferring Ukraine to win even if the conflict endures some time longer. Americans similarly believe that Ukraine must regain its territory if lasting peace is to be secured.

In contrast, people in non-Western countries possess a clear preference for the war to end now – even if it means Ukraine having to give up territory. In China, a plurality of those asked (42 per cent) agree that the conflict between Russia and Ukraine needs to stop as soon as possible, even if it means Ukraine giving control of areas of its territory to Russia. This desire to end the war soon is even stronger in Turkiye (48 per cent) and India (54 per cent). It is worth noting, however, that almost a third of people in both these countries would prefer Ukraine to regain all of its territory, even if it means a longer war or more Ukrainians being killed and displaced.

More at https://ecfr.eu/publication/united-west-divided-from-the-rest-global-p
ublic-opinion-one-year-into-russias-war-on-ukraine/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

SECOND

Thursday, February 23, 2023 7:59 PM (P)

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Putin is very trustworthy... for Russians. Russians can count on him for looking out for their interests while maintaining national sovereignty.

I wish I could say the same for our politicians, who are so much more concerned with small faraway nations and the poor illegal migrants that they forget their own citizens.

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
The neocons thought they had a "no fail" plan to collapse Russia. One year later, the plan still hasn't succeeded despite the neocons successively doubling down, like any obsessed gambler.

The neocons should take some advice from Kenny Rogers

I noticed a disturbing trend with people who defend Putin and/or Trump: to the very end of their lives, they insist Putin and Trump are doing what is best for Putin's and Trump's people. I sure would like for them to seek out some tangible proof of that rather than hear them tell me their feelings about Putin and Trump. If they had some measured, solid, hard proof then I would not have the queasy "feeling" that Putin's and Trump's people are hollow inside, empty vessels that Putin and Trump fill with patriotic feelings.

If Russians compared their lives and economy to another country, Canada for example, they could not rationally be saying Putin is doing what is best for Russians. Similarly, North Koreans could not rationally be saying Kim is doing what is best for North Korea, but only if North Koreans compare themselves to South Koreans. Somehow the comparisons never get made, perhaps because Putin and Kim discourage rational comparisons, preferring emotional comparisons such as who is most likely to use H-bombs and is most willing to die for their maximum leader.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

SECOND

Thursday, February 23, 2023 10:21 PM (P)

How Russia Uses Retired US Colonel’s Ukraine Misinformation for Domestic Propaganda

On February 15, Russia’s RIA Novosti state news agency quoted retired U.S. Colonel Douglas Macgregor’s interview with the “Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom” program, streamed on YouTube that same day.

The Russian translation of Macgregor’s claim isn’t precise but represents his ideas accurately:

"We just don't have ammunition to send. We have reached the limit; our own reserves are rapidly coming to an end."

This statement is misleading and fits into the Kremlin’s anti-U.S. and anti-Ukraine propaganda targeting Russia’s domestic audiences.

In reality, for most categories of ammunition, the U.S. can provide support to Ukraine indefinitely. Only for two types of ammunition -- 155 mm artillery ammunition, which includes a wide variety of non-precision projectiles, and 155 mm Excalibur GPS-guided precision artillery shells -- the United States may have a shortage in the coming years if it doesn’t replenish. However, the U.S. has already moved to increase munitions production to avoid shortages. Another way to prevent ammunition shortages is to purchase it from third countries. The U.S. military has already purchased Soviet-standard 152 mm and 122 mm artillery shells and 125 mm tank shells outside the United States.

According to the Pentagon, “Since 2014, the United States has committed approximately $24 billion in security assistance to Ukraine and approximately $21.2 billion since the beginning of Russia's unprovoked, full-scale invasion on February 24.”

Russian use of Macgregor’s misinformation

1) On December 15, 2021, when the United States was warning about an imminent Russian invasion of Ukraine and the Kremlin was denying any such plans, RIA Novosti reported it was unlikely that the Ukrainian army could withstand a Russian military invasion for more than three to four days. The agency quoted an article in The National Interest written by Macgregor and former CIA officer George Beebe:

“Under these circumstances, it is not unreasonable to assume that Russian ground forces would reach their operational objectives along the Dnieper River in as little as seventy-two to ninety-six hours.”

However, the Russian troops were unable to reach their goals in the Dnipro River basin even by mid-March 2022.

2) RIA Novosti quoted Macgregor again on March 6 as telling Fox Business that the Russian army in Ukraine was being very careful to protect civilians:

“The colonel noted that the Russian side is trying to act as carefully as possible and minimize damage, unlike, in particular, the US army in Iraq. He also expressed the opinion that the defeat of the Armed Forces of Ukraine is inevitable, and President Zelensky is trying to delay it by any means.”

That claim was also false. Ukrainian and international authorities, including the United Nations, reported mass atrocities against Ukrainian civilians allegedly committed by the Russian troops, some of which potentially constitute war crimes.

Amnesty International, a London-based human rights group, reported on February 25, 2022, that the Russian army had carried out indiscriminate missile and bomb strikes on civilian targets in Ukraine. In just the first five days of the war, at least 102 Ukrainian civilians were killed (including seven children) and 304 injured, according to the United Nations.

3) On March 25, 2022, RIA Novosti quoted Macgregor as falsely claiming in an interview with the “Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom” YouTube show that a majority of the residents of eastern Ukraine were Russians. Calling the Russia-occupied regions of eastern Ukraine “these republics,” in language used by the Kremlin’s disinformation campaign, Macgregor said:

“These republics are fundamentally pro-Russian. And, in general, mostly Russians live in eastern Ukraine. … They should not be forced to speak Ukrainian, write Ukrainian, they are not Ukrainians.”

But the 2001 census, the last before Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, showed that most of

SIGNYM

Thursday, February 23, 2023 10:28 PM (P)

Since everything you post about Russia comes from an unfathomably deep well of ignorance and disinformation, your opinions are tossed in the trash, where they belong.

And since everything you post about Trump supporters is equally stupid, that goes into the trash, too. I will say this about Trump: he had four good ideas,

Stop engaging in feckless war
Protect our southern border
Withdraw from "free trade" agreements that destroy our sovereignty
Repatriate capital

He was ineffective implementing them. And he had a lot of crappy ideas, too. But UNLIKE BIDEN*, OBAMA, the CLINTONS, GWB- he had America's interests at heart. Which is more than I can say for you, since you OBVIOUSLY hate most Americans

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake

SIGNYM

Thursday, February 23, 2023 10:42 PM (P)

One thing Trump never would have done: Given the WHO control over an American pandemic response

Quote:
Republican Senators Push Back Against Accord Giving WHO Power Over US Pandemic Response

https://www.theepochtimes.com/republicans-push-back-against-accord-giv
ing-who-power-over-us-pandemic-response_5070968.html

American policies should be to protect American interest, not to pander to a globalist plan

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake

SIGNYM

Friday, February 24, 2023 1:40 AM (P)

Quote:
Russia’s Declaration of Independence — A Review of Putin’s Speech to Russia’s National Assembly

21 February 2023 by Larry Johnson

Reflecting on Putin’s long awaited speech to Russia’s national assembly I was struck by some similarities with Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. What do I mean? Jefferson started with his iconic preamble (i.e., We hold these truths to be self-evident . . .) and then proceeded to present an indictment of Great Britain that created the predicate for the rebellion of the Colonies:

The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

That is precisely what Putin did in the first 45 minutes of his speech — he presented the “history of repeated injuries and usurpations” by the United States and NATO that forced Russia’s hand to undertake the Special Military Operation. Here are some of the key points:

* Russia did everything possible to solve the problem in Ukraine by peaceful means. But the statements of Western leaders turned into a forgery and a lie.

The West supplied weapons, trained the nationalist battalions. Even before the start of the SMO, negotiations were underway on the supply of air defense systems and aircraft. We remember Kyiv’s attempts to obtain nuclear weapons.

The United States deployed bases and biological laboratories near our borders, mastered the theater of military operations, prepared Ukraine for a big war.

We received a refusal on all fundamental positions. It became clear that the go-ahead for the implementation of aggression had been given. The threat grew every day. By February 2022, everything was ready for the next punitive action of Kiev in the Donbass.

They spare no expense to encourage unrest and coups around the world. At a conference in Munich, Russia was blamed so that everyone would forget what the West had done in recent decades. Entire regions are in chaos. American experts say that as a result of the wars unleashed by the United States after 2001, more than 900 thousand people died, more than 38 million became refugees.

In the 1930s, the West opened the way to power in Germany for the Nazis, today they are making “anti-Russia” out of Ukraine, this project goes back to the 19th century, Austria-Hungary, Poland nurtured it to tear off historical territories from our country. *

Putin then shifted gears and identified red-lines that will escalate the current conflict from demilitarizing and de-nazifying Ukraine to a full scale war if the United States and NATO continue to fund the war and arm Ukraine with more sophisticated weapons. Putin said:

* The more long-range Western systems will come to Ukraine, the further we will be forced to move the threat away from our borders.

The goal of the West is to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia, to end us once and for all. We will respond accordingly, because we are talking about the existence of our country.

We remember what problems the late Soviet economy faced. The Russian economy was created on a market basis. However, in the end, our economy became oriented towards the West, as business was aimed at selling resources and making quick profits. It took years to break this trend, and we have achieved visible change.

The image of the West as a safe haven turned out to be fake. Those who considered Russia only as a source of income have lost a lot. In the West they were simply robbed.

In early February, a NATO statement was made with the actual demand for Moscow to “return to the implementation of the strategic offensive arms treaty”, including the admission of inspections to our facilities. We know that the West is involved in Kyiv’s attempts to strike at our strategic aviation bases. Now they still want to inspect our defense installations? This sounds like bullshit.

The United States and NATO open

SIGNYM

Friday, February 24, 2023 2:14 AM (P)

Russia has been calling the USA "not agreement capable", with good reason, for years.

Medvedev's comment on the START treaty:

Quote:
Yesterday we had an address by the President of Russia to the Federal Assembly, in which, among other things, he announced the suspension of our participation in START III. A long overdue decision, the inevitability of which I noted last year. A decision prompted by the war the United States and other NATO countries have declared on our country. A decision that will have a huge resonance in the world in general and in the United States in particular.

The reasoning of the American establishment so far has been this: we will shit all over you, we will supply huge volumes of weapons to the Kiev regime, we will work to defeat Russia, we will limit and destroy you, but strategic security is a separate issue. It is not related to the overall context of the U.S.-Russia relationship. It is almost a sacred cow.

And the reason for this is that the USA lost the nuclear arms race 10 years ago. So now we reap the rewards of our belligerence.

Quote:
This conclusion is worse than a crime-it’s a grave mistake by Americans. A mistake born of their mania grandiosa. Their sense of superiority and impunity. After all, it is obvious to all reasonable forces that if the U.S. wants to defeat Russia, then we are on the brink of a world conflict. If the U.S. wants to defeat Russia, we have the right to defend ourselves with any weapon, including nuclear weapons. As Putin rightly said: “It is impossible to defeat Russia on the battlefield. This is precisely why we have suspended (for now) START III. Let the elites in the U.S., who have lost touch with reality, think about what they have achieved. Let us also watch the reactions of the other NATO nuclear powers: France and Britain. Their Strategic nuclear forces were not usually included in the balance of nuclear warheads and carriers in the preparation of agreements between the US and the USSR (Russia), and it is high time to do so.

https://sonar21.com/are-russia-and-china-moving-towards-a-mutual-defen
se-pact/

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake

SECOND

Friday, February 24, 2023 2:35 AM (P)

Russian warlord’s feud with Putin’s generals explodes into the open with gruesome PR campaign

Updated 2:39 PM EST, Thu February 23, 2023

Prigozhin posted a picture on Telegram showing the bodies of several dozen slain Wagner fighters, piled unceremoniously in a courtyard. Alongside that shocking photo, he posted the image of a formal request from Wagner for more ammunition, pointing the finger of blame squarely at the Russian Ministry of Defense for squandering those lives.

“This is one of the gathering places of the dead,” Prigozhin said. “These are the guys who died yesterday due to the so-called ‘shell starvation’ [by the Russian MOD]. There should have been five times fewer of them. So mothers, wives and children will get their bodies.”

What was the rationale behind this ghoulish spectacle?

Russian President Vladimir Putin has no clear successor, and some political insiders speculated that some opportunistic upstart – a Prigozhin, for instance – might sense a potential opening or chance to build a power base independent of Putin.

Certainly, Prigozhin’s outbursts would have been unthinkable before February 24, 2022, when open criticism of the defense leadership by a military contractor would not have been tolerated. Earlier this week, Prigozhin escalated his spat with Shoigu and Gen. Valery Gerasimov, the chief of Russia’s General Staff, accusing them of “treason” for their alleged failures to support and supply the Wagner group in Ukraine.

More at https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/23/europe/russia-ukraine-yevgeny-prigozhin
-wagner-campaign-intl-cmd/index.html

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

SECOND

Friday, February 24, 2023 3:38 AM (P)

Russia claims Ukraine is planning a false flag attack on Moldova

The warning, announced on the Russian Defense Ministry’s Telegram account, suggested the troops involved would dress up as Russians. “As a pretext for the invasion, it is planned to stage an alleged offensive of Russian troops from the territory of Transnistria,” the message warned, referring to the pro-Russian breakaway region of Moldova. “To do this, the Ukrainian saboteurs participating in the staged invasion will be dressed in the uniform of the military personnel of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation.”

In the build-up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine a year ago, the Kremlin attempted to stage or mock up a number of incidents in the Luhansk and Donbas regions which they claimed were Ukrainian military actions targeting pro-Russians. Alarmingly for Moldova, it was all just a pretext for Russia's all-out assault on Ukraine.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/russia-claims-ukraine-plans-false-flag-f
ake-attack-on-moldova

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

SECOND

Friday, February 24, 2023 2:54 PM (P)

UN resolution demanding Russia’s immediate, unconditional withdrawal from Ukraine supported by 141 nations

The demand that Russia withdraw was a bitter pill for Moscow’s friends. Besides Russia, the other no votes were Belarus, Eritrea, Mali, Nicaragua, North Korea and Syria. The 32 abstentions included China, Iran, India and South Africa and other developing countries that have remained mostly neutral or skeptical of Western motives.

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said before the vote that “never in history has the line between good and evil been so clear.” But no line will ever be clear to people who make excuses for Trump.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-n-nations-call-for-russia-to-exit-ukrai
ne-as-war-nears-one-year-mark-e8506794?mod=djemalertNEWS

India abstained from the vote because of oil: "How much money did India save in a year by buying Russian fuel?" https://qz.com/how-much-money-has-india-saved-by-buying-russian-fuel-1
850153966 If India had voted, then millions of barrels of discounted oil per week would not be sold by Russia to India.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

SECOND

Friday, February 24, 2023 2:54 PM (P)

You can’t understand the war in Ukraine without knowing history

By Timothy Snyder

Timothy Snyder is the Levin professor of history at Yale University and the author of “The Road to Unfreedom” and “Bloodlands.” His updated audio edition of “On Tyranny” includes 20 new lessons about Ukraine.

Teaching a lecture class on Ukrainian history last fall, I felt a touch of the surreal. The war in Ukraine had been going on for half a year when I began. A nuclear power had attacked a state that had given up its nuclear weapons. An empire was trying to halt European integration. A tyranny was attempting to crush a neighboring democracy. On occupied territories, Russia perpetrated genocidal atrocities with clear expressions of genocidal intent.

And yet, Ukraine was fighting back. Ukrainians resisted the nuclear blackmail, scorned the vaunted empire and took risks for their democracy. At Kyiv, Kharkiv and, later, Kherson, they beat back the Russians, halting the torture, the murder and the deportation.

