From the BOE REPORT
Some very big and important things are happening in the world, and it seems that we’re not paying attention at all. We are becoming so fixated on the simple, the sensational, that we’re not noticing the storm clouds.
Now, to be clear, the ballistic winging of a high-level American politician is most deserving of our attention, particularly when the circumstances and outcome are frankly not just nearly apocalyptic but bizarre. The circumstances are so strange and run counter to our expectations that have been baked in from viewing a thousand shows of that very theme (Half the audience watched the shooter wandering around, ratting him out to the cops, who did nothing? Secret Service left the roof unguarded because it’s nearly flat structure was too dangerous for SWAT teams? Huh? And on and on.).
We are no longer in the age of the Zapruder Film, where a singular grainy video captured all we know about the Kennedy assassination. Trump’s shooting was so well documented from every angle that we have acoustic engineers taking to social media with impressively detailed analyses of where shots came from, and equally impressive counter arguments based on some other esoteric analysis of another aspect. Thus, we analyze all.
Sunlight is indeed the best disinfectant, so all these viewpoints are of value and will hinder any miscreants from hiding anything. And yet I can’t help but marvel at the tectonic shifts happening in the world, almost unnoticed in the west, or ignored in the west, that are rearranging the global geopolitical landscape in significant ways, for decades to come, and it’s like we’re not even paying attention.
The biggest, quietest movement must the the rise of BRICS, the affiliation of nine countries that have formed an alliance to ‘counter western influence’ and work to chart a new direction. The founding countries – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – were joined by new members at the beginning of the year, including Egypt, Ethiopia, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia (who has been coy about explicitly affirming membership but is considered member last I checked). These countries are not a chain of unpopulated tropical islands; they have a combined population of about 3.5 billion people and annual GDP of over $28 trillion.
The BRICS group is growing quickly; earlier this year, it was reported that an additional 34 countries have expressed an interest in joining, with many applications from Africa, South America and Asia. It would not be hard to envision Russian satellite countries looking that way as well.
What makes the rise of this group so significant is that the west has charged down an economic/socioeconomic path that is reliant on at least some BRICS members/applicants (Saudi Arabia, various African countries with critical minerals, and above all China who controls the world’s metals processing capability to an alarming degree). The west is envisioning an energy transition in the next few decades that will be, to put it mildly, heavily dependent on this group’s output and capabilities.
There are two big problems arising here. One is exemplified by Europe, which is successfully reducing emissions in large part by de-industrializing and offshoring anything dirty to the developing world (then getting upset about their emissions).
The other is the fact that the west gets apoplectic at the sight of this group frolicking in the sun without putting the west’s wishes first. For example, the west has heavily (and imo justifiably) sanctioned Russia over the attack on Ukraine, in an attempt to cripple Russia’s economy. Sanctions include a price cap on Russian oil, a tactic that was roundly mocked as having no hope of being effective by seasoned oil market analysts, but nevertheless, a sanction meant to show that the world was serious and united.
But then a few weeks ago, India’s Prime Minister Modi paid a visit to the demon himself, Vladimir Putin, on Russian soil, and was greeted with a big hug (the hug was reciprocated; the humiliation for Putin otherwise would have been unbearable). “Why is Modi sucking up to Putin? It’s simple and cynical: China and Oil” snorted the UK’s Guardian through socialist and imperialist nostrils. The Guardian article is snide, provincial, and reeks of the arrogance of the once-relevant that won’t recognize the ‘once-‘ : “Modi knows well how to opportunistically turn someone else’s war to his advantage.” (Such pompous piffle isn’t unique; in 2023, the Economist’s editor-in-chief Manny Zinton Beddoes introduced an Economist article that explained “why the Middle East still matters to the world.” Note the complex arrogance embedded in that comment, that it is or has been a reasonable question as to whether the Middle East matters, and that you, as a dimwitted reader, will need some pedigreed ponce to explain to you the ‘why’. Go back to the 19th century.)
But anyway, step back and consider what the west is focused on, versus what the rest of the world is focused on. We follow the minutiae of sheer crap like Taylor Swift’s love life or George Clooney’s open letter about old man Biden like it is worthy of something; BRICS countries are quietly rearranging the furniture and changing the locks on the doors. We demand the world switch to ‘green initiatives’ like EVs, then slam the doors on Chinese EVs that would make them affordable to North Americans and hasten a transition.
I’m not sweeping under the rug any of Putin’s considerable transgressions, or commenting at all on China’s strategic moves that may not align with Western ideals. They do what they do internally, and we can’t do anything about that. The point is that all of this is going on and we pretend it isn’t, because we don’t like the players or the game.
