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In Other News …. – politicalbetting.com
In Other News …. – politicalbetting.com
When the Stalinist horrors of Putin’s attempt to wipe out Ukraine fill our TV news every night, it is … well, if not a comfort exactly ….. at least wearily familiar to see some things never changing.
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An enormous wave of Covid is washing over them
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aimo_Koivunen
How on earth did you end up down that rabbit hole - finding him?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/30/piers-corbyn-fined-10000-for-organising-anti-lockdown-rally
Piers Corbyn has become one of the first people to receive a £10,000 fixed penalty under new coronavirus laws restricting public gatherings of more than 30 people.
Ins'allah!!
The details are glorious
"In the week Koivunen was gone, he subsisted only on pine buds and a single Siberian jay that he caught and ate raw. "
Jumped so well 🙏🏻 And stayed!
So that could absolutely be spun as "mission accomplished" in Moscow while actually being an improved guarantee for Ukraine.
I really hope this isn't just the Russians buying time.
Why do they not Cyclefree? I keep reading articles about the law not being followed.
A few years ago we had one of these Saharan plumes on the first day of a holiday in Naxos. Overnight so much red dust fell in the rain that the swimming pool that came with the house we were renting was unusable for the rest of the week.
He should have written a diet book. THE KOIVUNEN METHOD. Take an enormous amount of methamphetamine, get injured by land mine, set fire to enemy camp, lie is a ditch for a week. Lunch: one Siberian jay (uncooked)
He's 69, and he's totally fucked his country's economy, for absolutely no gain at all. There will be a reckoning. His many rich friends will not be happy holidaying in Pyongyang for the rest of time
These types of update are just no surprise anymore.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10463833/Scathing-report-finds-extensive-failures-way-child-exploitation-tackled.html
Edit: note also this would be Round III. Looks like the light infantry training provided between Rounds I and II was a success - will we provide wider training and equipment this time?
What happens instead is the following:
1. They pay out more of our money in compensation to those wronged.
2. They then whinge about not having enough resources
3. The senior persons in charge get promoted. Others may retire on full pensions. Juniors may be forced to go on a course.
4. Some poor junior person gets to rewrite a lot of HR policies. These are sent out with a covering email saying "We really mean it this time". No-one reads the email or any of the policies.
5. A woman police officer is sent out in public to do all the PR. When she resigns or retires a few years later she gives an interview saying how difficult and appalling it all was. She will occasionally get invited onto Newsnight or similar programmes to comment on the latest scandal. No-one with any power to make changes will pay the slightest bit of attention.
What ought to happen:
1. The persons responsible face serious disciplinary action and some of them get sacked.
2.The police start paying attention to what the law says.
Dream on .....
You'd have thought for his one meal he might have treated himself to at least a magpie, instead of stinting.
Some people...
@Ulianalive
Путин: «Российский народ всегда сможет отличить истинных патриотов от подонков и предателей и просто выплюнет их как случайно залетевшую мошку. Убежден, такое естественное самоочищение общества, только укрепит нашу страну».
Послание валить из страны всем несогласным с убийцей.
https://twitter.com/Ulianalive/status/1504103164424986624
Putin: “The Russian people will always be able to distinguish true patriots from scum and traitors and simply spit them out like a random midge. I am convinced that such a natural self-purification of society will only strengthen our country.”
Message to throw out of the country all those who disagree with the killer.
I also hope the peace deal puts no obligations on other countries to remove sanctions.
I have written about grooming gangs and child abuse in various headers.
Here, for instance: https://www2.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2021/07/29/two-lessons-learnt/.
Last July. Can't remember you commenting.
Or here - https://www7.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2020/01/17/a-toxic-culture/. January 2020.
Or here - http://www2.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2019/10/13/the-tyranny-of-low-expectations/. October 2019.
I don't despise middle class men. I do expect them, naive fool that I am, to try to behave like decent people, like gentlemen even. And when they - or any man, come to that - don't behave well, I call them out on it. As I do to women who behave badly. Like, for instance and on topic, Cressida Dick.
PS "my ilk". 😁 I'd love to know who they are.
The UK has a proud record of being one of the only (if not the only) major developed economies to have never defaulted on its debts. The UK, like the Lannisters, always pays her debts - and this was an acknowledged debt all along to Iran.
But Iran was under sanctions and has been the entire time that the Ayatollahs have been in charge. Sanctions are not a default, even if an acknowledged debt exists.
The UK currently and rightly has all sorts of Russian money under sanctions. That is debts that the UK and British people, businesses or banks owe to Russia or Russian people, businesses or banks that can't be repaid. That isn't a default on those debts, its sanctions.
So for all those saying "why not pay Iran sooner" - if Russia today takes some British citizens hostage, should we lift the sanctions we've imposed on Russia as a result? That's exactly what you're calling for with regards to Iran.
There are all sorts of reasons why lifting sanctions on Iran may be appropriate - if we have a new deal with them, or realpolitik as we deal with the greater evil in Russia and need Iranian oil, or many other reasons. But that they've taken hostages should never be a justification for sanction-breaking.
That would be huge, if true.
Of course, the Ukraine has still been bombed to high heaven, so it will be a "victory" that has cost it dear.
And while Russia will no doubt avoid paying for the damage it has caused, it will have successfully drawn the West closer together, reversed half a century of German pacificism, ensured that Europe buys a lot less Russian energy, and made it pretty clear that Russian equipment is inferior to US, British, French and Swedish kit.
