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Russia versus Ukraine, good versus evil, and two kleptocratic shades of gray
This is not a comic book hero story.
There are geopolitical realities, and then there are ideological frameworks and constructs that don’t bear any resemblance to reality. In America today, we are dealing with the latter framework through shoddy, biased war reporting, presented to us by the corporate media and our ruling class, which insists upon a dichotomy that doesn't exist.
Let’s talk about reality, detached from all of the morality signaling on social media and TV.
Though Russia is the aggressor, and is therefore, responsible for most of the violence and suffering in Ukraine, this does not mean Ukraine can suddenly be labeled as an extension to American founding ideals.
We, the free people of the world, can absolutely support a country that is currently defending itself, but we don’t need to pretend that Ukraine is something that it is not.
Ukraine and Russia might sport separate flags, and they might currently play for different Great Power teams, but the two nations are not so different, after all. On the governance scale, both countries rank as two of the most kleptocratic and corrupted countries on earth. In Russia, oligarchs have heavy sway over the economy and politics of the nation. The same applies in Ukraine, where the sitting president was elected as the mere patron of a powerful oligarch. The average Ukrainian struggles mightily under this unfair, broken system. Ukraine is a country of abject poverty, where the average citizen earns around $3700 bucks a year.
In 2021, Ukraine’s President Zelensky, facing declining poll ratings, took it upon himself to place his foremost political rival under house arrest, while shutting down opposition television networks, all in the name of “national security.”
Why don’t Russia and Ukraine get along? Well, sometimes they do. Ukrainians often elect both pro-West and pro-Russia candidates to higher office. Western governments, in recent history, have not supported when the latter situation occurs, sometimes fomenting clandestine color revolutions to seek their exit from politics in Ukraine. ...
Ukrainian leaders now seem committed to trying to drag their Western partners into face to face conflict with Russia. Ukrainian politicians have a lot to lose, including, potentially their lives, so their desperation is somewhat understandable.
Ukraine might be winning the propaganda war, but the war on the ground tells a different story. Russia continues to secure access to the sea, and it will soon succeed in completely cutting off Ukrainian forces. Russia might be facing heavy sanctions, but its armies continue vacuuming up territory in Ukraine.
So far, NATO (the United States military) has rejected intervening and they should not intervene, because World War 3 is not worth it. But powerful western interests in Washington, D.C. and Brussels are attempting to use Ukrainians as pawns for a longstanding political campaign against Moscow. The massive weapons shipments continue to arrive in western Ukraine, with hopes that Ukrainians will use them in a long campaign against Russia. I hope Ukrainians recognize this, and refuse to act as human sacrifices for these campaigns.
Ukraine, facing a tug of war between Russia and the West, has a way out of the mess, if only its leaders choose to accept the reality it is facing.
Putin’s terms are pretty straightforward.
The recognition of Crimea as part of Russia
The demilitarization of Ukraine
Given that this is Russia’s initial approach, Ukraine can probably find some flexibility on the second demand. Though key to the agreement will come through Ukraine recognizing some geopolitical realities, like the fact that Crimea is most certainly gone, and that the pro-Russia separatist regions in Ukraine want nothing to do with Ukraine.
Since its modern recognition in 1991, Ukraine has remained bogged down by corruption, bad governance, and damaging foreign influence. Should Ukraine truly commit to remaining neutral, the country can reset relations with its neighbors and one day become a free and prosperous nation.
Follow the money: how Russia will bypass western economic warfare
The US and EU are over-reaching on Russian sanctions. The end result could be the de-dollarization of the global economy and massive commodity shortages worldwide.
Putin understands America’s moral decay
He and Xi Jinping think we’re weak and dissolving from within. Could they be right?
March 2, 2022
Last October, Vladimir Putin aired a speech to the Russian nation chiding the United States for its moral decay. He observed an America “blotting out whole pages” of its history, pursuing “reverse discrimination against the majority in the interests of minorities,” and renouncing time-honored values in an effort at “public renewal.”
