Random Rant Thread

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Ah, Angela Merkel announced that her country will give Ukraine 500M euro aid to rebuild the infrastructure in Eastern Ukraine.  Never mind the receiving party, the Poroshenko administration in Kiev, has no realistic authority over much of Eastern Ukraine.  The willful delusion/deception is almost surreal.

Everyone knew it was coming, though.  I guess it's nice that Germany shows its "generosity" in that tangible manner, but it's pretty much a preemptive business deal.  I mean, which country has the biggest "infrastructure" industry?  Yup, Germany.  Much of that money will go straight into the pockets of German companies.  Basically massive indirect subsidies by the German government for the country's industrial sector.

New roads and buildings are nice, but it's kind of obscene, given the timing.  Sure, it's less obscene than the rebels in Eastern Ukraine parading the POW's on the Ukrainian independence day, with the crowd shouting at them "Fascist!  Fascist pigs!", and on the other side the Kiev government showing off the Grad missile launchers, which have been killing loads of their fellow Ukrainians over the last months, including a staggering number of civilians, in the massive military parade in Kiev (<---- what a fucking waste of resources and energy) on the same independence day.  The Yugoslavia-nization/Bosnia-nization of Ukraine is nearly complete, I guess.

But the smug face of Merkel surely disgusts me.  The way virtually everyone has behaved re: Ukraine is just absolutely disgusting.  It's the Ukrainians (minus the wonderful oligarchs), "pro-Maidan" or "pro-Russia", that will have to suffer the consequences the most.

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To sum up what the American neocons are trying to do with Ukraine:

Pluck the country off the Russian sphere of influence and have Europeans pay for it

That's pretty much all there is to it.  The Europeans who are buying that "Freedom-loving Ukrainians vs. Evil Putin" brouhaha, including Ukrainians themselves, are total suckers.  The neocons have absolutely no interest in "freedom" in Ukraine.  The country can be the same oligarchy paradise for all they care, with the economy even worse than before, as long as the whole thing pisses off Putin and destabilizes the Russian political situation.  You've already seen how sophisticated their strategic thinking is in Iraq War, War on Terror, and so on.  They are idiots whose minds departed Planet Earth a long time ago.  They are dangerous precisely because they are fucking idiots with too much power.

That's the bottom line, and Europeans in particular should think hard about what they are getting themselves into.  Don't be suckers.  Don't go full retard.

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But of course, not all the Europeans who buy that neocon horseshit are suckers; some are utterly in sync with the American neocons, like cockroaches in the collective decision-making process across the Atlantic Ocean.  Meet our Secretary General of NATO, Anders Fogh Rasmussen:

Nato plans east European bases to counter Russian threat
www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/26/nato-east-european-bases-counter-russian-threat?CMP=twt_gu

You can tell he has a serious hard-on going there, dreaming of the epic battle against a Stalin.  This creep is the one who got his country, Denmark, involved in Iraq War despite the popular opinion against it even though the country had absolutely no need to suck up to the US under the political circumstances. 

That's what's generally called the Viagra Syndrome, the need to keep the testosterone level high to cover up your total intellectual impotence, and many European leaders critically suffer from it.

In fact, I tend to find them even creepier than their American counterparts.  Americans get a chance or two in every four years, like the Olympics/World Cup cycle, to actually make love to the phallic symbol that is the US military, whereas the European hawks are almost permanently sexually depressed, having not gotten laid in God-knows-how-many-years.  Potential rapists.  Thank God they are not the majority among the European elites.

I mean, they aren't, right?

