Random Rant Thread

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Incidentally, Israeli police told the BBC that the men who killed the three Israeli teens were a lone cell, and not operating under the Hamas leadership.

........

........

What the fuck.

You almost wish that they kept insisting (lying) that it was Hamas ordering the guys. Instead, they say that now, like that. Just like that. After hundreds of deaths, and the irreparable damage, both political and physical.

I must conclude that this mess is exactly what they wanted. And if it indeed is, they are the biggest idiots in the whole world.

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This must look like a death sentence to many Israelis:



Once the Baby Boomers are gone, and once the ethnic "minorities" become not-so-minority...

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Benjamin Netanyahu, July 2014:

They use telegenically-dead Palestinians for their cause. They want the more dead, the better.

Joseph Goebbels, November 1941:

The Jews...have recently found a new trick. They knew the good-natured German Michael in us, always ready to shed sentimental tears for the injustice done to them. One suddenly has the impression that the Berlin Jewish population consists only of little babies whose childish helplessness might move us, or else fragile old ladies. The Jews send out the pitiable.

Amazing, this synchronicity.

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Just FYI:

Wikipedia administrators have imposed a ban on page edits from computers at the US House of Representatives, following "persistent disruptive editing".

Another user from the Hill was quick to dismiss suggestions that the rogue edits were made by elected officials.

"I think the probability is near zero that these disruptive edits are being done by a member of Congress."

I don't know about that, knowing what kind of loonies many of those "elected officials" are, particularly in the House.

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You know, the West (= largely the US State Department, though) accused the rebels in Ukraine of "preventing us from investigating the cause of the MH17 tragedy" and even "looting the plane".  You'd expect some follow-up on that given the strong accusations.

But zero, nada, zilch so far.  And these words right out of the horse's mouth - NYT:

At the field in Ukraine where the exploded remnants landed, there are no guards and no recovery workers, no police officers and no investigators. Early Thursday evening, there were almost no people — just two curious 12-year-old girls looking at part of the tail of the Boeing 777...

...“There’s no one out here,” said Michael Bociurkiw, a spokesman for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, whose monitoring mission has been on the site every day since Friday. As for the arrival of international experts, “it’s not like our door is being broken down.”

Wait, what?

There were a few new faces at the site on Thursday. Three Australian investigators worked in the field, joining three Malaysians. Before departing Thursday, the Malaysians said that they were surprised at the amount of access they had to the site and that they felt safe, Mr. Bociurkiw said.

There have been widespread reports of looting, but Mr. Bociurkiw said his monitoring group, which has now spent more time at the site than any other, had not seen any. The Malaysians said they had seen valuables in the fields untouched, he noted, including a bottle of duty-free perfume, auto parts, backpacks full of belongings, a watch and some jewelry.

Hmmm... that is a tiny bit different from what we heard from those Americans and others, isn't it?

Have they lost interest now?

US ships with missile defense radars were in the Black Sea over the last several weeks.  Why don't they have the data they collected made public?  It could settle some, if not all, of the questions.

In fact, Russia is the only country who publicly presented their version of the story, with actual presentation and "evidence", in a typically-Russian, suspiciously-elaborate way.  Their conclusion is of course drastically different from the "West"'s - they are basically claiming that an Ukrainian fighter jet was involved in the downing of MH17.

Why hasn't anybody even tried to counter that?  "Well, son, we don't take seriously such a ridiculous claim - we are too adult to do that" doesn't fly, and the US is exactly the country who should know that.

Maybe they have lost interest in this particular thing for whatever reason? 

Well, as a matter fact, they throw a bunch of claims against the wall, and don't seriously follow up on any of them.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the clear sign of a Cold War coming back.  It used to be exactly like this back in the days: a bunch of claims with no evidence whatsoever.

