@104 Unfortunately the non-lunatics in ukraine are intimidated by neo-nazi thugs. Even Poroshenko is scared of them. They are currently blockading Donbass coal shipments.

Posted by: dh | Mar 2 2017 15:04 utc | 104

i finally found a link to tulsi gabbard’s h.r. 608 stop arming terrorists act.
‘a. Prohibition with respect to al qaeda, jabhat fateh al-Sham, and ISIL’ is straight-forward. hard to defend not voting for that.
‘b. Prohibition with respect to supporting countries’ means ksa, qatar, turkey … uk, fr, il … less hard to defend not voting for that.
should have been separate bills? or was this one designed to fail?

Posted by: jfl | Mar 3 2017 9:56 utc | 106

They bleat about the wonder of ‘democracy’ like ‘freedom of expressions’ , ‘freedom to protest’ . [1]
but they forget to tell you the most awesome aspect of it all,
freedom to kill,
freedom to terrorise !
‘People in the United States imagine that drones fly to a target, launch their deadly missiles with surgical precision and return to a U.S. base hundreds or thousands of miles away. But drones are a constant presence in the skies above the North Waziristan tribal area in Pakistan, with as many as six hovering over villages at any one time. People hear them day and night. They are an inescapable presence, the looming specter of death from above.
And that presence is steadily destroying a community twice the size of Rhode Island. Parents are afraid to send their children to school. Women are afraid to meet in markets. Families are afraid to gather at funerals for people wrongly killed in earlier strikes. Drivers are afraid to deliver food from other parts of the country.
The routines of daily life have been ripped to shreds. Indisputably innocent people cower in their homes, afraid to assemble on the streets. “Double taps,” or secondary strikes on the same target, have stopped residents from aiding those who have been injured. A leading humanitarian agency now delays assistance by an astonishing six hours.
What makes this situation even worse is that no one can tell people in these communities what they can do to make themselves safe. No one knows who is on the American kill list, no one knows how they got there and no one knows what they can do to get themselves off. It’s all terrifyingly random. Suddenly, and without warning, a missile launches and obliterates everyone within a 16-yard radius.’
http://articles.latimes.com/2012/oct/04/opinion/la-oe-gibson-drones-civilians-20121004
[1]
tell that to Kathy Kelly, jailed dozens of times for peaceful antiwar demonstrations.