Nowhere is this more evident than with respect to energy. Five years ago, we in the hydrocarbon sector had to listen to ignorant grandstanding blowhards explain, without a shred of energy knowledge, that hydrocarbons were so last-century, that there was no need or role for natural gas in an energy transition, that oil demand peaked in 2019 and would never recover. Every one of these dumbass claims lies trampled in the dust, and there has been not an iota of soul-searching or admission of error or recalibration; all we see is a doubling down on the same dumb thinking that went into the first cocktail of wild-eyed projections (go figure; the zealots strong-armed the International Energy Agency into an energy-transition propaganda powerhouse, forcing them to behave as some sort of macro support dog as their leg of ‘science’. It’s no wonder they have not much to say when the results are so hopelessly far off the mark from what they were wishing for.)
Related to energy is the auto industry, where calamity now reigns supreme. Western automakers were ensured that consumers were going to switch en masse to EVs – not hybrids, but EVs – because governments were going to make them. Many countries including Canada have legislated internal combustion engines out of existence past dates in the mid 2030s. So all you SUV-spewing auto companies, get on with the transition. 29dk2902lhttps://boereport.com/29dk2902l.html
Fine, they all said, and set about building EV manufacturing facilities and battery plants. Five billion here, ten billion there, and they’re off and running, ready for governmental zero-emissions mandates. Then, a scant few years into the forced migration, a few unforeseen developments arose (not really unforeseen, more like ‘wished away’, they should have been obvious…). Consumers became lukewarm on the whole EV idea, and have decided hybrids are what they really want. Now, big players like Ford are scrambling to get more hybrids to market (wise ones like Toyota never bought into the whole idea in the first place, and now have a hybrid version of every vehicle).
On the EV front, imagine that, China took their battery and metals processing dominance, their growing engineering prowess, and all the tricks they’ve learned from forced JVs with western companies and began a global flood of reasonably priced and well-built EVs. (China, in 2018, net imported $30 billion worth of autos. In 2023, they net exported $80 billion, and climbing rapidly. Some turnaround.) Now the west is panicking because of what those machines could do to home market manufacturers, and they’re caught between a rock and a hard place: consumers are reluctant to switch to EVs in large part because of cost, and while Chinese firms have solved the cost problem, western governments can’t allow them to decimate native industries, and are thus excluding Chinese EVs from their markets via huge tariffs. China is undeterred, and, coming back full circle to the BRICS story, is developing vast markets for their products in developing countries.
The 3.5 billion BRICS people, plus a few billion more around the edges, are finding their feet, their strength, and their voice, and saying either overtly or via trade deals that “We think we can get along on our own, thanks anyway.”
This reworking of the global order should be front page news, as it is going to be rather cataclysmic for the golden billion. Haha. Get real. Good luck for that story to fight its way in front of the dancing bears. Another example: As mentioned, about ten days ago, Donald Trump came within an inch or two of being murdered live on national media. Kind of a big deal. And yet that story has been pushed from the front pages by what should be the most obvious and anticlimactic story imaginable, that an 81-year old with severely diminishing mental capacity stepped down from the most powerful seat in the world. Gee, who saw that coming.
And next week will be an damning/hilarious/embarrassing/brilliant (ok scratch brilliant)/ridiculous video clip of Kamala or Donald or some grandstanding political boob, and we’ll watch it 50 million times and argue about it like our lives depend on it, and in the background China will quietly sign billions of dollars of development deals with developing countries; Russia, Iran, India and many others will continue strengthening cooperative channels that the west pretends doesn’t exist (we do see it: “Growing Cooperation Between Russia and China in Arctic, Pentagon Says” reports Reuters, and that the US, Canada, and Norway hope to sign a deal by year end to begin the process of building new icebreakers at some time in the next decade or two, at the regulatory speed these things work), and the frog will find at some point that the water is too hot to leap out of. And the North Korean flat top is going to be next year’s Gangnam Style must see. That we’d watch.
What the world desperately needs – energy clarity. And a few laughs. Pick up The End of Fossil Fuel Insanity, available at Amazon.ca, Indigo.ca, or Amazon.com.
Read more insightful analysis from Terry Etam here, or email Terry here.
And his last bout of covid made Joe grow in height by at least 4 inches.
Huh?
It’s psyops/scams everywhere.
There are storm clouds, but I don’t think they are as dark or scary as portrayed in this post.
The BRICS will not be able to displace the dollar as the international currency of choice, despite trying. China is too shaky financially, India is too weak industrially, Russia is too small economically. Rest are rounding error.
The BRICS are as a group not self sufficient in key industries like semiconductors and food. Means they cannot ever exert ‘control’ over the west.
The western climate scam is slowly imploding from inherent internal contradictions. That will relatively disadvantage BRICS future. UK Labour and Miliband will likely hasten this implosion.
The western MSM ‘video games’ are being exposed by Trump. Most recently like this week), Dems tried to claim Kamala Harris was not proclaimed border ‘tzar’. But we have 2021 video of Biden saying she was, and Harris accepting the job, both in the Oval Office. Quibbles over ‘tzar’ meaning do not change the indelible fact that she has failed miserably.
