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May You All Have A Happy Easter Walk
Easter echoes the eons old human festivity to celebrate the arrival of spring. The dark and cold days of winter are gone. The bright time of fertility has come.
Today's fertility symbols of Easter, the egg and the hare, relate to the old Germanic fertility goddess Eostre (Ostara). Another related goddess is Ishtar, a Mesopotamian representation of love, who stepped down into the underworld of death but was revived. The Christian resurrection of Jesus is probably a transformation of this older tale.
When the Christian message spread from its eastern Mediterranean origin its incorporation of old local gods and fables helped to convert the multi-theistic societies to the new monotheistic believe. The gods of the pre-Christian religions were not completely discarded but their tales were transformed to support the message the Christian preachers were spreading.
It is finally spring, the darkness has vanished and this is my favored holiday.
Happy Easter
Cont. reading: May You All Have A Happy Easter Walk
Ukraine Open Thread 2022-48
Only news & views related to the Ukraine conflict …
Ukraine Open Thread 2022-47
Only news & views related to the Ukraine conflict …
Librul Frenzy Over Musk Buying Twitter
In summer 2013 the Washington Post company and its publications were bought by the multi-billionaire Jeff Bezos, the owner of Amazon:
Bezos, whose entrepreneurship has made him one of the world’s richest men, will pay $250 million in cash for The Post and affiliated publications to The Washington Post Co., which owns the newspaper and other businesses.
The Post has since consistently promoted low taxes for billionaires:
Opinion: Think twice before changing the tax rules to soak billionaires
Yesterday Elon Musk, also a multi-billionaire, launched a hostile takeover of the messenger service Twitter. He claims he wants to do that to allow for more 'free speech'.
Twitter has been criticized on the left and right for suppressing certain voices and information. It is seemingly directed by the mainstream 'liberul' view of the world that is currently promoting a war against Russia.
The reasoning it has recently given for kicking Scott Ritter and Pepe Escobar as well as other well known writers from its service make otherwise no sense.
Musk's offer threw the mainstream pro-war 'liberuls' as well as their neo-conservatives allies into a frenzy.
Without a hint of irony a Washington Post writer opined against Musk's takeover offer:
Opinion: Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover bid is ‘peak billionaire’
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What does it mean when a billionaire can almost single-handedly swoop in and eat up this sort of communications platform? The easy answer is nothing good.
Yeah. Just ask Jeff Bezos or any Washington Post reader, or Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook and WhatsUp users, or the billionaires who own Google and Youtube. They all are system errors of capitalism. They should not exist. Tax codes should be designed to eliminate them.
Cont. reading: Librul Frenzy Over Musk Buying Twitter
Ukraine Open Thread 2022-46
Only news & views related to the Ukraine conflict …
Open Thread 2022-45 (Not Ukraine)
News and views NOT related to Ukraine …
U.S. Military Intelligence Official Refutes ‘Russian Atrocities’ Claims
Russian soldiers left the town Bucha in Ukraine on March 30. Two days later the Ukrainian Gestapo like SBU and men of the fascist Azov battalion moved in to find and remove 'traitors'. On April 2/3 video was published that showed freshly killed men laying on the streets of Bucha. Several of them had white arm bands signaling to Russian forces to see them as friendlies.
The 'west' and Ukrainian officials immediately called those dead the result of 'Russian atrocities'.
I had called it a provocation:
The Bucha 'Russian' atrocities propaganda onslaught may have worked well in the 'west' but it lacks evidence that Russia had anything to do with it.
The former Indian ambassador M.K. Bhadrakumar calls it an outright fake: …
And a fake it was.
Thankfully there are still some sane U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency officials and William Arkin is talking with them:
Last Wednesday, Bucha Mayor Anatolii Fedoruk said that 320 people had been killed in the town of 37,000.
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"It is ugly," a senior official with the Defense Intelligence Agency tells Newsweek. "But we forget that two peer competitors fought over Bucha for 36 days, and that the town was occupied, that Russian convoys and positions inside the town were attacked by the Ukrainians and vice versa, that ground combat was intense, that the town itself was literally fought over."
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"I am not for a second excusing Russia's war crimes, nor forgetting that Russia invaded the country," says the DIA official. "But the number of actual deaths is hardly genocide. If Russia had that objective or was intentionally killing civilians, we'd see a lot more than less than .01 percent in places like Bucha."
320 of 37,000 is not .01 percent. But we do not know how many of those dead were Russian or Ukrainian soldiers. Some of the dead were so called 'civilian defenders' which were supposedly local civilians to whom the government had handed guns to 'fight the Russians'. During a war a 'civilian' with a government issued gun shooting at enemy soldiers is a combatant, not a civilian.