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I've come to think that Twitter monkey Carl Bildt, of Sweden, may be the worst mainstream European politician.  It's not that he said something horrible yesterday or today; it's the track record of his behaviors and activities in the past several years, like his active involvement in the Institute for Information on the Crimes of Communism.  I've already talked about how it's basically a fanatically neoliberal fascist-apologist "Institute" whose purpose is beating the dead horse of the Left, and whose tangible achievement is the rehabilitation of former Nazi collaborators in Central/Eastern Europe.  I'm sure that he has no problem with the ultra-nationalistic Banderites in Western Ukraine, as they are "victims of communism" in his fucked-up historical view.  He may recognize those pathetic far-right Swedish mercs fighting for the Kiev side as bad publicity for his country, as he's too "respectable" and mainstream to embrace overt racism and fascism, but hey, better fighting Russians for a "good cause" in a remote place than beating up socialists and Muslims back home!  Or something like that.

I can see through creeps like him.

Just take this as a warning.  Don't underestimate someone like him just because they are from an ostensibly peacenik country like Sweden.  The European integration has produced some good things, but also empowered Bildt and his ilk unfortunately.

Those aggressively European-liberal (which is different from American liberal) types could easily undermine the peace and prosperity of the continent.  Their delusional, mindlessly self-congratulatory way of thinking can be even more dangerous than the far-right politicians and the likes of Viktor Orban (right-wing Hungarian president).

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So, Gaza and Israel have agreed on an indefinite cease-fire.  There will be long negotiations on the details ahead, but let's see what Israel has achieved thus far:


50 days of fighting - outrageously more than it expected/hoped
Loss of several dozens of its soldiers
Horrible publicity
Lots of international sympathy for Palestinians
More antisemitism
Unprecedented level of fury among not-so-Zionist Jewish Americans
Depleted arsenal/ammo
Economic slump ahead
Israelis pushed farther to the right, very much to the right of even Netanyahu himself
Netanyahu's approval rate roller-coastering up to 82% a few weeks ago, down to 38% now

and

Realization among Israelis that Hamas can disrupt, if not exactly "threaten", their life any time it wants


What else?  All the sexy selfies by the "Death to Arabs" Israeli girls on FB?

Smells like a defeat to me.

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I certainly underestimated the combat capabilities of ISIS.  But what I mean by that is that I had thought the actual ISIS was about 10% of all the hype, and that the events on the ground, meaning what happened in the north, made me revise the number up to, like, 18%.  That still amounts to less than a fifth of the hype.

Like I said, they are capable of controlling much of the Sunni area in Iraq, and a big chunk of Eastern Syria.  And that says more about the weakness of the Iraq military (and frankly, its unwillingness to seriously fight for troubling places/lost causes like Ramadi and Fallujah) and the total vacuum the civil war created in much of Syria than about ISIS's strength.

In any event, that's as far as ISIS can go, and I doubt they will be able to even hold their territory for a long time.  In fact, they actually had more territory in Syria at one point, but pissed off the locals too much and ended up being kicked out by their rival Sunni militias (most of whom are nowhere near as "secular" or "moderate" as you'd like to think, FYI).  The fact that ISIS fighters are mostly Sunni Iraqi - with hundreds of Chechens and some European jihadists (hyped way out of proportion as we speak, particularly in the UK), both of whom tend to be even more extreme in their fanatical devotion to Wahhabism/Salafism than the local Syrian/Iraqi Islamists - didn't help in Syria.  Islam is "universal" and all that, but people in general don't like being bossed around by foreigners who speak the language with different accent, or don't even speak it at all.  That kind of local sentiment usually trumps the religion.  No one likes a kid from England with an AK-47 who sucks at actual fighting telling them what to do in English with a Manchester accent, telling them the sinfulness of watching football and all that crap, just because he's their "Muslim brother".

ISIS is the most powerful Sunni Islamist militia right now.  But that's about all you can say.  The emergence of such a group was inevitable after Iraq War.  Basically, you take Saddam out, you lose "Iraq".  The country has been disintegrating, which has directly contributed to the destabilization of Syria.  At this point, you don't have a united nation state called "Iraq".  Instead you have: 1) the southern/eastern territory, which is largely Shia, controlled by Baghdad; 2) Kurdistan in the north; and 3) the Sunni vacuum in the center that is currently under control of ISIS.   There is no semblance of unity among them.