We were at a historical turning point. But where was the history? The television screens were full of Ukraine day in and day out, and the one thing any viewer could say with confidence was that the commentators had never studied Ukraine. I heard from my former students, now in government or in journalism, that they were glad to have taken Eastern European history. They said that they were a little less surprised than others by the war; that they had more reference points.

The contrast between the historical importance of this war and the lack of coursework in history reveals a larger problem. We know too little history. We have designed education to be about technical questions: the how of the world. And solving everyday problems is very important.

But if we deprive ourselves of history, everything is a surprise: 9/11, the financial crisis, the storming of the Capitol, the invasion of Ukraine. When we are shocked out of the everyday but have no history, we grope for reference points, and become vulnerable to people who give us easy answers. The past then becomes a realm of myth, in which those with power generate narratives most convenient to themselves.

Russian President Vladimir Putin told a story about the past that had nothing to do with history. Russia and Ukraine, according to him, were conceived together in a ruler’s baptism a thousand years ago. They shared the same culture, and therefore should be ruled by the same person. If anything else seemed to happen, it was not really history. Should Ukrainians not believe that they were Russians, this was the nefarious work of outsiders. Putin not only said such things; he had memory laws passed to prevent Russians from being challenged by history, and even had the word “Ukraine” stricken from textbooks.

As logic, this is circular; and as politics, it is tyrannical. If I can claim that Canadians are Americans because they speak the same language, or because we share a common history, that would strike us as an idiotic reason to order an invasion. When a dictator claims the power to define other people’s identity, then the question of their own freedom never arises. If identity is frozen forever at the whim of a ruler, citizens soon find themselves without choices.

As we observe where this logic led Russians, we begin to question the validity of such stories. But it shouldn’t have taken such an obvious atrocity for us to doubt. Until recently, far too many commentators were happy to go along with Putin: Russia and Ukraine were somehow eternally alike, people who spoke Russian were somehow Russians, culture as defined by a dictator was destiny.

It was surreal in a different way when millions of people joined my class online. Americans had recognized that something was wrong with the Russian myth but did not know how to fill the gap. It was heartening to hear, in the thousands of emails I received, that the gap could be filled by history. It was a lively semester; history was getting the students thinking. When we think historically, we recogni

SECOND

Friday, February 24, 2023 5:03 PM (P)

The Ukraine War Could Mean the End of Russia

Historically Russia always succumbed to centrifugal forces each time it suffered a defeat on the battlefield – this happened in 1905 after it lost to Japan, in 1917 after it lost to Germany in Europe, and then again in 1991 after it lost to the United States at the end of the Cold War.

It’s worth remembering that while in 1913 the Russian imperial court celebrated three hundred years of Romanov rule, with unparalleled pageantry in St. Petersburg and across the country, a mere four years later the country was wracked by two revolutions, while the great emperor Nicolas II and his family were butchered by the Bolsheviks. The empire was no more.

Little attention has focused on what might happen in Russia in the wake of this incredible folly committed by Putin last February. One question that ought to be on everyone’s mind is: where is Russia heading (after this war)?

What Putin Wants and What History Teaches

Putin’s Russia is re-litigating 1991 – in that sense, it is another aspirational empire, much like interwar Germany – still convinced that the Russian people can reclaim their imperial place in the sun once the treachery of its politicians has been expunged. Putinism is much like the Dolchstoßlegende (Stab-in-the-back myth) narrative during the Weimar Republic insofar as there is a sense among the citizenry that the Russian military never lost against the West, but was subverted by politicians – cowardly Gorbachev, drunken Yeltsin, you name it.

This imperial resentment gave Germany Adolf Hitler and a war that lit Europe on fire and which did not end until the back of German imperialism was finally and unequivocally broken. At a risk of over-rationalizing history, this is where Russia is today.

Putin’s claim that he is restoring the great Russian people, velikiy russkiy narod, follows the same tropes of resentment and entitlement to empire that Europe endured in the mid-20th century when Germany was intent on re-litigating Versailles.

And if Europe is to know lasting peace, the Russian armies that have raced into Ukraine must be unequivocally defeated in such a way that it shatters all illusions of Russian empire in the minds of Russian citizens.

More at https://www.19fortyfive.com/2023/02/the-ukraine-war-could-mean-the-end
-of-russia/

The Russo-Japanese War 1904 to 1905
https://www.history.com/topics/asian-history/russo-japanese-war
The costly and humiliating series of Russian defeats in the Russo-Japanese War left the Russian Empire demoralized, added to Russians’ growing anger at the failed policies of Czar Nicholas II, and would fan the flames of political dissent that ultimately resulted in the overthrow of the government during the Russian Revolution of 1917.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

SECOND

Friday, February 24, 2023 7:23 PM (P)

Russian support for Putin’s war in Ukraine is hardening

Putin has unleashed a wave of repression not seen since his KGB hero Yuri Andropov ruled, jailing citizens for the slightest hints of questioning of his official line, a mix of Russian imperial and Soviet nostalgia that has been rushed into curricula for schools and universities across the country. Artists, writers and actors have been hounded from their jobs for even suggesting critical views, their works and exhibits replaced by new ones scrubbed for adherence to the neo-Soviet “traditional values” Putin wrote into law. Schoolchildren denounce teachers and parishioners priests for suggesting peace instead of war.

To shore up support, his government has doled out cash payments to citizens in the country’s impoverished regions and shut down the few remaining media outlets that challenged the official state version of events. In stage-managed events lavishly covered by the state media, Putin maintains the image that the war is far away, rarely referring to it directly, highlighting economic successes, new welfare benefits and renovated clinics. That was the message of his state-of-the-nation speech this week, which blamed the conflict on the US and its allies but offered no hint of when it might end. Instead, Putin offered new benefits to veterans and their families, touting the value of combat experience as the “best school of life.”

So far, the message is working. Even as the invasion has dragged on far longer than the few days that the Kremlin originally hoped and casualties have mounted into the tens of thousands, the majority of Russians say they are ready to keep fighting, according to independent polls. Only about a fifth of Russians want to bring a quick end to the war if that means admitting defeat, according to a Kremlin consultant.

Around the country, Putin’s explanation that Russia is fighting not Ukraine but the entire “collective West,” a narrative adopted after a string of defeats at the hands of Kyiv’s forces, has resonated more than the initial claims the war was about removing the government in Kyiv, according to pollsters. The fact that the US and its allies aren’t actually fighting doesn’t shake that conviction.

The perceived strength of the support reinforces the Kremlin’s confidence that it can triumph in the conflict by outlasting Ukraine and its allies, even if that means tolerating much greater sacrifice, according to people close to the leadership.

Since he came to power in 2000, Putin has been remaking Russia to harden his control over society for just this kind of conflict, crushing potential threats to his power and eradicating opponents and dissenting views. Since he sent troops into Ukraine a year ago, that effort has accelerated exponentially. Staffers are already laying plans for his re-election campaign in 2024, which would keep him in power at least until 2030, the people said.

The Kremlin spent two decades forging the ‘Putin Majority’ — the tens of millions of Russians sure that the former KGB operative knows best — and is confident it’s still solid and ready for whatever he decides, the people said. That’s likely to be a war that may last years, but also could be a temporary truce to win time to gird for a new fight. At the same time, surveys show that anything that brings the war close to home for Russians — such as last year’s mobilization of 300,000 reservists — fuels alarm and support for a negotiated settlement.

The educated middle class in the country’s largest cities that had for decades been less antagonistic toward the West has been transformed or eradicated. Upwards of a million Russians, many of them young professionals, have left the country in the biggest exodus since the 1990s. Those in the elite once considered relative ‘liberals’ who’ve stayed are cowed into silence by fear of retribution or have embraced the Kremlin’s anti-western line.

Dmitry Medvedev, who as Putin’s hand-picked president from 2008-2012 embodied the hopes of the ‘liberal’ wing, has become on

SECOND

Saturday, February 25, 2023 4:49 PM (P)

Russia's current plan to take over Ukraine is to exhaust the country and its military over a long campaign, rather than focusing on taking new territory, according to the latest report from the UK Ministry of Defence.

Defence Intelligence

UPDATE ON UKRAINE
24 February 2023

INTELLIGENCE UPDATE

• Since 2014 Russia's strategic goal in Ukraine has highly likely been consistent: to control its neighbour. Over 2014-2021, it pursued this objective through subversion, by fomenting an undeclared war in the Donbas, and by annexing Crimea.

• On 24 February 2022, Russia pivoted to a new approach and launched a full-scale invasion which attempted to seize the whole country and depose its government. By April 2022, Russia realised this had failed, and focused on expanding and formalising its rule over the Donbas and the south. It has made slow and extremely costly progress.

• In recent weeks, Russia has likely changed its approach again. Its campaign now likely primarily seeks to degrade the Ukrainian military, rather than being focused on seizing substantial new territory. The Russian leadership is likely pursuing a long-term operation where they bank that Russia's advantages in population and resources will eventually exhaust Ukraine.

https://twitter.com/DefenceHQ/status/1628997992039473153

The strategy outlined by the MOD matches what experts say Russia has been doing lately.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

SECOND

Saturday, February 25, 2023 5:24 PM (P)

Official: Explosion reported at Russian ammunition depot in occupied Mariupol

by The Kyiv Independent news desk
February 25, 2023 11:27 am

An explosion allegedly occurred at a Russian ammunition depot in occupied Mariupol, Donetsk Oblast, earlier on Feb. 24, reported Petro Andriushchenko, an advisor to the mayor of Mariupol.

Andriushchenko said, citing a local resistance group, that the depot was destroyed. The official did not provide further details.

On the morning of Feb. 25, Andriushchenko also said explosions were heard in near Yalta and Yurivka, the villages near Mariupol. According to him, numerous Russian troops had been temporarily stationed there.

Earlier on Feb. 23, Ukraine's Southern Command spokesperson Natalia Humeniuk said that the area of Russian-occupied Mariupol was "no longer completely unreachable" for Ukrainian forces.

Earlier the same day, the city council reported three explosions in Mariupol with "a high probability" of hitting the area where Russian troops had been temporarily stationed.

Mariupol, located on the Azov Sea in Donetsk Oblast, has been under Russian occupation since May 2022, following a three-month-long siege that destroyed most of the city.

https://kyivindependent.com/news-feed/official-explosion-reported-at-r
ussian-ammunition-depot-in-occupied-mariupol

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

SECOND

Sunday, February 26, 2023 6:27 PM (P)

My year of living under constant attack in Kyiv

Mariia Shuvalova writes:

At 5 a.m. on February 24, 2022, my husband woke me up in our Kyiv apartment. He had heard explosions.

In complete darkness, I tried to dress and pack documents, a laptop, and cash into a backpack. Immediately I started experiencing nausea, diarrhea, and pain in the bottom of my stomach. My period began three weeks earlier than it normally would (something that also happened to many Ukrainian women with whom I’ve spoken). And I also had COVID.

We went to our relatives’ place, as they had a basement.

On February 10, 2023, we were still in Kyiv, and I was once again ill with COVID. Russia continues to attack my country with missiles from jets and a frigate in the Black Sea, so I hear air raids almost constantly. But this morning, my husband woke me up and said, “Morning bombardments again, so we are going out to eat waffles.”

Our emergency backpacks—containing vital documents, cash, tactical first aid kit, knife, protein bars, coffee beans in chocolate, torch, lighters, warm socks, gloves, and a laptop with a power source—are always near our front door. This morning, we picked them up, and walked out—to a waffle cafe, located in a basement, with a sign on the door reading, “We Do Not Work During Massive Shellings!!!”

It’s been one year since Russia escalated its war on Ukraine to one of nationwide, full-scale military aggression. The act of going out for waffles is one way we try—despite living under mortal threats and enduring the collapse of the lives we once lived—to recreate what was once a normal world. These old routines don’t feel the same, though they are valuable as they give us the fleeting comfort of feeling we can control at least this one little thing.

Great danger forces you to appreciate basic things. Small stories make up big landscapes, like going out for waffles during airstrikes. Here are some reflections on living my life during wartime.

More at https://www.thedailybeast.com/my-year-of-living-under-constant-attack-
in-kyiv

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

SIGNYM

Monday, February 27, 2023 3:11 AM (P)

Pobrecito!
Maybe those ppl in Kiev should have thought twice about shelling Donetsk city. For 8 years.

*****

Bakhmut and western hills about to be encircled. Ukrainian lifespan at the Bakhmut front about 4 hours.

https://www.newsweek.com/bakhmut-life-expectancy-near-four-hours-front
lines-ukraine-russia-1782496

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake

SECOND

Monday, February 27, 2023 4:09 AM (P)

Putin Casts War as a Battle for Russia's Survival

President Vladimir Putin cast the confrontation with the West over the Ukraine war as an existential battle for the survival of Russia and the Russian people - and said he was forced to take into account NATO's nuclear capabilities.

A year since ordering the invasion of Ukraine, Putin is increasingly presenting the war as a make-or-break moment in Russian history - and saying that he believes the very future of Russia and its people is in peril.

"They have one goal: to disband the former Soviet Union and its fundamental part - the Russian Federation," Putin told Rossiya 1 state television in an interview recorded on Wednesday but released on Sunday.

The NATO and the West dismiss such narrative, saying their objective is to help Ukraine defend itself against an unprovoked attack.

President Vladimir Putin cast the confrontation with the West over the Ukraine war as an existential battle for the survival of Russia and the Russian people - and said he was forced to take into account NATO's nuclear capabilities.

A year since ordering the invasion of Ukraine, Putin is increasingly presenting the war as a make-or-break moment in Russian history - and saying that he believes the very future of Russia and its people is in peril.

"They have one goal: to disband the former Soviet Union and its fundamental part - the Russian Federation," Putin told Rossiya 1 state television in an interview recorded on Wednesday but released on Sunday.

The NATO and the West dismiss such narrative, saying their objective is to help Ukraine defend itself against an unprovoked attack.

Putin said the West wanted to divide up Russia and then control the world's biggest producer of raw materials, a step, he said, that could well lead to the destruction of many of the peoples of Russia including the ethnic Russian majority.

"I do not even know if such an ethnic group as the Russian people will be able to survive in the form in which it exists today," Putin said. He said the West's plans had been put to paper, though did not specify where.

The United States has denied that it wants to destroy Russia, while President Joe Biden has warned that a conflict between Russia and NATO could trigger World War Three, though he has also said Putin should not remain in power.

Putin said the tens of billions of dollars' worth of U.S. and European military assistance to Ukraine showed that Russia was now facing off NATO itself - the Cold War nightmare of both Soviet and Western leaders.

Ukraine says it will not rest until every last Russian soldier is ejected from Ukraine, including from Crimea which Russia annexed in 2014.

RUSSIA

Putin's existential framing of the war allows the 70-year-old Kremlin chief to gird the Russian people for a much more deeper conflict while it also allows him much greater freedom in the types of weapons he could one day use.

Russia's official nuclear doctrine allows for the use of nuclear weapons if they - or other types of weapons of mass destruction - are used against it, or if conventional weapons are used, which endanger "the very existence of the state."

Putin has signalled he is ready to rip up the architecture of nuclear arms control - including the big powers' moratorium on nuclear testing - unless the West backs off in Ukraine.

On Tuesday, he sought to underscore Russian resolve in Ukraine by suspending a landmark nuclear arms control treaty, announcing new strategic systems had been put on combat duty and warning that Moscow could resume nuclear tests.

Putin said Russia would only resume discussion once French and British nuclear weapons were also taken into account.

Russia, which inherited the Soviet Union's nuclear weapons, has the world's biggest store of nuclear warheads. It has more warheads that the United States, France and Britain combined, according to the Federation of American Scientists.

