A Comprehensive Look At The Lead-Up To Russia's Invasion of Ukraine

 

This essay from "Rise Like Lions" might sound like Putin-apologetics but that would only be because you're brainwashed.  Everything said about the USA's foreign policy elite psychopaths seeking to weaken, or even destroy Russia is true.  The USA's oligarchic leadership seeks to achieve "Full Spectrum Dominance" against any and all rivals; these being at the moment Russia and China.

If you're brainwashed, you might say: "Well Russia is a corrupt, authoritarian hell-hole and China is an authoritarian, ecocidal, racist (anti-Tibetan/anti-Uyghur) hell-hole.  So what if the USA takes them down a couple of notches?"  But that viewpoint would ignore the corruption and violence of the USA's oligarchs with their prison-surveillance state, their denial of basic human rights to their own majority, their super-corruption and racism, their employment of death-squads to enforce their will in client-states.

I've said it before and I'll say it again; There is nothing to choose from between the USA's rulers and Russia's or China's rulers.  We need world-wide democracy and rooting for any of those teams is worse than a waste of time.  

And it is NOT "rootin' for Putin" to point out that Russia has been targeted by the USA.  Putin might behave like a reckless imperialist expansionist were Russia in a different space-time continuum that made Russia the enormously wealthy super-power and not the United States.  But such a different space-time continuum would have so many other differences that Putin might not have even been born in it.  It's useless speculation.  Russia does not have the wealth to behave the way that the USA behaves.  It's as simple as that.

NOTE:  I would have liked "Rise Like Lions" to have mentioned the precedent for recognizing Crimean and Donbas separatists of the USA's recognition of Kosovo's independence following an internal referendum.  (Something I doubt Canada or Spain would tolerate in the cases of Quebec or the Basques.) 

Sympathy For The Imperialists

 

Is it possible that our incompetent, amoral, psychopathic overlords continued to insist that they were "winning" in Afghanistan mainly because they wanted to believe that they were?  In the same way that progressives are forever celebrating their inconsequential and sometimes completely imaginary victories?  (You know, the "victories" here and there that culminate in the working class being worse off with each subsequent year?)

Maybe it ain't cynical propaganda.  Maybe the little darlings just can't take off their rose coloured glasses.

Andrew Nikiforuk Tries To Save Humanity

 

The Tyee has posted Andrew Nikiforuk's two-part essay about the very real energy crisis that is upon us and how we need to radically transform our societies to reduce our energy demands.

Nikiforuk starts off by saying how the recent surge in fuel prices, though given a big push by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, is actually part of a long-term trend and that things are only going to get worse.  Remember "Peak Oil"?  The argument that we have passed the point where the most readily accessible fossil fuels are used up and it will be increasingly harder to find further sources.  The more difficult it is to find this energy the more expensive it will be.  We were spared the increase of fuel costs temporarily due to the fracking boom and the OPEC price war that was waged against it.  This price war inflicted a heavy toll on the fracking industry but I recall reading more than a few sources who said that fracking was nevery viable in the long-term.

This is very important because fossil fuels are still the major source of energy for our industrial societies.

Despite effusive rhetoric about an “energy transition,” fossil fuels still account for 79 per cent of all energy spending in the global economy.

Whenever the price of those fuels rises, so too does the cost of food, housing, clothing and transportation, renewables and electric cars.

Art Berman has repeatedly underscored the basics: “Energy is the economy. Money is a call on energy. Debt is a lien on future energy.”

For decades now economists have mostly preached a different gospel. Their models pretend that money, labour or technology make the world go around. But this profession largely has been ignorant of the central role that energy plays in the rise and fall of civilizations. Whatever the economists might say, physical reality still rules. Growth doesn’t happen unless the per capita energy spending of fossil fuels increases. Period.

...

Meanwhile rising oil prices affect the cost of dinner, directly and indirectly. Whenever the price of diesel goes wild so too does the cost of our food, much of which travels far to our pantries. As the energy ecologist Vaclav Smil has calculated it takes the energy equivalents of five cups of diesel fuel (from fertilizers to herbicides to transportation) to put one kilogram of imported tomatoes on the table.

In fact we live in a wasteful civilization that thinks it is entirely acceptable to burn 10 calories of mostly fossil fuels to make one calorie of food, and all by employing fewer than one per cent of the population. Prior to the colonization of farming by fossil fuels, agriculture was local, small, low energy (employing human or animal muscle), inefficient and nutritious. Now it is global, big, high energy, efficient and tasteless.

The inflationary problem doesn’t stop with food. Most people, for example, still don’t understand that one barrel of oil does the equivalent work of 4.5 years of human labour.

