[EnergyUnlimited]

Ukrainians are surrendering in huge numbers.
10 thousands and more of Ukrainian soldiers are surrendering around Rabotnye village.
Game on Zaporozhia aimed at reaching Azov sea is over.
Huge numbers of Ukrainian soldiers are surrendering and if necessary "isolating" (exterminating?) nationalists and SBU agents forcing them to fight.
They are handing over western weapons to Russians and providing intelligence information.
Ukrainian counteroffensive in Zaporozhia is lost.
They are now mulling conscription of women because men are running out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyyps0QaSc8
Much of other Ukrainian infrastructure is annihilated at Russia's whim:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTCORk5NSMo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8WmFQE1Wd0
Now either NATO will go to war itself and if successful get annihilated in nuclear exchange or alternatively Zelensky's government will surrender next year after massive million strong Russian offensive and be replaced with something else.

Poland is calling for extradition of Ukrainian Nazi bandit applauded by Canadian parliament:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/20 ... tradition/

[theluckycountry]

"If they surrender as a unit they cannot be prosecuted for desertion."
youtube channel Redacted
2.13M subscribers (so millions are hearing the truth, just here alone.)

One can only hope that Ukrainian Hotel that was destroyed was home to western journalists. I have nothing against journos, the honest ones, but those whores that sell their souls for corporate lies need to be silenced. The western news is becoming increasingly dangerous to it's citizens, leading them to destruction basically, financial, moral, societal.

Former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern spoke before the United Nations regarding global free speech. Arden pushed for a lockdown on free speech, comparing free speech to weapons.
https://thecongressionalinsider.com/for ... ensorship/

This NWO Whore has been elevated to an international spokeswoman but her only cridentials are the mismanagement of New Zealand and being a muslim sympathizer.
She's the worst kind of white trash


A Canadian is pushing the same agenda. Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly has launched a United Nations declaration that calls for action to protect what it calls "information integrity" and to tackle "disinformation."

https://thecongressionalinsider.com/for ... ensorship/
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/can ... nformation

If they pass these "disinformation" laws across the West then all you will get on youtube et al is disinformation, government approved Lies. I suppose the truth will still be on the fringes of the web, just as the peakoil story was back in the day and the warning about the GFC, which allowed me to save a fortune from loss. But increasingly you need a VPN to escape national censorship.



Here in Australia all net traffic is routed though the national capital canberra and the servers there censor out anything deemed inappropriate for Australians. Thankfully the VPN is fully encrypted and for all they know could be bank traffic. Most of the data crossing the web is still this form I believe. The NBN was built by the government to "Ensure everyone had speedy internet" But it's been a disaster for anything other than intelligence gathering and censorship. The 5 eyes

[theluckycountry]

you know EnergyUnlimited, there is the generally accepted opinion that the Russian government lies about everything, and that may be true, but I have read many accounts about how the Russian people, who evolved over generations of communist rule, don't believe a word of the propaganda their government puts out anyway. In such an environment, why Lie? It would make more sense to tell the truth and have the people believe the opposite, a kind of reverse psychology lol.

I once knew a russian emigrant, that was 15 years ago. He was about 40yo at the time. I asked him once about Stalin and his whole demeanor changed abruptly. He went into a pat speech about how good Stalin was for Russia, blah, blah, blah. I thought Wow, that program they had running in their heads where they dare not say anything bad about him runs deep! What was he thinking, that I was a russian spy sent to test his loyalty? A very strange moment in my life.

I have heard lots of anecdotes on the web, russians in america touting the obvious lies in the newspapers as fact because that was what they were brought up to do. Even while they knew in their hearts it was all lies. I think I'd rather be like that than be sucked into believing the lies, believing the glass is half full and all that crap. One day soon the economies of the West are going to have a precipitous fall into reality, the debt pyramid will collapse and with it the savings and pensions of generations will be wiped out. Lies won't help put food on the table in that day.

