four minutes with frightening, but 100% true, facts about guns;
Monday, January 2, 2023
this essay presents the reality in the ukraine game and potential outcomes in an interesting fashion;
There is no doubt now that Russia will defeat Ukraine and impose its terms. As Putin said a few weeks ago, it was his mistake to think he could trust the West to come to a reasonable agreement and he had no real choice but military defeat of its Ukrainian puppet. His shrewd foreign minister Lavrov pointed out that there was no point in discussions with the current American government. They have no understanding of war and even less of diplomacy.
But how will the United States respond to its dawning understanding that the years of US/NATO planning the Ukrainian Proxy War Angela Merkel recently revealed have not led to the collapse of Russian power and the overthrow of Putin, but the destruction and partition of Ukraine and the exposure of the American and NATO military challenge as vastly inferior to its reputation? This was a fear Biden actually exposed in his White House meeting during the Zelensky visit before Christmas.
By its total control of media the US/NATO could keep its populations learning of this catastrophe to Western power and pretensions for a considerable time. But the international effects will take place immediately.
American military planning was once world class. But who would plan a proxy war against Russia, one of the acknowledged masters of artillery with far better air defense technology than any in the West, and then equip our puppet Ukraine with inferior weapons and only enough ammunition to last six months? And surely American planners couldn’t help knowing that there was no longer a manufacturing base for resupply, and NATO warehouses were practically empty?.........more..........
caitlin has some thoughts on the twitter file releases that i believe everyone aught to be thinking about these days;
Depending on what political echo chamber you’ve been viewing it from, the ongoing release of information about the inner workings of pre-Musk Twitter known as “the Twitter Files” might look like the bombshell news story of the century, or it might look like a complete nothingburger whose importance is being wildly exaggerated by the far right.
From where I’m sitting, the Twitter Files look like entirely newsworthy revelations which add new detail to information that had already been spilling out about the way government agencies have been inserting themselves into Silicon Valley’s processes of regulating online speech. Right wing punditry has of course been exaggerating the significance of the releases and spinning them in all kinds of disingenuous ways, and Musk himself plainly has a partisan agenda in releasing the information in the way that he has been, but it’s not actually difficult to separate that from the value of the information being released.
Many liberals and leftists have struggled to grasp this (in my view simple and obvious) distinction, but we’re now seeing articles coming out in publications like The Guardian and Jacobin explaining to their respective audiences that it should actually concern anyone who opposes government tyranny to see secretive agencies taking it upon themselves to control the way people talk to each other on the internet.
“Make no mistake: while some criticisms of the project coming from left of center certainly have merit, that doesn’t mean the disclosures aren’t important, or that the accuracy of the information contained in the files is somehow undermined by the political slant of some of those reporting on it,” writes Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic. “The Twitter Files give us an unprecedented peek behind the curtain at the workings of Twitter’s opaque censorship regime, and expose in greater detail the secret and ongoing merger of social media companies and the US national security state.”.........more........
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