“It’s their right, but we are asking them to steer clear of our home,” he warned. “We have a different viewpoint.” This iteration of family values and conservative critique went barely noticed by the American press at the time.
Comparing current social chaos in the US to 1917 Russia, Putin declared that “the fight for equality and against discrimination turns into an aggressive dogmatism on the brink of absurdity,” resulting in thought controls that are sometimes “tighter and stricter than what the Department of Propaganda of the Soviet Communist Party Central Committee did.” The perverse desire to “eliminate the whole notion of men and women,” and to insist that children believe this, he concluded, comes close to a “crime against humanity.”
The Chinese government likewise observes rapid deterioration in Western societies, an increase in racial discord, rising crime rates, family breakdown, vandalism, and political extremism that it believes results from an excess of individual freedom.
Putin and Xi know. After decades of coercive, doctrinaire multiculturalism, abundant sexual follies, and anti-white calumny, the US has arrived as an aggregation of races, ethnicities and social classes that have little in common and that don’t like each other much.
Both Russia’s and China’s leadership think the West’s reigning spirit is at best unsteady and frivolous, and at worst depraved; either way it’s a disposition to discourage in their own societies. Even Hollywood’s and Silicon Valley’s power brokers must be privately amazed as to how easy it is to control childlike minds with buzzy ads, electronic games, and emotive news, a manufactured world of celebrity, dreams and magic.
Putin and Xi must laugh like jackals when Yahoo “news” features “comedian” Chelsea Handler, the pride of Martha’s Vineyard and Bel-Air, “skiing topless with a joint in one hand and drink in the other.” She’s celebrating her forty-seventh birthday, plugging her 2022 national tour, “Horny and Vaccinated.” They do not see Chelsea as kicky or fun. From Jeff Koons’s $97 million “Rabbit” to the freakish Sam Brinton, nuclear wastes overseer, the American surrender to morbidity must appear to both heads of state proof-positive of stage-four terminal capitalism.
Putin is a cold-blooded realist, untouched by smiley-face politics, with memories of 18th-century empire, still stewing over Soviet reversals. His authoritarian, highly nationalistic style and assertive foreign policy seek to rebuild the Russian sphere of influence in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, not reestablish Soviet ideology. What he must think when America’s vice president, Kamala Harris, announces, “We won’t be silent about race. We won’t be silent about sexual orientation. We won’t be silent about immigrant’s rights. These are the very issues that define our identity as Americans.”
Americans at the top and the bottom of the social pyramid detest — or feel complete indifference toward — the nation’s classical, Christian, and Anglo-European foundations. Talk of commonwealth and common culture are rhetorical flourishes that inspire only the innocent and naive. We’re all in this together, go the jingles, but we’re not, not right now, least of all the woke plutocrats and their allies who see opportunity in wrecking old authorities.
The fish rots from its head. The New York Times’s 1619 Project calls for “reframing” American history and civics as the story of white supremacy and black subjection. Domestic terrorist-turned-sage Angela Davis comes to Andover to tell the nation’s future leaders they are being schooled on stolen land. Episcopalian bishops, Harvard deans, Ford Foundation executives, and Met curators climb onboard the crazy train, as style dictates. Holland Cotter over at the Times — on the day the US folded in Afghanistan — wondered whether “historic works of art can be considered exempt from modern moral scrutiny,” condemning “gender-based power plays” in Titian and Veronese’s mythical allegories. ...
The functional, well-adjusted, and normative give up, flee, or seek enclaves where they and their children can be secure, where streets are clean and neighbors are civil, and where schools teach basic academics unencumbered by anti-white or anti-American feeling. Despised yeomen acquiesce in their lost status, or turn in vain to Donald J. Trump for salvation. Half of the nation resists deracination. The other half turns it into a mission.