[EnergyUnlimited]

you know EnergyUnlimited, there is the generally accepted opinion that the Russian government lies about everything, and that may be true, but I have read many accounts about how the Russian people, who evolved over generations of communist rule, don't believe a word of the propaganda their government puts out anyway. In such an environment, why Lie? It would make more sense to tell the truth and have the people believe the opposite, a kind of reverse psychology lol.

In Eastern Europe we are habitually distrusting governments and we assume them to be liars unless proven otherwise.
The only difference between Poles and Russians is that Poles believe that Russian government lies more and Russians believe that Polish government lies more. In reality they lie on comparable level.
Our PM (Mateusz Morawiecki) was in the past convicted in court for perjury - but he is still PM and no one who support ruling party cares because he is convinced that an opposition leader lies even more but didn't get caught yet.
So we are not taking words of governments seriously - and they are treated with constant mistrust.
It is why governing in Poland is not easy - people are always searching for a second bottom and tend to undermine government efforts, even if occasionally they might be sincere.
So yes, sometimes our government is telling truth very much like broken clock twice a day shows exactly correct hour.
In Russia mistrust in government is similar but their culture is to support government regardless so Putin has a bit easier life there than our PM in Poland.

Sometimes lying is so primitive that it is easy to decode and people are pointing it out.
In such situation government behaves comparably to a thieve who got caught by hand and he cries that it is not his hand.
That is why our government gets all disrespect which it rightfully deserve.
And if government is changed then a second one will behave in the same way and get exactly the same respect, eg non at all.

There are small groups of people who will trust government from their favorite option but not another one - about 20% on each side but they are dismissed by rest as naive idiots.

Common perception is that Polish governments known for last 30 years are foreign agents and do not represent Polish interests most of the time. We understand that they are not sovereign entities.
There is a little hope here that democratic process can change it.

In terms of news I trust outlets like Al Jazerra and some Hindu outlets. I will discuss and quote here western news too but only for a reference purpose.
If western news are telling about Ukraine success I will dismiss it as a likely nonsense but if they talk about Ukrainians failing I will trust. In case of Russian news I will take an opposite stand.
Few independent content creators are far more trustworthy but they are commonly persecuted by YouTube. I can filter out and reject complete nutjobs.

It is not impossible to get a reasonable estimation of what is going on but you have to be diligent with your work.
Average people will just get infested with nonsense and trust all fairy tales and this is why democratic process is increasingly of no use.

But those governmental liars will not change a course of events so no amount of lies or wishful thinking is going to change failing West into successful, vibrant economy.
They will lie as much as they wish and still achieve nothing - OK maybe they will postpone riots and outright revolutions for a while but that's about it.
At some point people will give up on them, refuse to cooperate on anything and sabotage if forced to, switch off light, go home and it is how empires will end.
There are ample hints for this outcome - family unit collapse and MGTOW on West, Zen Generation in China, Europeans impartial to arriving Muslims barbarians and so called hikkocomoris in Japan.

[theluckycountry]

At some point people will give up on them, refuse to cooperate on anything and sabotage if forced to, switch off light, go home and it is how empires will end.

From my research, that is exactly how empires end. The people must know that the collapse will bring harder times but they simply don't care. They have had enough.

[jato0072]

UK planning to send troops into Ukraine to train Ukrainian forces on the ground, Defense Secretary Grant Shapps says - Telegraph

Twitter link

An interesting press release.

[theluckycountry]

Meanwhile in the newly liberated Russian territories.

New regions’ accession to Russia creates more development opportunities

MOSCOW, September 30. /TASS/.
The decision to join Russia that was made by residents of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, and the Zaporozhye and Kherson regions created new development opportunities, State Duma Chairman Vyacheslav Volodin said.

"The choice to reunite with Russia, their historic homeland, in 2022, brought us all together and determined our common future, opening new opportunities for development. He also noted that together with its new regions, Russia would overcome all challenges and become even stronger.

