Morning music
On this day a year ago
Russia/Ukraine
Plenty of msm comment to the effect that Putin is washed-up, that there may be a coup d’etat etc. Hard to say.
Some of the “Putin is finished” comment (including that with origins in UK/US intelligence services) may be wishful thinking. There is no obvious replacement for Putin, as far as I can see. If there were, he would not live long once Putin noticed him!
We hear that the war in Ukraine is lost. Is it? The pockets of Ukrainian resistance in the south and south-east have just been stamped out. The UK msm may call the surrender of the Ukrainian forces at the Azovstal plant near Mariopol/Mariupol an “evacuation“, but few are fooled by the “transformative language”. The Ukrainian forces left alive surrendered to the Russian forces.
To my mind, there are two, maybe three, main factors why Russia has not used even more brutal tactics in order to win militarily in Ukraine. The first is that Ukraine, after all, was almost part of Russia, certainly very closely linked, for a thousand years or more, albeit that the history is complex: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Ukraine.
The second reason that Russia has not as yet pulled out all the stops is that use of the most brutal weapons and tactics (e.g. battlefield or tactical nuclear weapons, e.g. flattening completely all major Ukrainian cities not in Russian hands) might bring down NATO response despite the inherent dangers in that.
The third reason why Russia has not brought to bear all its enormous power is that Putin wants to take over at least something of a functioning agricultural and industrial economy after any Russian victory, an objective impossible of realization if the cities are totally destroyed, the population killed or driven out, or if the land itself is contaminated.
I note that the Jew Zelensky, puppet head of the Kiev regime, has now said that diplomacy, not war, is the way to end the conflict. Does that betoken a perceived weakness in the Ukrainian position on the ground, or does it mean that Zelensky’s cabal thinks that the Russian military position is weak? You could look at it either way.
Zelensky, however, has obviously been told not to cede any territory to Russia de jure, not even Crimea, where 90%+ of the population is Russian and only about 2% Ukrainian now.
Speculating here as advocatus diabolus, some in the Russian camp may be thinking of a “Devil’s alternative”— destroying Kharkov, and even Kiev, almost entirely, as well as other places, driving out the Ukrainian population, then eventually repopulating the part of Ukraine east of the Dnieper with Russian settlers.
That would be a terrible and almost Biblical scenario, but it has happened in Europe previously, most recently in 1944-1946, when German populations were killed and/or driven out of East Prussia, Galicia, Pomerania and Bohemia, replaced by Russians (Konigsberg, East Prussia/Kaliningradskaya oblast), Poles (East Prussia, Pomerania and Galicia), and Czechs (Bohemia/Sudetenland).
Tweets seen
How can this be seen as acceptable?
Goering’s train
Interesting short historical documentary.
Alison Chabloz
Many readers of this blog will be aware that persecuted satirist and singer-songwriter, Alison Chabloz, was imprisoned (again) in mid-April for poking fun in song at some aspects of Jewish behaviour. She was sentenced to 22 weeks, which in terms of actual custody is 11 weeks (77 days). She has now served 38 days, meaning that sometime tomorrow (Monday 23 May 2022) she will be at the halfway point of her actual custodial sentence.
Imprisoned for singing a song. Britain has fallen far…
More tweets seen
A social menace that has been treated with kid gloves for far too long.
…and another part of that is to divide and rule over the motoring public, as witness the recent slew of fake “opinion polls” saying that “most people” want those over the age of 90, 80, 70, and even 60 either to be barred from driving or forced to retake a driving test (most people, even at 20 or 30, would struggle to pass the test again years after having passed).
…yet we hear all the time from System sources that the “Great Replacement” is a mere “conspiracy theory”. Indeed, Prosecution Counsel in the recent Alex Davies trial made that very point, if I recall the newspaper report aright; yet here we are, and we see that the Guardian (no less) is citing a United Nations report on it.
Late tweets
King was certainly a grade-A hypocrite.
The American lawyer, William Pepper, who defended King’s alleged assassin, James Earl Ray, was a door tenant at the very odd chambers where I did my pupillage in London (in 1992-1993). I met him once.
I remember that a young lady I knew laughed on seeing the board by the entrance showing the names of all members of chambers, and which had him down as “Dr. Pepper”, like the root beer. Well, in her defence, she was only 15.
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_F._Pepper; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_F._Pepper#Martin_Luther_King_cases.
Late music
Ian Robert Millard 