What feels edgy and liberating at the top gets rank and seedy fast in slums and backwaters, the grim places where big trucks and beaten-up RVs are parked on the neighbor’s lawn. At a time in the nation’s history when almost one of two newborns is born out of wedlock, insisting on firm family ideals is politically impossible.
The insensate and criminal are not just a few vagrants and sociopaths, living in shadows, facing universal pity and contempt. The welfare state has been feeding clients and their children for three or four generations, and its subsidies have not produced a better, stronger people grateful for their nation’s largesse and security. ...
Testing Western resolve is bound to continue. Putin and Xi know their rivals are poorly positioned politically and psychologically to confront austerity or force, the Ukraine invasion being one early probe into geopolitical power. For now, it’s chilling to think that Putin and Xi might perceive America’s internal weaknesses more clearly than most of the nation’s own ruling class.
Fierce reaction from the Biden thing when a journalist asks a question about "his" son and the connection to Ukraine.
French President Macron believes 'the worst is to come' after call with Putin
Emmanuel Macron held talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin over the phone on Thursday in a bid to ease tensions between Russia and Ukraine. According to a French official, the pair spoke for 90 minutes, with Putin telling Macron that the conflict was "going according to plan." A source present described the tone of the phone call as "pessimistic" and "not-so-friendly." As Russia's invasion of Ukraine enters its second week, Kherson mayor Ihor Kolykhaev told NBC News Thursday that the city had been captured by Russian forces. After more than a full day of continuous shelling, hundreds are feared dead in the port of Mariupol, the deputy mayor said. Explosions have been reported in the capital Kyiv and heavy shelling in the country's second city, Kharkiv.
UPDATE: A bulleted quote in the annotation below was inaccurately attributed and has since been removed.
Dunno what Trump would do, but i'm quite sure that Trump did not have a son taking bribes from Ukrainian gas companies. Biden did, and Pelosi, and Romney, and Kerry. Funny how they're all Democrats.
The very thing Putler and Xitler repeatedly named as their wettest dream. Hmmm. Are they working hand-in-glove with WEF to undermine the US? Seems to be the case.
The truth will come out this year.
Chinese officials in early February asked Russian officials to wait until the Winter Olympics in Beijing had concluded before sending troops into Ukraine, U.S. officials said, according to a report.
A Western intelligence service collected the information before the invasion and the U.S. considers it credible, according to the New York Times. The intelligence reportedly shows that China had some knowledge of Russia's plans.
The U.S. and its allies reportedly used the information to help determine when Russia might invade.
The Olympics ended on Feb. 20 and Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered troops into Ukraine on Feb. 24.
> Patrick
Who do you think was behind destruction of US cities in these last years?
Who do you think was behind destruction of US cities in these last years? If it wasn't China/Russia pulling strings then their intelligence agencies should be fired, so well it worked into their hands.
Reminding him of the Siege of Budapest in 1944?! Did Soros just remind everyone he was fighting/working for the real original Nazis at that time?
Who told the police not to arrest rioters nor climate change protesters but to arrest instead covid lockdown protesters?Xi more likely than Putin. Indirectly of course. Most people are easily bribed, but it didn't have to be bribary. Also note that current US leadership is less inclined to do anything drastic in Ukraine, less so than Trump seemed to. Also note how hard they tried to pin "Russian collusion" on Trump. Also note how the current attack on Ukraine didn't start until Trump was out of the office.
Does Putin or Xi control American Law Enforcement?
Who gave that order?
Russia doesn't have the cash to do this. Pro-CCP groups exist on almost every college campus; they are few to no Putin Forever groups.As I already pointed out, the entire theory makes sense if you stop thinking about Russia and start thinking about a new alliance, in which China is the top player and Russia is one of the tough guys doing it's bidding. We don't know the true strength of relationship between China and Russia. Current public image, warm as it is, still means nothing. All will be revealed in it's due time.