Cont. reading: U.S. Military Intelligence Official Refutes ‘Russian Atrocities’ Claims
How The U.S. Does ‘Diplomacy’
The U.S. doesn't do diplomacy. Every country has its own interests. But the U.S. and its pricks in the State Department insist that its interests must have priority over all others. Any country that disagrees with that will be called out on this or that issue or will even get sanctioned.
March 19 2022: President Xi Jinping Has a Video Call with US President Joe Biden
The two sides exchanged views on the situation in Ukraine.
President Biden expounded on the US position, and expressed readiness for communication with China to prevent the situation from exacerbating.
President Xi pointed out that China does not want to see the situation in Ukraine to come to this. China stands for peace and opposes war. This is embedded in China’s history and culture. China makes a conclusion independently based on the merits of each matter. China advocates upholding international law and universally recognized norms governing international relations. China adheres to the UN Charter and promotes the vision of common, comprehensive, cooperative and sustainable security. These are the major principles that underpin China’s approach to the Ukraine crisis.
March 21 2022: US announces new sanctions on Chinese officials over ‘repressive acts’
The State Department said it would impose visa restrictions on Chinese officials it said are believed to be responsible for “policies or actions aimed at repressing religious and spiritual practitioners, members of ethnic minority groups, dissidents, human rights defenders, journalists, labor organizers, civil society organizers, and peaceful protestors in China and beyond.”
April 11 2022: Ukraine dominates Modi-Biden talks
Mr. Modi, who spoke via videolink to Mr Biden, described the situation in Ukraine as “very worrying” and said he had spoken, several times, with both Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Russian President Vladimir Putin and had not just urged peace, but also direct talks between them. India’s unwillingness to call out Russia by name for its attack on Ukraine has not gone down well in Washington, but U.S. officials have also said that they hoped countries that have relationships with Moscow might leverage them to bring about a resolution to the situation.
April 12 2022: US Monitoring "Rise In Human Rights Abuses" In India: Antony Blinken
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the United States was monitoring what he described as a rise in "human rights abuses" in India by some officials, in a rare direct rebuke by Washington of New Delhi.
"We regularly engage with our Indian partners on these shared values (of human rights) and to that end, we are monitoring some recent concerning developments in India including a rise in human rights abuses by some government, police and prison officials," Mr Blinken said on Monday in a joint press briefing with US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar and Defense Minister Rajnath Singh.
January 10 2022: Chas Freeman – Diplomacy as an Instrument of Statecraft: A Practicum
What distinguishes diplomats from courtiers, securocrats, and other bureaucrats in a national capital is a reliance on empathy: the ability to see the world through other eyes and to use this insight to induce others to see their interests the way the diplomat wants them to see them. It takes more than a diplomatic passport, position, or title to make someone a “diplomat.” Diplomacy, like other skilled work, requires knowhow gained through training, mentoring, on-the-job experience, and awareness of historical precedents. It is a calling and a role, not a job title.
Yet diplomacy remains at best a proto-profession in the United States, thanks to the uniquely American reliance on the political spoils system to staff even key national security functions. This makes diplomatic appointments to benefit appointees and their political parties rather than the country. It thereby enshrines amateurism and incompetence. As the New York Herald-Tribune put it in 1857, in the United States “diplomacy is the sewer through which flows the scum and refuse of the political puddle. A man not fit to stay at home is just the man to send abroad.” Only one thing has changed about this in the last 165 years. Female campaign donors and celebrities now compete with men for appointments to what they imagine are ambassadorial sinecures in plummy places abroad, leaving seedy and dangerous places to lifers.
The Reasons For And Dangers Behind The War In Ukraine
The war in the Ukraine continues but the propaganda hysteria around it seems to have calmed down a bit as reality is setting in.
This gives room from more sane voices to be heard by the public. I will start with the Russian ones.
The Russian ambassador to the U.S., Anatoly Antonov, was interviewed by Newsweek. He explained Russia's political and judicial reasoning behind the war:
"The special operation in Ukraine is the result of the unwillingness of the Kiev regime to stop the genocide of Russians by fulfilling its obligations under the international commitments," Antonov told Newsweek. "The desire of the NATO member states to use the territory of a neighboring state to establish a foothold in the struggle against Russia is also obvious."
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To Russia, Antonov said that the [Maidan] revolution was a "bloody coup d'état instigated by the West" in which "ultranationalist ideas came to power in Kiev." He said that policies viewed by Moscow as hostile such as the removal of Russian as a national language and the rehabilitation of nationalist Ukrainian figures such as Stepan Bandera, who collaborated with Nazi Germany during World War II, had "taken root in Ukraine under external administration."
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Antonov argued that it was the "nationalist frenzy and revanchist sentiments of the Kiev regime" that resulted in the effective death of the Minsk deals as Ukraine chose "the path of rapid militarization" with help from abroad.