September 30 is celebrated as the Day of Reunification with Russia. On September 30, 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin and the heads of the DPR and the LPR, the Zaporozhye and Kherson Regions signed treaties on their accession to Russia.

https://tass.com/politics/1682727

All's well that ends well.
My congratulations to the peoples of the new republics, may you enjoy peace with economic security under the wing of your chosen superpower, and enjoy the full benefits of being in the BRICS alliance.

UK planning to send troops into Ukraine to train Ukrainian forces on the ground...

They would be better advised to deploy them at home against the muslim like Sweden is planning.



Muslims eject 'unclean' guide dogs from buses

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/musl ... zvkqlsmhs9

Muslim bus drivers’ ban on guide dogs
MUSLIM drivers are forcing blind people and their guide dogs off buses because they consider the animals to be ‘unclean’, it has been revealed.

https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/18771 ... guide-dogs

Of course, and next it will be women in immodest apparel, then the buses will all stop for the call to prayer, etc etc etc.

[EnergyUnlimited]

Russia is getting new friendly EU government in Slovakia which is bordering with Ukraine:
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/10/01/worl ... index.html
It was a very daft move for Zelensky to take Poland, Slovakia and Hungary to WTO over ban on Ukrainian grain dumping and calling these nations on UN Genaral Assembly to be Moscow enablers.
Now he retracted this WTO complains but huge damage is already done.

[theluckycountry]

UK PM Sunak says there are no plans for now to send British troops to Ukraine
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/g ... 21844.html

Many are now turning their backs on the ukrainian Nazis. Not the US though, it's in for the long haul.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell says “Providing assistance for the Ukrainians to defeat the Russians is the number one priority for the United States right now, according to most Republicans“....

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/wha ... -americans

So once again we see the truth, that on the matters of real importance to the American citizens, health, poverty rates, crime, war, Both parties are in lockstep, two sides of the one coin. Oh I get it, Russia and China etc are the big threat, but not in the way it's being sold to the public in the west. The threat isn't against Democracy and freedom, it's against Western control of world finances and commodities. After 400 years the empire is collapsing and instead of bowing out gracefully they will fight to the last dollar.

Of course as a Westerner I will lose in this collapse too, but being a realist I can't engage in the BS propaganda. That's for the useless eaters, for the cannon fodder and I am not in that category. I have very little money in the Western financial system and live far from it's machinations. Have you noticed something EnergyUnlimited? That we two are the only ones almost posting here these days? This forum is predominantly American, and we are not! When you read back over the years you find much activity but nearly all of it hopium about the Rebuildable Energy sector, the EV transition, the Holy Grail of shale oil. But the wheels have fallen off all these.

I think the US posters are speechless because they are finally realizing the truth. Even over on the Wind power thread, where I was proved wrong about the energy efficiency of those towers, it made little difference to the fact that the rollout of the technology is stalling. It doesn't matter if it works, it doesn't matter if you can get to Mars and build a colony, if you haven't got the money it isn't going to happen. And if it doesn't return a fat profit for the corporations, it isn't going to happen. There is little profit in fighting crime in American cities so it isn't happening. There is no profit in solving poverty and a housing crisis so it isn't happening.

Everyone should have read Strauss and Howe's "The Fourth Turning", they would have seen this coming a mile away.

The authors made the Fourth Turning predictions in 1997, during the Third Turning (the Culture Wars in America), which began in 1984. The authors roughly estimated that the Third Turning would last through 2005 but acknowledged that it could end a few years earlier or later.

The authors predicted that the Fourth Turning—a Crisis—would begin within the first few years of the 21st century, around 2005. Because the catalysts for a Fourth Turning are always foreseeable based on the trends that are established during the Unraveling, the authors make a handful of predictions about what the next catalyst might look like:

A terrorist attack by a foreign group purporting to have nuclear weapons, leading the US to declare war and begin searching people’s homes. Suspicions that the president fabricated the event would lead to a nationwide strike and the loss of foreign capital.

(Shortform note: This prediction bears a striking resemblance to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. As the authors suggest in the book, there were some warnings of this attack in advance, including a memo sent to the FBI by Special Agent Kenneth Williams in July of 2001 warning of a potential terrorist plot by Osama Bin Laden. The memo was not acted upon, and experts have suggested that it could have been used to mitigate or prevent the September 11 attack if it had been dealt with properly. However, Neil Howe has noted that the attack didn’t have the lasting impact of a Crisis catalyst.)