China’s huge real estate bubble, despite the CCP’s intensive efforts to prop it up, is popping in slow motion. Foreign investment is way down, and the Belt&Road imperialism scheme is largely a bust. And a demographic time bomb 70 years in the making is ticking ever louder as the chickens of One Child come home to roost.
All the recent saber-rattling over Taiwan and the Phillipines, and the political brinkmanship toward the west in general, is a facade to distract from China’s trouble at home.
Trump himself was one of the biggest employers of illegal immigrants outside the farm sectors at his hotels, golf courses and hotel restaurants. They were cheap, worked hard and couldn’t complain or unionize.
Proof?
WRONG. All the people he employed had Green cards… were not illegal.
You are being LIED TO by the far-left media, yet again
In believing them, you mark yourself as being are as stupid as Luser.
This is just a debunked claim by the Clinton campaign during Trump’s first run. Just like the Russia hoax, it was totally made up and only gained traction by the MSM pushing it hard.
Accurate assessment Rud. “There are storm clouds, but I don’t think they are as dark or scary as portrayed in this post.” Fact is, if America fails the whole world fails and I’m not talking as a flag waving American. The USA has held the position of reserve currency longer than any nation for reasons and they’re not going away soon, although some are trying to make it happen.
I think Rome held it for longer. Probably the British next.
China’s debt issue does provide some hope that if we wake up from being woke in the next few years we can extend our dollar as the world currency for a few more years.
Even if BRICS did take off and become a major power…
… it would be far less destructive to Western Society than things like Net-Zero and the Green stupid Deal
If Trump gets elected, he will get the U.S. back on the right track, which also means he will reign in our enemies, starting with the Mad Mullahs of Iran. No more money for you!
China, no more Iranian oil for you, if you want to do business with the U.S.
I agree with you, the storm clouds are not as scary as portrayed. However, I don’t believe BRICS want’s to replace the US Dollar as the reserve currency. Talk until up to now, and being practised in some countries already, is cross border trading in local currencies.
I’m not inclined to believe China is any more financially shaky than America is, saddled as it is with $35Tn debt. And China has the industrial means to address the issue. Where is America’s industry? Indeed where is the west’s industry? It’s in China.
Taiwan is amongst the largest, if not the largest semi conductor manufacturer in the world. It also happens to have been part of China since 1943 when the Brits and Americans handed it over when the Chinese helped kick the Japanese off the island.
Russia has a vast capacity for food production and I understand deals are/will be agreed between them and China.
I’m not sure why BRICS would be disadvantaged by the inevitable collapse of the climate scam in the west. They follow international politics as well as anyone and understand what’s going on in the UK and understand we are chucking good money after bad.
My hope is Trump is elected, he deals with the UK and Europe by telling us there will be no US assistance for anything until we drop the climate scam and get back to work. I suspect the first call he makes on day one will be to Putin and Xi to diffuse the tensions, wrap the Ukraine issue up and begin rebuilding some trust so favourable trade conditions can be established.
Maybe, maybe not. The western/european bloc is in a race to catastrophe with BRICS. Question is, will it be economical or military. When the USA’s markers are called, and rates continue to exert tremendous pressure on the pressure cooker that the (((fed))) is responsible for and sitting on, interest payments on the $35T will not just be unsustainable, they will trigger a reaction that is as yet unforeseen.
In the meantime oligarchs, bigtime grifters and the largely immoral politicians across the earth will continue to fight, lie, scrabble and steal every last dime, ruble, sheckel and yen. The climate hoax is just one of the grifts, plus it provides a great amount of fear porn for the masses.
Don’t believe it? Watch in the USA as absolutely nothing will happen to the ACTBLUE campaign finance fiasco/grift. It has been fully exposed, yet nothing will happen.
Spengler would be like leonardo decaprio in that meme pointing at the TV set with the title ‘seeing western civilization burn down, just like you called it 100 years ago’
I would like you to be right, Rud, but all the 4thC media reports said that the Goths, Vandals, etc, were too weak to successfully challenge Rome. What they didn’t realise was that Rome was sowing the seefs of its own destruction – it didn’t matter who delivered the coup de grace, events inside Rome guaranteed there would be one. The USA and the western world are in the same state now that Rome was in then.
The US has three major problems that NEITHER of the presidential campaigns are addressing – 1. interest on the debt, 2. Medicare insolvency, and 3. Social Security insolvency.
These three are going to eat up our entire budget in the coming years. No more being the worlds arms dealer, the world’s policeman, and the worlds financial backstop. We are going to impoverish ourselves paying for this. Add to this costs and the job losses in the health care industry from Medicare for all, the job losses and energy costs from no more fracking, the job losses and costs from the Green New Deal and we are headed to a Great Depression type of catastrophe.
