Posts Tagged ‘ukraine war’

Under the Fedora Thoughts Mac can’t win, Missing an Opportunity, The Bodies are Piling up, What a difference less than 20 years makes, Missing the Biggest lede of the year

Posted: December 28, 2022 by datechguy in baseball, Blame Biden Administration, covid, culture, nfl, official oppression, war
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Mac Jones can’t win.

Last week he was pilloried by Patriots greats on the air for not doing all he could to stop Las Vegas (had to stop myself from typing “Oakland”) from scoring on that last play that cost New England a game they should have won.

Now a week late he makes a desperate attempt to stop Germaine Pratt from scoring a touchdown on a recovered fumble that if not for the Dolphins falling apart might have ended their playoff hopes and he’s attacked for it and fined by the NFL.

It may or may not be fair but I think that Mac is in a no-win position. He can’t be Brady and will never be Brady.

At least the Redsox Went from the greatest hitter of all time (Williams), to an all time great HOF (Yaz) to a power hitting Hall of Famer (Rice) to a pretty good outfielder (Greenwell) over 25 years easing the blow. No such luck for spoiled Pats fans.

There was a time before Tom Brady when the Redsox ruled this town. Even in the days of Russell, Havlicek and Bird it was a baseball town. Tom Brady made the difference and while David Ortiz kept the flame alive Brady’s timeless success wrenched the city away from the bats and balls and delivered it to the pigskin.

Right now the Patriots are in the lowest point that they’ve been and if the Red Sox ownership was smart they would take this moment to invest heavily to grab back the hearts of the fans from the gridiron and back to the diamond.

The current strategy may be penny wise but it’s pound foolish. The Pats are giving the Sox a huge opening which a wise ownership should drive right through.

However I suspect they are not all that wise.

Just four years ago you didn’t have stories of people “dying suddenly” at young ages. Now it’s so common that if a week passes without such an event it’s a miracle.

The worst of it is that now we have more studies from every inhabited continent that show Ivermectin (.02 a pill) to be effective against COVID. as noted “100% of these have shown positive results.” at the same time the Twitter files have revealed a concerted effort to suppress information and/or opinions from medical experts contrary to the sanctioned positions of the Biden Administration.

These people and those who submitted to their will have a lot of bodies to answer for and they are very lucky that it is no longer considered fashionable for those who have had husbands ,wives, children and parents die from their despicable acts to take personal revenge. It it was, none of those bastards would last a week.

It has been less than twenty years since the Massachusetts Supreme Court by a 4-3 vote legalized gay marriage in the state and then governor Mitt Romney did all he could to keep it off the ballot in order to advance his presidential ambitions.

Now twenty years later we see the results as summarized in a single tweet

All this is by design, the next generation of Jeffrey Epstien’s and the next generation of Prince Andrews and the like who they will serve need to get their fodder from somewhere.

Incidentally I suspect there are more than a few Epsteins out there still serving the same customer base that Ms. Maxwell keeps in her head. Jeffrey just happens to be the one that was caught which makes him the exception.

Finally the single most significant story of the day is likely this one. The drone war in Ukraine and Russia:

In interviews in the United States, Europe and the Middle East, a range of intelligence, military and national security officials have described an expanding U.S. program that aims to choke off Iran’s ability to manufacture the drones, make it harder for the Russians to launch the unmanned “kamikaze” aircraft and — if all else fails — to provide the Ukrainians with the defenses necessary to shoot them out of the sky.

The shift to drones by both sides is a incredibly significant change to the war. The story continues

In fact, one of the Iranian companies named by Britain, France and Germany as a key manufacturer of one of the two types of drones being bought by the Russians, Qods Aviation, has appeared for years on the United Nations’ lists of suppliers to Iran’s nuclear and missile programs. The company, which is owned by Iran’s military, has expanded its line of drones despite waves of sanctions.

The administration’s scramble to deal with the Iranian-supplied drones comes at a significant moment in the war, just as Ukraine is using its own drones to strike deep into Russia, including an attack this week on a base housing some of the country’s strategic bombers.