A new, highly contagious virus spreads, resulting in significant deaths and causing the government to create and enforce quarantines. The National Guard is deployed to isolate areas hit hardest by the disease, and the president is pressured to declare martial law.

(Shortform note: As of March 27, 2023, COVID-19 had claimed over 1,150,000 American lives, and though the National Guard was not deployed and martial law was not declared, most state governments issued stay-at-home orders. This pandemic occurred too late in the Turning to serve as the catalyst but still contributed to a major shift in the country’s culture and mood and may comprise part of the Turning’s climax.)

Conflicts in and around Russia result in civil wars and the capture of American diplomats, leading the US to send ships into the Black Sea and Congress to consider reinstating the draft.

https://www.shortform.com/blog/the-four ... edictions/

And that is the ukrainian conflict, though the US involvement was over stated in their hypothetical scenario, and indeed there is talk of a Draft again. Ahhh, the things you discover when you turn off the TV for a few decades eh.

[theluckycountry]

An excerpt from chapter one, The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy

Have major national mood shifts like this ever before happened? Yes—many times. Have Americans ever before experienced anything like the current attitude of Unraveling? Yes—many times, over the centuries.

People in their eighties can remember an earlier mood that was much like today's. They can recall the years between Armistice Day (1918) and the Great Crash of 1929. Euphoria over a global military triumph was painfully short-lived. Earlier optimism about a progressive future gave way to a jazz-age nihilism and a pervasive cynicism about high ideals. Bosses swaggered in immigrant ghettos, the KKK in the South, the mafia in the industrial heartland, and defenders of Americanism in myriad Middletowns.

Unions atrophied, government weakened, third-parties were the rage, and a dynamic marketplace ushered in new consumer technologies (autos, radios, phones, jukeboxes, vending machines) that made life feel newly complicated and frenetic. The risky pleasures of a “lost” young generation shocked middle-aged decency crusaders—many of them “tired radicals” who were then moralizing against the detritus of the “mauve decade” of their youth (the 1890s). Opinions polarized around no-compromise cultural issues like drugs, family, and “decency.” Meanwhile, parents strove to protect a scoutlike new generation of children (who aged into today's senior citizens).

Listen to Walter Lippmann, writing during World War I:
We are unsettled to the very roots of our being. There isn't a human relation, whether of parent or child, husband and wife, worker and employer, that doesn't move in a strange situation. We are not used to a complicated civilization, we don't know how to behave when personal contact and eternal authority have disappeared. There are no precedents to guide us, no wisdom that was not meant for a simpler age.

https://archive.org/details/the-fourth- ... 7/mode/2up
https://archive.org/stream/the-fourth-t ... b_djvu.txt
https://epdf.pub/the-fourth-turning-an- ... phecy.html

[EnergyUnlimited]

Here you have a very interesting interview about possible Ukraine future with one of American intelligence officers:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6y3l9xLBRs
1. Ukraine must resign from NATO ambitions.
2. Must sign peace treaty and transfer current Russian occupied territories to Russia.
3. Demilitarize and set demilitarized zone on its side.
4. The longer it will fight the less of it will be left.
5. No amount of NATO help will change it.

It corresponds to my points as stated at the beginning of this war.
Ukraine cannot win.
It can only loose and carry on existing or loose even more and cease to exist.

[theluckycountry]

Just what the world needs, another de-militarized zone. A point of tension and conflict for decades to come. The coup that put the zelinskee faction into power is clearly of US making, Russia has always been the thorn in the US side, without it they would have achieved global domination, unbridled power over all the earth, and we'd all be eating cheese doodals and growing ever fatter while we watched endless crap reality TV shows. The Western world owes Russia a debt of thanks but they don't realize it.