Add nuclear energy development to the list. The US is pretending to build advanced reactors like the one in Wyoming that has never been tested at pilot or demonstration scales.
China is building the third generation of their molten salt reactor and will start construction on the first full size reactor in 2030, shortly after the third generation plant enters service. https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3271978/china-sets-launch-date-worlds-first-thorium-molten-salt-nuclear-power-station
China is quietly building more nuclear power stations than the western world combined.
As they commission them they will decommission coal fired plants and wind up with cheap, reliable, clean electricity whilst we’re still fumbling around with renewables they are manufacturing for us.
We can hardly blame the Chinese for lifting 900m people from extreme poverty in 30 years. A feat never achieved in history by any nation.
Meanwhile, it appears western governments are attempting to reverse the process in the west.
About that low-slope roof “safety issue” –
I understand it was standard 3-degree gradient.
Yet the standard 4.8 degree slope gradients for elderly / disabled access ramps at the front of public buildings such as libraries don’t pose a “safety issue” for those users?
What’s up with that?
She was talking out her hat without thinking. But likely the Secret Service reviewed that roof and decided it wasn’t scaleable (the would-be assassin brought his own ladder) and supposedly nobody was allowed up there. And it had been determined to be a local police control area, and they thought they had total view of what was supposed to be an un-occupied roof from at least 2 other anti-sniper locations. I can see a “who is that guy up on that roof” communication situation delaying decisions. You can’t go around shooting somebody that might just be the rooftop air-conditioning repair man. How somebody got a ladder and an AR through the gate and crowd security is certainly strange.
Crooks did not use a ladder.
People on the ground saw him crawling on the roof and saw him prone with a rifle at least three minutes before he shot Trump. A local traffic cop trying to get boosted to the roof may have rushed the shooter and saved Trump’s life.
The roof *should* have been occupied by someone. The Secret Service *should* have verified this before allowing Trump on stage. This should have been in the operational plan from the word go.
There was a hired sharpshooter assigned to that roof. A local (PA) person not a SS employee. Either he did not show up or decided to stay inside the building because it was too hot on the roof. The story is changing. There were three local (PA) hired snipers inside the building but none outside or on the roof. Trump says he is going back to Butler to finish the rally.
“The story is changing.”
The way I heard it is there was a local sniper team assigned to that building. They were inside the part of the building that was elevated over the section of the building where the shooter fired off his shots. The snipers could look out the window and had a full view of the roof the shooter got on.
It was said that at one time the local police were looking around the grounds for the shooter and they told these two snipers to come outside and assist them in hunting for the suspect. They did go outside, and apparently, about this same time, the shooter climbed up a vertical pipe alongside the building and got on the roof unobserved. Or maybe not. It is also reported that these same two snipers were the two who looked up over the edge of the roof and spotted the shooter, who pointed his rifle at the one cop, and the cop dropped out of sight to protect himself. And apparently, the shooter started shooting right after this took place, so the cops had no chance to stop him from there.
So if this is true, then had the snipers stayed put, they would have been sitting there when the shooter climbed up on the roof and would have stopped him there.
The shooter reportedly had 50 bullets with him. He fired eight bullets and then the Secret Service Sniper nailed him. The shooter had 42 bullets left to shoot. That sniper saved a whole lot of people a whole lot of trouble.
Btw, Trump says he is going back to Butler, PA to hold a rally for the man who was killed (Cory), and the two wounded men.
Trump started a “Go-Fund Me” account for them right after the attack happened that has raised millions of dollars.
There is more than one eyewitness who claims the shooter NEVER turned around and aimed his rifle at a cop trying to get on the roof. They claim the cop climbing on the roof story is false. We do not know his name and I have not seen him interviewed.
Twenty minutes passed between the time USSS snipers first spotted Crooks on the roof and the time shots were fired at the former president
We will never get the true story.
Hilarious and accurate geopolitical snark but you left out two salient energy points: those Russian icebreakers are nuclear powered. the US should have done that but the Navy would not stand for the Coast Guard operating any reactors. As for the Kamala CZAR remarks: here is al link to past Energy CZAR Kerry on Utube actually stumbling on some truth about the West/O/ECD contribution to solving global warming. https://youtu.be/aAtiygrbTSq
Dismiss Putin as some sort of slavering, vicious dictator hell bent on seizing land Russia neither needs nor want’s, at your peril.
Remember, it was Russia that negotiated with Ukraine and reached a draft peace agreement in April 2022, just over a month after had conducted a legal (according to the UN) Special Military Operation (SMO) across the border into Ukraine.
That treaty agreed that Russia would withdraw entirely from the regions occupied during the SMO in return for some promises, amongst them being that Ukraine would become neutral and never join NATO and that the rights of ethnic Russians would be respected.