As I already pointed out, the entire theory makes sense if you stop thinking about Russia and start thinking about a new alliance, in which China is the top player and Russia is one of the tough guys doing it's bidding. We don't know the true strength of relationship between China and Russia. Current public image, warm as it is, still means nothing. All will be revealed in it's due time.
The National Pulse first identified Zimmerman’s connections to the Chinese think tank, the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences (SASS) on Tuesday, after the Biden White House released its annual report to Congress on White House personnel last week. The report lists Zimmerman as the special assistant for national security personnel and his annual salary is also listed at $110,000 per year.
Prior to his current White House role, Zimmerman’s listed career history includes acting as a visiting scholar for the SASS while working at New York University’s Center on International Cooperation. Zimmerman’s career history also includes work within the White House National Security Council staff and the U.S. Department of Defense under former President Barack Obama.
The National Pulse pointed out the SASS Chinese think tank’s involvement in recruiting at least one former CIA officer, Kevin Patrick Mallory. The former CIA officer was charged with transmitting “Top Secret and Secret documents to an agent of the People’s Republic of China.” In 2019, Mallory was convicted and sentenced to 20 years in prison for giving up that classified information.
Austin Lin’s unearthed role as a Special Assistant to the President and Deputy Director of Technology adds to the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s controversial role in the 2020 election, which it has been accused of rigging through partisan grants and mail-in ballot manipulation.
Moreover, Lin was hired to serve as the Biden Harris Transition Team’s Director of Information Technology and Security in July 2020, immediately after departing his role at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.
From the Transition Team, Lin entered the Biden White House as a Special Assistant to the President and Deputy Director of Technology, serving under fellow CZI alumnus David Recordon.
Similar to Recordon, Lin previously served in the Obama White House’s Office of Information Technology.
he Congressional Black Caucus partnered with a Chinese Communist Party influence group flagged for its efforts to malignly influence U.S. government policy on a virtual visit discussing “economic and trade cooperation,” The National Pulse can reveal.
The Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) counts membership from most African-American elected officials in Congress, including high profile representatives such as Rep. Maxine Waters and Sen. Cory Booker. Other members include the Somali-origin Rep. Ilhan Omar, January 6th Committee Chairman Rep. Bennie Thompson, and prior to becoming Vice President, the Indian-Jamaican origin Kamala Harris.
The caucus claims to tackle racism and “marginalization,” but, as The National Pulse has previously revealed, it collaborates with one of the most racist, repressive, and genocidal regimes in history: the Chinese Communist Party.
In addition to CBC members sending their student-age constituents on propaganda trips to China, the group also had its staff members participate in a “virtual visit” with the Chinese People’s Institute of Foreign Affairs (CPIFA) in December 2021.
“On December 14th, the Chinese People’s Institute of Foreign Affairs (CPIFA) and the US-Asia Institute co-hosted a Virtual Visit of the US Congressional Black Caucus Staffers,” explains the think tank’s website.
“The two sides exchanged views on issues such as US-China relations, US-China economic and trade cooperation and climate change,” added the CPIFA.
The CPIFA functions as part of China’s United Front Work Department, which the U.S.-China Security and Economic Review Commission identifies as Beijing’s operation “to co-opt and neutralize sources of potential opposition to the policies and authority of its ruling Chinese Communist Party” and “influence foreign governments to take actions or adopt positions supportive of Beijing.”
And that's the fault of the Russophobic Establishment. Putin asked to be a NATO member in 2000 and was laughed out of the room.Let's not use double standards and call anything Putin doesn't like "Russophobic". Ukraine is still, STILL not in NATO. Is NATO Ukrainophobic? 2000 was a timeline of the second Chechen campaign.