Sure, ISIS is a group that "thinks big", but no matter how PR-savvy it is, and regardless of all the big talks about the Caliphate and all that, it's almost strictly a local matter.  The notion that a Sunni militia like ISIS poses a national security threat to the US homeland and shit like that is pure nonsense that belongs in a Hollywood movie.  If they are worried about terrorist attacks, well, destroying ISIS would eliminate the threat in exactly what way?

What the "West" is doing is hype the shit out of ISIS and raise its status in the region and the world.  In that respect, ISIS has already won.  If you actually believe what those dumbass politicians and think-tanks say about ISIS, you are even worse than the suckers who actually believe Starbucks cares about the "environment", that Google and Apple care about your "liberty", etc.  You deserve every piece of shit you get in your life.

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No, this is not an Onion article.  It's an official statement from NATO countries, regarding Libya.  The last sentence is pure gold.

We believe outside interference in Libya exacerbates current divisions and undermines Libya’s democratic transition.

LOL.  Our leaders are comic geniuses, I'm telling you.  They would be absolutely zany if their actions hadn't caused such big humanitarian, geopolitical disasters.

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Sometimes it seems as if the mainstream media purposely don't hire people who actually know anything about warfare.  They had been saying until yesterday that the days of the rebels in Eastern Ukraine were numbered, the Ukrainian force were routing them, Russia threw them under the bus, etc.  They basically bought everything that Kiev was saying.

It would've taken only a glance at what was actually going on there to call bullshit on all of that.  Sure, the Kiev side managed to take a few towns, but none of them were defended by a sufficient number of fighters.  None of them were strategically that important.  Those "victories" were hyped way out of proportion, and it seems that the Kiev government actually bought its own bullshit.  It's a pretty stupid case of positive feedback inside the Western media-Kiev echo chamber.  Hey, the New York Times says that we are winning, so we must be!  They should've known that taking Luhansk and Donetsk and all the border area was practically impossible.  But being drunk with those small victories, Poroshenko decided to go for a full victory, only to see his troops swiftly routed and surrounded when the rebels mounted a few counterattacks.  Even though the rebels were still running low on supplies.  Well, both sides are running low on supplies, to be fair.

The result is that Kiev effectively lost control of the southeastern border with Russia, and even much of the Sea of Azov coastline.  It also lost a good chance for a good negotiation right there.  It's not that the Russians are a bunch of evil geniuses or anything like that; it was purely an own goal by Kiev.

And what are the media saying now?  Of course - if the "inferior" rebels could kick the asses of the "superior" Ukrainian side like that, the Russian military must be actually and actively involved now!  An invasion!

Those media idiots never think that the whole assumption was false to begin with.  Thus a NYT article quotes "American officials" who say shit like:

the separatists have no experience in using such weaponry.

Such weaponry, eh?  Like what?  As if the old Soviet weaponry used by both sides required Unix and C++ coding skills or something.  The beauty of the old Soviet tools is that they are very simple, minimalist and durable unlike their contemporary American counterparts, which tended to be the exact opposite.  That's part of the reason why insurgents everywhere in the world continue to use them and love them even today.  Even I could operate most of them, and most of those involved in this war have at least some experience of regular military service in the past, perhaps except for the Swedish psychology students on the Kiev side, and the Spanish unemployed on the rebel side.  The Soviet artillery equipment is a piece of cake for them.

Look, if I were a rebel fighter, I would be almost pissed at Russia.  There is no doubt at this point that Russia has been supplying them with ammo, "volunteers" and even some gadgets, duh, but every single picture that I've seen of the scenes on the ground shows the old Soviet stuff, on both sides, the kind that the Ukrainian army is still using.  No modern Russian equipment anywhere.

But unfortunately, most of the reporters can't tell a T-72 from a T-64, and the editors can't even tell an RPG-29 from a fucking bagpipe.

