It’s a huge commitment since human offspring have by far the longest period of dependency on their parents of any creature on the face of the Earth. It’s all hard work especially when they’re younger, but there are also undeniable pleasures. Providing for them, protecting them from all dangers becomes a huge driver in your life. Anyone mucking around with that basic instinct does so at their peril.

I once saw a man who was caught interfering with a little girl almost get beaten to death by two enraged parents, and I nor anyone else was in any mood to stop it either. By the time an ambulance arrived, the cops attending knew him and what most probably had occurred and were not surprised they couldn’t find a single witness in a crowd of people to what happened.

One of the most disturbing trends in what’s being sold to us as new popular culture is normalising child sexual molestation with children as young as kindergarten age. It isn’t normal, it isn’t acceptable but the Hollywood degenerate set are working very hard in their so-called entertainment products to include sexually explicit material in their movies aimed at children. They think they know better than children’s parents and seem determined to slip in as many scenes as possible which amount to what’s commonly called grooming.

The worst offender in this area is Disney. Parents, believe it or not, are hypersensitive to spotting threats to their children, especially of the sexual molestation kind, but Disney seems woefully unaware of this unenlightened propensity of parents all over the world irrespective of nationality, race, creed or political leaning.

Disney’s woke policies and pedophile inclinations have not only managed to destroy franchises like Star Wars, Toy Story, and Pirates of the Caribbean amongst others, but also in the space of a year crashed their stock price from $150 to $90 and it’s still dropping like a stone. Add in the fact that they’ve just fired their CEO who was hand-picked by his predecessor who introduced the woke deviancy slant into all Disney products in the first place. He’s just the man to pull their roasting cajones out of the fire, isn’t he?

But the woke cancer destroying Disney has now proceeded to phase two. Phase one was the prime purchasers of their product, parents, realised how questionable some of the content Disney was trying to sneak past them actually was. After a fruitless search through their range for child suitable material, they gave up. Let’s face it, if you have to pre-screen a modern Disney product before letting your children see it, then after a while, you won’t bother.

Phase two is trust has been lost. When parents see the Disney logo on anything, they refuse to watch it or even buy it, never mind going to the trouble of pre-screening it or unleashing it on their children. Life is too short when there are plenty of other non-perv providers of child appropriate material who now realise Disney’s content suicide policies have opened up some huge gaps in the market for children’s entertainment.

Just last weekend their latest effort, a sequel to Avatar, bombed at the box office. It’s a three hour perfectly woke borefest that people started walking out of by half time. As for the rest of the potential bums on seats, they just stayed away because for them the Disney brand is now toxic. One look at that brand name and it was safer, cheaper and a lot less trouble to park the kids in front of the TV and watch reruns of Wile E. Coyote versus the Roadrunner on Nickelodeon.

The best part of Christmas for me is buying presents, especially for children. Thinking about what they’ll like and enjoy and finally hitting on the perfect idea really rings my bell. When they unwrap it, you can always tell if you’ve got it right. If someone had said to me I’ve got you the perfect Christmas present, I’d have been intrigued. The kids usually tear their hair out coming up with a fun and thoughtful present for me.

But, I’ll already have had the perfect present. Those sicko, perv, grooming, child molesting bastards at Disney killing another franchise, losing $450 million in the process and taking another step towards the got woke, went broke graveyard have delivered the ideal Christmas present to me. It could only be topped by them bolting for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection next year.

Happy Christmas to you all. Here’s hoping Santie is as good to you as he was to me.

©Pointman

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The power of your pennies.

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After the book’s publication and the resultant storm of offended blood, snot and feathers had settled to the ground, it gradually dawned on the history establishment that there was more than a grain of truth in the proposition. People assumed, said things and provoked each other into such an outbreak of mass hysteria that after a certain point some sort of conflict not only became universally expected but almost inevitable. All policy, treaties, good intentions and promises were forgotten in all the excitement.