The widespread use of drones in warfare and the Islamic state of Iran’s ability to produce “Kamikaze” drones should be of great worry to us as that is likely going to be the next tool of international terrorism and it goes without saying the next phase of warfare in general. After all consider the cost of maintaining a single destroyer vs the cost of a drone that can be programed to hit a specific geographical location.

If that doesn’t put a shudder in your spine nothing will.

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.

A Silly Line from Moscow

Posted: April 2, 2022 by datechguy in war
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Captain Darling: So you see, Blackadder, Field Marshall Haig is most anxious to eliminate all these German spies.

General Melchett: Filthy hun weasels, fighting their dirty underhand war!

Captain Darling: And fortunately, one of our spies…

General Melchett: Splendid fellows, brave heroes risking life and limb for Blighty!

Blackadder goes forth General Hospital 1989

There are some things that are simply silly and this is one of them:

-Russia accused Ukraine of carrying out an air strike against a fuel depot in the Russian city of Belgorod on Friday, an incident the Kremlin said set an unfavourable tone for peace talks with Kyiv.

Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, said he could not confirm or deny reports of Ukrainian involvement in the strike as he did not have military information. The Ukrainian Defence Ministry and the general staff did not respond to requests for comment.

Accused?

Russia has invaded Ukraine and the two nations are currently at war with Ukraine. One of the general realities of war is that the enemy tends to make a habit of shooting at you and at military targets like ammo depots and fuel dumps.

How DARE the Ukrainians attempt to take out an enemy fuel depot inside Russian territory. Don’t they understand that while the Russians reserve the right to strike at targets in Ukraine they do not accept Ukraine’s right to do the same in Russia!

That response was so stupid you would have thought it came from the Biden Administration.

Bubbles, Battles and Reality

Posted: March 28, 2022 by datechguy in war
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Depending on where you go on the net or in the media you read a lot of different takes on the war in Ukraine.

You might hear one thing:

it is impossible to ascertain exact information about a battlefield situation on the other side of the globe, but these limited reports indicate that the Ukraine counter-offensive is making progress. If that is the case, we should soon begin hearing about fighting around Borodyanka, a key crossroads that would logically need to be taken by Ukrainian forces seeking to surround the Russian force at Bucha.

Or you might hear another:

The destruction inflicted on the Ukrainians by Russia is vast. If Ukraine still had a viable air force they would be challenging Russian combat aircraft and carrying out airstrikes on Russian positions. I have seen no reports in Western media about such actions.

In cities, such a Mariupol, that are besieged by Russian forces there has been no visible attempt to provide air support, artillery fire or reinforcements. The AZOV battalion left in an ever shrinking perimeter in Mariupol have no way out and are running out of ammunition and food. No soldier in the world survives long without ammo and chow.

There is evidence that a growing number of Ukrainian soldiers in other parts of the battlefield are surrendering

The problem are the bubbles. Both Russians and the West are being informed inside bubbles that do not acknowledge the failures and realities of war. The prime realities are these:

  • Any army that either doesn’t have or can’t be resupplied with food, fuel or ammunition can’t function.
  • A guerilla force can’t function If they can’t be supplied with ammunition and food.
  • Without either a safe air corridor or open and clear roads neither of these things can be provided for thousands of men on a daily basis

No amount of press briefings, internet memes or speeches in front of cameras changes these facts.

If Russia can’t supply their forces with these things those forces will be forced to withdraw or surrender.

If Ukraine can’t supply their forces with these things, they will have to do the same.

If neither can, then it will be a stalemate.

The big difference is that Russia can choose to resupply or relieve their forces from their own reserves, Ukraine can’t without western intervention

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. They have painted themselves into a corner so they will have to find a way to declare victory and that will be their best case scenario with the media lionizing Biden for his leadership if they manage this result.

We might be treated in the end to the odd spectacle of both sides declaiming victory but none of those claims will have any bearing on the reality on the ground which I suspect will continue to be unpleasant for all concerned.

In time that will become apparent because in the end reality doesn’t care about anybody’s spin.

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