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Excellent article on Russia. Required reading for everyone who has even a tiny bit of interest in what Russia is, and what it means to the rest of the world:

The Eternal Collapse of Russia
nationalinterest.org/feature/the-eternal-collapse-russia-11126

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The whole Ukraine fiasco is such a train wreck that I almost feel like just forgetting it altogether.  There is no silver lining whatsoever.  It's madness.  Seeing Ukrainian PM Yatsenyuk talking about joining NATO makes me puke.  It seems as if everyone is living in some kind of a fantasy land.  Does he understand that his country is already fucked x 10, fucked beyond all recognition and nothing good will come out of any of that shit?  He surely knows his country is broke in a million different ways, and headed for an utter economic catastrophe that will make Greece's plight look mild in comparison.  Does he seriously think that the EU is going to bail him out?  Does he actually believe the stupid, irresponsible words of the likes of Sikorski and Bildt?

What the fuck makes him think that the EU and its bandits will ever actually save him and his country?  That's just a whole new level of positive thinking, aka delusion.  The Europeans who honestly think of Ukraine as part of "Europe" are a small minority, EVEN IN BRUSSELS.  That's why his cause in actuality only attracts far-right losers like the Swedish psychology student and stupid right-wing neoliberal interventionist creeps who forever live in 1991, totally in the moronic spirit of Wind of Change, like Carl fucking Bildt.  Everyone else thinks of his country as a mere pawn.

Seeing Fogh Rasmussen still in such an influential position, the position where he can speak as the face of NATO, makes me ill, too.  This is a guy who said 10 years ago: "OF COURSE, Iraq has WMDs.  We don't think it does; we know it does," with sheer confidence to the Danes who questioned the wisdom of participating in Iraq War.  It wasn't "We don't have any reason to doubt the explanations from the US intelligence" or any such phrase.  He said he "knew" that Iraq had WMDs, and proceeded to explain, in such a patronizing way, that Iraq would be a wonderful democratic place without Saddam.  He's a Danish Donald Rumsfeld, one of those "Slam Dunk!" people.  With such a phrase, he should've assumed personal responsibility for the shit.  Alas.

These idiots, war criminals, who keep being rewarded for their failures make me fucking sick.  Tony Blair is at least universally disliked, for God's sakes.

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Very predictably and very reliably, the Washington Post has been in a total war-mongering mode lately.  What's with Evil Putin and ISIS (but not Israel-Palestine, heh), you see a total hard on going there.

Anne Applebaum, the neocon wife of the neocon Polish foreign minister, thinks that the US should be prepared for a "total war" against Russia, with nukes very much as a legit option, because... well, I don't even know how the brains of these crazies operate.  Apparently because her husband showed her old Polish photos or some crazy shit like that which should make no sense to even half-way sane people.

And you also have David Ignatius, giving us his wisdom about Saudi Arabia:

For a generation, Americans and Saudis have worried that the kingdom was a potential tinderbox, with Muslim and secular extremists vying to undermine the conservative monarchy.

Beware of the "secular extremists"!

Seriously, what the fuck?  This nutcase is telling Americans to care about Saudi Arabia's corrupt, Arab-chauvinist, petro-dollar-addicted, Wahhabi royal regime, which you could easily argue is the #1 reason for why the Middle East is in such chaos, in its battle against "secular extremists".  I'm speechless.

And the editorial is of course beating the drums loudly:

If any international norm can still be called uncontroversial, it is the stricture against cross-border aggression by one sovereign state against another. Certainly any failure to enforce it in one place invites violations elsewhere.

...says the paper who never misses an opportunity to call for America's "cross-border aggression" every time something happens somewhere in the world.

The total lack of self-awareness, on an almost superhuman level, is what is required of being employed by the mainstream media in America.  "Hypocrisy" is too weak a word to express it.  I know Americans are sick of being made fun of, but they must understand that their elites do their utmost to invite the ridicule.  The lengths to which they go to make sure that people outside America will go "Oh there the Yanks go again, sheesh" are simply incredible.  The rest of the world can't stop America the Retarded Godzilla going full retard and wrecking retard-havoc under these crazies' guidance.  Making fun of them is really the only option left for us, the powerless non-American suckers.