Since the end of April, it became apparent to all that the US-led West block’s hybrid war against Russia was an abject failure. Their economy wasn’t wrecked and they achieved their military objectives in a slow grind into the Donbass basin to both denazify and annihilate Ukrainian regular forces. Yes, in response, a few sanctions were imposed but let’s face it, they were water off a duck’s back. The economies of Western Europe are in ruins, the EU is toe dancing right on the edge of the disintegration abyss and despite a lot of spin and presentation, the US economy is already in recession, whatever the Biden administration does to technically redefine that economic state.

Even though the measures enacted to humble Russia have proved exactly how weak West block were against Russia, the appearance of a great and successful show must go on. Take the propaganda up a notch. First of all, big up any Ukrainian successes, imaginary or otherwise, and secondly invent some victories of the variety where you’ve stymied the Russians from doing things by doing a show of muscle flexing and testosterone pissing. Of course, all those things you’ve prevented them from doing they never had any intention of doing in the first place, but it plays well to a house trained press corps who don’t need a hint hammer tap on the noggin to be reminded what the official narrative is.

The biggest example of this drawing of false red lines is supposedly dissuading Russia from using nuclear weapons in the Ukraine. Why on Earth would Russia be tempted to use nuclear weapons when they’re already winning the ground offensive? But by using it the Biden buffoons will have demonstrated how successfully they’ve intimidated the Russians out of using them, so that’s a big win for the propaganda machine, innit? It’s a meme they’ve used several times and was starting to crescendo to something like the West block talking themselves into WWIII and a nuclear exchange à la A.J.P. Taylor’s theory that world wars can start from hysteria and misreading your opponent’s intentions.

Putin, a scholarship kid and extremely well read despite what you’ve read, is no doubt aware of Taylor’s theory of history occurring because of one cockup after another, gave a speech a couple of months back about Russia and its rules of engagement with regard to nuclear weapons. If attacked, they’d reply in full. He finished the speech with the simple words – “this is not a bluff.” All the nuclear sabre rattling from West block went away in a hushed no comment silence storm and hasn’t been heard from since. If anything, the effect of the speech was that the US made a point of announcing it would not be supplying long range munitions to the Ukraine that would enable them to do something insane like fire a dirty shell into the Rodina. There is absolutely no doubt that Russia would have to do a nuclear reply to something like that.

Roll it on a few months and we had the Polish incident where the Russians are accused by the puppet Zelensky of overshooting a target within the Ukraine by over 500 Km and hitting a nondescript village in Eastern Poland and killing two extremely unlucky civilians. BTW, they were most probably hit by the debris of the missile’s self-destruct mechanism. The Ukraine and Poland start screaming for a retaliatory strike on the Russian home land which was greeted by supreme silence by the USA who know via satellite tracking exactly who fired that missile. The real question was – was it deliberate or not? Was the cokehead Zelensky trying to bounce NATO and the US into WWIII?

What really mattered was that Russia without hesitation immediately went to their equivalent of DEFCON 3, which is a five point scale of preparing to go to war with DEFCON 1 being a full nuclear exchange. Not a few specific missiles had been spun up in their silos, but everything they had in the whole arsenal had been warmed up and ready to launch at the first sigh of a launch bloom from continental USA. It was that fast and we came very close to Einstein’s prediction that if we ever fought WWIII, the next world war would be fought with sticks and stones.

The Akula hunter killer subs had sortied out of the Baltic ice-free ports ahead of and protecting the missile launching subs, commonly called boomers for obvious reasons. As they headed to transit across the largely neglected GIUK line of Cold War fame, what had been the four minute warning was quickly degrading to a three minute warning the closer they got to America’s coast. Give it a few days of steaming and your ass could be history in less than sixty seconds. Old plans that hadn’t been looked at since the fall of the Soviet Union about how to defend against a million man plus Russian invasion through the central German plain via the Fulda Gap got dusted off in the harsh light of almost empty NATO arsenals that got donated to the African black market in arms via the Ukraine.

Factor in the imponderables like the sanctions regime preventing Russian verifiers of the SALT agreements even being allowed into America, and the Russians therefore retaliating in kind, Christ knows how much they might have ramped up nuclear arms production. Remember, these days building an ICBM delivery vehicle is a relatively simple industrial procedure. It’s producing the nuclear materials to put into the warhead that is the real challenge and Russia is still by far the biggest exporter of commercial nuclear materials. Put that in your Rand corporation sponsored pipe and smoke it Mr Nash.