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Immortal Technique, Don Martin (US), Eltipo Este (Cuba), Tumi (South Africa), Tonto Noiza (France) and Tommy Tee have just produced this:



And when they say "boycott" Israel, they are specifically talking about the BDS (Boycotts, Divestment, Sanctions) movement, which was started by Palestinians, and has now spread to the US, Europe and beyond among non-Arabs/non-Muslims.  It scared Israel enough for them to intensify their PR campaign, including the government program - Hasbara - that actually pays young Jewish people, Israeli or not, to do online/offline activities to "promote" the Israeli position.  Sadly, and predictably, what most of them do every day is troll on Twitter, comment sections of articles/blogs, and FB and end up expressing their crude racism toward Muslims/Arabs.

Anyway, I think what we need is that kind of a rather straightforward message.  Only the outside pressure, particularly the economic one, can do anything to the current rotten status quo in that part of the world, especially since the US, who could change it overnight any minute any second, will continue to do its best to preserve the situation as is for the foreseeable future.  Hilary Clinton is most likely to become the next POTUS after all.  She will quite clearly be a lot worse than Obama.  She's parroting right now, as we speak, the meme that it's all Hamas's fault and nobody else's.  It seems that even the bombing of the UN shelter school is somehow Hamas's fault, while even Madeleine Albright (Jewish), a former US Secretary of State who is an expert on "overkill" with lots of blood on her hands, says that Israel's actions have been indeed overkill.

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Here's Rania Khalek talking about the BDS movement and many other things:



Rania is one of my personal go-to people when it comes to the Palestinian issues. You have to excuse her high-school-girl-ish way to talk, though. She's much brighter than she sounds.

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Even the tragic downing of a passenger plane isn't slowing the war in Ukraine in any way.  I'm afraid that just like most of the precedents, this one will probably be merely used as a political talking point by all sides, and put into the dustbin of history as "collateral damage" soon enough.  The US won't seriously get to the bottom of it unless they can find clear evidence to connect it to Russia.  And they probably won't be able to find anything if they haven't already.  "The rebels did it by mistake" doesn't quite cut it for their agenda, but that seems to be the (grudgingly) official American position that they don't even want to talk much more about now.  There is virtually nothing the Dutch government can do, especially since unilateral actions are de facto forbidden under the umbrella of the EU.

While Gaza is pretty much occupying the TV time, Donetsk in Ukraine has become a war zone.  Shelling by the Kiev government continues, and the central train station is crowded with people who are trying to get on the train to Crimea, now part of the Russian Federation.

It's a catastrophe, and meanwhile in Russia, pressure from nationalists is mounting on Putin to "take action", meaning a war with Ukraine, which would mean a war with the US/Europe.  If it reaches such a point, it would have the potential to not only destroy that particular part of the world, but fatally cripple Europe as a whole.  No one in Europe would be speared with the brutal shock wave.  You'd be foolish to think otherwise.  The elites have been playing with that kind of fire.  In fact, I know for a fact that much of Brussels is aware of that, but it's too late to regret their recklessness now.  They are hopelessly lost, sandwiched between Russia and the US.  Brussels today is an even bigger mess than a typical EU-sceptic would think it is.

What scares me about Ukraine (and Israel for that matter) is that I don't know what the endgame will look like.

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Trying to terrorize civilians with an overwhelmingly superior force into submission is a bad idea, especially when you keep doing that to the point where the civilians have come to expect that treatment as the "normal" state of affairs. The problem of that strategy is that it hinges on the idea of "breaking apart their will to fight on", completely ignoring the fact that it's a classic case of easier said than done.

Vietnam is one clear example of that difficulty.  And contrary to what is generally believed, Germany and Japan in World War II were no exceptions either.

The massive carpet bombing campaign by the US killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians, and they even dropped two atomic bombs, instantly killing another hundred thousand civilians, not to mention the battles in Okinawa where the majority of the deaths were civilians.  Did it break Japan?  No, hardly.  What actually happened is that it emboldened and hardened the Japanese.  The more civilians died, the more obsessed the majority of the elites grew with the idea of apocalyptic battle for the survival of the Japanese race.  So, no, the atomic bombs didn't end the war.  Most of American historians are wrong on that.