[careinke]

Here you have a very interesting interview about possible Ukraine future with one of American intelligence officers:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6y3l9xLBRs
1. Ukraine must resign from NATO ambitions.
2. Must sign peace treaty and transfer current Russian occupied territories to Russia.
3. Demilitarize and set demilitarized zone on its side.
4. The longer it will fight the less of it will be left.
5. No amount of NATO help will change it.

It corresponds to my points as stated at the beginning of this war.
Ukraine cannot win.
It can only loose and carry on existing or loose even more and cease to exist.

EU, thanks for the link, well worth the time.

I have to say, Scott Ritter and I have basically the same views. His history of Ukraine since the end of WWII, is spot on and helps to set the background. Unfortunately, us in the U.S. will never hear this from the MSM. If Plant watched this one video, I think he may stop supporting the Nazi's. He won't of course and will think of an excuse not to learn.

The video actually gave me some hope this conflict will end much faster than I was anticipating. Ukraine is a dead man walking, with it's only hope of resurrection, is an immediate peace deal.

PEACE

P.S. Bitcoin can fix this

[theluckycountry]

This is probably nothing but I thought I'd pass it on anyway.

Putin Orders First-Ever Nationwide Nuclear Drill, Prepares Bomb-Test At Arctic Circle

The one-day nuclear attack exercise is based on the assumption that NATO will launch a nuclear strike on Russia, destroying 70 percent of Russian housing and life-support facilities. In the scenario, martial law is imposed in the country and a full-scale mobilization is ordered.

https://rmx.news/defense/putin-orders-f ... ic-circle/

bound to happen one day, might as well be as prepared as possible.

[theluckycountry]

How the sanctions against Russia worked on the ground.

McDonalds walked away, russians rebranded the stores, reopened them, and now all the profits stay in Russia.



And a dash of satire


Same with the massive coke profits.




Article by John Michael Greer
The roots of the Russo-Ukrainian war go back a very long ways, but for present purposes we can begin in 2014. That’s when the US and its European allies sponsored a coup d’etat in Ukraine, overthrowing the elected pro-Russian government and replacing it with a pro-NATO one. Once the new regime settled into place, the US and its allies began funding a military buildup that gave Ukraine the second largest army in Europe. That army was armed and trained with an eye toward a massive shift in military affairs that was then underway.

In 2006 the Israelis launched one of their periodic incursions into Lebanon. To the surprise of many people, the Hezbollah militia dealt the Israelis a bloody nose and forced them to withdraw with their main goals unachieved. The Israelis, like every other modern army at that time, used the tactics that had been pioneered by the Wehrmacht in 1939 and 1940, and perfected by Soviet and US militaries in the years immediately following: massive assaults by tanks and mobile infantry supported by air superiority, driving deep into enemy territory to get behind the defenders’ lines, disrupt their supply and communication routes, and cripple their ability to resist.

What Hezbollah demonstrated is that those tactics had passed their pull date. Having built a network of underground shelters and urban strongholds, they lay low while the Israeli vanguard moved past, then popped up and started clobbering Israeli units with sudden ambushes using state-of-the-art weapons. The Pentagon watched the whole business closely, and planned on using the same tactics against an eventual Russian incursion into Ukraine. That’s why the Ukrainian military built a massive network of defensive works just west of the Russian-held areas of the Donbass, the easternmost, ethnically Russian part of Ukraine.

In retrospect, it’s clear what the Ukrainian government and its NATO allies had in mind. Once war with Russia came, the Ukrainian army would draw the Russians into a grueling stalemate that would deny them an easy victory and cost them more than the Russian economy could afford. Meanwhile sweeping economic sanctions would finish wrecking Russia’s economy and force Russia into a humiliating withdrawal and an internal political crisis. The long-range endpoint was regime change, leading to the often-stated Western goal of breaking up the Russian Federation into a gaggle of weak, unstable states. These could then be absorbed by the EU, in the run-up to the final confrontation with China a few decades further down the line.