Joe Biden dispatched Boris Johnson tout de suite (toot sweet) to order Zelenskyy to tear the agreement up and instead fight. Two and a half years later Russia is now gobbling up towns and villages on the way to securing the borders of Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia.
Russia now has no choice. It must, by it’s own laws, secure these regions as the citizens voted in a referendum that they wanted to rejoin Russia. Nor is there any point in dismissing this as done at the barrel of a gun, the referendum was internationally observed and we note there is no screeching of electoral corruption in western media which has been rabidly pro Ukrainian since the conflict began.
We have been saddled with Joe Biden who has been living out his Cold War fantasies of confronting and crushing Russia for the last three and a half years. British politicians are even worse. There seems to be some sort of irrational hatred of Russia passed down, generation to generation, for the last 200 years at least. Presumably because it was a giant piece of the imperialist jigsaw it failed to fully conquer.
My point being, the west has done this to itself. We have driven Russia and China closer together over the Ukraine conflict, indeed, our shoddy treatment of Russia since 1991 when it dropped communism and came in from the cold to a democratic, capitalist world. Mind you, it’s far from perfect, but so far it’s had 33 years to perfect a political, social and economic system the UK and the US is still screwing up since King John agreed the Magna Carta in 1215.
And militarily, Russia has involved itself with conflicts directly on its borders or, where it’s been invited to assist by legitimate government states. The African states of Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger spring immediately to mind where the French colonised for hundreds of years. Syria is another case, indeed whilst Russia is there by invitation the US has several illegal military bases there.
Talking of military bases, the US/NATO has around 700+ of those scattered around the world, I can find only 14 belonging to Russia and none of consequence belonging to China. Oh! Taiwan has belonged to China since the allies ‘awarded’ it in 1943 when China helped the allies kick the Japanese off the island. It was included in the Potsdam agreement in 1945. I mean, what the hell did Europeans and Americans want with an island of Sampans and rice?
The last time Britain had to fight an occupying force encroaching on it’s border was against the French in the First Barons’ War of 1215, funnily enough the year the Magna Carta was agreed. And I think The defence of the Alamo was the last time America had to do it.
So is China and Russia going to march masses armies across the Steppes of Russia to occupy Europe?
Lets put it this way, at the current rate of progress against a determined Ukrainian military, Russia has seized a few miles of Ukrainian territory since the initial SMO. For arguments sake, say an average of two miles across the entire battlefront. In which case it’s going to take them 1,400 years to fight the 1,400 miles to the English channel. But as soon as they set foot onto NATO territory beyond Ukraine, it might just take a little longer.
Russia and China don’t want a punch up with the west. They have done extraordinarily well by avoiding one over the last 30+ years. We are routinely assured by western media that China’s broke, but we know western media routinely lies. What they also fail to tell us is that Russia’s debt to GDP is around 0.5%.
Whilst we have been spunking money on wars, DEI, LGBTQ, BLM, and climate change, those guys have been taking care of business. They are nation states. They don’t tolerate unrestricted immigration. And that’s why our Globalist neocons in NATO, the UN, the WEF and our own governments are scared of them. They are about to be exposed to their own people as the charlatans they have been for hundreds of years now in the biggest possible way.
But what we must also bear in mind is that we are China’s biggest customer. They want us fat and wealthy to consume the goods they produce. If they kill us militarily or economically, China (and possibly Russia) starves.
Quite an unusual perspective on a naked power and land grab by Russia
Predictable response, sadly. Think about the issue. The NATO provisioned and trained Kiev military regime was attacking the eastern regions of its own country for 8 years, since the Maidan coup in 2014.
The eastern regions are for the most part ethnically Russian, because the region used to be Russian. Kiev banned the Russian language across Ukraine and amongst other things, shut down orthodox Russian churches following 2014.
Nor is it a “perspective”. Most of my post is verifiable fact. You are welcome to refute it with facts you can find on the subject. You might also want to ask yourself what the largest country in the world, almost double the size of the USA and 28 times the size of all of Ukraine, wants with a few miles of territory in Ukraine. The regions occupied by Russia are around 20% of Ukraine.
You can get a better understanding of chronological events by reading one of many articles on the subject by Professor Michel Chossudovsky “an award-winning author, Professor of Economics (emeritus) at the University of Ottawa, Founder and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), Montreal, Editor of Global Research. He has taught as visiting professor in Western Europe, Southeast Asia, the Pacific and Latin America. He has served as economic adviser to governments of developing countries and has acted as a consultant for several international organizations. He is the author of 13 books. He is a contributor to the Encyclopaedia Britannica. His writings have been published in more than twenty languages. In 2014, he was awarded the Gold Medal for Merit of the Republic of Serbia for his writings on NATO’s war of aggression against Yugoslavia.”
https://www.globalresearch.ca/bombshell-nato-says-war-started-in-2014-nato-war-against-russia-fake-pretext-to-invoke-article-5-of-atlantic-treaty/5828312?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Thank you for your reply. Filled with rational thought rather than invective. I will mull it over.
