Posts Tagged ‘russia’

Under the Fedora: Dangerous Pillow Makers, Trusted Russians Manufacturers, Less Lucky Russians, Metal Detectors and Don Bolduc

Posted: September 14, 2022 by datechguy in business, elections, internet/free speech, News/opinion, opinion/news
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The FBI decided to go after that well known dangerous fellow Mike Lindell the pillow maker at a Hardee’s Drive-Thru.

Well I suppose he is dangerous to the Biden Administration in the sense that despite the loss of millions in business by places like Bed Bath and Beyond (now folding like a cheap suit) ridicule and attacks he steadfastly refuses to compromise on his opinion (which I share) that the last election was stolen and continues to produce evidence to support said claim.

That’s the thing about devout Christians, they have an affinity to the truth and they tend to not abandon it even when the emperor siccs their lions on them.

However there are apparently some things that the FBI totally approves of: Headline:

Wait — the Steele Dossier’s discredited source became a paid FBI informant?

Ed Morrissey being an honest and honorable man is flabbergasted:

There must be an explanation for this plot twist, which appears to have come right out of a James Bond film. Maybe Casino Royale … the David Niven version, not the straightforward Daniel Craig reboot. According to a court filing from John Durham, the FBI turned Steele dossier source Igor Danchenko into a paid informant.

Well after all he was willing to spread falsehood in order to aid and abet the left’s political ambitions. If that’s not worth a paycheck to the FBI I’d like to know what is?

Prediction: In my lifetime we will see FBI agents and bureaucrats who are taking part in and/or enabling the Biden Administrations efforts to intimidate their political foes & the citizens who support said foes will be sitting in a witness chair arguing:

I was only following orders!

Rather disgusting.

While that Russian apparently did OK a lot of Russians are not doing so well in Ukraine as a counter offensive seems to be gaining ground to the point where some are wondering if they should push into Russia proper and risk overextending their lines of supply.

For the record assuming these reports are correct I’d go deep enough to neutralize logistic centers that the Russians would need for any counteroffensive

In theory the Russians have the power to bring and use overwhelming force if they so choose (although it would take time to raise an deploy said force) against Ukraine, what the real question is, do they have the will?

And the bigger question is this. If this results in the fall of Putin, what replaces him?

Yesterday when I got to the warehouse where I work I was surprised to see metal detectors had been installed and that we from now on we will have to pass through them to enter.

I asked the chief of security who was there for the first day of them why, he said the company’s new owners decided on it. He suggested that given what’s been going on in the country it’s better to get ahead of such things.

Well considering that the new owners have stores and such in blue states and cities that have seen first hand what Democrat rule does and that I work in a deep blue state that is likely to replace a moderate Nevertrump republican with a radical democrat and put a DA who will do their best to turn Massachusetts into California in charge I’d say it might be prudent to be prepared for what is going to come.

Finally General Don Bolduc has won the GOP primary in NH to challenge Maggie Hassan for the US senate:

I interviewed General Bolduc at the Carenet dinner in NH last year it’s available both on Youtube

and Rumble

https://rumble.com/v1d5nqu-general-don-bolduc-nh-us-senate-candidate-interview.html

I really think this election in NH will determine if that state can be saved. If Hassan can win in this environment over a vet who has served in combat than any Massachusetts conservative who wants out of the state before it becomes California had better head to Montana, Wyoming or somewhere south, heat and bugs be damned.

Given his outspoken support for President Trump I’m sure he can expect an FBI raid any day now.

Now that Ukraine is taking back territory from Russia, now is the time for the New York Times to return Walter Duranty’s tainted Pulitzer

Posted: September 11, 2022 by John Ruberry in media, News/opinion, war
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Pro-Ukraine protest in downtown Chicago this spring

By John Ruberry

There is good news out of Ukraine, its forces have made gains in the Kharkiv region and they are near Russian border. There is much ground still to liberate, not only land that Russia has seized in the war that began early this year, but also the area that have been controlled by Russian separatists in the Donetsk region since 2014, as well as Crimea, which Vladimir Putin annexed the same year.

Ukraine has endured an unhappy history. World War II and the Holocaust devastated Ukraine. And in order to impose communism on wealthier peasants in Ukraine, Josef Stalin engineered a famine in the early 1930s, known there as the Holodomor, translating roughly into “man-made starvation.” Roughly four million people perished as a result of Stalin’s atrocities against the kulaks in Ukraine.