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It seems that Brits are very upset about the disproportionate number of their fellow countrymen joining ISIS to fight in Syria (and Iraq), but remember: Fighting as a merc in a foreign land has always been a viable career option for able-bodied British males.  What's the difference between, say, a Scottish merc fighting in Africa and an English Muslim kid "finding the purpose of his life" in Syria?  Hell, the latter has an even more persuasive reason to fight over there given the current global political/religious climate.  What?  Atrocities?  What makes you think that the Scottish merc in Africa had never committed or seen some?  Guerrilla warfare and atrocities are best friends with each other, and historically Britain is clearly no stranger to atrocities.  ISIS is a mere flyweight compared to the British Empire in terms of that.

Sure, the British ISIS fighters are mostly confused kids whose actual combat value is pretty close to nil, but most of the British mercs in other parts of the world were confused men, too.  Couldn't fit in the post-imperial modern British society. 

In any event, I'd simply consider it a British tradition, the leftover of Anglo adventurism, which used to enable them to rule most of the seas and so much of the lands on this planet.

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I quickly reviewed the EU Agreement with Ukraine a few hours ago - which triggered the whole thing no matter what BS the "West" and media tell you - and was once again appalled at the sheer criminality of it. It's essentially "Hey, Russkies! Fuck you, and kiss our ass! If Ukraine signs on it, it will take no time for us to install a NATO base in Crimea, hahaha! Yeah, we might not do that, but remember we could any time we want, okaaay?" in a formal language.

It can't be stressed enough how explosive it was. It's almost the Saddam-with-WMD level of recklessness in diplomacy. It's too bad that most people in the world know, and will hear nothing about it.

I just can't believe Germany let it pass. Why did they let Poles, Swedes, Baltics etc. run amok like that? They surely wouldn't have if they had known it would lead to such a calamitous situation.  The problem, though, is that they totally should've known it would.  It's mind-boggling.

It's getting increasingly clear that a huge amount of delusion and hubris was involved in that moronic decision. The neocons could've never had their way if those Europeans weren't such world-class morons.

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This is one of the best articles about Ukraine ever, and it was written by an American basketball player.

My season in war-torn Ukraine
espn.go.com/olympics/basketball/story/_/id/11453771/coleman-collins-season-war-torn-ukraine

Take it as an account from someone who doesn't quite understand the local language(s), but top-notch writing, in the Alice-in-the-Wonderland literary tradition. And it is insightful, too.

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I don't live in the UK or really know what is going on on the ground level over there, but it's quite amusing to read so many Brits (meaning mostly the English, and Scottish Unionists) going apeshit over the Scottish independence, which has apparently been elevated from "ain't-happening" to "possible" according the latest polls.  Boris Johnson whining about the UK possibly "losing its global name and brand" was a pure comedy.  I have no fucking idea what "global brand" he's talking about.  Is it still 1870 or something?

Looks like the whole opening-the-way-for-referendum thing is possibly turning out to be a bit of an own goal.  I guess they never thought that Scots could actually say YES.

As far as I'm concerned, it does make sense for Scotland to bid farewell to England.  One is tempted to invoke stuff like:



... but, it's not even about that kind of national sentiment.  I just don't see any good point in their sticking together, particularly from the Scottish point of view, other than the tradition.  Neither Conservative nor New Labour have done a whole lot of good for Scotland.  Their neoliberal shite is simply not working, while the City of London continues to use the Scottish resources as mere collateral for their wicked malinvestment.

The only caveat is that it doesn't make much sense to go independent and stick with the British pound, which seems to be the (vague) plan at this point.  What's the point of independence when you remain a slave to the Bank of England?  London can be even more sadistic to Scotland than Frankfurt is to the European Periphery.  The English elites probably won't forgive Scotland, mostly for emotional reasons.

Anyway, this thing is building up to be something bigger than I thought.  And if they are indeed to go independent, you bet that it will have a ripple effect in continental Europe as well.  Popcorn time.