"The NATO member countries have commenced a military exploration of Ukraine," Antonov said. "It was flooded with Western weaponry while President Vladimir Zelensky announced Kiev's plans to acquire nuclear weapons which would threaten not only neighboring countries, but also the entire world."
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"In this context, Russia had no other choice but to recognize the independence of the Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics," Antonov said. "Then, in accordance with Chapter VII, Article 51 of the U.N. Charter, with the authorization of the Federation Council of Russia and in execution of the Treaties of Friendship and Mutual Assistance with the Donetsk People's Republic and the Lugansk People's Republic, President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin made a decision to begin a special military operation."
"Its aim is to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine in order to reduce military threats posed by the Western states that are trying to use the fraternal Ukrainian people in the struggle against the Russians," he added.
Sergey Karaganov is a high level Russian political scientist and commentator who is also a presidential advisor in Moscow. He was interviewed (in English) by the Italian Corriere Della Sera
Sergey Karaganov: «We are at war with the West. The European security order is illegitimate»
An excerpt:
Cont. reading: The Reasons For And Dangers Behind The War In Ukraine
Ukraine Open Thread 2022-44
Only news & views related to the Ukraine conflict …
The MoA Week In Review – NOT Ukraine OT 2022-43
More Evidence That Ukraine Fired The Missile Which Killed Dozens In Kramatorsk
This is a follow on to yesterday's Ukrainian Tochka-U missile strike on the Kramatorsk railway station. Russia no longer has Tochka missiles (search for Tochka in the pdf) while the Ukraine, Belarus and several other states still use them.
There is now additional evidence that the missile was fired by Ukrainian forces. The facts do not matter in 'western' media who stick to whatever story they are told to produce. Still, I do believe that facts matter at least in the long term and that there is a historic value in documenting them.
The Tochka-U is a tactical missile with a maximum range of some 120 kilometer. It is typically fired from a transporter, erector, launcher vehicle (TEL) with little need of preparations.
The TEL vehicle for the Tochka is a six wheeled BAZ 5921 /5922. These are amphibious floating hull chassis. The picture below shows a BAZ TEL in parade mode with a Tochka missile slightly erected. In the normal transport mode the missile lies horizontally under a protective roof.
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Cont. reading: More Evidence That Ukraine Fired The Missile Which Killed Dozens In Kramatorsk
Ukrainian Tochka-U Missile Killed Dozens At Kramatorsk Train Station
The current top headline of the New York Times is:
Live Updates: Russia Strikes Train Station, Ukraine Says, as Thousands Flee From East
“Dozens” were feared dead and injured, a local official said, after a missile strike in Kramatorsk, which had been a main point of evacuation for people trying to leave eastern Ukraine.
CNN quotes an Ukrainian military official who described it as an Iskander missile strike:
Two missiles struck the station, according to the head of Ukraine's national rail system, Oleksandr Kamyshin. Pavlo Kyrylenko, the head of Donetsk regional military administration, said the Russian military used Iskander short-range ballistic missiles.
A pro-Ukrainian twitter account also describes this as a result of the missile attack (the time stamp is UTC+2):
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The same account describes this as the remains of the booster section of the missile that hit the train station:
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Cont. reading: Ukrainian Tochka-U Missile Killed Dozens At Kramatorsk Train Station
U.S. ‘Intelligence’ Says Its ‘Intelligence’ Is Bullshit
U.S. 'intelligence' folks tell their stenographers at NBC News that their obvious lies are obvious lies.
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That announced 'break with the past' of faking 'intelligence' happened when?
How 'rock solid' was the 'intelligence' about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction or chemical weapons attacks in Douma, Syria?
U.S. 'intelligence', then and now, is pure imagination for the purpose of deceiving the U.S. and 'western' public about the reality of this or that conflict:
Cont. reading: U.S. ‘Intelligence’ Says Its ‘Intelligence’ Is Bullshit
Ukraine Open Thread 2022-42
Only news & views related to the Ukraine conflict …
Open Thread 2022-41 (Not Ukraine)
News and views NOT related to Ukraine …
If The Pentagon Can Not Confirm The Bucha Tales, Who Can?
This was the most important one of yesterday's news items.
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Pentagon can't independently confirm atrocities in Ukraine's Bucha, official says
WASHINGTON, April 4 (Reuters) – The U.S. military is not in a position to independently confirm Ukrainian accounts of atrocities by Russian forces against civilians in the town of Bucha, …
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"The Pentagon can't independently and single handedly confirm that, but we're also not in any position to refute those claims."
If the Pentagon, which includes the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency, could not confirm what the government in Kiev claimed, who else could?
Certainly not the European minions who reacted to those dubious claims by removing more Russian embassy personal from their countries.