The occupation of the lands of the Ukraine as defined by the 1991 borders down the centuries has varied as assorted invaders have swept through various parts. Tatars, Turks, Cossacks, Polovtsians (them of the Prince Igor dances), Vikings, Swedes, Poles/Lithuanians, Austrians and Hungarians, Mongols, Gytha the daughter of King Harold (one in the eye there). By the same token there have also been great expulsions down the centuries. The structure of the 1991 geography was much affected by the period of Soviet occupation and the aftermath of the Kholodomor and WW II. Vast numbers of Ukrainians (especially those with Jewish connections) were sent to Siberia.
It is not an unusual perspective. Hotscot has brilliantly set out what millions of people outside the US think aboiut the Ukraine issue. We have read , from non Russian sources, that the Minsk II agreement in 2014 , that supposedly gave some degree of autonomy to ethnic Russians in Donbas and Lugansk was in fact a scam .German and french politicians have confirmed that . It was intended by the west and by Ukraine to give Ukraine a breathing space to build up its forces . Meanwhile shelling of Donbass villages and towns led to 10000 civilian deaths before Putin finally snapped and launched the SMO. Even then he was prepared to call a ceasefire and return to the previous agreement , but this time with guarantees. That was not good enough for the West . American senators have expressed, indeed gloated about, the ultimate dream of annexing all the huge , not fully exploited, natural resources in the immense landmass of the Russian Federation.
I only wish I could have been as concise as you.
Yes, the truth has become unusual partly due to the addiction to simplistic narratives relied upon by the hegemon and its NATO fringe and endlessly supplied by the complicit media.
You really are a Russian bot aren’t you.
And you sir, are a poo-bum.
OK you win….
And you will always be a loser.
Bring some facts to a debate. Cheap shots don’t cut it. They make you look like the idiot you really are.
OK here is a fact. Do you think the Ukrainians would be fighting like they are, with every fibre of their being, if on any level they wanted to be part of Russia? If they, like you say, voted to join Russia they would be rolling over. But they are not. They have put up a gallant fight against an invading army many times their size. And what on earth makes you think an illegal vote held by the invading forces would be anything but corrupt. Putin is a proven tyrant who murders his political opponents and corrupts anything he touches. There is no way this invasion is anything but immoral.
Not a single fact in your whole post, just opinionated gibberish..
As to be expected.
There is no way the simpleton is anything but immoral and incredibly stupid.
Probably support Hamas as well.
Eastern Ukraine is already part of Russia. The rest of Ukraine is not part of Russia and NEVER was going to be a part of Russia. That is western propaganda to demonize Russia and promote never ending war.
It would have been far easier for Russia to take over all of Ukraine than to take over the eastern 20% of the nation.
When you begin your facts with “Do you think” it’s clear you don’t understand what a fact is.
It wasn’t ‘Ukraine’ that voted to rejoin Russia, it was the semi autonomous and formerly Russian regions of Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia which the Kiev government had been bombing since 2014.
I made that pretty clear in my original post I think.
Predictably, a, you imagine the referendum the people of Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia held was corrupt, yet as I stated it was conducted under international observation and there has been no wailing from the western MSM about corrupt elections.
Like I said, you need to provide factual evidence of your claims, particularly those of Putin murdering his political opponents. I might say the same thing about 57 close associates of the Clinton’s having been suicided, with over 100 not so close associated doing the same, but it appears there is no evidence to convict them.
Meanwhile, Putin corrupts so much that he touches, 140m Russians who are entirely free to leave the country, choose to remain there. Indeed, he’s so corrupt, 85% of those people chose to re-elect him recently, entirely consistent with historic, independent, western polling.
And the CIA and MI6 continue with their political exterminations which are never reported in the western MSM because it’s controlled media.
I’m going to call complete unprovable garbage on a lot of this. But I’ll humour you.
Who are these 57 Clinton suicides. What evidence do you have?And here is the real story of your voting. No support at all from international observers. Complete farce on numerous levels. Many voted at gunpoint. Many were already living in Russia when they voted. And think about it, why would an invader get to hold a referendum. It’s not their country. Makes no sense. Fail. https://www.npr.org/2022/09/27/1125322026/russia-ukraine-referendums#:~:text=The%20official%20outcome%20of%20that,vote%2C%20Moscow%20quickly%20annexed%20Crimea.“And the CIA and MI6 continue with their political exterminations which are never reported in the western MSM because it’s controlled media.” Please supply a reference for this?Like I said you are a Russian Bot and you just proved it. You make about as much sense as Tucker Carlson and his “they have shopping trolleys” propaganda.