As grand strategies go, this was fairly good, but it had two serious weak points. The first was that the sanctions had to have the effect on the Russian economy that Western economists predicted. The second was that the Russians had to stick to pre-2006 military doctrine no matter how badly things went. That’s where Stormtrooper Syndrome first showed up. The decisionmakers in Washington, Brussels, and Kiev convinced themselves that those weak points didn’t matter because the Ukrainians were the Good People and the Russians were the Bad People.

Then war broke out last February. Those of my readers who watched the news will recall how closely things followed the script, at first. The Russians launched a classic blitzkrieg operation, driving deep into Ukrainian territory, only to find that the Ukrainians fell back on prepared defenses and urban strongholds. Some Russian units suffered embarrassing defeats; others found themselves overextended in hostile territory and retreated. Meanwhile the US and the EU slapped sanctions on the Russian economy…and that’s when the plan ran straight off the rails.

The first difficulty was that most of the world’s nations didn’t cooperate with the sanctions. There were several reasons for that. Nations such as Iran and China that are hostile to the US saw the situation as an opportunity to extend a middle finger to their enemies. Nations such as India and Brazil that are nonaligned powers saw the situation as a chance to demonstrate their independence. Still other nations wanted Russian oil and grain and weren’t willing to forgo them, so they acted in accordance with their interests rather than ours.

Yet there was another difficulty with the sanctions. Do you remember all those big corporations that loudly announced that they were leaving the Russian market? They couldn’t take their outlets and infrastructure with them, and so the Russians simply rebranded those and kept going. The Russian subsidiary of Coca-Cola, for example, now produces something called Dobry-Cola. Yes, it tastes just like Coca-Cola, and it’s in a very slightly different red can. The crucial point is that the profits from sales of Dobry-Cola and similar products and services aren’t flowing out to stockholders in the US, they’re staying in Russia, where they’ve given a timely boost to the Russian economy. This presumably wasn’t what US and NATO elites had in mind.

But the worst news for NATO came from the battlefields. What happened there has an odd personal dimension for me. Some years ago I wrote a paper, “Asymmetric tactical shock: a first reconnaissance,” about what happens when an army becomes too dependent on complex technologies and its enemies figure out how to monkeywrench those. The example I used came from the end of the Bronze Age, but the lesson applies more broadly: the monkeywrenched army faces total disaster unless it does something most people these days can’t even conceive of doing.

My essay circulated quietly among people interested in such things, and finally saw print in my 2020 collection Beyond the Narratives. I have no reason to think that anybody in Stavka (the Russian General Staff) pays the least attention to obscure American fringe intellectuals like me. The fact remains that when the Ukrainians monkeywrenched the Russian version of blitzkrieg, the Russians did exactly what I suggested an army in that situation had to do: they fell back on an older form of warfighting that wasn’t vulnerable to the monkeywrenching tactics.
How the ancient Egyptians defeated the Sea Peoples. Massed spearmen were considered obsolete in 1300 BC, but they did the job.

That was why the Russians abandoned their deep thrusts into Ukrainian territory, retreated from vulnerable areas around Kharkov and Kherson, launched a mass mobilization of troops and a major expansion of their already large munitions industry, and got to work building entrenched defensive lines to guard the territory they’d seized. Meanwhile the Russian government got very friendly with Iran and North Korea. Why? Because both nations have large munitions industries that don’t depend on access to Western technology and capital, and both are eager to sell weapons and ammunition to their Russian friends.

That is to say, since the new Ukrainian tactics made it impossible for the Russians to refight the Second World War, the Russians switched to First World War tactics instead, . The defensive lines and urban strongholds on which the Ukrainians relied to defeat Russian tank columns didn’t provide anything like the same defense against massed Russian artillery bombardment. While the Russian Army was retooling for the new (or rather old) mode of war, mercenary units—Wagner PMC, most famously, but there were others—took over the brunt of the fighting, tested out First World War tactics against entrenched Ukrainian forces in Bakhmut, and won.