Any conventional war between NATO and Russia would have to turn into a nuclear war very quickly. NATO has empty arsenals, Russia doesn’t, so they’d roll westwards with no significant resistance. As I write this, Russia is already ramping up its arms production factories from a five to six day week and an eight hour day to a twelve hour day. When they look like losing the land battle, some bright spark in NATO will try the tactical nuclear ploy – let’s see what they’ll do if we nuke Krasnoyarsk. No brainer. Russia would respond with perhaps a bigger tactical nuclear strike most probably followed by a massive nuclear one.

Let’s face it, nobody in West block ever invested in a decent ABM system whereas the old Soviets did, as well as the fabled Doomsday system of Dr. Strangelove fame which apparently exists and is still active. Don’t forget, they’ve still got the biggest number of nukes and the sanctions regime has totally broken down the inspection protocols that were such a vital part of the SALT treaties of yesteryear. The median estimate is they’ve already got between 5,000-6,000 nukes which if accurate gives them the biggest nuclear arsenal in the world anyway.

Add in the population dispersal problem we have and the advantage they have in terms of how vast even the much slimmed down size of Russia versus the old Soviet Russia and it’s still twice the land mass of the USA with lots of room left over to slip in a Belgium or two.

If you really want to jack up your nuclear war anxiety index, consider Russia releasing details of its new Sarmat delivery system which it’s in the process of rolling out. As usual, our wonderful intelligence community was so busy illegally surveilling its own populations that it completely missed the development of what’s been memorably nicknamed the Satan 2 system because if you thought the Satan 1 system was badass, you’ll love this apparently unstoppable baby. It’s so hot, it encourages the lethal notion of a winnable nuclear war.

I’ve barely outlined the scenarios that we could rapidly find ourselves in with regard to nuclear sabre rattling over the Ukraine but as all the writers on war from antiquity onwards, through to Machiavelli and von Clausewitz have repeatedly reminded us, as soon as you go to war, you lose a huge amount of control over the events unfolding.

Once you ring that unringable bell, subsequent events take on a horrible and unpredictable life all of their own.

©Pointman

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Such bios are designed to somehow leave you with the impression that this kid, a true man of the people, clawed his way up out of abject poverty without actually telling that lie but anyhow, he knows what it’s like to be an ordinary man like you or me rather than a privileged brat. In Putin’s case, that humble background tale is actually true.

A physically small kid who grew up in what amounted to Leningrad’s version of Hell’s Kitchen, he soon learned to fight his corner with a ferocity that ensured the usual suspects gave him a wide berth. His home into his early twenties was a one room apartment with his parents of a communal housing project that had a central quadrangle. It was still heaped with debris from the German shelling during the siege and a favourite game of all the children was to hunt with sticks the rats who lived in the debris.

One day he cornered a particularly big one and to his surprise, it attacked him and escaped. Years later he told that story in a passing out lecture to some freshly minted FSB officers. He was actually the guy who put the FSB together from the ruins of the old KGB and headed it up for a time. The lesson he learned that day was that when you’ve succeeded in cornering someone, always leave them a way out.

If you look at the wars he’s fought, nearly all fomented by the lads who brought you the Bay of Pigs, you’ll find they all share two common traits. First, he won all of them. Second, he always kept open the option of accepting a face-saving surrender in all but name from his opponents. It was that or face complete annihilation and on most occasions to date his opponents backed into a corner by him took the sensible course to end the conflict.

He applied that same lesson when dealing with the Ukrainian invasion. Instead of just declaring war on the Ukraine and rolling in with the full might of the Red Army and blasting everything to rubble, he decided to do a “special military operation” using Donbass militias operationally supported by elements of the Red Army. It was to be a military incursion with well-defined military objectives and then it would roll to a stop. He’d take back the ethnic Russian bits but had no interest in taking on running the corrupt, economic disaster that was the rest of the Ukraine.