In exchange for cooperating with Russia in this project, Dugin proposes that Germany be given back "Kaliningrad oblast' (Eastern Prussia)". As a result of a Grand Alliance between Russia and Germany, the two countries will divvy up the territories lying between them into de facto spheres of dominance. There is to be no "sanitary cordon."
"The task of Eurasia," Dugin emphasizes, "consists in making sure such a [sanitary] cordon does not exist". Russia and Germany together, he insists, "must decide all disputed questions together and in advance".
The integration of swaths of Western and Central European territory into a German sphere of dominance will be encouraged directly and abetted by Eurasia-Russia. The formation of a "FrancoGerman bloc" especially is to be supported. "In Germany and France,'" Dugin asserts, "there is a firm anti-Atlanticist tradition". Germany's influence likely will spread to the south--to Italy and Spain.
Only Britain, "an extraterritorial floating base of the U.S." is to be cut off and shunned.
John Dunlop on Dugin's Foundations Of Geopolitics
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/british-airways-scraps-facemasks-on-flights-cr93blmhr
"British airlines to drop mask mandates as U.K. lifts remaining travel restrictions
Passengers on some British Airways and Virgin Atlantic flights can remove their masks starting this week"
https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2022/03/14/british-airlines-lift-mask-mandate/
"Ukraine and Russia have made significant progress on a tentative 15-point peace plan including a ceasefire and Russian withdrawal if Kyiv declares neutrality and accepts limits on its armed forces, according to three people involved in the talks."
It is the "limits on its armed forces" that I would think would be the troubling bit - because that potentially opens the country up to being reinvaded in five years time.
The guarantors agree that an armed attack against Ukraine shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognized by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist Ukraine by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other guarantors, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of Ukraine.
And the guarantors are at a minimum UK, Poland, France and Germany.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-60763494
Shows courage, giving up a state guaranteed salary at a time of financial meltdown. Or an awareness which way the wind blows.
Does Putin survive?
I mean, sure, he'll spin this as a victory. But it will be obvious to all but the most deluded that he will have spent an awful lot of money and lives on achieving the enmity of most of the world. Russian firms will probably continue to be under sanctions for some time. And Europe will continue to pivot away from Russian energy.
Plus, of course, all but the most loony of his foreign "useful idiots" will have deserted him.
I guess there are no obvious successors to him, and he runs a fairly vicious police state, so maybe he can continue. But he will have been dramatically weakened.
The efficacy of these weapons and others must have spread around the Russian troops
Mykhailo Podolyak, a senior adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, told the Financial Times that any deal would involve “the troops of the Russian Federation in any case leaving the territory of Ukraine” captured since the invasion began on February 24 — namely southern regions along the Azov and Black Seas, as well as territory to the east and north of Kyiv.
Ukraine would maintain its armed forces but would be obliged to stay outside military alliances such as Nato and refrain from hosting foreign military bases on its territory.
Net overall disaster for Putin.
It comes across as passive aggressive, malicious compliance. With a very unattractive topping of completely irrelevent and insulting "victimhood".
In fact it seems to be a deep rooted way of thinking. I remember being told by a moderately senior policeman that they *had* to use the Prevention of Terrorism act to detain young black men. Because it was there.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.rawstory.com/amp/ukraine-rejects-russian-neutrality-idea-as-us-steps-up-aid-2656968579
Suggests Russia accepts Ukraine can be an EU member.
That said, Napoleon invading Russia is similar. That certainly captures the scale of this disaster. Up there with the Grande Armee advancing and then retreating from Moscow
Of course, that is the case ONLY IF the war ends now on the terms we can glimpse. I do not wish to Tempt Fate
This whole adventure has been a disaster for Ukraine and Russia. Except Russia chose it. It is their fault.
I hope Putin goes to hell and rots there.
From the details leaked to the FT, EU membership appears to still be on the table. Whether the EU will want to accept - with the consequent massive financial obligations - Ukraine as a member is another question altogether.
I would hope that the West (and this would be a great opportunity for the EU to lead) will help with the rebuilding of the Ukraine. And I would expect that - absent regime change in Moscow - we will demand help from Russia in paying for it.
NY Times blog
He'll be blaming jewish celebrities next.
Even if the Germans demand it is re-instated (and they may well not), why would the US unwind the sanctions that make it impossible?
I think it was on the order of decade for some of the Eastern countries?
And the cash needed for compensation is mainly Russian Govt reserves frozen in Western and other banks. Plus perhaps ill-gotten gains of Putin-cronies could be confiscated.
It would not surprise me if there were already some lawyers working on keeping those frozen assets, frozen.
In all three cases, nemesis took years rather than months to show up.
https://twitter.com/BillNeelyReport/status/1504115600754360322
I guess Putin has to show gains for a deal to be possible. The key thing is that what it's cost him should be greater than those gains. Then it's a loss. Aggression has not paid.
The other big issue that Russia has got here is time. Economically, the longer this goes on, the more drain on their economy. Militarily, Ukraine will also get “stronger” as it receives more equipment and recent recruits are more trained and / or foreign recruits start to be deployed.
If Lavrov is talking about Sweden and Austria as models, the Russians have clearly seen the signs on the wall.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10618473/Russias-Lavrov-says-neutrality-Ukraine-seriously-discussed.html
It's hard to see how either side could really agree on the neutrality point. For Russia it's the whole point but for Ukraine its giving up on a path they want to take.
@MoonRabbit you’re a genius
Putin aint getting anywhere near kyiv at this rate.
That's going to be a tough sell in the West. Our sanctions are clearly working. Do we just drop them all because Russia makes a vague promise?
It would have to be a negotiated process, done step by step