Then, what was the straw that broke the camel's back in the end?  Easy - it was Stalin's betrayal.  As soon as the Soviet troops poured into Manchuria in China, a de facto Imperial Japanese territory, tearing apart the non-aggression treaty between the two countries, it was Game Over for the Japanese regime.  Stalin was supposed to be their trump card up their sleeves.  He was supposed to either broker a deal between Japan and the Allies (meaning the US, because the Japanese didn't give a shit about anyone else) or part ways with the US to mess up the situation to Japan's advantage.  And they had lost it.  That caused the instant collapse of the political credibility of the regime.  The hardliners STILL wanted to fight on, but the emperor had to throw in the proverbial white towel as the gesture to dismiss them.

It's the same with Germany.  It's not the horrific civilian deaths that compelled them to end the whole thing.  It was the collapse of the political order first and foremost, caused by the death of Hitler.  Once such a breakdown occurred, the "will" to fight didn't even matter anymore, since the entire war machine was based on that particular political order.  The "will" was still there in Germany, but that didn't matter.  What followed was a total internal mess, which left no option other than just quit the whole thing.

And now, Palestine.  What sets them apart from the two examples above is that they have never even had the "luxury" of a stable political order.  Almost all the political leaders failed to create a coherent political structure there, and all they've got instead was the will to fight, the will not to cave in so easily.  As I illustrated above, it's not easy to break the "will" even when you are dealing with a people who were initially the aggressors.  And Palestinians are definitely not aggressors.  They have always been the defending side, and you should expect their will to resist, fight on, to be even stronger than that of the Japanese and Germans.

The early far-right Zionists were correct when they talked about the necessity of "killing them" in order to have the Jewish state that they wanted.  Not "terrorize" them, but "kill" them.  There is no will where there is no life.  The only option left for Israel is Kill'em All, or most of them anyhow.

But fortunately, that ain't gonna happen.  Israelis are neither that suicidal nor ruthless enough, even if the world is to allow them to be, which it won't.

And this is, of course, another roundabout way to say that Israel will never "win" this one.

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Many pundits and "experts" on Russia nearly declared the end of the rebels in Eastern Ukraine after the MH17 tragedy, arguing that Putin would have no choice but throw them under the bus due to the enormously bad publicity that it had created for the "pro-Russian" side. Julia Ioffe @ the New Republic said so, and so did Mark Galeotti, to name a few. And they are not exactly Tom Friedman/Nick Kristof/etc., the know-nothing "pundit" clowns whose opinions on Russia/Ukraine should count as much as Sarah "I can see Russia from Alaska" Palin's.

Doesn't seem like they were right, does it?

Maybe they should've opened the history book (which is always a good idea) before saying such a thing so definitively. Indeed, the history doesn't show any precedent of the party guilty of downing a passenger plane reversing its foreign policy in the aftermath. None. The one who suffered the most was Ukraine after shooting down a Russian passenger plane, and by "suffered the most" I mean some compensations (= money) that they had to pay. None of the countries had to pay much for the crime that they committed; only some of the individuals involved did by being demoted, etc.  Hell, the US commander who shot down the Iranian airplane instantly killing 300 passengers was awarded a fucking medal only two years after the incident. George H. W. Bush certainly didn't apologize for that either. Why did they think that this one would be much different?

The only thing that you could say for sure was that there would be a PR war. And even that "war" hasn't turned out to be much so far, certainly not as big as I expected. The problem is that even the semi-official American explanation - namely, the rebels shot down the plane (by accident) with an SA-11 (which was OBVIOUSLY provided by Russia, so it's all Russia's fault, BTW!) - hasn't really stirred up much outrage at the rebels outside the Netherlands, not even among the US officials, it seems. Everyone in the US military knows that SA-11s suck at distinguishing a civilian aircraft from a military one, and that Kiev had switched their strategy and started utilizing their air force more and more since that's the clear advantage that Kiev has over the rebels. The area where the MH17 was shot down is almost exactly where heavy air strikes by Ukrainian air force had just taken place. Many of the US media, such as the WSJ, have pretty much reported it as such.

I personally think that Putin will continue to support the rebels until a concrete plan for negotiations from Kiev is on the table. President Poroshenko did have one during the campaign, but it seems that he has already thrown that away.  I suspect there was a piece of (very, very counterproductive) "advice" from the fucking neocons at the US State Department.

