Ukrainian False Flag

The biggest disappointment of recent years has got to be Mitt Romney. Not that I expected him to be wonderful, but I expected him to be decent, and to have some decency and integrity.

Watching him offer bald-faced lies to the public over and over again in the last couple of years, and double down on them, and then make vague threats against anyone who calls him out, like Tulsi Gabbard, is just execrable. As Mr. Lira points out, he represents one of the many interests in the US who wants to get us involved in war with Russia, and he clearly has wanted that for many, many years.

It's hard to imagine that kind of evil sinking in to a normal, "nice guy" mentality that Romney portrays. I'm forced to conclude that he likely wasn't ever really much of a nice guy at all.

I'm also really quite disappointed in the people who swallow the propaganda about how Russia is losing so badly, Putin is so desperate, he made a major miscalculation, etc. People who really should know better. I'm less inclined to be judgmental to the many, many idiots out there who are super gullible and always have been, but far too many people should know better and don't.

Gonzalo Lira has some other cool videos too, that I'm liking. His puppets of the west video is really good, for instance.

Once again, the Z-man. I link and quote him a lot. Not because I think he's the smartest guy out there, or even that he's always right. But when he is right, he manages to be both right and very articulate in describing how he's right. He's quite gifted and describing reality, when he can manage to see it. Which, luckily, is also a skill that he has where he's better than average.

Last week, the current president of Ukraine thanked Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg for his role in helping him win the propaganda war. Facebook lifted its ban on praising the various neo-Nazi militias in Ukraine. Then it announced it would allow calls for violence against individual Russians. In the world of infinitely malleable ethics, this is what Silicon Valley now calls a principled stand. Ukraine supporters are proud of their work on social media wining the meme war with Russia.

In the real world, the Russian army is slowly turning Ukraine into the world’s largest mound of rubble. In the Donbass, they have the Ukrainian army and the tens of thousands of militia members surrounded. It is not easy to get reliable information about what is happening on the ground, but reliable estimates say fifty thousand pro-Ukrainian fighters are now trapped in the Donbass “cauldron.” Barring a peace deal, they will be vaporized over the next couple of weeks.

In the south, the Russian army has created a corridor to the Crimea. This was a primary objective of the invasion. Mariupol, a city in southeastern Ukraine, lies along the estuary of the Kalmius and Kalchik rivers near the Sea of Azov. This city has been surrounded and cutoff by the Russian army. The Ukrainian army based there has been given the chance to surrender, but the irregulars will be given no quarter. It is a preview of what will happen in the Donbass over the next month.

The point here is that despite losing the social media war, the Russians are winning the actual war in Ukraine. It has been slow going as the Russians do not wage television friendly wars, so no cool video. Ukraine was slowly being turned into a fortified outpost by Washington, so the Ukrainian army is well trained and supplied. Digging them out of those fortification will not be easy, but it is inevitable. The Russians will turn Ukraine into rubble if that is what it takes to achieve their objective.

What this war has revealed is a clash of realties. On the Washington side, reality is played out on TV chat shows, office politics and the internet. They really think winning the public relations campaign matters. In the reality in which Western leaders live, words count for everything. Facts are just tools to be used to decorate a clever argument or a novel public relations campaign. From the perspective of the West, the war has been a disaster for Russia.

On the other side, the Russians operate in a different reality. They are focused on securing their border, which means neutralizing Ukraine. They have prepared for the economic consequences. They have prepared their people, who seem to be overwhelming supportive of the effort. Westerners have described Putin as having a medieval mindset, which may be true, but he is dealing with a people and a reality that still thinks the old way about the world.