In the main it achieved those objectives fairly quickly and the Ukraine peace negotiations that happened under Turkey’s auspices appeared to be approaching a fruitful end with essentially the ethnically Russian parts of eastern and southern Ukraine going back to Russia. Let’s face it, what was the old Ukraine was far from an ethnically homogeneous entity anyway; Russian areas to the East, Polish to the north, Hungarian to the west and even in the south a large chunk of ethnic Greeks of all things.

The nominal peace in the east of the country under the Minsk 1 and 2 treaties of 2014 had been ignored by the Ukraine from the very start. They’d lobbed artillery shells into the Donbass basin on a daily basis while West block not only turned a blind eye to the blatant disregard of the treaties but NATO also trained an estimated 10,000 Ukrainian soldiers every year from 2014 onwards.

West block’s true intentions towards Russia became blatantly clear. Let the Ukrainians provoke a war with Russia. While play acting as honest brokers, they’d get the Ukraine into NATO and thereby place a military threat right on Russia’s borders, despite repeated assurances to the contrary since the early ’90s as a precondition of Russia with a gun to its head agreeing to dissolve the Soviet Union.

The peace negotiations a few weeks into the war were quickly squashed by Zelensky’s West block handlers who told him to get back to defeating Russia and just wait for the collapse of its economy in a month or two. From then onwards, West block via their performing seal Zelensky has been setting impossible preconditions before any peace talks can even begin. All their lost territory back, including the Crimea, the surrender of Russia and Putin deposed. None of that is ever going to happen.

The strategic expectation of the Washington warmongers was that the Russian economy would quickly fold and the military incursion would just as quickly grind to a halt in the hybrid war they’d planned. Both forks of the grand strategy failed miserably, throwing the world into recession and the face saving way out for them was to rebrand the quick win plan into one of slowly bleeding Russia white while all the time pretending that had actually been the real plan all along. The war of economic and military attrition we now find ourselves in is not going well for West block or those countries who thought they could curry some favour by slip streaming in behind the policy.

Thus appeared the catchphrase “as long as it takes” but as economic events are demonstrating, time is on their side, not ours. Despite a coordinated West block propaganda blitz of massive proportions, Russia is winning the hybrid war by any objective metric you wish to choose. The next escalation was for West block or its pawns to start doing things like blowing up underwater gas pipelines, murdering Russian citizens in the Russian homeland or sending in explosive laden lorries driven into the Donbass by innocent truck drivers unaware that the cargo they were transporting was about to kill them. Such tactics are not guerilla war but state-sponsored terrorism.

Russia’s doctrine of winning a war is the complete reverse of West block’s. They do very measured amounts of violence. The prime aim is to annihilate the enemy’s armies while leaving the infrastructure of the country intact. This is the direct opposite of West block’s military doctrine which arguably destroys a country totally while producing years worth of juicy reconstruction contracts for their cronies in the military industrial complex when it’s over. Everybody’s a winner except the US taxpayer who ultimately pays for the reconstruction.

The relative merits of each approach you can judge for yourself but when Russia wins a war, it stays won which is why after winning a war in Chechnya a number of years back they command enough respect to be using a Chechen regiment in the Ukraine, rather than fighting a long drawn out, bitter, unwinnable guerilla war in Chechnya for the next twenty years. They kill military offensive capacity rather than the water and power infrastructure the civilian population depends on.

A number of weeks back, Ukraine committed their first terrorist act. In response, Russia did two days of infrastructure strikes against water and power hubs. It was a one-off punishment thing, a slap on the hand warning that said don’t do that again or this will be the response. Instead of taking the hint, Ukraine and its West block allies have escalated the terrorist attacks and to my mind Russia in response has changed its strategic objectives.

Russia will not allow West block’s failing war of attrition to transform into a years-long, nagging terrorist war both on their western border and within Russia itself, so their hand has been forced.

They’ve launched a nearly continuous air offense against any and all infrastructure objectives. Generators, power transmission systems, transformers, water purification and distribution networks, the whole cyber structure of the country, bridges, factories and anything else it thinks of even tangential importance to the running of a country. This is scorched earth. If you still entertained some idea of Russia wishing to conquer all of the Ukraine, ask yourself who’d want to take over the smoking ruins that’ll be left.