"In today's conditions, w

SIGNYM

Monday, February 27, 2023 4:21 AM (P)

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Putin Casts War as a Battle for Russia's Survival

Biden*, Blinken, Nuland, Sullivan and SECOND cast war in Ukraine as plan to destroy Russia.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake

SECOND

Monday, February 27, 2023 4:47 AM (P)

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Putin Casts War as a Battle for Russia's Survival

Biden*, Blinken, Nuland, Sullivan and SECOND cast war in Ukraine as plan to destroy Russia.

Signym, per usual, you misunderstand the situation completely.

Putin and Signym were shocked when Colonel Qaddafi died, suddenly, from a bayonet puncture in a very private spot, but the Colonel should have expected it because he was playing the role of a Strong Man. He was too old for that role (69 years), had been in the job too long (42 years), and had acquired many enemies. He didn’t have the sense to retire sooner. Likewise, Putin has been serving for an awfully long time, he is older than Qaddafi, and he is not a convincing actor in the role of Strong Man. He has created enemies by the millions. Putin is due for his own bayoneting.

Muammar Gaddafi Capture and assassination
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muammar_Gaddafi#Capture_and_assassinatio
n

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

JAYNEZTOWN

Monday, February 27, 2023 5:55 AM (P)

Hillary did she know there would be Slave Markets?

Second talks about Libya like Flooding the West with islamists was a good thing

with Russians you won't have people who go to a mosque five times a day, it will be chemical engineers, ex- soldiers good at math, people who fix your lawnmower or tv or hack, guys who know building and chemistry, thugs and killers and brawlers and ex drinkers and ex drug addicts and mafia type, physicist engineer, ex-KGB type, people mentally damaged from battles, some might even be part of a group in a factory and build hyper-sonic missiles....and its a good idea to flood these Russians across the former USSR and the rest of the world? maybe some Nuclear Engineers or someone who can home make a chemical or bio weapon
and all these mixed with real genuine 'refugees'

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

People are individuals. But Democrats don't understand that because all they want to do is throw everyone in intersectional boxes.

identity politics continues with Nu-Democrats

anyways some news

Putin casts war as a battle for Russias survival
ttps:// www.reuters.com/world/europe/putin-russia-must-take-into-account-nato-
nuclear-capability-state-tv-2023-02-26/

SIGNYM

Monday, February 27, 2023 8:28 AM (P)

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Putin Casts War as a Battle for Russia's Survival

Biden*, Blinken, Nuland, Sullivan and SECOND cast war in Ukraine as plan to destroy Russia.
Signym, per usual, you misunderstand the situation completely.

Putin and Signym were shocked when Colonel Qaddafi died, suddenly, from a bayonet puncture in a very private spot, but

SECOND doubles down on evil. Because a failed state where women (and men) are openly sold on the street as slaves is SO MUCH MORE PRFERABLE to a nation with a high standard of living and literacy!

Meanwhile

China openly sides with Russia and condemns USA bullying, I reference, forced regime changes, and hegemony.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/a-year-later-china-blames-us-hege
mony-not-russia-for-war-in-ukraine/ar-AA17NgmE

Wagner forces are hurriedly collecting Ukrainian bodies by the hundreds from around Bakhmut before the coming thaw starts them decaying.
Price of Russian oil holds firm at $71/ bbl.
China rattles EU cages at the Munich Security Conference.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake

SECOND

Monday, February 27, 2023 3:02 PM (P)

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

SECOND doubles down on evil. Because a failed state where women (and men) are openly sold on the street as slaves is SO MUCH MORE PRFERABLE to a nation with a high standard of living and literacy!

Meanwhile

China openly sides with Russia and condemns USA bullying, I reference, forced regime changes, and hegemony.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/a-year-later-china-blames-us-hege
mony-not-russia-for-war-in-ukraine/ar-AA17NgmE

Wagner forces are hurriedly collecting Ukrainian bodies by the hundreds from around Bakhmut before the coming thaw starts them decaying.
Price of Russian oil holds firm at $71/ bbl.
China rattles EU cages at the Munich Security Conference.

"Everything is going according to plan." - V. Putin.

Putin has spoken that phrase, or variations, a thousand times. That one little phrase is all it takes to cause even the most apparently monumental loss to be completely turned on its head. Putin has been reading TV Tropes to learn what villains say. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AllAccordingToPlan

You might not know this, Signym, but when the bad guy falls, be he a Libyan Strong Man like Colonel Muammar Gaddafi or a Russian Strong Man such as Tsar Nicholas II, the people who depended on him suffer also. That is why Strong Men should not be empowered. When Strong Man Putin finally gets what he deserves, the people depending on him will suffer. Maybe only a little. Maybe a great deal if the Russian Federation falls apart. That all could be prevented if Putin would step down early rather than continue on-and-on, with no scheduled endpoint, as Strong Man for Life.

Signym, before you insist that Putin was democratically elected, the same is true for Kim in North Korea. Kim always wins. Kim always is the Strong Man until he dies. North Korea has not done well economically because there is always a new Kim to be the Strong Man. Russia has not done well economically because of its version of Strong Men leading a nation where everything is going according to plan.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Russian_presidential_election

Kim Jong Un Wins 100% of Votes in North Korea Election
Young leader seals remarkable victory in country "seething with election atmosphere," according to state media.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/kim-jong-un-wins-100-votes-north-ko
rea-election-n49011

China's Xi allowed to remain 'president for life' as term limits removed
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-43361276

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

SECOND

Monday, February 27, 2023 5:48 PM (P)

Former Russian president, prime minister, and current Security Council Deputy Chairman Dmitry Medvedev issued a new round of threats to the West on Monday that the continued supply of arms to Ukraine will lead to atomic armageddon.

"Of course, the pumping in of weapons can continue .... and prevent any possibility of reviving negotiations," Medvedev said according to a Reuters report. "Our enemies are doing just that, not wanting to understand that their goals will certainly lead to a total fiasco. Loss for everyone. A collapse. Apocalypse. Where you forget for centuries about your former life, until the rubble ceases to emit radiation."

https://www.alternet.org/dmitry-medvedev-collapse-apocalypse-ukraine/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

JAYNEZTOWN

Monday, February 27, 2023 6:07 PM (P)

I think its wrong to say China is supporting Russia, as both China and India are calling for an end to the war the Chinese even recently pushed a peace plan.
Many of Russia's former allies are calling for Russian withdrawal.

At the UN votes the only countries to vote no in support of Moscow were Belarus, North Korea, Eritrea and Syria.

The West accuses Iran and North Korea of selling weaponry.

Belarus got directly involved in the war

Russia economy falling makes goods cheaper for India, Arabia, South America, China and other buyers of Russian goods.

Of course there are many on both sides selling guns and making profit from bloood for some it will be like business as usual.

testing new killer robots

and are wars becoming failures or stalemates...does anyone win wars anymore

interwebs opinions

Russia will not win this war
https://www.happierabroad.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=44918
'We come in Peace ... Shoot to Kill!' ...
https://forum.davidicke.com/index.php?/topic/29808-we-come-in-peace-sh
oot-to-kill/
War
Ukraine border
https://atthemac.proboards.com/thread/380/ukraine-border
https://www.city-data.com/forum/politics-other-controversies/3360156-u
kraine-war-1367.html
2022-2023 Russo-Ukrainian War
https://www.worldaffairsboard.com/forum/international-defense-geopolit
ics-discussion/europe-and-russia/1578933-2022-2023-russo-ukrainian-war/page506
Five futures for Russia Ukraine war
https://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=182943
Ukraine War Video
https://www.ozpolitic.com/forum/YaBB.pl?num=1648588695
Russian invasion of Ukraine ...They wouldn't be that stupid, would they?
https://www.avforums.com/threads/russian-invasion-of-ukraine.2386753/
Ukraine war and when Russia will collaps?
https://www.bikechatforums.com/viewtopic.php?t=334674&postdays=0&a
mp;postorder=asc&start=225
Interesting conversation about Ukraine, one year into the war
https://politicalhotwire.com/t/interesting-conversation-about-ukraine-
one-year-into-the-war.265437/
the show must go on?
Eurovision tickets to be allocated to displaced Ukrainians in UK
https://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/forum/topic/364326-eurovision-ti
ckets-to-be-allocated-to-displaced-ukrainians-in-uk/
Russian invasion of Ukraine
https://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/showthread.php?t=7173708
Ukraine Crisis
http://www.rationalskepticism.org/news-politics/ukraine-crisis-t57137.
html

SIGNYM

Tuesday, February 28, 2023 2:15 AM (P)

Quote:
Originally posted by JAYNEZTOWN:
I think its wrong to say China is supporting Russia, as both China and India are calling for an end to the war the Chinese even recently pushed a peace plan.
Many of Russia's former allies are calling for Russian withdrawal.

At the UN votes the only countries to vote no in support of Moscow were Belarus, North Korea, Eritrea and Syria.

But many nations, including China and India, abstained.

Also, what China presented was not a "peace plan". It didn't lay out terms.and concessions from each side. It wasn't even a "road map" (i.e. first this has to happen then that has to happen.,)

It was a set of principles for lasting peace, worldwide, which called for- among other things- an end to color revolutions, interference in other nation's internal affairs, respect for sovereignty etc and listed America's numerous invasions and destabilizations. China CLEARLY puts the blame for the Ukraine clusterfuck on the United States.

You should read the actual Chinese statements and not speak from such a deep well of ignorance.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake

SECOND

Tuesday, February 28, 2023 2:48 AM (P)

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

But many nations, including China and India, abstained.

Also, what China presented was not a "peace plan". It didn't lay out terms.and concessions from each side. It wasn't even a "road map" (i.e. first this has to happen then that has to happen.,)

It was a set of principles for lasting peace, worldwide, which called for- among other things- an end to color revolutions, interference in other nation's internal affairs, respect for sovereignty etc and listed America's numerous invasions and destabilizations. China CLEARLY puts the blame for the Ukraine clusterfuck on the United States.

You should read the actual Chinese statements and not speak from such a deep well of ignorance.

I know why an end to color revolutions is on Signym's list. An end to color revolutions is on Putin's list:

War in Ukraine ‘stems from the Orange Revolution, a humiliating ordeal for Putin’

Issued on: 26/02/2023 – 18:17

Text by: Lou ROMÉO

One year into the war that Russia launched against Ukraine, FRANCE 24 takes a closer look at the anti-Western rhetoric President Vladimir Putin used to justify the conflict, which is rooted in events in the early 2000s, according to historian Françoise Thom, an expert on post-Communist Russia.

On February 24, 2022, as a Putin speech was broadcast on television, Russian troops were penetrating into Ukrainian territory, initiating the most important military operation on European soil since World War II.

During his speech, the Russian president tried to justify the invasion with a brutal tirade against the Kyiv government, which he described as “neo-Nazi”, and against the perceived threat posed by NATO and the US against Russia.

This rhetoric, far from being new, dates back to Ukraine's Maidan Revolution in 2014 and Orange Revolution in 2004, according to historian Françoise Thom, an expert on post-Communist Russia, who spoke with FRANCE 24.

FRANCE 24: In February 2022, Putin justified the invasion of Ukraine by citing the necessity to shield Russia from NATO and the West. When was the first time the Kremlin used this rhetoric?

Françoise Thom: Vladimir Putin’s anti-Western rhetoric is long-standing. We can date the change in the Kremlin’s discourse to the colour revolutions between 2003 and 2004. At that time, a wave of anti-corruption and pro-democratic liberal movements were sweeping across several post-Soviet states, namely Georgia – the Rose Revolution – and in Ukraine where the Orange Revolution took place in 2004.

In my opinion, the ongoing war stems from the Orange Revolution, which was a humiliating ordeal for Putin. The candidate he backed, Viktor Yanukovych, lost the popular vote to a pro-European candidate, Viktor Yushchenko, in the 2004 elections.

The outcome was a slap in the face for Putin and he developed an intense hatred towards Ukraine and its people. Interpreting the turn of events as the result of US interference, the ex-KGB agent saw scheming by the US as the only reason for his candidate’s loss.

Putin’s paranoid rhetoric took root from that point on. As illustrated by Kremlin ideologist Vladislav Surkov in a 2004 text: “The enemy is on our doorsteps, we have to defend every Russian and every household against the West”.

During the 2007 Munich Security Conference, Putin challenged the West, especially the US. He then followed up by launching a reform of Russia’s military in 2008. The war against Ukraine therefore has very old roots. Far from an improvisation, the current conflict is part of a wider context tied to Russia’s row with the West.

FRANCE 24: US foundations were quite active in Ukraine and Georgia in the 1990s and 2000s. What was their role that Putin condemned?

Françoise Thom: Indeed, there were US foundations operating in Ukraine as well as in Georgia during the colour revolutions. They aimed to train a new generation of ex

SIGNYM

Tuesday, February 28, 2023 12:08 PM (P)

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

But many nations, including China and India, abstained.

Also, what China presented was not a "peace plan". It didn't lay out terms.and concessions from each side. It wasn't even a "road map" (i.e. first this has to happen then that has to happen.,)

It was a set of principles for lasting peace, worldwide, which called for- among other things- an end to color revolutions, interference in other nation's internal affairs, respect for sovereignty etc and listed America's numerous invasions and destabilizations. China CLEARLY puts the blame for the Ukraine clusterfuck on the United States.

You should read the actual Chinese statements and not speak from such a deep well of ignorance.
I know why an end to color revolutions is on Signym's list. An end to color revolutions is on Putin's list:

So, I take it you would be OK with Russia or China .... or Soros ... funding revolution in the USA?

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake

SECOND

Tuesday, February 28, 2023 3:48 PM (P)

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

So, I take it you would be OK with Russia or China .... or Soros ... funding revolution in the USA?

The USA did NOT fund the color revolutions which Putin despises. Putin said the USA did fund the color revolutions because Putin didn't want to state aloud the real reason: Putin doesn't want Russians to get the idea that Putin could be overthrown as were Putin's chosen political candidates.

There is an unfortunate psychological mechanism working inside people like Putin. The Strong Man always judges himself as irreplaceable, whether his name is Putin, or Kim, or Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, or Bashar al-Assad, or Donald Trump. Any lie, any violence, anything is justified to remain the Strong Man. How do Strong Men get away with this unfortunate behavior?

Most people don't know when a dictator is a dictator because he was elected. For example, every Kim received 100% of the vote for generation after generation. How could a Kim be a dictator when 100% of his people love him? How could Bashar al-Assad possibly be a dictator when he receives 95% of the vote? The man is loved by his people, I tell you! Before Colonel Gaddafi's death, he was loved and had the votes to prove it. Kim, Assad and Putin are all buddies. Dictators couldn't be re-elected in a Democracy, could they? The people would never vote for a dictator, would they?

How did Colonel Muammar Gaddafi maintain and grow the love his people felt for him?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_Libya_under_Muammar_Gaddafi#
Revolutionary_sector

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

SECOND

Tuesday, February 28, 2023 3:51 PM (P)

A year after it invaded Ukraine, Russia is weakened and humiliated

The war has been catastrophic for both sides. But Putin’s “special military operation” has been a strategic disaster

By Ruth Deyermond, February 23, 2023

One year after Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, both countries and the rest of Europe have been transformed by the war. As at other great turning points in European history, this transformation is irreversible; there is no way to return to the world before February 2022, however the war ends. The future of European and global security will be shaped by how states and institutions address this fact.

The domestic and international effects on Russia have been profound and shocking. Already an authoritarian state, it has descended with frightening speed into something approaching totalitarianism, where military training is compulsory for schoolchildren, peaceful protest against the war is punished by 15 years in prison and TV pundits threaten Ukraine-supporting states with nuclear annihilation.