That put Ukraine and its NATO backers into a very difficult position. In First World War-style combat, the winner is the side with the largest munitions industry and the biggest pool of recruits to draw on. Russia has a huge advantage on both counts. First, NATO countries no longer have a political consensus supporting mass military conscription, while Russia does. Second, while the US and its allies dismantled most of their munitions factories at the end of the Cold War, Russia didn’t, and it also has those good friends in Tehran and Pyongyang. All these give the Russians an edge the NATO nations can’t match in the near term.

This wasn’t a message that NATO was willing to hear. To a very real extent, it was a message they weren’t capable of hearing. It’s been 70 years—since the end of the Korean War, in fact—since the United States and its allies last fought a land war against a major power. The entire NATO officer corps got its training and experience in an era when they had overwhelming superiority over their enemies, and they have no idea how to fight without it. (Even with that—cough, cough, Afghanistan, cough, cough—they aren’t too good at winning.) That’s when Stormtrooper Syndrome really came into play, because it never occurred to NATO that Ukraine could lose—after all, our government shills and corporate media have defined them as the Good People!

That’s why the elites in Washington, Brussels, and Kiev convinced themselves that the Russians couldn’t possibly ramp up their munitions industry to a pitch that would permit them to carry on trench warfare for years at a time. (Remember all those confident news stories that insisted the Russians were about to run out of shells and rockets?) They convinced themselves that the Russians were using mercenaries because the Russian army was too demoralized and brittle to stand up to the rigors of combat. They drew up plans for a grand Ukrainian offensive to turn the tide of the war, and funneled more arms to Ukraine, along with big contingents of NATO mercenaries to fill out the ranks of the depleted Ukrainian army.

Meanwhile, European politicians made public statements admitting that the previous ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia had been a sham, none of the Western nations that signed onto it ever intended to fulfill their parts of the bargain, and the whole point was to give Ukraine time to build up an army that could take on the Russians. Those statements weren’t made by accident. Their purpose was to convince the Russians that negotiation was a waste of time, thus making it impossible for a peace faction in Ukraine to go behind NATO’s back and negotiate with the Russians. So NATO got the grand Ukrainian counteroffensive it wanted.

The counteroffensive began on June 4th. Two months on, it’s clear that it has failed. A successful assault against fortified positions in modern war requires a three-to-one advantage in soldiers on that region of the battlefield, a large advantage in artillery, and air superiority. Ukraine has none of these things, and somehow or other no eucatastrophe showed up to save the day. That’s why tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers lie dead in the mud of Zaporhizhzhye amid the charred remains of hundreds of NATO armored vehicles, and the Russian defensive lines remain unbroken. One of the defining battles of the 21st century has just been fought in southern Ukraine. The short version? NATO lost.

Now of course the Russo-Ukraine war isn’t over yet, and the fortunes of war may yet favor the Ukrainian side—though this looks very improbable just now. Meanwhile, history is not waiting around for the details to be settled. Last week the heads of state of 40 African nations gathered in St. Petersburg to sign agreements giving Russia a leading position in the economic and military affairs of the world’s second largest continent, while Russian defense minister Sergei Shoigu was in North Korea negotiating further arms deals. The Russians know better than to wait for miracles to save them from the consequences of their own actions. Only our leaders are that stupid.

The mess in Ukraine isn’t the only way that Stormtrooper Syndrome has shaped recent history. It’s because of Stormtrooper Syndrome that so many people suffered nervous breakdowns when Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016—their reaction amounted to “he’s a Bad Person, he’s not supposed to win!”—and the same factor also kept them from wondering why so many people had lost so much faith in the political establishment that they were willing to settle for Trump, of all people, as an alternative. Nor, to be fair, is Stormtrooper Syndrome in short supply on the right, where shrill moral dualism is far more common than thoughtful discussions of how to deal constructively with the cascading crises overwhelming America today.