In tandem with this policy of once and for all removing the Ukraine as a proxy enemy and a springboard for terrorist attacks on Russia, I think they’ll seek to deny access to the Black Sea by simply extending their offensive westwards towards Odessa which is after all a Russian ethnic city founded by the Tsarina Catherine II, otherwise known as Catherine the Great. It’ll of course cause a lot of hullabaloo by the West block propaganda machine but I can’t recall either Russia or the old Soviet Union ever being bothered by being sent to stand in the naughty corner by their enemy’s condemnation.

That Pentagon buffoon Gen. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, whined with some indignation last week that he’d been calling various people in the Russian government but they’d all been to busy to talk to him over a missile strike in Poland. In the middle of a shooting war when nobody powerful on the other side refuses to even pick up back channel phone calls from you, you know they’re out of patience with you and your silly games. A decision has been made. You’ve become irrelevant and lost that vital option of being able to turn the war off – from now on, that can only be done by your enemy in their own time and most probably on their own terms.

©Pointman

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Western Europe and the US are in a recession, though the denial compulsion of bidenomics insists that the old rules no longer apply in the brave new world of the great reset currently in progress. It’s all nonsense of course and unless there’s some serious remedial action taken, we’re in all probability looking at a long worldwide recession the Bank of England estimates to be of two years duration. I think not only is that an optimistic estimate but if we’re not careful about how the global situation is managed, we could be looking at something a lot like a long depression. Add in the trade barriers, known as sanctions these days, being hurriedly thrown up between major trading blocks and all the exacerbating ingredients for that disaster are shaping up nicely, just like in the 1930s.

We are now beset by the return of those evil twins – a rising cost of living and a decline in the purchasing power of your money. Governments are desperately indulging in a lot of what’s called gaslighting these days by the smart set about the true state of their economies. Nearly all statistics issued by government and quasi-governmental bodies have been cosmetically fiddled with so much over the years for political reasons that they need to be taken with a heavy pinch of salt.

There are still one or two exceptions like the Bank of England which calculated inflation in the UK to be running at 11.1% in October, a number that didn’t go down well with the government. I tend to think their happy days of relative independence will soon be drawing to a close if they persist in producing reports contradicting the happy clappy, all’s well with the world narrative a government in disarray is pushing.

Published economic statistics have become like opinion polls. They’re only there to persuade you of the truth of some lie using the specious gravitas of having been issued by an official authority and are therefore inherently truthful and objective. The only numbers you can actually trust are the ones on the notes coming out of your wallet, anything else is most likely highly official but deceptive rubbish. Every time you fill up your car, do your weekly grocery shop or buy practically anything, you can’t help but have noticed everything is going up in price. What cash savings you have are barely earning half of one percent while inflation is eating alive the purchasing power of your money by over eleven percent.

What’s happening here is not the gentle periodic up and down sine curve of good times and bad times but sudden brutal trauma with no time for the usual economic mechanism to make timely adjustments. It’s simply too much to handle at once and the measures that need to be taken are being pointedly ignored because the current official narrative is emergency, what emergency so as not to scare the sheep. A truism of all levels of finance is that if you don’t manage your money, it will start to manage you. The very same truism holds in managing a country’s economy, but it’s worse than that.

The only way off this path to economic annihilation is to properly address the policies that in less than half a year hurled the world into recession. The failed policy everyone knows was to voluntarily cut ourselves off from the biggest source of commodities we’d allowed ourselves to become totally dependent on in the vain hope that source would implode. They didn’t, we’re the ones who’re imploding. While our central banks are surreptitiously raising interest rates by not enough, their central bank is lowering theirs.

We’ve emptied our arsenals onto the black market via donations to Ukrainian spivs to the point where we couldn’t even defend ourselves if for some mad reason Russia decided to conquer the economic basket case Europe is fast becoming. On both the economic and military front, all Putin has to do is wait. Wait for West block economies to collapse resulting in regime changes to more amenable faces. Wait for General Winter to do his terrible work before launching the massive Spring offensive every man and his dog knows they’re preparing east of the Dneiper. Wait for West block populations to get fed up of living in cold and poverty over a country most of them couldn’t even find on a world map. Wait for Ukraine fatigue to set in after a brutally cold winter.