Posted by: denk | Mar 4 2017 0:55 utc | 108

I have some military background, not much. I have not been in any war. I am not a US citizen nor Russian.
Very good posts denk. I want to reply to the second one, to me there is something particularly offensive about the special kind of hypocrisy that all militaries and societies indulge in. You and many others might actually find the following opinion extremely abhorrent (and I can see why despite having it) but to me the reason is not because I think people should mourn an enemy or other casualties like their own or anything like that (because I don’t) but because it is at its core a complete denial of what not only war but all use of violence is about: killing, maiming, or at the very least inflicting pain or debilitating force, to win.
Soldiers nor officers nor politicians nor any adult should have any miscomprehension about that. The inherent denial is disgusting precisely because how obvious it ought to be. It (and this was unintentional) ties in with the last topic below in the form of a denial of reality: a lie, nothing but yet more lies.
I am of course not talking about or criticizing genuine grief of a person or remembrance, just to be clear. I am talking about the denial of what violence is which although it might always be there to a certain extent has a tendency to completely overshadow everything and become a spectacle, a circus, a freak show of prostituted self-indulgence in hypocrisy.
I still nurture some hope that you might be wrong about the person you don’t want to mention. Sometimes when people talk of “the lesser of two evils” the strong implication is that there’s hardly any difference between the two but in this case the difference was and continues to be vast, so there’s always that. However he must know that such is not why he was elected by people overwhelmingly fed up with US “adventures” and that if he doesn’t truly deliver on that as well as just about everything else then he’ll only have one term or less (and unlike the paid “opposition” these people actually are armed and willing).
People inside and outside the USA were not joking when they said this was the last chance. Some might have said it as a threat but all said it as a perceived inescapable fact. Last chance because it can’t and won’t be allowed to continue like it has. It is not up for debate, people perceive it as a matter of survival. Existential.
In very stark contrast to the above what I really wanted to write about before reading denk’s comments was how I found the following interesting and indicative (but perhaps only because I want to believe that things are better than they are; yet another type of lie):
“Unfortunately, some influential forces in the US have been taking using relations with Russia as a tool for achieving their own goals, they consider bilateral relations to be collateral damage in the war they have been fighting inside the country,” Ryabkov noted. “It causes very much regret, but we are not inclined [to] make a big deal out of it. This is their business, we do not interfere in internal affairs.”
That’s Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov by the way saying “…we are not inclined [to] make a big deal out of it [everything happening in the US]”. There’s also the use of “war” as a description but maybe that has less impact as a description in the original Russian I assume this was translated from.
Taken from TASS and the URL is very small and tidy http://tass.com/politics/933907 (but of course not all that informative —can’t have it both ways) 🙂
I’m not sure what to make of it, it might be a very clever form of deliberate deescalation, it might be complete confidence, but it also strikes me as smartly meek in context.
Now onto something completely different and if anyone thinks they know something feel free to tell.
We live in a world almost entirely of lies, so many layers and varieties that one doesn’t know where to stop doubting. Often they are lies that lead nowhere at all, and for which it seems impossible to find any real documentation, and then eventually it doesn’t seem to matter anything at all in any way despite how it seems it ought to. “Curiosa” like this example:
“Berga [concentration camp] was run by a fanatical German national guard sergeant named Erwin Metz, who was responsible for the inhumane conditions and who gave the order to take the prisoners on the death march.”
“…he [Metz] was sentenced to death, because he had killed a US POW, Pvt Morton Goldstein (Battery C/590th Field Artillery/106 US Division) on March 14, 1945. However, because of the American political climate and the shifting priorities of the American War Department toward defending against the Soviets in the lead-up to the Cold War, many German war criminals’ sentences were commuted in exchange for intelligence that the Western allies believed could be used against the Soviets. Metz thus was instead sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment, though in the end he served only nine before being released back into Germany a free man.”
From Wikipedia URL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berga,_Thuringia
So a death sentence ends up being nine years. A bit like how life imprisonment is no more than 21 years or less in many countries. Life sure is cheap, sometimes cheaper than talk.
I’m curios if Erwin Metz perhaps is one of those rumored to have been imported to and reemployed by the US and Canada as torturers back then or if those were exclusively “Ukrainian” (if it’s true at all).
Loose ends all over the place (I’m sure that was an infinitesimal one, just a sadist), history becoming nothing but selected narratives. A quantity of lies so big and deeply layered that not even any of all the “top” liars truly have any reason to think they know anything at all.

Posted by: Outsider | Mar 4 2017 12:54 utc | 110

What they did in NAM,
[tip of an iceberg]
*’there was a lot of screaming and just chaos coming from the direction of the village and a lot of people started running out of the tree line.
From where I was standing, I saw maybe two or three male villagers and the rest were women and children–some of the children walking and some of them young enough to be carried, I would say under a year, maybe. The last thing I heard as a command was the gunnery sergeant told them to open fire to keep them back. Their village was on fire and they were in panic; they didn’t stop, so they just cut down the women and children with mortars, machine guns, tanks, snipers.8′
*’We sure are pleased with those backroom boys at Dow. The original product wasn’t so hot–if the gooks were quick they could scrape it off.
So the boys started adding polystyrene–now it sticks like shit to a blanket. But then if the gooks jumped under water it stopped burning, so they started adding Willie Peter [WP–white phosphorous] so’s to make it burn better. It’ll even burn under water now. And one drop is enough, it’ll keep on burning right down to the bone so they die anyway from phosphorous poisoning.
*artillery crews zero their fire towards the sound of babies cries,
*The use of the insertion of the 6-inch dowel into the canal of one of my detainee’s ears and the tapping through the brain until he died. The starving to death [in a cage] of a Vietnamese woman who was suspected of being a part of a local political education cadre in one of the local villages…. [T]he use of electronic gear such as sealed telephones attached to…both the women’s vagina and the men’s testicles [to] shock them into submission.20
Other techniques included throwing prisoners out of planes alive and cutting off fingers, fingernails, ears, and sexual organs.21*
http://isreview.org/issues/20/rogue_state.shtml
wtf am i bringing up all these shits, nobody is interested any more ,
murkka is a god damned tefloned country remember ?
but wait,
these are the kind of ‘half arsed measures’ that team trump sniff at.
trump..
‘from now on we wont fight with one arm tied behind our backs like in NAM,
we’d fight to win’, we’d make murkka great again !,
and not a peep from the trumpsters !
trumpsters,
‘but he did stop clinton didnt he’ ?
hehehehe

Posted by: denk | Mar 6 2017 4:32 utc | 112