As a consequence current oil consumption equals the employment of 500 billion fossil fuel “energy slaves” in our economy. This vast disruptive army has enabled the level of global consumption responsible for the relentless poisoning of oceans, the degradation of forests, the depletion of fisheries, the erosion of soils, the disruption of nutrient cycles and the destabilization of the climate.

So the truth is this: Civilization largely has used fossil fuels to destroy robust natural ecosystems and to replace them with artificial and fragile ones.

I mean, we have to cut back anyway due to the environmental damage caused by fracking, and the apocalyptic consequences of global warming.  But regardless of all of these realities, as a collective, humanity wants to continue on auto-pilot, wants to sleep-walk into the future, wants to continue to live in Dreamland.

One of the ways we're doing this is by deluding ourselves that we can continue to make and consume all of the crap that we're doing and grow the economy and build more unsustainable shit for all of humanity simply by switching to renewables like wind and solar:

Meanwhile the green technocrats offer an equally distorted narrative about the state of things. They get climate change, but pretend a transition to renewables can be achieved without a massive investment of fossil fuels (try making a solar panel or windmill without oil) and the brutal mining of rare earth minerals. They even pretend that inflation, which makes every renewable more expensive, is not a barrier.

They also ignore that it took 160 years to build the current energy system at a time when petroleum and minerals were abundant and cheap. Now they propose to “electrify the Titantic” as ecologist William Ophuls puts it, at a time of expensive fossil fuels, indebted financial systems and mineral shortages.

The techno-greens also pretend that civilization can substitute fossil fuels, which are densely packed with energy, with renewables, which are less energy dense — and do so without subsequent reductions in demand or changes in behaviour.

Power density can’t be taken for granted. It measures how much a particular form of energy can flow from a given unit area. Art Berman recently explained what a shift from high density to low density energy sources means. In basic English, “it takes two coal workers, 169 solar workers and 1,100 wind workers to equal the work of one natural gas worker.”

Low density energy not only requires more materials but occupies a larger physical space on the land. It also delivers smaller energy returns. If a forest spends more energy growing fewer leaves to conduct photosynthesis, it must either shrink or collapse.

An in-depth 2021 study by Simon Michaux at the Geological Survey of Finland illustrated this inconvenient reality. It calculated that to replace a single coal-fired powered plant of average size producing seven terawatt-hours per year of energy would require the construction of 213 average sized solar farms or 87 wind turbine array facilities. Renewables just have to work harder.

The global economy currently operates 46,423 power stations running on all types of energy, but mostly fossil fuels noted Michaux. To green the sector up and still keep the lights on will require the construction of 221,594 new power plants within the next 30 years.

So it's nonsense.  Global warming is real.  Fossil fuels are running out in any case.  Renewables are not up to the task.  (Nuclear energy is still problematic.)  And we are a wasteful civilization consuming more than we need and destroying the earth's ability to sustain us on numerous levels.  We have to reduce our consumption levels.

There is, of course, a third narrative which no one wants to discuss. Lovelock, who is famous for postulating the Gaia hypothesis for how Earth’s systems are regulated in synch, urged in 2005 that we embrace “a sustainable retreat.”

An economic retreat means shrinking fossil fuel spending by at least one third, which means the end of economic growth. (One recent study suggested high income states probably need to cut their resource use by 70 per cent.)

So what does shrinkage look like? It means returning to standards of living prevalent in the 1960s and 1950s. It means deglobalization. It means slow living instead of fast consumption. It means walking instead of flying. It means more people growing food on smaller plots. It means relocalizing life. It means making changes most of us are not yet willing to talk about, let alone make.

This is an enormous task and, sadly, it is my observation that the Left (the political demographic that most accepts all these realities) has so far not progressed beyond identifying the problem; petitioning our overlords to change; and grumbling about how our overlords continue to only pay lip-service to changing.

Who Votes For Doug Ford?

 

A culture that believes nuclear war might be justified in light of Russia's invasion of the Ukraine.  A culture that believes wearing a mask during a viral, airborne, respiratory pandemic is an intolerable assault on liberty.  (Mustn't forget the people who do wear a mask but leave their noses uncovered because they don't understand the concept of breathing.)  A culture that believes that the so-far toothless measures to deal with global heating are Stalinism but agrees wholeheartedly in the surveillance/torture state constructed in the Great Bullshit War on Terror.