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What you've just witnessed is Grad attacks today by the Ukrainian military (and "National Guard" militia) in Gorlovka, Eastern Ukraine.  And yes, people lost their lives under those smokes.  Reportedly 20+ civilians at least.  I got some photos, but they are too sickening for me to show you here.  A few of them are even worse than the ones you see from Gaza.

We are seeing more and more of these Grad attacks and air strikes.  The problem with Grad rockets is that they can't be properly controlled.  You pull the lever and pray Hail Mary.  Very reliable "collateral damage" producers.  And those who are using them, on both sides but more on the Kiev side, should know that.

Using Grads like that in a residential area can be considered a war crime under the current international laws.  That's how intense this war has become.

That country is so fucked.  If the Kiev side "wins" it this way, for how long do you think they will be able to maintain the peace afterwards?  How the hell will they govern that part of the country, where so many civilians were savagely killed, and so many properties and hopes were destroyed, by the country's official military?  What a way to win the hearts and minds of the people.  The majority of Eastern Ukrainians don't even like the rebel leaders, but Kiev is working extra hard to make sure that they will hate the government even more with passion.  I can definitely assure you that a shit load of people in that area will join the rebels after these senseless attacks.

Hello?  Is anyone thinking seriously about the aftermath?  The whole thing feels disconcertingly neocon.  Are they actually listening to the Yankee neocon crazies' fucktarded "advice" by any chance?  They are the same morons who begged Georgians to wage a guerrilla war against Russia.  Do they understand that?

And Kiev is even planning to introduce flat 1.5% "War Tax", like sales tax.  We are talking about a country of more than 45 million people where 85% of the economy is controlled by 100 super riches.  Regressive tax on steroids, in other words.  And the central bank of Ukraine has just announced with the IMF that they will implement aggressive "monetary policies" to "enhance financial stability" and strengthen "resilience of the banking sector."  The same fucking phrases that we've heard in every place that the IMF fucked up.  The notion that "monetary policies" would do the trick in a bankrupt country with such staggering inequality is so frighteningly ridiculous.

What a depressing world.

EDIT: Actually, the fine weather condition, geography and the photos I got from friends make me suspect that there was a little more than "erratic Grad rockets" involved in this massacre in Gorlovka.  It seems that "20+" is far from the true number of the civilian casualties, too.

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Another neocon classic.

James Kirchick, just like all of his fellow neocons, hasn't been right about anything.

If you think three years - from 2011 to 2014 - is long enough for things to change, I must inform you that Libya was already hell before the end of 2011, only a few months after James the Genius declared the triumph for America Fuck Yeah.  It's just that the situation has gotten even worse now like I said it would. 

Needless to say, they "love America" like you love herpes.

And no one - certainly neither Cameron nor Sarkozy - will be held accountable.  No one cares.  I can assure you that our wonder boy James doesn't even remember now where the country is.  James the Captain America has moved on to another world problem to "solve".

The pic for the first article is pretty cool, BTW.  Check it out:



Sexy.

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Wow.  You don't expect such an interesting article on the pages of Bloomberg, but this one is really interesting, and very educational.

My Captivity in Ukraine Shows Amateurs Succumb to Hatred
www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-07-27/my-captivity-in-ukraine-reveals-when-amateurs-succumb-to-hatred.html

The three captors -- Pavel, Ruslan and Dmitry, as I learned later -- were military intelligence officers from the Dnepr battalion, sponsored by Dnipropetrovsk governor and billionaire Igor Kolomoisky. In this war, oligarchs train, equip and fund detachments, which are then under the control of the Ukranian army.

Dubbed “Kolomoisky castigators” and “fascists” by Russian media, my captors turned out to be the same kind of people I met when talking to separatists: bored Russian-speakers, the blood and muscle of a conflict where random hatred reigns on both sides.

“So, what do the rebels say?” was the first question after I was taken out of the car.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Well, what do they say, in general?” a gunman elaborated.