Since the start of the war, hundreds of thousands of people have fled the country in an exodus that has been compared to the wave of emigration after the 1917 Russian Revolution. Rich Russians have relocated to Dubai and other places where they can dodge the effects of sanctions. Large numbers of conscription-age men have sought refuge in other states of the former Soviet Union. Tens of thousands of workers in the IT sector are reported to have left, posing significant problems for the economy. It is unclear how many of these people—some of the most highly skilled and economically active Russian citizens—will ever return to their home country. The Kremlin needs them back but, unsurprisingly, has not been able to persuade them.

While the rich and educated have escaped, those in some of the poorest parts of society have not been so lucky. Mobilisation has disproportionately targeted men from Russia’s ethnic minority populations in regions far from Moscow and St Petersburg. In return, their families have been given frozen fish or bags of vegetables or, in one infamous case, packs of towels when soldiers have died. And the state is not the only organisation treating marginalised Russians with contempt. The Wagner mercenary group has recruited thousands of inmates from Russia’s prison system to act as little more than cannon fodder. Staggering numbers of them—reportedly up to 80 per cent of those deployed—have been killed, wounded or captured.

The UK government estimates that there have been 200,000 Russian casualties, 60,000 of them killed—four times more than the number of Soviet troops killed in a decade-long war in Afghanistan. Perhaps as startling as the numbers is the ratio of killed to wounded; observers have suggested that this is partly a result of inadequate medical support but also of poor unit cohesion, with soldiers unwilling to risk their own lives to save injured men.

It is hard to see how any of this can be sustained in the medium or long term, either organisationally or politically. Across Nato and the EU, policymakers and analysts are contemplating the prospects for Putin’s political survival, and who might replace him if discontent and infighting within elite circles grow. The possibility of a state collapse on the scale of the USSR’s dissolution in 1991 concerns many western policymakers, as was clear from President Macron’s recent comments on the need to avoid crushing Russia. A Soviet-style implosion seems unlikely, but the fact it is being discussed at all is a sign of how much expectations have changed over the last year.

The war has crushed Russia’s claims to anything like a sphere of influence in the post-Soviet space

All this is a consequence of Russia’s profound military failure in Ukraine. The damage to the armed forces’ reputation is hard to overstate; the war has been a disaster in every way imaginable. The humiliation of the first phase has been replaced with a war of attrition in which tiny gains are being presented as great victories, because

SECOND

Tuesday, February 28, 2023 4:28 PM (P)

If Russia wins, China is more likely to invade Taiwan because Putin has proved the world will not strongly and effectively resist countries being exterminated one by one, as China already has done to Tibet.

U.S. intelligence shows that China’s President Xi Jinping has instructed his country’s military to “be ready by 2027” to invade Taiwan though he may be currently harboring doubts about his ability to do so given Russia’s experience in its war with Ukraine, CIA Director William Burns said.

Burns, in a television interview that aired Sunday, stressed that the United States must take “very seriously” Xi’s desire to ultimately control Taiwan even if military conflict is not inevitable.

“We do know, as has been made public, that President Xi has instructed the PLA, the Chinese military leadership, to be ready by 2027 to invade Taiwan, but that doesn’t mean that he’s decided to invade in 2027 or any other year as well,” Burns told CBS’ “Face the Nation.”

“I think our judgment at least is that President Xi and his military leadership have doubts today about whether they could accomplish that invasion,” he said.

https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-taiwan-politics-united-state
s-government-eaf869eb617c6c356b2708607ed15759

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

JAYNEZTOWN

Tuesday, February 28, 2023 5:08 PM (P)

The Chinese use two ways to describe Ukraine both of them both Traditional Chinese and the modern simplified Chinese character use the food measurement term 'grams' to spell out Ukraine, maybe it was know as a bread basket back then, as a nation I don't think the Japanese use these old hanzi / kanji characters and instead pronounce the country more phonetically using one of their four alphabets 'katana' just as Koreans use modern Hangul, some words translated have a deeper meaning and others used for their phonetic tone and sounds and do not provide any meaning. This usage is similar to that of the Japanese Katakana and Hiragana, in each countries description of old Ukraine they often refer to historical Kingdoms, or nation states or wars or Kievan Rus (Rus), Slavic culture, which formed the basis of Ukrainian and Russian identity as the center of East Slavic culture, invasions and Wars Rus Khaganstate, East Slavic, West Slavic. We used to have many skilled readers of Hanzi, Japanese China based characters Kanji, Hanja or Vietnamese based Chinese Chu-Nom characters on this site, posting and translating back in the early days, historic use of words and writing used throughout the Sinosphere moving as far as Singapore. Hindu Indian culture is old but the Republic of India as a Democracy is new, e Republic of India recognized Ukraine as a sovereign country in December 1991.

in news

‘No conditions for peace’: Russia reacts to China’s 12-point plan to end war
https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/kremlin-on-china-plan-says-no-cond
itions-for-peace-at-the-moment-in-ukraine/hadibgj9n

The People's Republic of China's stance on Crimea is based upon its longstanding policy of noninterference in the domestic affairs of other nations. China sees the Crimean problem as an issue that should be solved within Ukraine. And thus, China argues that neither the involvement of Russia nor NATO is legitimate. In the United Nations, China abstained from condemning the referendum in Crimea as illegal. China does not recognize Russia's annexation of Crimea and recognizes Crimea as a part of Ukraine.
https://carnegieendowment.org/2015/04/01/explaining-china-s-position-o
n-crimea-referendum-pub-59600
,
https://thediplomat.com/2014/03/china-reacts-to-the-crimea-referendum/

The Indian government took a relatively balanced position on the situation in Ukraine. India in the past has not historically made supporting democracy abroad a central tenet of its foreign policy and said in its official statement that they would observe the situation in Ukraine and respect the decisions of both sides as long as they are peaceful. The Ministry of External Affairs asked its nationals, particularly students, to leave the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, effective from 29 May 2014, in eastern Ukraine which is witnessing frequent violent clashes and warned Indian travelers to be cautious and avoid non-essential travel in parts of eastern and southern Ukraine and to remain vigilant about their personal safety and security. According to officials, there were about 1,000 non-resident Indians living in the affected regions
https://web.archive.org/web/20150601151232/http://www.dw.de/indias-bal
ancing-act-in-crimea-crisis/a-17534847
'
http://www.firstpost.com/world/ukraine-crisis-india-asks-nationals-to-
leave-donetsk-lugansk-1550523.html

Russia-Ukraine conflict drives refugees into Lithuania
http://en.people.cn/n3/2023/0228/c90000-10213900.html
Italy's purchasing power halved since start of Russia-Ukraine crisis
https://english.news.cn/europe/20230228/03ba275ac8a9422a8f2ecb6e1b4445
21/c.html

Two dead in Russian drone attack in west Ukraine
https://www.thehindu.com/news/international/two-dead-in-russian-drone-
attack-in-west-ukraine/article66559974.ece
Russia's £274m A-50U Surveillance Aircraft 'blown Apart' By Pro-Kyiv Supporters In Belarus
https://www.republicworld.com/world-news/europe/russias-274m-a-50u-sur
veillance-aircraft-blown-apart-by-pro-kyiv-supporters-in-belarus-ar

SECOND

Tuesday, February 28, 2023 5:26 PM (P)

Putin’s former advisor was particularly critical of the Russian President’s decision to invade Ukraine last February. The day after the invasion, Pavlovsky told the Financial Times:

"He’s even more isolated than Stalin. In the last years of his life, Stalin didn’t come to the Kremlin and lived in his dacha, but the politburo came to see him and they talked and drank. Putin doesn’t have that. He’s as isolated as he can be. And in that situation rational issues become irrational."

He continued:

"Putin’s used to being lucky. That’s very dangerous for a gambler because he starts believing fate is on his side. When you play Russian roulette, you feel that God is on your side until the shot rings out."

In April 2022, Pavlovsky told RFE/RL's Georgian Service that Putin made a serious misjudgment, and his decision made 'no political sense'. He said:

"This is all Putin's own personal decision. Nobody other than Putin would have made it… Nobody, including myself, realized just how maniacally obsessed he must have been with Ukraine. We underestimated the extent of decay of the Russian government."

He continued that Putin 'stepped into a trap in Ukraine' and would find it hard to declare 'victory'. Pavlovsky also believed it was no longer 'unthinkable and impossible' that the conflict could 'spill into conventional warfare between Russia and the West, with NATO'.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/vladimir-putin-s-ex-advisor-who-s
aid-he-s-maniacally-obsessed-with-ukraine-dies-from-serious-illness/ar-AA180U4L

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

SECOND

Wednesday, March 1, 2023 1:55 AM (P)

A concerted attack against the Crimean peninsula – isolating it, neutralising and inflicting severe damage against its military infrastructure by long range strikes – would be a major blow for Russian morale. In the absence of decisive battlefield success elsewhere, it would represent a defeat for Moscow that it could not disguise, and could lead to collapse of Russian forces in the field and even to Putin’s downfall.

But – as so often in this war – without boosting our support, it is unachievable. Even this more limited operation would demand massively increased Western assistance, including many more tanks than have been promised, much larger quantities of ammunition, as well as long-range missile systems which so far have not been provided at all. This additional support would have to be sustained and that would mean stepping up defence industrial production in the US and Europe beyond what has been contemplated so far in this war.

To achieve this is a question of political will on the Continent, one that remains shaky. There are signs now of European leaders pushing Zelensky towards peace talks with Russia rather than the defeat of Moscow’s invasion. That was the message delivered directly to the Ukrainian leader in Paris recently by President Emmanuel Macron and Chancellor Olaf Scholz. Both their countries have said they will not be providing new types of weapons this year. All talk at the moment is of future security assistance and guarantees to Ukraine from Nato after the war ends, as a means of pressuring Zelensky into an accommodation.

Putin recognises this wavering of Western support for Ukrainian offensive action and will be encouraged to press forward his own offensive to maximise territorial gains in advance of any potential negotiations. He is unlikely to achieve his full objectives on the battlefield, but neither will he willingly surrender what he now holds, which is significantly greater Ukrainian territory than when the war began.

With Ukraine denied the resources for decisive success, the scene would then be set for a period of relative quiet followed by the next round of Russian aggression. General Hodges’s plan for Crimea may be overly optimistic, but he is absolutely right to suggest that long-term peace is contingent on Russian battlefield defeat. The scenario that Nato leaders are now planning equals the vanquishment of the West and the emboldenment of both Russia and China. It is a crying shame when the possibility of a total Russian collapse remains within reach.

Colonel Richard Kemp is a former infantry commander

https://news.yahoo.com/total-russian-collapse-surprisingly-close-19000
0011.html

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

SIGNYM

Wednesday, March 1, 2023 2:29 AM (P)

Everything you post is bullshit, SECOND. Putin is not a gambler and neither is the Russian Security Council. They have been building up their military since 2007 in preparation for western aggression.

And Ukraine is never going to retake Crimea.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake

SIGNYM

Wednesday, March 1, 2023 2:33 AM (P)

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

So, I take it you would be OK with Russia or China .... or Soros ... funding revolution in the USA?
The USA did NOT fund the color revolutions which Putin despises.

BWAHAHAHAHA!!!

Jeezus, SECOND, do you think we're as stupid as you are?

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake

SIGNYM

Wednesday, March 1, 2023 5:04 AM (P)

I'm surprised you missed this

Quote:
Mass Drone Attack Unleashes Chaos, Air Raid Sirens Inside Russia
...
Amid all the local reports coming out of Russia, there were in total possibly half-a-dozen to a dozen or more inbound drones which had been sent against various Russian cities overnight into Tuesday.

This comes after a past year which witnessed a number of sporadic drone and alleged sabotage attacks on sensitive Russian facilities, including military bases, as Ukraine and its backers grow more ~~emboldened.~~

desperate. You don't resort to pinprick drone attacks if you're winning on the battle field. Which Ukraine/NATO are not.

Quote:
One December investigative report written by a US special forces veteran said the CIA was behind many of the covert sabotage operations happening with increasing frequency on Russian soil. President Putin has recently said he sees the conflict in Ukraine and West-backed proxy war there as a fight for the survival of the Russian people, alluding to it as an 'existential threat' in fresh comments.

MORE AT https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/mass-drone-attack-unleashes-cha
os-air-raid-sirens-inside-russia

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake

SECOND

Wednesday, March 1, 2023 5:08 AM (P)

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

So, I take it you would be OK with Russia or China .... or Soros ... funding revolution in the USA?
The USA did NOT fund the color revolutions which Putin despises.

BWAHAHAHAHA!!!

Jeezus, SECOND, do you think we're as stupid as you are?

Why are you unaware that "leaders" who supported Putin are leaders until death? Kim in N Korea, Bashar al-Assad in Syria, the lifetime officeholder Ali Khamenei in Iran. Xi in China has set up a legal framework to be the next Chairman Mao who will die in office. All these men have killed people by thousands to hold on to jobs that, in more rational countries, will constantly be moving to new officeholders. And then there is Putin, who has threatened to destroy the world before he will step aside. Putin definitely intends to die in office.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

SIGNYM

Wednesday, March 1, 2023 5:10 AM (P)

Zelensky Hints At Withdrawing From Russian-Encircled Bakhmut: 'Out Of Options'
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/zelensky-hints-withdrawing-russ
ian-encircled-bakhmut-out-options

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake

SIGNYM

Wednesday, March 1, 2023 5:16 AM (P)

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

So, I take it you would be OK with Russia or China .... or Soros ... funding revolution in the USA?
The USA did NOT fund the color revolutions which Putin despises.

BWAHAHAHAHA!!!

Jeezus, SECOND, do you think we're as stupid as you are?
Why are you unaware that "leaders" who supported Putin are leaders until death? Kim in N Korea, Bashar al-Assad in Syria, the lifetime officeholder Ali Khamenei in Iran.

With the exception of N Korea and China, those nations hold elections. As do India,bBrazil,and other nations that support Russia.

And, no, they have not "killed millions". At least, not in the last 50 years. That would be the USA.

Really, SECOND, just how stupid do you think we are? Cause we're not as stupid as you.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake

SECOND

Wednesday, March 1, 2023 7:55 AM (P)

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

With the exception of N Korea and China, those nations hold elections. As do India,bBrazil,and other nations that support Russia.

And, no, they have not "killed millions". At least, not in the last 50 years. That would be the USA.

Really, SECOND, just how stupid do you think we are? Cause we're not as stupid as you.

Signym, I wrote thousands, not millions died. And Kim Jong Un Wins 100% of Votes in North Korea Election. So you are wrong about N Korea not holding elections. How about China? 100% for Xi. Signym, where do you get your ideas about China and N Korea not being Democracies? Democracies are what those two countries claim to be (The Democratic People's Republic of Korea, The People's Republic of China) so we have to take their word when the maximum leader receives 100% that the best man won in the finest tradition of Democracies everywhere.

But, Signym, you missed the bigger point that Putin's allies are men who will remain in their government offices until they die, as will Putin. And Putin's allies are absolutely loved by their people because the votes prove they are loved and deserve to serve their countries forever. Or until death. Putin is loved, too, by the voters! Why should he ever leave office when he is so lovable?

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

SECOND

Wednesday, March 1, 2023 7:59 AM (P)

Feb 28, 2023
Some of the starkest images of Russian brutality in Ukraine emerged from the Kyiv suburb of Bucha last year. Ukrainian officials say 1,700 people were killed and 9,000 war crimes were committed there. With the support of the Pulitzer Center, special correspondent Simon Ostrovsky and videographer Yegor Troyanovsky returned to Bucha to tell the story of a group of Ukrainians executed in cold blood.