The U.S. is again pushing the Europeans into suiciding their economies. The U.S. would of course be the only country that would gain from that.
Its over. The Ukraine has lost the war. Its navy, air force and defense industry no longer exist. The Russia air force is doing hundreds of bombing runs per night eliminating any fuel and ammunition depot that is left in Ukraine.
Without fuel tanks and trucks are immobilized. Without ammunition artillery falls silent. The heavy Ukrainian units along Donbas are now unable to do maneuver warfare. They can not even flee. Replenishment and reserves are unable to reach them. They have the choice of giving up or getting destroyed in place.
Anyone who is still pushing more weapons into Ukraine or tells Kiev to prolong the war is putting more Ukrainian lives at risk for zero potential gain.
That's criminal.
Parliament Moves, Elections Let Empire Losses Accumulate
Yesterday saw three important political events, each with an outcome that is unsatisfactory for the U.S. and its European sidekicks.
In Pakistan the Muttahida Qaumi Movement-Pakistan (MQM-P) party had left the government coalition. Additionally some members of prime minister Imran Khan's PTI party had change sides. The opposition in the parliament was preparing a no-confidence vote against him. At the same time a report by the Pakistani ambassador to the U.S. said that U.S. officials had warned that Pakistan would stay on their enemy list as long as Imran Khan was left in his position.
This was understood to be a call for regime change with rumored bribes pushing the swing votes against Khan.
Yesterday the deputy speaker of the parliament did not allow the no-confidence vote to take place. Imran Khan then asked the president of Pakistan to dissolve the parliament and announced new elections within 90 days.
The case is now in the hands of the supreme court of Pakistan which, after a session today, will continue to hear the case tomorrow.
It seems likely that the supreme court will make a 'wise' decision, blame everyone and agree to new elections.
It will then be the voters who will have to decide mainly on an issue of Pakistan's foreign policy. Should it be independent and friendly with China and Russia or should it change back to the U.S. side?
I haven't found any recent polls from Pakistan but a few days ago Khan's party had won the local elections in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The people may well be impressed with his position and give him their vote.
As usual in Pakistan the military, who's leadership tends to be pro-U.S., may intervene though I doubt that it will have sufficient public support for it.
In Hungary Prime Minister Viktor Orban has won his fourth election with his party again gaining a two-thirds majority. Hungary is in the EU and in NATO but Orban has his own ways and is friendly with Russia's president Vladimir Putin:
Cont. reading: Parliament Moves, Elections Let Empire Losses Accumulate
The Bucha Provocation
The Bucha 'Russian' atrocities propaganda onslaught may have worked well in the 'west' but it lacks evidence that Russia had anything to do with it.
The former Indian ambassador M.K. Bhadrakumar calls it an outright fake:
An indignant Moscow has angrily demanded a United Nations Security Council meeting on Monday over the allegations of atrocities by Russian troops in areas around Kiev through the past month. Prima facie, this allegation is fake news but it can mould misperceptions by the time it gets exposed as disinformation.
A Tass report says: “The Russian Defense Ministry said on Sunday that the Russian Armed Forces had left Bucha, located in the Kiev region, on March 30, while “the evidence of crimes” emerged only four days later, after Ukrainian Security Service officers had arrived in the town. The ministry stressed that on March 31, the town’s Mayor Anatoly Fedoruk had confirmed in a video address that there were no Russian troops in Bucha. However, he did not say a word about civilians shot dead on the street with their hands tied behind their backs.”
Even more surprising is that within minutes of the “breaking news”, western leaders — heads of state, foreign ministers, former politicians — popped up with statements duly kept ready and only based on the videos, seconds-long videos and a clutch of photos, ready to pour accusations. No expert opinion was sought, no forensic work was done, no opportunity given to the accused to be heard.
I had yesterday, at 15:09 UTC, posted a timeline of the events in Bucha on Twitter. Here is an expanded version.
Cont. reading: The Bucha Provocation
The MoA Week In Review – OT 2022-40
Last week's posts at Moon of Alabama:
Propaganda:
- Gonzalo Lira proves without doubt that four different Ukrainian propaganda clips with different actors were all filmed at the exact same location, a 'battlefield' with several long destroyed Ukrainian tanks –> Propaganda BTFO (video)
- Yesterday evening a Ukrainian station showed a video of Ukrainian troops driving through Bucha, north of Kiev, with several 'dead' people lying in the street allegedly 'killed by Russians'. There are two difficulties with these claims:
– One of the dead appears to move his arm: video
– Bucha was declared 'completely liberated' of Russian troops by its mayor on Thursday, March 31. Are we to believe it would take three days for such an 'incriminating' video to come out? Or that those 'dead' were lying there for three days with no one bothering?
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Other issues:
Cont. reading: The MoA Week In Review – OT 2022-40
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