Another post using ultra-leftist propaganda pap.
Biden said it was a scam… yet won’t admit his own election was a massive scam
You have ZERO CREDIBILITY !
Nice attempt at a diversion into the Clinton mess.
Clearly you don’t understand the concept of “semi autonomous” regions.
The fact that the Kiev regime attacked those regions for 8 years, killing thousands of people following the Maidan coup, is convincing evidence that they didn’t like the people of Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia, don’t you think?
The regions were awarded self governance under the Minsk agreements, but that was never respected by the Kiev regime.
The link you post is to NPR. It has about as much credibility as CNN.
Details of assassinations by the US are easy to find, even Wikipedia publishes them. You could have looked yourself before appearing as stupid as you clearly are:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assassinations_by_the_United_States
As for observers, here they are:
What you have written here is as void of substance and truth as a Trump speech.
Nothing on the Clintons. The people the US are meant to have assassinated are all terrorists so good job and your observers are a list of observers. Nothing on what they have found….. Which was that the referendum was a sham. You are a Russian Bot nothing more.
I see, so the Minsk agreements are a pack of lies, the list of people murdered by America is a pack of lies, and the international observers to the referendum are a pack of lies.
I stated:
“And the CIA and MI6 continue with their political exterminations”.
Murdering terrorists is political extermination.
What the international observers in Ukraine didn’t report is people being forced to vote, even at gunpoint.
You haven’t even the dignity to admit you’re wrong when confronted with facts. You’re either sick in the head or you’re paid to contaminate this, and probably other blogs, with your crap.
“ Many voted at gunpoint.”
WRONG…as always…
Many voted in secure locations is what you meant to say… right !
The simpleton is far less than a bot… more like a snot.
So you are a Russian Bot too. OK that makes sense now.
The simpleton yaps again.. what a sad little cretin. !
Chuckle. Enter the simplistic bumper sticker response. HotScot is not the bot. He is dead on.
So you think the referendum in Ukraine was legitimate? An invader gets to decide who keeps the country? Really? Another bot I’d say.
You continue to be a complete far-left moron.
You have absolutely zero understanding of anything to do with Ukraine.
Everything HotScot has said is totally correct.
You don’t even have the intelligence of a bot… just a yapping always-ignorant fool.
There have been quite a few elections in the Ukraine since 1991. All of them display a very similar pattern. Here’s one from 2004, a decade before the 2014 agreement. The artificial construct was the Ukrainian SSR, complete with its donation of Crimea by Khruschev in 1954.
“Russia and China don’t want a punch up with the west.”
I’ll agree with you there. It serves noone’s interests.
Joe Biden’s weakness has emboldened our enemies, but not enougth for them to go to a world war, or a large regional war.
And in six months, the landscape may look very different. U.S. weakness will be sitting in Deleware and California. U.S. strength will be in the White House and it will be a new ballgame. Russia and China and North Korea will get friendlier, and the Mad Mullahs will be put in check, which will help in the Ukraine war as Mad Mullah munitions diminishes over time. Maybe Trump can talk Kim to stop selling artillery shells to Russia. Maybe Trump will offer him a deal he can’t refuse.
Maybe if we elect Trump, our enemies may think to themselves that those Americans are not as stupid as we thought they were. Maybe they aren’t the pushovers that Joe Biden makes them seem to be.
It’s yet another western MSM delusion/propaganda that Russia is buying artillery shells from N. Korea. There is absolutely no evidence that’s happening. Remember who controls our western media, western governments, and that’s where these reports spill from.
As long in the tooth climate sceptics we should know by now to approach any MSM claim as a lie, and work from there.
Hopefully the landscape will look different in 6 months. Both Trump and Vance are anti-war and, hopefully, anti deep state. Assuming they settle both Ukraine and Gaza, don’t escalate tensions in Taiwan, and begin dismantling some of the US/NATO military bases around the world, we can at least hope for a lasting peace between superpowers.
Nor do I understand where this concept of China and Russia being our enemies comes from, other than the cold war obsessives like Biden, Pelosi, Schumer and Graham. And we know of the Biden Mafia’s activities in Ukraine. How convenient is it that all evidence of their activities is now either bombed or dead.
When in modern history, has either country mounted a military conflict on any western nation? As I said, the only military activities Russia and China undertake are to protect their borders, or by invitation from a legitimate government.
Most of Russia’s conflicts in recent years have been against the Islamic state that the US/NATO largely created. We armed the Mujahideen against the USSR in Afghanistan. They turned those weapons against the US after 9/11 as the Taliban. Al-Qaeda was a US funded organisation before it was demonised (the nephew of Bin Ladin was a F1 prospect) and ISIS was created with US funding to attack Bashar al-Assad in Syria.