Ukrainians in Bucha reflect on horrors and brutality suffered at hands of Russian forces

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

SIGNYM

Wednesday, March 1, 2023 8:30 AM (P)

Neither Xi nor Kim are elected directly
You stupid, SECOND.

****
Yanno, you post walls of gibberish, SECOND. The more desperate you are, the more words you post.

But all the words in the world won't change reality. So keep on blathering, bc you'll look dumber with every post.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake

SECOND

Wednesday, March 1, 2023 9:23 AM (P)

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Neither Xi nor Kim are elected directly
You stupid, SECOND.

The US President is NOT directly elected. Biden only received 306 votes while Trump received 232, but the US is a Democracy, just as North Korea and China are "Democracies". Just ask Kim or Xi about it. They will tell you that they were "Democratically" elected, but unlike Biden, Kim and Xi got 100%, so they must be really loved by their people. With so much love, Kim and Xi will never leave office while still alive. They are needed, much the same as Russia needs Putin forever and ever.

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
****
Yanno, you post walls of gibberish, SECOND. The more desperate you are, the more words you post.

But all the words in the world won't change reality. So keep on blathering, bc you'll look dumber with every post.

Signym, you, 1kiki, and 6ix always gave off the odor that you are very articulate yet very unsuccessful people. Signym, you proved it again by misunderstanding how the Electoral College works.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidential_election

Here is an example of Signym being an overly articulate idiot. Note that it wasn't hard to find:

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
So, in terms of ACTUAL SCIENCE... it seems that the spike protein by itself is cytotoxic... that is, it damages cells by itself. I already posted a link to that study.
Spike protein toxicity was studied in the context of Covid infection, with spike proteins circulating in the bloodstream.

In other words, one would expect the same spike protein toxicity from an actual infection as one might expect from a vaccination. So far, the risks of infection seem higher for certain groups of people.

The only ways I could imagine the vaccine being MORE toxic than the vaccine are:

The vaccine spike protein being circulated by the bloodstream before the body has a chance to mount an immune response. That is, in the case of a normal Covid infection, it begins in the nose and throat, and your body starts reacting to the virus before it gets to the lungs and starts dumping a lot of virus and virus particles into the bloodstream. That might help explain the one side effects of vaccines that doesn't appear with infection: appendicitis or intestinal perforation.

Complete spike proteins had a "open frame reading" coding and, I presume, a "stop" codon. A fragment without a stop codon may overproduce. Early batches of vaccine with higher amount if fragments had higher negative reaction rates.

And now for something possibly even more dangerous than the vaccine in terms of clotting:

Erythritol.

Artificial Sweetener Linked to Blood Clots, Heart Attacks: Study

https://www.webmd.com/stroke/news/20230228/artificial-sweetener-linked
-blood-clots-heart-attack-study

http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=65226&mid=11701
63#1170163

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

SIGNYM

Wednesday, March 1, 2023 10:45 AM (P)

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Neither Xi nor Kim are elected directly
You stupid, SECOND.
The US President is NOT directly elected. Biden only received 306 votes while Trump received 232, but the US is a Democracy, just as North Korea and China are "Democracies". Just ask Kim or Xi about it. They will tell you that they were "Democratically" elected, but unlike Biden, Kim and Xi got 100%, so they must be really loved by their people. With so much love, Kim and Xi will never leave office while still alive. They are needed, much the same as Russia needs Putin forever and ever.

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
****
Yanno, you post walls of gibberish, SECOND. The more desperate you are, the more words you post.

But all the words in the world won't change reality. So keep on blathering, bc you'll look dumber with every post.
Signym, you, 1kiki, and 6ix always gave off the odor that you are very articulate yet very unsuccessful people. Signym, you proved it again by misunderstanding how the Electoral College works.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidential_election

Here is an example of Signym being an overly articulate idiot. Note that it wasn't hard to find:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
So, in terms of ACTUAL SCIENCE... it seems that the spike protein by itself is cytotoxic... that is, it damages cells by itself. I already posted a link to that study.
Spike protein toxicity was studied in the context of Covid infection, with spike proteins circulating in the bloodstream.

In other words, one would expect the same spike protein toxicity from an actual infection as one might expect from a vaccination. So far, the risks of infection seem higher for certain groups of people.

The only ways I could imagine the vaccine being MORE toxic than the vaccine are:

The vaccine spike protein being circulated by the bloodstream before the body has a chance to mount an immune response. That is, in the case of a normal Covid infection, it begins in the nose and throat, and your body starts reacting to the virus before it gets to the lungs and starts dumping a lot of virus and virus particles into the bloodstream. That might help explain the one side effects of vaccines that doesn't appear with infection: appendicitis or intestinal perforation.

Complete spike proteins had a "open frame reading" coding and, I presume, a "stop" codon. A fragment without a stop codon may overproduce. Early batches of vaccine with higher amount if fragments had higher negative reaction rates.

And now for something possibly even more dangerous than the vaccine in terms of clotting:

Erythritol.

Artificial Sweetener Linked to Blood Clots, Heart Attacks: Study

https://www.webmd.com/stroke/news/20230228/artificial-sweetener-linked
-blood-clots-heart-attack-study
http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=65226&mid=11701
63#1170163

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

And...?

Everything I posted is verifiable fact. Unlike the bullshit you post.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake

SECOND

Wednesday, March 1, 2023 3:53 PM (P)

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

And...?

Everything I posted is verifiable fact. Unlike the bullshit you post.

Verifiable fact? You mentioned a study of Artificial SweetenerS (ASS abbreviated). Here is the "logic" of the study: 1) Fat people are bigger ASS users. 2) Fat people have more heart attacks. 3) Therefore ASS causes heart attacks, the only logical explanation. Such a brilliant study. Here are "verifiable" facts from Putin. He uses "logic" in the same manner as the ASS study did. His "logic" would never misunderstand the facts and come to wrong conclusions since Putin is brilliant:

Vladimir Putin RAGES Against NATO, Claims The 'West Wants To Destroy & Dismantle Russia' In Latest Rant

Putin also expressed fear that Ukraine’s Western allies might soon start to use their “nuclear capabilities” against Russia and ultimately kill a large number of Russian citizens in the process.

"When all the leading NATO countries have declared their main goal as inflicting a strategic defeat on us, so that our people suffer as they say, how can we ignore their nuclear capabilities?” Putin fumed during an interview with Russian state television outlet Rossiya 1 on Monday.

"They have one goal: To disband the former Soviet Union and its fundamental part – the Russian Federation,” he continued.

The Russian leader also indicated "such an ethnic group as the Russian people may not be able to survive in the form in which it exists today” should the West be successful in their alleged plans to “destroy and dismantle” Russia.

As RadarOnline.com previously reported, Putin’s remarks on Rossiya 1 on Monday came shortly after former Russian president-turned-Putin spokesman Dmitry Medvedev slammed the West, President Joe Biden, and claimed Russia would use its own nukes to defend itself from “the verge of a world conflict.”

“After all, it is obvious to all reasonable forces that if the United States wants the defeat of Russia, then we are on the verge of a world conflict,” Medvedev wrote last week.

“If the United States wants to defeat Russia, then we have the right to defend ourselves with any weapon,” he added, “including nuclear.”

Medvedev’s remarks were seemingly in response to a speech President Biden gave days earlier in which the United States leader proclaimed that while “Ukraine will never be a victory for Russia,” the U.S. and Ukraine’s other Western allies “do not seek to control or destroy Russia.”

Putin also recently pulled out of a 2010 nuclear treaty between the U.S. and Russia that allowed each nation to inspect the other’s nuclear arsenal.

President Biden called Putin’s decision to pull out of the treaty “not very responsible” and a “big mistake.”

“This war was never a necessity. It's a tragedy,” Biden said during his speech in Poland last week. “If Russia stopped invading Ukraine, it would end the war. If Ukraine stopped defending itself against Russia, it would be the end of Ukraine.”

https://radaronline.com/p/vladimir-putin-rages-nato-west-destroy-disma
ntle-russia-rant/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

SIGNYM

Wednesday, March 1, 2023 9:15 PM (P)

Is the erythritol study really the hill you choose to die on, instead of the Ukraine one?
Or are you just trying to create a diversion from your massive intelligence failure?
Probably the latter.

But let me snipe at your "erythritol" position:

If there is a correlation, A can cause B, B can cause A, A and B are both caused by C, or it's coincidence. In THIS CASE, the causative factor was backed by both lab (in vitro) and animal studies.

Quote:
Animal and lab studies reinforced the idea that erythritol might cause clots, said Dr. Stanley Hazen, who led the research and chairs the department of cardiovascular and metabolic sciences at the Cleveland Clinic.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2023/02/27/sugar-substitute
-erythritol-increase-risk-stroke/11330213002/

Look it up.
And now, back toour originally-scheduled topic.
At some point, I should list EVERY POINT you've been wrong on, which is just about every one you've ever made on the topic

Oh, and go fuck yourself, stupid.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake

SECOND

Wednesday, March 1, 2023 9:55 PM (P)

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Is the erythritol study really the hill you choose to die on, instead of the Ukraine one?

I am being as blunt as possible: if anything in the article is true, then erythritol requires that several different groups all start their own human study immediately and finished ASAP. It is an emergency, but nobody is treating it at all like thousands will die from heart attacks and strokes. Instead, everybody is all "ho-hum, we'll get around to it one of these days. Maybe next year. When we have more time. We are busy-busy and cannot change priorities in less than 12 months."

Same thing with Putin. He threatens to nuke the world unless Ukraine capitulates to him and everybody, except Ukrainians, act as if this is "ho-hum, we'll get around to Putin in time, but not immediately." The world does not want to respond too fast because, as in the example of French voters who are cheese-eating surrender monkeys, the French don't want France to do too much for Ukraine. The French are so busy-busy and cannot change their priorities for Ukraine. And then there is the expense of doing anything more than sending a token number of weapons that France has no use for, except if Putin actually invades France, which he won't be doing if Putin is stopped by Ukraine.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

THG

Wednesday, March 1, 2023 11:39 PM (P)

Opinions are useless without fact backing them up. This is why comrade signym does not respond to my posts in the other threads. I post too much truth for her to spin into bullshit.

T

THG

Wednesday, March 1, 2023 11:40 PM (P)

Opinions are useless without fact backing them up. This is why comrade signym often chooses not to respond to my posts in the other threads. I post too much truth for her to spin into bullshit.

T

SECOND

Thursday, March 2, 2023 12:21 AM (P)

It’s time to stop giving Ukraine what we think they need and give them what they want

by Retired Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré, opinion contributor - 02/28/23 1:30 PM ET

For years, the Kremlin has been assailing Western democracies with cyber-attacks and sophisticated misinformation campaigns. Ukraine, sitting as it does on Russia’s front step, is now bearing the brunt of Putin’s most aggressive attack on democracy to date, with a ground assault on their territory. The Ukrainian people are most definitely defending their land and themselves from the Russian army, but they’re also defending Western democracy on behalf of us all.

When we send surface-to-air missile batteries to the front or bring Ukrainian soldiers stateside to train on the patriot missile system, we are doing our part to defend democracy against a raging autocrat without breaking the bank or risking American lives. It’s a conservative investment if ever there were one.

The war is not just one between autocracy and democracy, but also between an immoral petro-state and a sustainable climate future for us all. Russia’s power comes from only two things: oil and gas. When we hold the line in Ukraine, sanction Russian fossil fuels and invest in renewables, we are containing the spread of authoritarianism and slowing the rate of climate change.

The ambitions of an autocrat know no bounds. Were Putin to take Ukraine, there is no sign that he would respect its western boundaries any more than he has respected its eastern border. To stop Putin, defend democracy and save our climate, Ukraine must stand — and we, as Americans, must stand with Ukraine.

Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré (Ret.) is the former commander of the U.S. First Army. He now leads The Green Army, a nonprofit dedicated to finding solutions to pollution.

More at https://thehill.com/opinion/international/3877280-its-time-to-stop-giv
ing-ukraine-what-we-think-they-need-and-give-them-what-they-want/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

SECOND

Thursday, March 2, 2023 12:55 AM (P)

Funny how people opposing Putin keep ending up dead:

Vladimir Makei, the former foreign minister of Belarus, expressed his fears that Russia would annex Belarus before his sudden death in November 2022, according to Finland's foreign minister Pekka Haavisto.

Makei, who had held his post since 2012, died "suddenly" at the age of 64 in Minsk, Belarusian state news agency Belta reported on November 26. No cause of death was given.

Haavisto gave an interview with Finnish tabloid newspaper Iltalehti published on Wednesday. He said that he had spoken with Makei after Russian President Vladimir Putin illegally proclaimed to annex four Ukrainian regions on September 30, 2022 — the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.

"He was very worried about whether Belarus would be the fifth [region]," Haavisto said.

He told the news outlet that he told Makei that his view was interesting, because, to outsiders, it appears that Belarus supports Russia "in every way."

While Belarus, a loyal Kremlin ally, hasn't directly joined the Ukraine conflict, Russian troops have been allowed to conduct exercises on Belarusian territory since before the beginning of the war. The country was used by Russia to launch its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022.

The Finnish foreign minister said sweat was dripping from Makei's forehead and that he said that he never knows who will be next.

Last week, a group of international journalists said they obtained a Russian presidential document from the summer of 2021. It lays out a plan for Russia to absorb Belarus by 2030.

The 17-page document, entitled "Strategic Goals of the Russian Federation in Belarus," details how to push back Western influence in Belarus and how to diminish the country's independence.

By 2030, Russia should have "control of the information space" in Belarus, the document allegedly said.

"Unprecedented political and sanctions pressure from the collective West is pushing Russia and Belarus to speed up the unification process," Putin told a bilateral forum in the Belarusian city of Grodno on January 6.

Makei's mysterious death came two months after Putin's illegal annexation of the four Ukrainian regions.

"Vladimir Makei, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Belarus, has suddenly passed away today," the Foreign Ministry said in a statement at the time. It did not give further details on the circumstances surrounding his death.

Makei had been scheduled to meet with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, just two days later. Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said the ministry was "shocked" by reports of his death.

Newsweek has contacted Russia's foreign ministry for comment.

https://www.newsweek.com/belarus-vladimir-makei-annex-fears-russia-dea
th-1784597

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

SIGNYM

Thursday, March 2, 2023 2:13 AM (P)

Quote:
Originally posted by THGR: Opinions are useless without fact backing them up.

Yep! And that's exactly why your posts and SECOND's are useless. (Oh, and BTW your "facts" need to be backed up by... what is that word, again? Oh yeah: Evidence[/]. Otherwise your "facts" are just opinion.)

But, yanno, time will tell who is right and who is wrong.
I doubt either of you will be man enough to admit that you're wrong bc you haven't been so far.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake

SECOND

Thursday, March 2, 2023 4:04 AM (P)

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
Originally posted by THGR: Opinions are useless without fact backing them up.
Yep! And that's exactly why your posts and SECOND's are useless. (Oh, and BTW your "facts" need to be backed up by... what is that word, again? Oh yeah: Evidence. Otherwise your "facts" are just opinion.)

But, yanno, time will tell who is right and who is wrong.
I doubt either of you will be man enough to admit that you're wrong bc you haven't been so far.

The biggest fact from the past was the answer to "Did Russia interfere with the 2016 election?" The fact is that the answer was Yes, but Signym insisted the answer was No. Trump said "Fake News."

"Did Russia interfere with the 2016 election?"
https://www.google.com/search?q=Did+Russia+interfere+with+the+2016+ele
ction

How did Signym turn a Yes into a No? Signym kept reformulating that question as "Did Russia collude with Trump?" Trump did the same thing. Trump and Signym refused to understand that is a different question.