Really, it’s hard to name anything in contemporary life in the Western industrial nations that hasn’t been twisted bizarrely out of shape by the efforts of our privileged classes to pretend to be the heroes of their own Star Wars sequels, posturing nobly while the Imperial Storm Troopers fill the air around them with harmless faux-blaster fire. Yet the lesson being whispered by the winds from Ukraine is that nobody and nothing else is required to play along. That lesson may end up costing a great many people bitterly in the not too distant future.

https://www.ecosophia.net/notes-on-stor ... -syndrome/

[theluckycountry]

Ukraine "Corrupt At All Levels" - Says Former EU Commission Chief Juncker



Sorry Plant, but the meme is breaking down and leaving leftists like yourself looking like fools for ever believing the lies.

Ukraine has long ranked as the most corrupt country in Europe and among the top in the world. US and European media have increasingly acknowledged this of late, and Juncker's sudden boldness could be due to the general increase in press coverage of the issue.

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/ ... ef-juncker

Two Hoes and a coke addict went into a senate

[theluckycountry]

Venezuelan leader slams West for ignoring how Kiev-bound weapons turn up on black market

"A reign of absolute corruption has begun in Ukraine, where the trafficking of weapons of all kinds has been going on since Zelensky [took office as president]," Maduro noted, stressing that "this is how NATO brought another war to Ukraine."

Hate him or hate him he's siding with the BRICS, another resource rich nation going over no doubt. The US has totally shot itself, and the rest of the the West, in the foot with this war. If ever the nations oppressed by the $US system of exploitation wanted a reason to rally this was it. In 5 years it will be all over at the pace it's going. America will be bankrupt and gone as a world power.

Iraqi PM arrives on visit to Russia

Talks between Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Iraqi prime minister are expected to take place later on Tuesday. According to the Kremlin press service, the parties "will thoroughly discuss issues related to multifaceted cooperation between Russia and Iraq

So after 20 years of abuse under US invasion forces they are siding with Russia.

Well Surprise Surprise Surprise

https://www.reuters.com/article/russia- ... SL1N3BG00A

[EnergyUnlimited]

Ukraine should be watching because now American and other western weapons are likely to be needed on Middle East.

Here you have my worst case scenario:
While Israel is flattening Gaza Hezbollah from Lebanon is bound to attack because they would be next in line, this will cause Israel to retaliate on Lebanon and Syria at which point Iran will join in.
Of course US will attack Iran in such situation and this will be an extremely good opportunity for Chinese to take over Taiwan.
US will need all its resources to even attempt to contain all of that and incidentally all Arabs around together with Iranians and Turks may decide that now is a golden opportunity to get rid of Israel for good at which point Israel might use nukes it has because there will be nothing to lose.
But there are too many of Arabs, Iranians and Turks around to stop even with 100-200 nukes Israel might have (out of which about half will work as intended upon deployment).
So once nukes are deployed and Israel is overrun anyway there will be a murder all Jews operation which will dwarf even Third Reich. There won't be any gas chambers but Arabs with guns and machetes doing job in Hutu/Tutsi fashion.
At this point US might either decide to go to nuclear war against ME, Russia, China, NK and Pakistan together (and cease to exist as a result) or just withhold and helplessly observe how current edition of global order go down to ashes.

Without new supplies of American arms Ukrainian army is likely to be gone as organized entity in no time at all, Russia will take whole of Ukraine and possibly invade other parts of Europe including Poland.

[jato0072]

We live in a simulacrum clown world. I really don't know why we haven't collapsed yet.

All we need now is for China and her proxies to start making moves soon. Korean war mark II ? Taiwan blockade?

[jato0072]

I also have to post a link to a good Substack piece. It is both Ukraine and peak oil related:

With that out of the way, let’s see where we are when it comes to the topic of the war in Europe. By risking upsetting a few readers, I must tell it upfront:

The war aimed at extending and thereby preserving unquestioned Western hegemony on the European continent has been decisively and irretrievably lost.

It cost the lives of half a million men — 80–90% of whom died fighting for the western side. The failure is of course blamed on not applying Western doctrine properly or an inadequate amount of equipment, but it was mostly due to a strategy rooted in delusions and dreams of re-fighting WWII. Apparently, Western political and military elites have missed the version number on this one, much to the detriment to the nation they tried to preserve...

The Honest Sorcerer - War & Peace