Even in a closed society, it’s difficult to coverup a famine. And news trickled out of Ukraine about the Holodomor. But a New York Times reporter, based in Moscow, Walter Duranty, dismissed such stories, instead of “famine” he wrote of “malnutrition” in Ukraine, for instance. 

For a series of 1931 articles about the Soviet Union, Duranty, for his “dispassionate interpretive reporting,” he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize. 

While in Moscow, Duranty, was granted a rarity, interviews with Stalin; he also enjoyed another rarity, a luxury apartment in the Soviet capital. During the entire history of the USSR, housing of any kind was scarce. In Moscow Duranty had a mistress, whom he impregnated, and a chauffeur. Automobiles were also rare in Russia in the 1930s. 

In 1933, another journalist, or I should say, a real one, Gareth Jones, visited Ukraine and he was horrified by what he found. “If it is grave now and if millions are dying in the villages, as they are, for I did not visit a single village where many had not died, what will it be like in a month’s time?” Jones wrote for the London Evening Standard. “The potatoes left are being counted one by one, but in so many homes the potatoes have long run out.” 

Duranty’s response to Jones was a New York Times article, “Russians Hungry, But Not Starving.” That same year, Duranty wrote to a friend, “The famine is mostly bunk.”

Another shameful sentence from Duranty, about Stalin’s brutal policies as the Holodomor continued, “To put it brutally,” Duranty wrote for the Times, “you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”

Since the war began attention has been brought to Duranty’s undeserved Pulitzer. Even NPR took notice. “He is the personification of evil in journalism,” Oksana Piaseckyj told NPR earlier this year of Duranty. She is a Ukrainian-American activist who emigrated here as a child over 70 years ago. “We think he was like the originator of fake news,” Piaseckyj added.

The New York Times admitted on its corporate website about Duranty’s work, “Since the 1980’s, the [Times] has been publicly acknowledging his failures.” But it has not returned the tainted Pulitzer. It also notes that twice, most recently in 2003, the Pulitzer board has decided not to revoke its award to Duranty. 

It’s time for them to reconsider.

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

Five Fast Thoughts Under the Fedora The CNN+ Mystery, No Argument, Gas Attack, Klepto Problems, and the cost of a stolen election in Dollars.

Posted: April 28, 2022 by datechguy in under the fedora
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There are wastes of space and articles like this:

What doomed CNN+? How rival strategies and executive intrigue fueled the streaming service’s rapid demise

Seriously, it’s because of rival strategies and executive intrigue that CNN+ failed. How about the idea that it was trying to get a population to pay for a product that they haven’t been able to give away free.

God how stupid do they think we are?

Nothing illustrates how deadly the idea of people being able to make their case to the general public without leftist censorship to the electoral prospects of Democrats as the complete and utter meltdown of the left over the Elon Musk purchase of Twitter.

Again when your opponents have bad arguments it’s not hard to dispute them, when they have better arguments that’s the time to rethink your positions or panic. The left has chosen the later

As Ann Althouse put it: “It’s interesting how much free speech the opponents of free of speech already have.”

Anyone surprised by Russia’s move to cut of Gas to Poland and Bulgaria has no sense of history or of how Russia thinks.

In terms of how they think, anyone who has followed this history of the last 200 years knows that once Russians decide someone is their enemy no amount of local hardship is unendurable if it causing said enemies to suffer. That’s how Putin will sell it to his people and they’ll buy it.

Secondly all of the history of the last forty years of the USSR & Russia funding groups in the west to decrease energy self sufficiency was precisely for this eventually where Russia would force their potential foes into tough choices.

Not sure how this ends.

Speaking of Russia and the war while I distrust all the various sources all we have seen thus far shows the weakness of the crony system of procurement.

When you’re busy stealing and skimming it can be a problem when suddenly the equipment you have turns out to be substandard. Furthermore in a Kleptocrocary which in many ways Russia is the idea that you would use state funds to enrich yourself rather than solve a problem is considered the norm.

It’s very possible that the Russia’s performance in the war in Ukraine is the natural end result and this time around there won’t be the US sending convoys of arms and equipment to save them.

Finally I got an oil bill earlier this month that perfectly illustrates the cost of a stolen election.

It was a split bill for the 180 gallons of oil I got. Half of it was priced at the pre-pay price that I paid under Trump before the election. The other half showed the current price under Biden.

You can talk about the costs of a stolen election in terms of what it’s done to our country, our foreign policy and our freedoms but I have a concrete figure of how much this stolen election is costing me in cash. And that cost is a full week’s take home pay every time oil is delivered.