A culture that forgets how Ford's first instinct upon hearing that Ontario seniors were dying in droves from COVID-19 because their for-profit long-term care home owners were pursuing profit over their goddamned responsibilities, and who (it was quickly revealed) had been leaving their clients to live in filth and squalor for years, ... Ford's first instinct was to protect these long-term care profiteers (including his filthy, murderous, super-corrupt predecessor Mike Harris) from legal liability.

A culture with a media system of scumbags and airheads that works night and day to make a scumbag shithead like Doug Ford seem like a regular guy.

Obviously our anti-democratic First Past the Post electoral system is working as our elites think it should.

The Enemies of Progress are Now Internal

 The forces of reaction decided to colonize the enemy.  And they're so smart and we're so stupid and hopeless that they might get away with it.

Commenting On George W. Bush Saying "Iraq" Instead of "Ukraine"

When george dubya bush was president some people said that he was only pretending to be stupid.  They said an absolute moron could not have flown those difficult fighter jets used by the Texas Air National Guard.  (A reminder:  the TANG was the institution that bush II's family pulled strings to get him into so that he could avoid the danger of serving in the War On Vietnam which they supported.  It's also the institution from which he went AWOL from aside from stopping at a base between drunks to get free dental care.)  Assuming that dubya ever flew one of those planes would only establish that he had good reflexes (and he did, dodging those shoes thrown at him was evidence of that) and that he had a decent memory to remember how to use the plane's controls.

At no other time in his life did bush II display any particular intelligence or wisdom.  Not as young man who got a legacy appointment at Yale (where he was a C-student) and then (by hook or by crook) a Harvard MBA.  He wasn't showing intelligence or wisdom as a young man post-graduation, drinking and carousing and doing the rich white boys' drug of cocaine and going AWOL from the TANG.  He was made the figurehead of a consortium of wealthy business parasites who bought the Texas Rangers baseball team and who ripped-off the taxpayers for hundreds of millions to get a publicly financed stadium.  dubya then became governor of Texas and executed a lot of people.  At some point he sobered up and became just an asshole.  Then he stole the presidency and then 9-11 happened on his watch.  The entire time he was president he displayed a slow-wittedness and an inability to speak as anything other than a moron.

Some people said it was an act.  It wasn't, but even assuming it was for the sake of argument, it was a life-long act.  bush II was so stupid that Dick Cheney was able to pose as the brains behind their operation and Cheney himself wasn't very smart.  Cheney was a fuck-up academically and in business.  His entire career was his wife's creation.  

People are always saying that it's dangerous to underestimate these people.  I don't think that I am underestimating them.  I think that I'm giving them their due.  It's those who say that people like bush II, Cheney, Biden, stephen harper, etc., etc., are highly intelligent who are doing reality a disservice.  

I recently dallied with some internet weirdo who believes in conspiracies to the extent that he types online that COVID is actually a chemical poison spread through civilization by a globalist elite that is trying to ethnically cleanse the Ukraine to provide living space for International Jewry and that Vladimir Putin (actually a body-double since 2016 or some other year it doesn't matter because it's not true) was trained by MI-6 and various national leaders who did not allow the importation of vaccines to their countries (Haiti and some African countries I believe) were assassinated after which the vaccines came in.

Sheer insanity.  But a lot of these conspiracy theories are similar to the thinking that demands we believe that people like george dubya bush or stephen harper are intelligent.  It creates this shadowy world of genius string-pullers that allow the conspiracists to revel (simultaneously) in their ability to see the patterns and their inability to do anything about it.  These dark, sinister forces, (the Rothschilds, the Bilderbergers, the Globalists, etc., ) have pulled the wool over everyone's eyes except for these diligent, intrepid independent researchers who have their own little community where they trade their imaginary insights with each other and curse "the sheeple" for not seeing what they see.  Somehow or other the Globalists either don't know about these communities of truth-seekers and that is why they all haven't been killed, or they do know about them and ignore them because they're not a threat.  (Or, once in a while, one of these internet conspiracy researchers dies in a way that can be considered mysterious and that just shows how ruthless the Globalist Davos Soros crowd can really be.)

All of this is just my way of establishing my own view that bush II really is a moron.  That when he was speaking at the Southern Methodist University's George W Bush Presidential Center in Dallas, on the date of May 18th, 2022, and blathered stupidly and hypocritically about how the absence of democracy in Russia produced a great tragedy:

“The result is an absence of checks and balances in Russia, and the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq. I mean, of Ukraine.”