"Did Russia collude with Trump?"
https://www.google.com/search?q=Did+Russia+collude+with+Trump

At present moment, the new question is "Did Russians invade Ukraine?" If you ask Putin, the answer is "No". Russia is protecting itself. Putin is as ridiculous as Trump in saying the opposite of what is true. According to Putin, there is no Ukraine. The land has always been Russian. How can Russia invade Russia? This is why the formulation is "Special Military Operation" rather than good old-fashion "War".

"There is no Ukraine."
https://www.google.com/search?q=there+is+no+Ukraine

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

SIGNYM

Thursday, March 2, 2023 8:51 AM (P)

Oh piffle.

Yanno who REALLY influenced the election? Britain's MI6 and ex-intelligence, and the FBI
Seriously, SECOND, out of the hundreds of millions of tweets and hundreds of millions of FB posts about the election, how many can be unambiguously traced to Russia?

You probably don't know. Neither does Mueller. But I bet you'd need a microscope to find that needle in that ginormous haystack.

How stupid do you think we are?

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake

SECOND

Thursday, March 2, 2023 5:19 PM (P)

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Oh piffle.

Yanno who REALLY influenced the election? Britain's MI6 and ex-intelligence, and the FBI
Seriously, SECOND, out of the hundreds of millions of tweets and hundreds of millions of FB posts about the election, how many can be unambiguously traced to Russia?

You probably don't know. Neither does Mueller. But I bet you'd need a microscope to find that needle in that ginormous haystack.

How stupid do you think we are?

Signym, how about another round of the "You Can't Seriously Blame Russia For That?" game?

Signym, in this next round you will be claiming that the US did NOT spend more than $5,500 billion because of Russia's nuclear arms race.

Go, Signym, Go!

"How much money did the US spend on nuclear weapons?"
https://www.google.com/search?q=how+much+money+did+the+us+spend+on+nuc
lear+weapons

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

SECOND

Thursday, March 2, 2023 5:31 PM (P)

The other nuclear threat you might have missed from Putin’s speech

Easy to miss in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s speech to parliament last week was a glancing reference to the possibility of Russia resuming nuclear testing.

In a surprise move, Putin said that Russia was ready to resume nuclear weapons tests if the US conducted one first.

While most of the media focus has been on Russia suspending its participation in the New START nuclear arms treaty, this announcement was just as significant, with potentially devastating consequences.

It would signify a further step towards escalation in Ukraine by demonstrating Russia’s intent to use nuclear weapons and could begin another, more devastating, nuclear arms race.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/02/opinions/russia-nuclear-test-putin-mess
mer/index.html

SECOND

Thursday, March 2, 2023 6:08 PM (P)

Mariupol: The People’s Story | Documentary Trailer | BBC Select

Before the war in Ukraine, Mariupol was a thriving city, home to 430,000 people. In a little under three months, most of its citizens fled Putin's army and thousands were killed. Filmed and told by residents, this is the story of their loss, bravery, determination and incredible daring in escape. They were among those who sought refuge in the Mariupol Theatre, only for it to be bombed, the maternity hospital which was also hit, and the Azovstal steelworks.

https://www.bbcselect.com/watch/mariupol-the-peoples-story/

Download the 1 hour 30 minute show from https://comment.rlsbb.ru/panorama-mariupol-the-peoples-story-2022-1080
p-webrip-x264-cbfm/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

SECOND

Thursday, March 2, 2023 8:07 PM (P)

"This conflict has already grown into an existential war between Russia and the West. Yes, the West is not participating in this war with their militaries. But they are providing us with weapons so we can use them in the fight. This means a Ukrainian victory over Russia is a common victory. And if Ukraine falls – though unlikely – it's a defeat for all of Western civilization."

- Maj. Gen. Kyrylo Budanov, the chief of the Main Directorate of Intelligence of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2023/03/02/war-top-ukraine-s
py-says-russia-out-of-military-tools/11310628002/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

SIGNYM

Thursday, March 2, 2023 10:53 PM (P)

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The other nuclear threat you might have missed from Putin’s speech

Easy to miss in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s speech to parliament last week was a glancing reference to the possibility of Russia resuming nuclear testing.

In a surprise move, Putin said that Russia was ready to resume nuclear weapons tests if the US conducted one first.

While most of the media focus has been on Russia suspending its participation in the New START nuclear arms treaty, this announcement was just as significant, with potentially devastating consequences.

It would signify a further step towards escalation in Ukraine by demonstrating Russia’s intent to use nuclear weapons and could begin another, more devastating, nuclear arms race.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/02/opinions/russia-nuclear-test-putin-mess
mer/index.html

OMG!!!
Russia might resume nuclear testing if we start testing first!!!

/snicker

Do you realize what a ninny you sound like?

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake

SIGNYM

Thursday, March 2, 2023 11:52 PM (P)

Quote:
NBC Reporter Goes To Crimea, Shocks Viewers By Telling The Truth
Mainstream media correspondents for major US networks rarely, if ever, report from inside Crimea and certainly are nowhere near Russian-held territory in eastern Ukraine. However, this week NBC News chief international correspondent Keir Simmons went to Sevastopol, surrounded by a significant Russian military presence given it is home to the Russian Navy's Black Sea Fleet, and in a live segment admitted that it's not at all realistic Zelensky and Ukrainian forces can ever hope to take Crimea.

This is especially as the "the people there... view themselves as Russian." Simmons noted that "This is the closest that any US news crew has got to the Russian Black Sea Fleet in many many years." He explained that "Vladimir Putin will be determined to defend that port - to not have it take it away from him - he may well do pretty much anything to try to achieve that."

BREAKING: NBC News / MSNBC concedes that Zelensky’s goal of retaking Crimea is unrealistic and dangerous.pic.twitter.com/fb2RCRBHOn
— David Sacks (@DavidSacks) March 1, 2023

"It is a very, very dangerous standoff.. it's hard to see how you reach a negotiation over that. There's military absolutely everywhere, it is a military town," he continued, before saying...

"When for example Victoria Nuland talks about that at the very least we [the US] want Crimea to be demilitarized, I find myself standing there and wondering, how on earth does that happen?"

Ukrainian officials and pro-Kyiv media pundits are said to be outraged at the segment, given it repeatedly and bluntly referenced that Crimeans see themselves as Russians. Even a separate write-up filed days earlier from inside Crimea and posted to NBC's website included the following:

MORE AT https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/msnbc-reporter-goes-crimea-shoc
ks-viewers-telling-truth

Quote:
A view from Crimea, the Russian-annexed territory Ukraine is hoping to seize back
By Keir Simmons, Natasha Lebedeva and Tatyana Chistikova NBC

SEVASTOPOL, Crimea —
...
Crimea is a territory teeming with Russian forces.
Nowhere is that truer than in Sevastopol, a city that has long embodied naval might in the Russian imagination.

Fishermen watch as Russia’s Black Sea Fleet docks and sails. “Special Military Operation for the future of Russia,” a billboard declares en route to the port. Sevastopol’s “Victory” cinema now also sports a massive Z. Roads like Lenin Street are lined with red, white and blue Russian Federation flags.

This is not Russia...

But Praskovya Baranova, 73, speaks Russian, feels Russian and lives here.
"This is our land,” she said Monday. “We will all put on uniforms and will go to the border to defend ourselves.”Her comments echoed those of most people NBC News spoke to in Crimea this week. While the government of President Vladimir Putin has cracked down on free speech everywhere,

Uh huh.

Quote:
including in Crimea, the peninsula’s majority Russian-speaking population was considered more pro-Moscow than in other parts of Ukraine when it was annexed.

...
But Zelenskyy has said Crimea is one of the reasons he wants more powerful weapons from the United States and NATO. “Crimea is our land, our territory,” he said in January. "Give us your weapons — we will return what is ours." And if Ukraine does try to take the peninsula back by force as its leaders have promised, many of the 2.4 million people living here will be caught in the middle.

“He wouldn’t take it,” Ruslan Nalgiev, 36, said. “Even if there is a war here, we would still defend Sevastopol. Because, if we don’t defend our motherland, we would become slaves. No one wants to become a slave.”
...
Doubts persist, however, about whether the U.S. and other allies are willing to give Ukraine the firepower it may need for such an ambitious operation — especially given the Kremlin’s stance that Crimea represents a red line.

“The

THG

Friday, March 3, 2023 12:37 AM (P)

T

Hundreds US Bradley Combat Vehicles arrive in Ukraine

SIGNYM

Friday, March 3, 2023 1:07 AM (P)

"They burn, just like any other"

Kiev has already lost thousands of armored vehicles. What difference will a a few hundred make?

/snicker

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake

SIGNYM

Friday, March 3, 2023 5:28 AM (P)

Big Serge is an infrequent poster but ALWAYS worth reading.

Quote:
Schrodinger’s Offensive
A ramble about force design, Moldova, and a fortress on the steppe
Big Serge
Mar 1
Winter War on the Steppe

Where is the big Russian offensive? This is, at the moment, the million dollar question that inevitably intrudes on any discussion of the war’s current course. It is probably not surprising (to those of us that are familiar with human nature, at least) that this question becomes a Rorschach test in which everybody sees their own prior assumptions about the Russian military.

The answers to this question do indeed vary widely. On one extreme, there are those who believe that hundreds of thousands of Russian troops are prepared to launch an enormous “big arrow” offensive at any moment. We see this both from commentators like retired US Colonel Douglas MacGregor and from some Ukrainian sources who are likely trying to foment a sense of urgency to extract more aid from the west. On the other extreme, we have those who claim that the Russian military is so depleted that there will be no offensive at any point whatsoever. There are also some in the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda western intelligentsia, like the Nuland Institute for the Study of War or Michael Koffman, who argue that the offensive has already begun but is so lame and weak that nobody noticed.

Okay. So either a giant offensive will happen any minute now (it might have just started while I was typing that), or it will never happen at all, or it already happened, or perhaps it’s in a state of quantum superposition in which it has both succeeded and failed, at least until we open the box.

A thorny issue indeed. There is, at the moment, a great deal of important and intense combat occurring in many different sectors of front - but what relation do these operations have to any big arrow action by the Russians? Is this an underwhelming entrée or an appetizer?

I would like to suggest an alternative to all these theories, because what the world needs most right now is more opinions.

AND with sense of humor!

Quote:
At the moment, Russia has the initiative across the front. Ukraine’s reserves are in a tenuous state right now (especially given their politically imposed mandate to try and accumulate a force for an offensive against the land bridge to Crimea), and Russia is driving high intensity combat in important sectors right now.

These operations, I would argue, serve three different purposes at once. First and foremost, they are valuable shaping operations in their own right that have important implications for launching future operations. Secondly, they function essentially as spoiling attacks in that they keep the burn rate at the front high and degrade Ukraine’s ability to form reserves. As a sort of metaphor for this, there are already rumors that some of Ukraine’s new Leopard tanks will be sent into combat around Bakhmut rather than held in reserve for a future offensive. Whether the Leopard rumor is true or not, in manpower terms Ukraine continues to pump units into Bakhmut in an unconscionable waste of men. Third and finally, all the combat in the east is occurring under an umbrella where Russia’s supply lines and ISR are robust, creating conditions where Ukraine continues to trade at abysmal loss ratios.

The synthesis of all these points is that Russia is currently driving the attrition of the Ukrainian army and denying Ukraine any chance at regaining operational initiative, while at the same time pursuing important shaping objectives. I believe this is occurring against the backdrop of moderate, but not catastrophic organizational disorder and restructuring in the Russian armed forces, which are delaying its readiness to launch a large scale offensive. In other words, the current pace of Russian operations supports the overall attrition of Ukrainian manpower and implies that there is no need to rush an ambitious operation until organizational issues have been sorted out.

In the remainder of t

SECOND

Friday, March 3, 2023 6:10 PM (P)

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The other nuclear threat you might have missed from Putin’s speech

Easy to miss in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s speech to parliament last week was a glancing reference to the possibility of Russia resuming nuclear testing.

In a surprise move, Putin said that Russia was ready to resume nuclear weapons tests if the US conducted one first.

While most of the media focus has been on Russia suspending its participation in the New START nuclear arms treaty, this announcement was just as significant, with potentially devastating consequences.

It would signify a further step towards escalation in Ukraine by demonstrating Russia’s intent to use nuclear weapons and could begin another, more devastating, nuclear arms race.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/02/opinions/russia-nuclear-test-putin-mess
mer/index.html
OMG!!!
Russia might resume nuclear testing if we start testing first!!!

/snicker

Do you realize what a ninny you sound like?

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake

Signym, you are sounding very North Korean. On TV and in print, they are dripping with contempt for the US.

North Korea is a mini-Russia. Or Russia is a giant-North Korea. Six of one, half dozen of the other.

A few examples:

North Korea abandons nuclear freeze pledge, blames 'brutal' U.S. sanctions
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-northkorea-nuclear-usa/north-korea-
abandons-nuclear-freeze-pledge-blames-brutal-u-s-sanctions-idUSKBN1ZK1FX

North Korea blames ‘reckless military hysteria’ of US and allies for missile tests
https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/07/asia/north-korea-missile-report-monday-
intl-hnk/index.html

N Korea warns of ‘all-out’ nuclear response to US ‘aggression’
North Korea has promised to ‘resolutely react’ to US threat of nuclear weapons use with its own nuclear capabilities.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/11/19/north-korea-warns-of-all-out
-nuclear-response-to-us-provocation

North Korea’s Kim Jong-un blames US for being ‘root cause’ of tensions
The North Korean leader also accused Seoul of ‘hypocrisy’ and threatening peace in the peninsula with its military build-up
In a speech at a military exhibition, Kim said his country was only increasing its weapons in self-defence and not to start a war
https://web.archive.org/web/20211104164413/https://www.scmp.com/news/a
sia/east-asia/article/3152014/north-koreas-kim-jong-un-blames-us-being-root-cause-tensions

It is easy to see why North Korea is impoverished compared to South Korea. Russians have not yet realized that imitating North Korea is not the path to peace and economic prosperity for them. Perhaps Russians should look more closely at the difference between how the Korean countries go about their daily business?

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

SECOND

Friday, March 3, 2023 6:27 PM (P)

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Big Serge is an infrequent poster but ALWAYS worth reading.
AND with a sense of humor!
MORE AT https://bigserge.substack.com/p/russo-ukrainian-war-schrodingers

Eliot Cohen is an infrequent poster with zero sense of humor and is always worth reading. He wrote: The Shortest Path to Peace

Supporting and arming Ukraine, and accelerating the collapse of the Russian military, is the most realistic way to end the conflict.

Flawed judgments about military history helped fuel bad policy in the run-up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and through the conflict’s early phases. Bad historical analogies look to do the same now, in the debate over how to bring this war to some kind of durable termination.

One line of argument, advanced by some French and German leaders in recent discussions with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, according to The Wall Street Journal, is that sooner or later Russia and Ukraine can reconcile like Germany and France after World War II. (A German government spokesperson later denied the report, but this is hardly a new recommendation.) It is a terrible analogy. Reconciliation may have arrived a couple of decades after the Second World War, but that conflict had ended with the aggressor not merely defeated but devastated. French troops had occupied Germany, including a part of its former capital. Clear borders between the two countries had been established and German society, if not thoroughly de-Nazified, had moved a long way in that direction.

The Russia-Ukraine case is very different. Russia, as unambiguous an aggressor as was Nazi Germany in 1940, will not, even under the most optimistic assumptions, see its cities flattened, its regime overthrown, its military disbanded for 10 years and only reconstructed thereafter under the supervision of the Western democracies. And the idea that the fighting will conclude with Russia again accepting (as Moscow did three decades ago) the legitimacy of Ukraine’s 1991 borders is barely conceivable.