Multiply that times every voter who sees snow and cold in the winter and that tells me that they’ll have be even more blatant next time to push that walking corpse in the White House over the line.

Stacy McCain Spots the Flaw in My Ukraine War Reasoning

Posted: April 11, 2022 by datechguy in blogs, war
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The Network: You are children and you require guidance. There is no room for imperfection.

Gary King: Hey earth isn’t perfect alright? And humans aren’t perfect and guess what? I ain’t perfect!

The Network: And there in lies the necessity for this intervention. Must the galaxy be subjected to an entire planet of people like you?

Andrew Knightley: Hey who put you in charge? Who are you to criticize anyone? Now, you might think Gary is a bit of a cock and he is a bit of a cock, but he is my cock!

The World’s End 2013

I few weeks ago I wrote this about Russia and the War in Ukraine

The real wild card is that we don’t know the actual war aim of Russia. If it was to secure eastern Ukraine they’ve pretty much already done so and everything else is gravy. They can pretty much stop fighting and declare victory at any time. It remains to be seen if Putin wants the whole thing (I suspect he does) not just because he wants to rebuild the old Soviet/Russian empire but also because Biden and company has given him the chance to achieve a bigger goal, the humiliation of the west and as long as the continued existence of the Ukraine is in doubt that goal is in reach.

Whatever happens Putin will declare victory.

Meanwhile Ukraine has a single goal, to survive as an independent nation. Even if Russia carves out large chunks of the nation if any is still there at the end they can claim to have held off the Russian bear. That’s the bottom line here, I predict that is the endgame of the western media and powers, to wait for this result and then declare it the greatest military victory since Midway. 

It’s been a few weeks and the news reports indicate that the Ukrainians have been having success around Kiev and that the Russians may be in retreat in that sector at this time.

As I’ve already stated I take all reports with a grain of salt as neither Russian, Ukrainian nor MSM sources are reliable, the first two because they will naturally in time of war spin things for their end and the latter because they’ve proved themselves dishonest and dishonorable. Furthermore I neither have the time nor the inclination to dedicate myself to sorting out the actual reality so the only thing I can state as an undisputed fact is that as of this writing Ukraine hasn’t fallen.

Stacy McCain however has a bit more time than me and he’s come across what, if true is one of the most important stories concerning the war about what the Russians did to the people of one village when the expected quick victory became a slow costly slog.

On Monday, police forensic teams arrived to investigate along with a team of men to dig out the bodies.

They hauled the man up who was slumped at the bottom of a well with a bruised and lacerated face and upper body.

Next they dug out Ms. Litvynenko’s body from the nearby grave. Her father glanced into the hole as four men pulled her out.

“Yes,” he said. “It’s her.”

The village is mourning its loss. Alina Sukhenko, who grew up in Motyzhyn, recalled her grandmother saying the Nazis only killed one person when they were in the village.

The Russians “looked for the strongest people,” said Ms. Semenova, Ms. Sukhenko’s friend. “Olha was a locomotive who pulled everyone else behind her.”

“If there is no locomotive, they think we will be slaves like in Russia,” she said. “But we will never be slaves.”

Assuming this report is correct we must presume that this type of thing is happening anywhere that the Russians are fighting. This should not be a big surprise as the Russians were not known for their gentle nature on their way to Berlin although in fairness in that case they were provoked, as the Ukrainians are now.

And this is the point where Stacy McCain calls upon Human nature to make a critical point:

 It would appear, based on this account, that Motyzhyn was perhaps the southernmost advance of the Russian force that came south out of Belarus via Borodyanka. The atrocities inflicted on the villagers at Motyzhyn seem to have been typical of the brutality that Russian troops practiced everywhere in Ukraine.

Now, let me ask: If you were Volodymyr Zelenskyy, would you be willing to cede anything in negotiations with the Russians who had done this to your people? Or would you rally your people to fight until there was not a single invader left alive to return to Russia? Whatever the cost, cut off their retreat, surround them and kill every one of them — no quarter.

By God, I know that’s what I’d do. 

It’s one thing for diplomats and elites to come up with compromises and trade away territory, it’s another to give into a blood enemy how has committed atrocities upon your people. If the Ukrainians didn’t think of the Russians as blood enemies before I suspect they do now.

This won’t end well, in fact the best case scenario will be two blood enemies boarding each other armed to the teeth.

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