The "Ukrainian military" now consists largely of these amateur soldiers under the payroll of oligarchs.  And their view?  This part of the article says it all:

Dmitry, Ruslan and Pavel were small-business men before the conflict, they told me. Their companies had monthly sales of around 300,000 Hryvnia ($25,000) each. They used to travel together to Oktoberfest in Germany and organized weekend parties in country vacation houses. Dmitry turned out to be an expert in wind generators and dissuaded me from buying one for my dacha.

The three of them hated everything other than nature. They hated the Euromaidan protests for igniting the unrest, hated Americans and Europeans for supporting it, hated ousted Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich and, of course, hated Putin, journalists and Russians.

“Russians and Ukrainians are not brothers anymore ’til Putin dies,” Pavel, who looked older than his friends, said, as he played a disc of Russian rock pioneer Viktor Tsoi in the Hyundai.

They are no fans of Maiden.  Pretty much "anti-West".  Yet they fight on the Kiev side.  Because Putin.  For now.

Our leaders like to paint the Israel issue as "complicated", while labeling the Ukrainian one as a simple LotR battle between the "West" and "East". 

And as usual, the opposite is the case in reality.

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Oh look!  It's him - James the Wise!

Finlandization Is Not a Solution for Ukraine - by James Kirchick
www.the-american-interest.com/articles/2014/07/27/finlandization-is-not-a-solution-for-ukraine/

Yup, he's busy trying to save Ukrainian people now.  Don't bother him with that Libya shit, ok?

"Don't be like Finland", says Wise Young James, so don't, my dear Ukrainian friends. 

I mean, look at Finland, that impoverished, dirty ghetto in the outskirts of Europe.  You surely don't want to be like those poor, miserable Finns, amirite?

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It seems that the Netherlands has moved to the hawk camp re: Russia inside the EU.  No surprise there after the MH17 incident and resentment among the population, though I don't know for how long the Dutch elites will keep that to appease the Dutch voters.  The trade volume between Russia and the Netherlands is rather disproportionately big.

Anyway, so, the EU, re: Russia, looks roughly like this now:

Hawkish - Poland (reliably anti-Russia all the time), Sweden (gone rather neoliberal/neocon lately, known within some circles in Brussels as "Carl Bildt effect", and not much trading with Russia anyway), Romania (pretty much spooked by the whole thing), the Baltic countries (to whom "European" means "as far away from Russia as possible", despite the large presence of ethnic Russians, particularly in Latvia and Estonia, and surprisingly big volume of trading with Russia; if anyone is truly determined and serious, it's these people - crazy enough to genuinely eager to join the euro zone)

Hawkish-ish - The Netherlands (formerly dovish, and now hawkish - "MH17 effect"), Ireland (Americans' favorite tax haven in Europe - "don't care really, but let's side with the US now"), Denmark (secretly rather anti-Russia, and obsessed with "humanitarian concerns" whatever the hell that means)

Fake Hawkish(-ish) - The UK (fomerly dovish, but hawkish with one leg now because of the US watching them like a head master, and still dovish with the other leg because of, well, obviously money in the City), France (formerly dovish, and now fake hawkish-ish - "we-are-so-clever-that-we-can-maneuver-this-to-our-advantage delusion effect")

Dovish - Hungary (who, like Poland, should have lots of historical reasons to hate Russia's guts, but adamantly against any sanctions), Italy, Greece, Cyprus (collectively called "Three Amigos of Putin's" inside some circles in Brussels), Spain, Portugal (the economically struggling Iberian sisters who don't quite want to burn the bridge to Russia), Finland (too plagued with recession to even imagine anything happening to the steady supply of gas - 100% reliance on Russia)

Dovish-ish - Germany (too much trading with Russia to go hawkish), Austria ("Germany's quiet cousin"), Czech Republic, Slovenia, Slovakia, Croatia (the former-Communist bloc countries who disappoint the American neocons to no end; relegated from "Brave New Europe" to "Wannabe Pussy Old Europe" - No, I didn't make that up; an American neocon did use those words to describe the countries right in front of me)

Swinger - Bulgaria (extremely divided inside the country - could go either way in a rather extreme way)

I'm sure I forgot some countries, but roughly this is the picture now.  Subject to change any time, of course.

EDIT: Shit, I forgot Belgium, my host country in Europe, lol.

Fortunately, they don't matter much.