To suppose that any real peace between Russia and Ukraine is possible within the next decade, after the horrors of the invasion—rape, torture, murder, the wholesale kidnapping of children—is simply naive. Nor are the Arab-Israeli truces a plausible model for the future. Those truces lasted, respectively, seven years (1949–56), 11 years (1956–67), six years (1967–73), and nine years (1973–82). And that does not count the cross-border raids, aerial dogfights, terrorist attacks, and up-to-the-edge-of-war mobilization crises during those truces. In the Middle East, the great powers were able to put brakes on their clients, and the country whose existence was up for dispute, Israel, eventually became the strongest power.

A rather more popular analogy is the truce after the Korean War, which has lasted for a good 70 years. But here as well the comparison is too flimsy to hold up to a closer look. Stalin approved the original North Korean invasion of the South. Only after he died, in March 1953, did the new Soviet leadership indicate that it was willing to bring the conflict to an end. In July of that year, the armistice was finally signed. Not to put too fine a point on it, although Vladimir Putin’s demise would probably make it easier to conclude the conflict in Ukraine, he is not dead yet.

The analogy breaks down in many other ways, as well. For one thing, China and North Korea couldn’t have imagined victory after early 1951. In August of that year American and United Nations ground forces, coupled with the South Korean army, numbered more than 500,000 troops, half of them American. The front line was about the length that the demilitarized zone is today, stretching through 150 miles of mountainous, and therefore defensible, terrain. The lines had been restored roughly to the prewar demarcation between the South and North.

In Ukraine, the active front lines are about 600 miles in length, but the Russia-Ukraine border is much longer than that. Ukraine must defend not a narrow, mounta

SIGNYM

Friday, March 3, 2023 9:33 PM (P)

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Big Serge is an infrequent poster but ALWAYS worth reading.
AND with a sense of humor!
MORE AT https://bigserge.substack.com/p/russo-ukrainian-war-schrodingers

SECOND: Eliot Cohen is an infrequent poster with zero sense of humor and is always worth reading. He wrote:

Quote:
The Shortest Path to Peace

Supporting and arming Ukraine, and accelerating the collapse of the Russian military, is the most realistic way to end the conflict.

Hahaha!
He IS funny!
/snark

*****

He stupid.

Altho I WILL say that I did hear about a study that claimed the most durable civil war conflict resolutions leading to the longest peace are ones in which one side is thoroughly trounced. So maybe the real answer is for Russia to obliterate Ukraine.

Not sure if that's correct: Germany was thoroughly trounced in WWI but the terms of peace were so onerous that they led almost immediately (historically speaking) to WWII. OTOH Germany and Japan were destroyed in WWII but forced to rebuild in the American model, with their political and military establishments neutered and THAT'S led to a lasting peace.

Maybe Ukraine needs to be neutered.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake

SECOND

Friday, March 3, 2023 10:33 PM (P)

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Hahaha!
He IS funny!
/snark

*****

He stupid.

Altho I WILL say that I did hear about a study that claimed the most durable civil war conflict resolutions leading to the longest peace are ones in which one side is thoroughly trounced. So maybe the real answer is for Russia to obliterate Ukraine.

Not sure if that's correct: Germany was thoroughly trounced in WWI but the terms of peace were so onerous that it led to WWII. OTOH Germany and Japan were destroyed in WWII but forced to rebuild in the American model, with their political and military establishments neutered and THAT'S led to a lasting peace.

Maybe Ukraine needs to be neutered.

Russia needs to have the things it fears most happen to it. That is what it took to knock sense into Italy, Germany and Japan. Today those people are more prosperous and more numerous than they would be if the Axis Powers had won. Absolute rulers absolutely are the worst at making their countries prosper. See North Korea, which has had a series of irreplaceable Kims, compared to South Korea, which has had a series of very replaceable leaders. Which Korea is more prosperous, Signym?

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

SIGNYM

Friday, March 3, 2023 11:33 PM (P)

And you* pretend that your* goal isn't to destroy Russia?

OMFG you're such a liar. Nobody can believe a word you post, you contradict yourself (i.e. lie) every post.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake

SECOND

Saturday, March 4, 2023 2:18 AM (P)

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
And you* pretend that your* goal isn't to destroy Russia?

OMFG you're such a liar. Nobody can believe a word you post, you contradict yourself (i.e. lie) every post.

You write like you are North Korean. They go on and on about having a strong military, with many nukes, because North Koreans do NOT want to be slaves to the US like South Koreans are.

The North Koreans also never skip a chance to tell the world that they have an independent economy that does not need to trade with countries plotting to enslave the North Koreans.

Funny how Russian propaganda is becoming very similar to North Korea. Great minds think alike.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

SECOND

Saturday, March 4, 2023 2:56 AM (P)

March 03, 2023 | Beyond the Horizon | Estonia

Few countries have been more stalwart in their opposition to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine than Estonia.

A former Soviet republic and current NATO member with a nearly 200-mile-long border with Russia, Estonia has for years been ringing alarm bells about Russian espionage, military provocations and other meddling. The Russian-speaking community that comprises around a quarter of Estonia’s population has complained that they are in the middle of a tug-of-war between the West and Russia, too.

“I don’t think there can be any relations as usual with a pariah state that hasn’t really given up the imperialistic goals,” Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas said in Munich recently, according to an Associated Press story that said Estonia is the largest per-capita supplier of military aid to Ukraine. “If we don’t learn this lesson and don’t prosecute the crimes of aggression, the war crimes will just continue.”

It’s no surprise, then, that Estonia and Europe’s relations with Russia have become central to the Baltic country’s parliamentary elections on March 5. Kallas, moreover, is not running for reelection, meaning that voters know they will be choosing a new leader.

As the Baltic News Network recently reported, the Estonian Conservative People’s Party (EKRE) has threatened to sue local media outlets that published a Politico article claiming that the party has ties to the Wagner Group, a private military contractor with insider ties to the Kremlin that has supplied Russian President Vladimir Putin with some of its most fearsome fighters.

Politico wrote that Wagner supported the EKRE’s right-wing, Euroskeptical messaging. Part of the alleged Russian-backed messaging for the party included a #ESTexitEU keyword on social media promoting Estonia’s exit from the European Union. The party denied having any connection to Wagner or Russian operatives.

The EKRE is the main rival to Kallas’ liberal Reform Party, which has ruled the country in a coalition with the center-left Social Democratic Party and the conservative Isamaa Party, the Robert Schuman Foundation explained. Polls show the Reform Party will likely garner the most votes but will still need coalition partners to form a government.

Russia isn’t the only major issue in the election. High energy costs and soaring inflation have hammered the Estonian economy. Many Estonian voters feel as if Kallas and her allies have refused to deal with the twin crises, argued Tallinn University political scientist Tonis Saarts in the Baltic Times.

Such disputes are one reason why Lauri Husser, the leader of the left-wing party Eesti 200, wrote in an Estonian Public Broadcasting opinion piece that voters face a choice between marshaling the power of government to confront Estonia’s challenges (Husser’s preferred path), or embracing a conservative approach that equates national sovereignty with being outside the EU as the way forward.

Of course, Putin would recommend Estonians opt for the latter course of action.

https://www.dailychatter.com/stories/beyond-the-horizon/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

SIGNYM

Saturday, March 4, 2023 4:49 AM (P)

Russia has no intention of invading Estonia, unless Estonia seriously prepares to invade Russia first. And that would be so suicidal on Estonia's part that they would have to go nationally nuts to do that.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake

SECOND

Saturday, March 4, 2023 5:16 AM (P)

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Russia has no intention of invading Estonia, unless Estonia seriously prepares to invade Russia first. And that would be so suicidal on Estonia's part that they would have to go nationally nuts to do that.

The Prime Minister of Estonia finds your promises so very reassuring. Actually, the PM doesn't, which is why joined NATO. That is also why Estonia supports Ukraine.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

6IXSTRINGJACK

Saturday, March 4, 2023 5:26 AM (P)

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Russia has no intention of invading Estonia, unless Estonia seriously prepares to invade Russia first. And that would be so suicidal on Estonia's part that they would have to go nationally nuts to do that.
The Prime Minister of Estonia finds your promises so very reassuring. Actually, the PM doesn't, which is why joined NATO. That is also why Estonia supports Ukraine.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

That's easy to do. It's not the Estonian men being sent to their death for NATO, just like Ted isn't being sent to his death for NATO.

Maybe they have cute little "Estonia Supports Ukraine" bumper stickers on their cars like the one Ted's been driving around with for a year.

--------------------------------------------------

Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.

SECOND

Saturday, March 4, 2023 6:18 AM (P)

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Russia has no intention of invading Estonia, unless Estonia seriously prepares to invade Russia first. And that would be so suicidal on Estonia's part that they would have to go nationally nuts to do that.
The Prime Minister of Estonia finds your promises so very reassuring. Actually, the PM doesn't, which is why joined NATO. That is also why Estonia supports Ukraine.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

That's easy to do. It's not the Estonian men being sent to their death for NATO, just like Ted isn't being sent to his death for NATO.

Maybe they have cute little "Estonia Supports Ukraine" bumper stickers on their cars like the one Ted's been driving around with for a year.

How many NATO troops were sent to Ukraine? Zero, despite what Russia says, but Russia keeps threatening to nuke the world for sending troops that have not been sent.

How much money did Estonia send to Ukraine? More than 1% of its GDP, despite Russia threatening to nuke anybody who sends weapons to Ukraine. The world is just being gracious and polite toward two mentally ill countries that desperately need psychiatric help, but if Russia or North Korea actually do what they continuously threaten to do, we will see what the world does back.

"how much money has estonia sent to ukraine"
https://www.google.com/search?q=how+much+money+has+estonia+sent+to+ukr
aine

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

SIGNYM

Saturday, March 4, 2023 7:12 AM (P)

It's a good thing that "NATO" troops aren't in Ukraine and "NATO" weapons aren't in Ukraine bc that way there will be no deaths of foreign soldiers and no destroyed foreign equipment.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake

6IXSTRINGJACK

Saturday, March 4, 2023 7:36 AM (P)

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
It's a good thing that "NATO" troops aren't in Ukraine and "NATO" weapons aren't in Ukraine bc that way there will be no deaths of foreign soldiers and no destroyed foreign equipment.

Yeah. And, yanno... That would be starting WWIII if we stop pretending that Ukraine is just defending itself and they made it all official like.

But try explaining that to either of the two inbreeders left in the RWED here that have been bouncing on Ukrainian flagpoles while jerking each other off for the last 365 days.

--------------------------------------------------

Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.

SIGNYM

Saturday, March 4, 2023 11:45 AM (P)

Those two... I don't know what world they're living in. But I'll get back to that later.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake

SECOND

Saturday, March 4, 2023 5:11 PM (P)

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
It's a good thing that "NATO" troops aren't in Ukraine and "NATO" weapons aren't in Ukraine bc that way there will be no deaths of foreign soldiers and no destroyed foreign equipment.

Yeah. And, yanno... That would be starting WWIII if we stop pretending that Ukraine is just defending itself and they made it all official like.

But try explaining that to either of the two inbreeders left in the RWED here that have been bouncing on Ukrainian flagpoles while jerking each other off for the last 365 days.

The Russians murdered 4,000,000 Ukrainians in the Holodomor, a word derived from 'to kill by starvation' and the Russians are doing it again:

Kherson torture centers were planned by the Russian state, say lawyers

The lawyers said on Thursday they had investigated 20 torture chambers in Kherson and concluded they were part of a “calculated plan to terrorize, subjugate and eliminate Ukrainian resistance and destroy Ukrainian identity”.

“The mass torture chambers, financed by the Russian state, are not random but rather part of a carefully thought-out and financed blueprint with a clear objective to eliminate Ukrainian national and cultural identity,” said the British barrister Wayne Jordash, who is leading the team.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/mar/02/kherson-torture-centres-
were-planned-by-russian-state-say-lawyers

Attorney General Merrick Garland made an unannounced trip to Ukraine on Friday, according to a Justice Department official, his second trip to the country after Russia invaded a little more than a year ago.

On Wednesday, Garland testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee that he believed the Russian government was committing crimes against humanity and said the Justice Department supports efforts by The Hague to investigate and prosecute those crimes.

The attorney general last went to Ukraine in June. During that trip, Garland announced that he was appointing Eli Rosenbaum, the top US so-called “Nazi hunter,” to lead a Justice Department team to identify and prosecute war criminals.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/03/politics/merrick-garland-ukraine/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

SECOND

Saturday, March 4, 2023 5:17 PM (P)

Putin’s war has ‘lost’ Russia up to one million young men

Daily casualty rates as a proportion of those fighting are now higher than for the Somme in 1916

The Somme has become synonymous with battlefield deaths. Russia's casualty rate in Ukraine is now higher than that in 1916

Putin’s renewed invasion of Ukraine passed its first-anniversary last month with little sign of ending. A further grim milestone will soon be reached. Since February 24 2022, Russia has lost almost one million young males to the war, through both inordinately high battlefield casualty rates, and from the hundreds of thousands of young Russians who have fled forced conscription into the Russian armed forces.

The scale of the Russian battlefield casualties is wholly out of line with modern Western military expectations. The West places a premium on short, decisive war-fighting, taking great care to minimize losses. Russian military strategy, in contrast, is still largely governed by Soviet-era doctrines of human wave-style assaults with massed infantry and artillery overwhelming the opposing force’s defenses.

These crude tactics have evolved recently in Bakhmut to become an even blunter instrument. New Russian assault units have been created to overpower Ukrainian defenses. Their new assaults have started, and are largely underwhelming. Scattered too thinly, the lack of a Russian concentration of force — in addition to superior western military equipment joining the fight over the coming weeks and months — will lead to even higher Russian casualties.

Russia began the war with approximately 150,000 men. Current estimates of Russian losses are almost 200,000 killed, wounded, and missing; an initial force turnover of 130 per cent within twelve months.

During the first few weeks of the renewed Russian offensives, between 800 and 1,000 Russians have been killed and wounded each day. Some days casualties have nudged over the 1,000 mark. That’s well in excess of 20,000 per month. To put these figures into context, these daily rates exceed even those sustained in proportion to the numbers fighting during the battle of the Somme in 1916.

Russia can only sustain these numbers if they recruit more fighting men. There are rumors of a further round of forced conscriptions to bring an additional 500,000 to the front. Putin already agreed to raise the age of conscription from 27 to 30 last year.

Russia mobilized up to 300,000 conscripts by last autumn, and many of those will now have replenished the depleted Russian ranks. However, it is estimated that up to 700,000 Russian males fled Russia to avoid the drafts last year, terrified of being sent into Putin’s meat-grinder in eastern Ukraine. This takes the figure to almost one million young Russian males lost as a direct consequence of Putin’s ill-conceived war.

As of January 2022, one month before the war, Russia had seven and a half million fighting age males able to be conscripted. In just twelve months that figure has shrunk to six and a half million. If the war continues at present rates there won’t be much of a young male Russian society left.

Robert Clark is the Director of the Defence and Security Unit at Civitas. He previously served in the British military

https://web.archive.org/web/20230303235929/https://www.telegraph.co.uk
/news/2023/03/03/putins-war-has-lost-russia-one-million-young-men/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

6IXSTRINGJACK

Saturday, March 4, 2023 5:24 PM (P)

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
It's a good thing that "NATO" troops aren't in Ukraine and "NATO" weapons aren't in Ukraine bc that way there will be no deaths of foreign soldiers and no destroyed foreign equipment.

Yeah. And, yanno... That would be starting WWIII if we stop pretending that Ukraine is just defending itself and they made it all official like.