Every extended hand has been mocked or spit on since the 90s.It's a popular propaganda point. It's also untrue. In the mid-90s, during the hard times, it was the humanitarian aid from the west that kept many from hunger. I remember vaguely that the "Bush legs" program costed around 50Bil (I could be off on that, don't mind being double-checked). That same program later, at better times, was mocked amongst the Russians and used as an example of "humiliating pay-off".
Dmitri Alperovitch
@DAlperovitch
Russian military distributing flyers in Melitopol:
- Russia is not fighting with Ukrainian ppl, only Kyiv junta
- Ppl have nothing to fear. Russia guarantees you peace and security
- Do not leave your house unless necessary
- Do not approach military
- Read our telegram channels
UN estimates number of civilian casualties in Ukraine
A total of 249 civilians have been killed and 553 were wounded in the first week of hostilities in Ukraine, the UN Human Rights office said on Thursday. Most of the civilian casualties were caused by missiles, airstrikes, shelling and other explosive impacts, the UN said.
Let's not use double standards and call anything Putin doesn't like "Russophobic". Ukraine is still, STILL not in NATO. Is NATO Ukrainophobic? 2000 was a timeline of the second Chechen campaign.
It's a popular propaganda point. It's also untrue. In the mid-90s, during the hard times, it was the humanitarian aid from the west that kept many from hunger. I remember vaguely that the "Bush legs" program costed around 50Bil (I could be off on that, don't mind being double-checked). That same program later, at better times, was mocked amongst the Russians and used as an example of "humiliating pay-off".
NATO was formed as an anti-communist alliance, that has turned into a subsidy program so Europeans can disarm themselves while patting themselves on the back for being committed to peace and backseat driving when America does gets involved somewhere or makes a mistake "Tsk, tsk." or "Sad Wise Uncle" act.
Some thoughts:
This whole thing could very easily have been avoided with a little bit of diplomacy. The only reason that didn’t happen was it would have meant the U.S. empire taking a teensy, weensy step back from its agenda of total planetary domination. I’ve seen people call it “sad” or “unfortunate” that Western powers didn’t make basic low-cost, high-yield concessions like guaranteeing no NATO membership for Ukraine and having Kiev honor the Minsk agreements, but it’s not sad, and it’s not unfortunate. It’s enraging. That they did this deserves nothing but pure, unadulterated, white hot rage.
Narrative managers have been working furiously to quash all discussion of No. 1, however. Like our good friend Michael McFaul here:
Please don't give Putin propagandists a platform on your media platforms. There is a time and place for hearing two sides of an issue. This tragic moment in European history is not one of them. Do not give false equivalency to voices of evil and voices of good.
— Michael McFaul (@McFaul) February 24, 2022 ...
Look at this.
Kyiv and Kharkiv are being bombed. The largest invasion on our planet since WW2. Republicans are rooting for the Russians. God be with Ukraine and democracy.
— Rep. Eric Swalwell (@RepSwalwell) February 24, 2022
These people actually believe it’s legitimate to call this “the largest invasion on our planet since WW2.” Just snip out all the pages from the history books between 1950 and 2003 to make Western imperialists feel good about themselves. Unbelievable. ...
After the bombs drop and I’m dying of radiation poisoning, with my final breath I’m going to thank U.S President Joe Biden for denying Putin the moral victory of an assurance that Ukraine won’t join NATO.
Probably goes without saying but just in case: anyone who supports any kind of Western military confrontation with Russia is an enemy of our entire species. ...
It sure is a lucky coincidence that Westerners have spent the last few years being persuaded to hate Russia by their governments and media. Otherwise they might not be giving consent to the West’s dramatic response to this act of aggression.
Remain intensely skeptical of all news coming out of Ukraine. Since 2016 the Western empire has been running an extremely aggressive narrative management campaign about Russia the likes of which we’ve never seen before. The news media have been fully complicit in this mass-scale psyop. Watch and wait for hard evidence of every claim made. Recall how snipers were usedduring the 2014 coup in Kiev to kill protesters and pin the blame on the ousted Yanukovych government.
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