And then he excused his stupidity on his being 75 years old and the audience laughed along with him because it was comprised of people who self-select for cretinism by wanting to go and listen to that brain-dead war criminal in the first place.

bush II's outburst was so bizarre it made me wonder (for a second) if he was actually an evil genius after all.  That he knew how counterproductive it would be to provide such a brazen example of the USA's murderous hypocrisy but that he knew the opposition against the system is so impotent that it wouldn't matter.  In the end, I had to remember that nothing was served by bush II's stupidity and that the whole power-elite of our times are idiots who only survive because the system that they've inherited was built by more capable people and it remains somewhat powerful despite the fact that the people holding the steering wheel for the past few decades are monkey-brained psychopathic incompetents.

And then it got even better. After correcting himself with a nervous chuckle, Bush broke the tension in the empire-loyal crowd with the words, “Iraq too. Anyway.” He then quipped that he is 75 years old, leaning harder on his “Aw shucks gee willikers I’m such a goofball” persona than he ever has in his entire life.

And Bush’s audience laughed. They thought it was great. A president who launched an illegal invasion that killed upwards of a million people (probably way upwards) openly confessing to doing what every news outlet in the western world has spent the last three months shrieking its lungs out about Putin doing was hilarious to them.

There are not enough shoes in the universe to respond to this correctly.

As comedian John Fugelsang put it, “George W. Bush didn’t do a Freudian slip. He did a Freudian Confession.”

One of the many, many interesting things about this occurrence is the likelihood that Bush’s words tumbled out in the way they did because he’s either heard a lot of criticisms of his invasion or has been thinking a lot about them; a familiar neural pathway would explain why his brain chose the exact worst word he could possibly swap out for “Ukraine” in that moment. This would be a small light in the darkness for we ordinary folk who oppose war and love peace, because it suggests that even the worst empire managers cannot fully insulate themselves from our criticisms.

george dubya bush really was a stupid man who stole the presidency and fabricated a "justification" for an illegal war of aggression that killed over a million people and traumatized tens of millions more and his stupid case for this illegal war was approved by Joseph R. Biden and Hillary R. Clinton and they both went on to destroy several other countries and now we're supposed to pretend that they're alarmed by Putin's "unprovoked" invasion of the Ukraine.  bush II is just a contemptible shit-head who should have been hanged by the neck until dead like the war criminals they condemned at Nuremberg.

"Wars Are Not Won By Evacuations"

 

Indeed.  That quote is from Winston Churchill's speech after the successful evacuation of much of the British Expeditionary Force (and over 100,000 French allied soldiers) from the beaches of Dunkirk in 1940.  While the evacuation ["Operation Dynamo"] was rightly considered a wonderful achievement, Churchill cautioned:

"We must be very careful not to assign to this deliverance the attributes of a victory.  Wars are not won by evacuations."

I was moved to recall Churchill's words in response to the bizarre reporting on the end of the fighting at the Azovstal Steel Plant in the contested city of Mariupol in the Ukraine.  Every headline in the pro-NATO media refers to an "evacuation" and to "an end of combat operations" there.  But reading further it appears that the fascist (and the mainstream media was fine with referring to these nazis as nazis up until a little while ago) battalion surrendered to the Russians:

Hundreds of combatants were evacuated on Monday from the besieged Azovstal metallurgical plant in the southeastern port hub of Mariupol. Ukraine’s deputy defense minister, Anna Malyar, said fifty-three wounded soldiers were taken to a hospital in Novoazovsk, a town controlled by the breakaway pro-Russian Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), and another 211 Ukrainian personnel were taken to the DPR-controlled village of Olenivka.

A little while ago I posted about how it's difficult to know what the real military situation in the Ukraine is.  The propaganda in the NATO countries says that Russia's military is floundering, it's soldiers dividing their time between murdering civilians and surrendering.  NATO's weapons are pouring in and being used to destroy tonnes of Russian military equipment.  Meanwhile, in Russia itself, the population is simmering with anger against the tyrant Putin (who apparently smells funny and is losing his mind).  The Ukrainians are defying imperialism and protecting democracy and are a light and an example for the world.

Meanwhile, the pro-Russian websites are saying that Russia's special military operation is progressing in an orderly fashion according to their own timetable.  Ukrainian nazis are murdering pro-Russian collaborators and shooting civilians trying to escape through corridors provided by the Russians.  Ukranians have filmed themselves torturing Russian prisoners.  Russia has systematically destroyed the Ukraine's airforce and transportation infrastructure.  NATO weaponry is obsolete, cannot be used without proper training and is being destroyed before it reaches the front in any case.  Meanwhile, in Russia itself, Putin has 80% popular support and there is no mention of how he smells or how his body and brain are crumbling.