But try explaining that to either of the two inbreeders left in the RWED here that have been bouncing on Ukrainian flagpoles while jerking each other off for the last 365 days.

The Russians murdered 4,000,000 Ukrainians in the Holodomor, a word derived from 'to kill by starvation' and the Russians are doing it again:

Kherson torture centers were planned by the Russian state, say lawyers

The lawyers said on Thursday they had investigated 20 torture chambers in Kherson and concluded they were part of a “calculated plan to terrorize, subjugate and eliminate Ukrainian resistance and destroy Ukrainian identity”.

“The mass torture chambers, financed by the Russian state, are not random but rather part of a carefully thought-out and financed blueprint with a clear objective to eliminate Ukrainian national and cultural identity,” said the British barrister Wayne Jordash, who is leading the team.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/mar/02/kherson-torture-centres-
were-planned-by-russian-state-say-lawyers

Attorney General Merrick Garland made an unannounced trip to Ukraine on Friday, according to a Justice Department official, his second trip to the country after Russia invaded a little more than a year ago.

On Wednesday, Garland testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee that he believed the Russian government was committing crimes against humanity and said the Justice Department supports efforts by The Hague to investigate and prosecute those crimes.

The attorney general last went to Ukraine in June. During that trip, Garland announced that he was appointing Eli Rosenbaum, the top US so-called “Nazi hunter,” to lead a Justice Department team to identify and prosecute war criminals.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/03/politics/merrick-garland-ukraine/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Sources: CNN, The Guardian, Merrick Garland and the DOJ.

--------------------------------------------------

Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.

SIGNYM

Saturday, March 4, 2023 5:30 PM (P)

I huess this is "later".

I've been trying to figure out how people can get "stuck" on certain ideas. I know that there are probably pathological emotional factors at work- SECOND blames Nixon, and by extension all Republicans, Trump voters ("Trumptards") and anyone who might be a Trump supporter for every evil thing he's done in his life, beginning wth Vietnam. The guy's got some deep twist in his mental makeup. And THUGR, AFAIK, is still trying to prove to "somebody" that he's military-worthy material.

But there are perfectly normal people with average backgrounds that wind up on extreme ends of one ideology or another, and I think a lot has to do with propaganda.

Take women. There certainly is, historically, a lot of bias against women. Women were prohibited from owning property, education, gathering, driving, birth control, etc. In some cases they still are. And women still face prejudice that keeps them from being considered equally. Under the drumbeat of feminism it's easy to focus entirely on the prejudices both large and small, and filter out everything else. After all, it's not like women have no evidence to back up their claim of being harassed and discriminated against. It's just that that's ALL they see.

Same with blacks. Everyday prejudice still exists. And if you're told, over and over, that the reason why you're treated a certain way has nothing to do with how you dress, how you talk, your education and diligence (or lack of) and criminal history, but that it's ALL due to your skin color ... well, there's plenty of evidence to bolster that opinion.

People who quite rightly (IMHO) think that the "establishment" is lying to them about politics and the economy (plenty of evidence for that!) jump to the idea that they're being lied to about... well.... everything, including long-established and useful science (yanno, chemistry, biology, physics). Why? Because it's easy to point out the big whopping lies being told by "the establishment" today.

I could say the same how Dems view Repubs, how young people view the elderly, etc.

For the longest time, I saw everything thru the lens of "efficiency". I assumed that the most "efficient" organism/economy/society would outcompete, survive and evolve. I thought I was looking at something fundamental and inescapable. It wasn't until I realized that pefectly adapated highly efficient systems are fragile and don't survive shock that that assumptiopn fell away. And I go there by looking at nature, which tossed up a multitude of creatures that ALMOST fill the same niche ... diversity and redundancy creates robustness which out-survives efficency.

It's not that there's no evidence at all for a POV. There's PLENTY. It's just that it's HIGHLY FILTERED.

Life is complicated. The real world is complicated. It tosses up lots and lots and lots and lots of events, facts, factoids, correlations etc. It's like looking at clouds: you can see aything you want.

"Give me white noise and the right filters and I can show you anything you want".

I guess one way to get out of those kinds of traps is to seriously consider thoughts tht fall outside of a preferred pattern.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake

SECOND

Saturday, March 4, 2023 6:28 PM (P)

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
I huess this is "later".

I've been trying to figure out how people can get "stuck" on certain ideas. I know that there are probably pathological emotional factors at work- SECOND blames Nixon, and by extension all Republicans, Trump voters ("Trumptards") and anyone who might be a Trump supporter for every evil thing he's done in his life, beginning wth Vietnam. The guy's got some deep twist in his mental makeup. And THUGR, AFAIK, is still trying to prove to "somebody" that he's military-worthy material. . . .

Signym, you are confused. I have not done anything evil in my life, but if you know something about me that I have forgotten, write it down and tell me, right now, because I am really curious. In contrast, Putin, Nixon, Bush II, and Trump have done many evil things and those evil deeds are well documented in print and video.

When I see a Trumptard struggling to stay in the middle-class, 6ixStringJack for example, I blame them for their problems. I do not blame the system. When Russians kill and torture Ukrainians, I blame Russians, not the US. I don't do the absurd mental tricks Signym uses of claiming the Ukrainians are Nazis or US puppets getting punished for being evil. Signym, you have got some kind of mental glitch that causes you to confuse up with down, or get cause and effect reversed, or get Ukraine invading Russia.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

6IXSTRINGJACK

Saturday, March 4, 2023 6:42 PM (P)

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
For the longest time, I saw everything thru the lens of "efficiency". I assumed that the most "efficient" organism/economy/society would outcompete, survive and evolve. I thought I was looking at something fundamental and inescapable. It wasn't until I realized that pefectly adapated highly efficient systems are fragile and don't survive shock that that assumptiopn fell away. And I go there by looking at nature, which tossed up a multitude of creatures that ALMOST fill the same niche ... diversity and redundancy creates robustness which out-survives efficency.

Six-Sigma & Globalism in a nutshell.

Everything is fine until it's not fine. Spend decades stripping away all redundancy and contingency plans to bolster the bottom line for shareholders, and then after decades of resting on your laurels perched atop what much greater men than you built, employ a bunch of diversity hires with no (diverse) knowledge or (diverse) skills to replace people who knew what they were doing and how to fix things and you're left with Biden*'s America and a global infrastructure that is in tatters.

--------------------------------------------------

Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.

6IXSTRINGJACK

Saturday, March 4, 2023 6:42 PM (P)

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
I have not done anything evil in my life

Just what an evil person would say. Get fucked, liar.

Quote:
When I see a Trumptard struggling to stay in the middle-class, 6ixStringJack for example, I blame them for their problems.

I blame myself for my problems. That's how I end up fixing them.

I'm having no problem staying in the middle class.

Everything is paid for. My net worth for my age is well beyond both the median and the mode for my age group, and I haven't drawn a paycheck since June of 2019.

--------------------------------------------------

Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.

SECOND

Saturday, March 4, 2023 7:04 PM (P)

Karen Shakhnazarov, director general of studio Mosfilm, said individuals arguing that the West was about to fall or that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was simply a puppet were "deluding" themselves.

This attitude is rarely seen on Russian state TV as guests regularly predict the demise of Western nations like the U.S., the U.K., France and Germany, allies who have committed to supporting Ukraine's war effort.

The video has been viewed more than 500,000 times since being posted on Thursday by BBC journalist Francis Scarr.

https://www.newsweek.com/russia-ukraine-war-state-tv-lose-war-karen-sh
akhnazarov-west-1785300

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

6IXSTRINGJACK

Saturday, March 4, 2023 7:16 PM (P)

That's what I thought.

Enjoy the weekend because it's back to work on Monday for you, drone.

--------------------------------------------------

Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.

SECOND

Saturday, March 4, 2023 7:18 PM (P)

Vladimir Putin called a special meeting of the National Security Council on Thursday, amid speculation that Russia could officially declare war on Ukraine and order a further mobilization of hundreds of thousands of troops for the army.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, when asked by journalists whether the gathering of senior defense officials would upgrade what Moscow continues to call a "special military operation," said: "I don't know, I can't say."

It is a punishable offense in Russia to refer to Moscow's offensive in Ukraine as a war.

https://www.poncacitynews.com/news/putin-calls-security-council-meetin
g-after-accusing-ukraine-terror

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

SECOND

Saturday, March 4, 2023 7:24 PM (P)

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
That's what I thought.

Enjoy the weekend because it's back to work on Monday for you, drone.

Social Security pays me $4,555 on the third Wednesday of each month. My wife will get the same after her 70th birthday. That's $9,110 per month. 6ix, we could adopt you as our 5th child since our Social Security for one month is more than enough to pay your entire yearly living expenses.

(Whoops! I checked with my oldest daughter. She said that she doesn't want a brother who is a loser. The adoption is off the table. Sorry, 6ix.)

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

THG

Saturday, March 4, 2023 8:16 PM (P)

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

It's a good thing that "NATO" troops aren't in Ukraine and "NATO" weapons aren't in Ukraine bc that way there will be no deaths of foreign soldiers and no destroyed foreign equipment.

Right, there are no NATO troops in Ukraine. As for NATO weapons, there are plenty with more on the way. Try to keep up comrade.

T

6IXSTRINGJACK

Saturday, March 4, 2023 8:31 PM (P)

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
That's what I thought.

Enjoy the weekend because it's back to work on Monday for you, drone.

Social Security pays me $4,555 on the third Wednesday of each month.

We've been through this before. No it doesn't.

You're also unmarried and don't have any kids. Not by choice, but because nobody in real life can stomach you either.

--------------------------------------------------

Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.

SIGNYM

Saturday, March 4, 2023 10:03 PM (P)

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
I guess this is "later".

I've been trying to figure out how people can get "stuck" on certain ideas. I know that there are probably pathological emotional factors at work- SECOND blames Nixon, and by extension all Republicans, Trump voters ("Trumptards") and anyone who might be a Trump supporter for every evil thing he's done in his life, beginning wth Vietnam. The guy's got some deep twist in his mental makeup. And THUGR, AFAIK, is still trying to prove to "somebody" that he's military-worthy material. . . .

SECOND: Signym, you are confused. I have not done anything evil in my life,

If that's what it takes to feel ok about yourself, honey....

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake

SIGNYM

Saturday, March 4, 2023 10:20 PM (P)

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
That's what I thought.
Enjoy the weekend because it's back to work on Monday for you, drone.

SECOND: Social Security pays me $4,555 on the third Wednesday of each month.

Not according to Social Security...

Quote:
The maximum benefit depends on the age you retire. For example, if you retire at full retirement age in 2023, your maximum benefit would be $3,627.

https://faq.ssa.gov/en-US/Topic/article/KA-01897

Quote:
SECOND: My wife will get the same after her 70th birthday.

Your fictitious wife gets the same fictitious payment?
I guess "she" goes along with your fictitious children.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake

SIGNYM

Saturday, March 4, 2023 10:35 PM (P)

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM: It's a good thing that "NATO" troops aren't in Ukraine and "NATO" weapons aren't in Ukraine bc that way there will be no deaths of foreign soldiers and no destroyed foreign equipment.

THUGR: Right, there are no NATO troops in Ukraine. As for NATO weapons, there are plenty with more on the way. Try to keep up comrade.

And you THUGR ... I guess you don't "get" sarcasm, along with all the other things you don't "get"?
Too stupid for the Army?

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake

SECOND

Sunday, March 5, 2023 12:06 AM (P)

U.S. intel on China considering lethal aid for Putin's war was gleaned from Russian officials

One of the Biden administration’s goals is for China to recognize that “it’s not OK for Russia to kill innocent Ukrainian people, and nobody should be helping them do that.”

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/us-intel-china-considering-lethal-aid
-putins-war-was-gleaned-russian-o-rcna72994

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

6IXSTRINGJACK

Sunday, March 5, 2023 2:00 AM (P)

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
That's what I thought.
Enjoy the weekend because it's back to work on Monday for you, drone.

SECOND: Social Security pays me $4,555 on the third Wednesday of each month.

Not according to Social Security...
Quote:
The maximum benefit depends on the age you retire. For example, if you retire at full retirement age in 2023, your maximum benefit would be $3,627.

https://faq.ssa.gov/en-US/Topic/article/KA-01897

Quote:
SECOND: My wife will get the same after her 70th birthday.

Your fictitious wife gets the same fictitious payment?
I guess "she" goes along with your fictitious children.

He cuts and pastes all of his info from Google. He's too stupid and/or inept to even push back at you on that one even though he could have. If he was 70 years old in 2023 AND got the maximum benefits AND waited until he was 70 to retire, it would be $4555. He's not and he doesn't and he didn't, but notice how he went back to ignoring us when he thought he was made an ass of again.

This is all moot for 2 reasons anyhow...

1. We've already debunked Second's Social Security fantasy a few months back and either he's forgotten that happened or he thinks we did.

2. I'll be just fine with my $816 per month social security the second I'm old enough to take it and I'm just as impressed with any rich people getting $4555 per month in retirement as I am anybody making 6 or 7 figures at their jobs right now. Which is to say not at all.

--------------------------------------------------

Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.

THG

Sunday, March 5, 2023 3:38 AM (P)

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
Originally posted by THGR: Opinions are useless without fact backing them up.
Yep! And that's exactly why your posts and SECOND's are useless. (Oh, and BTW your "facts" need to be backed up by... what is that word, again? Oh yeah: Evidence. Otherwise your "facts" are just opinion.)

But, yanno, time will tell who is right and who is wrong.
I doubt either of you will be man enough to admit that you're wrong bc you haven't been so far.

The biggest fact from the past was the answer to "Did Russia interfere with the 2016 election?" The fact is that the answer was Yes, but Signym insisted the answer was No. Trump said "Fake News."

"Did Russia interfere with the 2016 election?"
https://www.google.com/search?q=Did+Russia+interfere+with+the+2016+ele
ction

How did Signym turn a Yes into a No? Signym kept reformulating that question as "Did Russia collude with Trump?" Trump did the same thing. Trump and Signym refused to understand that is a different question.

"Did Russia collude with Trump?"
https://www.google.com/search?q=Did+Russia+collude+with+Trump

At present moment, the new question is "Did Russians invade Ukraine?" If you ask Putin, the answer is "No". Russia is protecting itself. Putin is as ridiculous as Trump in saying the opposite of what is true. According to Putin, there is no Ukraine. The land has always been Russian. How can Russia invade Russia? This is why the formulation is "Special Military Operation" rather than good old-fashion "War".

"There is no Ukraine."
https://www.google.com/search?q=there+is+no+Ukraine

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Yep TWO, good post.

T

THG

Sunday, March 5, 2023 3:42 AM (P)

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Oh piffle.

Yanno who REALLY influenced the election? Britain's MI6 and ex-intelligence, and the FBI
Seriously, SECOND, out of the hundreds of millions of tweets and hundreds of millions of FB posts about the election, how many can be unambiguously traced to Russia?

You probably don't know. Neither does Mueller. But I bet you'd need a microscope to find that needle in that ginormous haystack.

How stupid do you think we are?

Purposeful forgetfulness is also one of comrade sigmyms tools to avoiding facts. Our Intel showed the building, the ip addresses and even what Russian sat at what desk while interfering in our elections.

I'll post a video showing a good example of signyms, Russians, type of bullshit. Her, their, style of completely ignoring facts.

T

G20 audience laugh at Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov for Ukraine war claims

6IXSTRINGJACK

Sunday, March 5, 2023 3:47 AM (P)

lol

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Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.

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USER	POST DATE
SECOND	11:34
6IXSTRINGJACK	11:41
SECOND	14:44
6IXSTRINGJACK	14:53
6IXSTRINGJACK	14:53
SIGNYM	15:44
SIGNYM	15:53