“Maybe if we elect Trump, our enemies may think to themselves that those Americans are not as stupid as we thought they were. “
Consider stopping making enemies. It may be more productive for all in the long run.
HotScot has studied the subject and knows what he is talking about. I could only add death figures and estimates:
2014 to 2022
11,000 eastern Ukrainians killed by Ukraine military in a geno cide
2022 through 20124
Up to 500,000 Ukrainians killed
100,000 to 200,0009 Russians killed
Wounded would be double to triple those death estimates.
The US, UK and EU have done everything possible to keep this proxy war going. It could have been ended in mid-2022. Russia HAS WON BY SEIZING THE EASTERNN TERRITORIES AND STOPPING THE GENO CIDE. But the costs were far higher than expected based on the Russia takeover of Crimea … after a new anti-Russian Ukraine President announced he was throwing out the Russian naval base that had existed in Crimea since the 1700s.
Common sense now says the war has three losers: Ukraine, Russia and the US.
A good US leader would have stopped the slaughter. Biden promotes the slaughter.
“Common sense now says the war has three losers: Ukraine, Russia and the US.”
Russia nd Ukraine are both losers, no argument.
US, however, is the primary beneficiary. Breaking economic ties of Russia and EU prevents formation of an entirely self-sufficient Old World market, from Atlantic to Pacific, that would make US irrelevant. This was the major point of the two World Wars. This time this is achieved in a (so far) local war.
The looser is EU, and particularly Germany.
Don’t forget ESG.
I think you need an update on Chinese involvement in ports around the world.
https://www.cfr.org/tracker/china-overseas-ports
In fact, the problem is worse: that analysis excludes leased ports like Darwin where the Chinese have 99 years of conrol
This brilliant sentence from the article, and my sarcastic climate prediction from 1997, sum up everything one needs to know about climate science and energy:
ENERGY
“Five years ago, we in the hydrocarbon sector had to listen to ignorant grandstanding blowhards explain, without a shred of energy knowledge, that hydrocarbons were so last-century,” T. ELAM
CLIMATE SCIENCE
“The future climate will be warmer, unless it is colder.” RG 1997
Drill baby drill, Russia war effort collapses, climate crap collapses. Cheap oil solves both.
Excellent post.
But a few caveats. First: the era of dominance is over. No country will be able to control economically or militarily. Technology and globalism has ended it. Each big country has its own problems and the one that is the least problematic, India, does not seek dominance. The US will have to swallow its pride. Europe is dead.
Second: the real danger comes from supra national conglomerates hellbent on power. Big money/ Big tech/ surveillance/ digitalisation/ control and comply mechanisms.
Coupled w that:
The Green dream is turning into a nightmare and countries will have to lick their wounds in the coming decade. That is also part of why AI will struggle to get a foothold as the extra energy needed is not easily available. The economic prospects are dire globally. This will put a damper on anything ambitious.
We will pray it wont lead to serious conflict between the Big guys. Many consider the chances of war quite high. The arrogance of US politicians almost have no bounds. It’s almost always win or lose, binary tribal thinking.
The BRICS are what they are, an attempt to decouple. Whether they succeed is anyone’s guess. Domestic issues will, as i said, kill overambitious projects. Demographic reality, overshoot, mission creep cannot continue linearly, much like the climate issues..
The era of ‘World Order’ is over. No more hegemony. And that is a good thing. BRICS are not going to ‘take over’ anything. It will partially decouple fr US power/ dollar system.
‘ For example, the west has heavily (and imo justifiably) sanctioned Russia over the attack on Ukraine, in an attempt to cripple Russia’s economy.’
The USA sanctioned Russia and ordered its European satrapies to do likewise. The USA suffers not one iota from that, Europe is suffering terribly.
It is incontestable that Russia was a reliable and cheap energy supplier to Europe for decades, it started in the days of the Soviet Union. Its gas is 500% cheaper than US LNG.
So the US blowing up Nordstream II and then forcing LNG on Europe was the action of an economic enemy, a mafia, not that of an ally.
Europeans who do not earn money kissing US backsides see this clearly. It’s just the bought politicians, the MSM prostitutes etc who can’t.
The USA made an enormous error blowing up Nordstream. It now treats Europe the way the Soviet Union treated the Eastern European Warsaw Pact countries.
It cannot be surprised if, down the line, European countries seek freedom from the US stranglehold and they may well ask the likes of India, Russia, China etc to help them in achieving that freedom.
Most Americans are completely enthralled and distracted by the modern day bread and circuses and have the attention span of a gnat. They would do well to revisit the path to destruction that Ancient Rome took (which we are replicating, but at a much faster pace). Sadly, the woke mind virus controls nearly all the public schools and most parents are too busy watching their reality shows to get involved in fighting the indoctrination and grooming of our children. Grab your helmet and secure your safety straps, we have a bumpy, globalist road ahead.
One World Order.