Perhaps the truth lies somewhere in the middle?  I don't know.  But I have to say, with this stupid drivel about "evacuating" the nazi Azov Battalion from Azovstal when in actuality they've surrendered and been taken prisoner, the pro-NATO propagandists aren't doing themselves any favours.  The word "evacuation" tends to mean getting your people out to safety (like the British did at Dunkirk) and not being captured.

[EDITED TO ADD: It's so insane the way that surrender was referred to as an "evacuation" that in writing the post I forgot that the main reason I used Churchill's "Wars are not won by evacuations" quote is because however much that is an obvious truism, it is even MORE obviously true that wars are not won by surrenders to the enemy.  Even if you call those surrenders "evacuations."]

In related news, Norman Finkelstein asks a question that I've been pondering myself: What exactly was Putin supposed to have done in the face of YEARS of USA/NATO provocations?

And my question which I’ve constantly been putting in correspondence is a very simple one: if you agree that for 20 years—more than 20 years, more than two decades—, Russia has tried to engage in diplomacy; if you agree that the Russian demand to neutralize Ukraine —not occupy it, not determine its government, its form of economy, just neutralize it like Austria after World War II—, if you agree that was a legitimate demand; if you agree that the West was expanding and expanding NATO; if you agree that Ukraine de facto had become a member of NATO, weapons pouring in, engaging in military exercises in NATO; and if you agree… You know, Russia lost 30 million people during World War II because of the Nazi invasion, so there’s a legitimate concern by Russia with all of these —if you excuse my language— Nazis floating around in the Ukraine, then the simple question is: What was Russia to do?

I’m not saying I agree with the invasion, I’m not saying it went right, but I think one thing: the invasion showed… you know what the one thing the invasion showed, Briahna, was that Russia is kind of weak militarily, which is why all the more they may have been fearful of a NATO-backed Ukraine filled with Nazis, and probably at some point positioning nuclear missiles on its border. And I think 30 million, 30 million people… Listen to this: I think 30 million people is 30 million arguments in favor of Russia. Now I’m not going to say, because I’m not a general and I’m not a diplomat, so I’m not going… I’m not a military strategist so I’m not going to say it was the wisest thing to do. I’m not going to say it was the most prudent thing to do. But I will say —and I’m not afraid to say it because it would dishonor the memory of my parents if i didn’t say it—, I will say that they had the right to do it. And I’m not taking that back. They had the right to do it. They had if I can call it the historic right to do it. 30 million people (killed during WW2), and now you’re starting again, you’re starting again. No, no, you know I can’t go for it, I can’t go for those who acknowledge the legitimacy of the arguments made by Putin but then call the invasion criminal. I don’t see that.

Now you could say the way they executed it may have had criminal elements. However I don’t know… Well, you went to Harvard Law School, I don’t know if you studied the laws of war, but the laws of war make a very big distinction between ‘jus ad bellum’ and ‘jus in bello’, namely whether the launching of the war was legitimate or whether it was an act of aggression versus the way you conduct the war, ‘jus in bello’. Maybe the conduct, targeting of civilians and so forth, that probably violates the laws of war, but that’s a separate issue under law from “did they have the right to attack”. I think they did. I’m not going to back off from that.

Now, I think there's too much veneration of what the Soviet Union did in WWII and no acknowledgement of why Ukrainians might hate Russians because of Stalin's terror-famine in the 1930's.  (Though I don't think most Ukrainians hate Russians.  Seventy-three percent of the Ukrainian electorate voted for Zelensky as a peace candidate.  It's really only the degenerate extremists propped-up by the United States that have a visceral hatred for the Russians.)  Still and all, I think Finkelstein's stance is more respectable than those "idealists" blathering about their uninvestigated abstract principles (when they're not yammering insanely about how nuclear war might be an option to end Putin's aggression).

Also, the Democratic Party cult-site "Daily Kos" had a headline about how "Tankies" refuse to blame Russia for this war.  At this point in my life I just don't feel like engaging with something so irredeemably stupid and shit-headed.  I'm not going to argue with it.  I'm not even going to bother linking to it.  It is so fucking goddamned stupid to think that Russia wasn't provoked.  If you believe that ... fuck it.  

Here's something I will link to: An account of the European Union's economic suicide, within which are links to Michael Hudson's reflections, including news about psycopath Victoria Nuland's amoral scheming:

The only way left for U.S. diplomats to block European purchases is to goad Russia into a military response and then claim that avenging this response outweighs any purely national economic interest. As hawkish Under-Secretary of State for Political Affairs, Victoria Nuland, explained in a State Department press briefing on January 27: “If Russia invades Ukraine one way or another Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.” The problem is to create a suitably offensive incident and depict Russia as the aggressor.

That's my blog post for tonight!