Nobody but a fool tries to catch a falling knife. He’ll let it clatter to the tile floor and then negotiate from a position of strength having won the hybrid war. By that time, we’ll be the old beggar in the snow people walk by.

The brainless battle cry of we’ll continue to pour money and munitions into the Ukraine “for as long as it takes” plays exactly into Russia’s patient game. In effect, we’re the ones getting sucked dry and they’re the ones not expending a kopek nor an unnecessary Russian life. West block is like someone hopelessly trapped in some obsessive-compulsive loop who somehow thinks that by repeating the same failed moves over and over again, there’ll somehow be a different result after enough blood and treasure has been spent.

In the mean time, all we’ve got to look forward to is what politicians call austerity regimes. As the name suggests, they’ll be harsh but you’ll be led to believe that sort of thing is supposed to be good for you. The best medicine always tastes nasty. Character building, don’t you know. Higher taxes, higher interest rates, cutbacks in most government spending, wage strikes everywhere, a standard of living in free fall, getting used to eating fish fingers rather than steak and of course a few wars we can feed our kids into but nothing too big to upset anyone’s corporate share options.

If you’ve got a penknife, now is the time to use it to make a few new holes in your belt.

©Pointman

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The narrative the majority are pushing is that it was all Trump’s fault even in the races where he wasn’t directly involved. Not only is that a part of the democrat controlled far-left press agenda of knocking him out of the race in ’24, but it’s being faux reluctantly used by the GOP establishment. A lot of the phony right-wing news channels are pressing the same button because they have to. Knocking him out of the race or at least stopping him endorsing another candidate is a must. Love him or hate him, he’s still by a country mile the biggest draw the GOP has.

More than once in my career I’ve been called in to turn around a failing enterprise or project of some sort and while the immediate cause of the problem is always pretty obvious; wrong product, wrong marketing, technical problems or loss of control of the whole production process, the root cause is always the same – bad management. In a long career in a number if areas, I’ve never yet seen some relatively junior member of staff almost bring an enterprise to its knees, it’s always been the management and the answer has always been the same – start firing the under performing managers.

I’d be putting a red dot on the chest of several individuals such as Kevin McCarthy and most especially Mitch McConnell. The campaign was eminently winnable but was managed not into a complete car wreck but a heavy fender bender. McCarthy, as minority leader of the House, is both disagreeable and incompetent. McConnell, as minority leader of the Senate, can be most agreeable but is only interested in himself and not the greater good of the GOP. If he was, he wouldn’t have done things like switching PAC funding from the Alaskan surefire GOP candidate to a GOP incumbent Lisa Murkowski who’d voted to impeach Trump.

The thing creatures like McConnell, McCarthy and Murkowski all have in common is not only that they’re classic GOP establishment but also more importantly Washington swampers. Their prime objective is to blunt and ultimately destroy the upstart America First, MAGA element that threatens the comfortable club of talk a lot but do bugger all, otherwise known as the uniparty in congress. A red dot needs also to be placed on the chest of a number of individuals in the RNC and those who directed an essentially mediocre election campaign that should have won big.

They either mismanaged the campaign out of sheer incompetence or for deliberate swamper reasons and if they were really serious about winning rather than just trying to look as if they making a serious effort, they’d have spent the last two years since the 2020 banana republic election plugging the scandalous election rule loopholes the Dems exploited ruthlessly to steal the whole presidential election. They didn’t, and that’s why the world now stares with wonder at an America that’s always bending their ear about democracy and has through crooked elections managed to elect an obviously senile puppet president, a brain damaged senator and several dead men to congress.

If there are no fundamental changes made at root and branch level of the GOP party, then being beaten yet again in 2024 by what will be by then an even more unpopular Dem administration will be a foregone conclusion. Even this week, Congressman Josh Hawley has called for a fundamental reform of the GOP or going with the schism that’s already underway and forming a new party that’s more reflective of the bedrock populist vote that feels increasingly that most of the GOP is a loser RINO party anyway.

And just to underline that assessment about nothing being done about electoral fraud, notice how many House and Senate elections have gone into a holding loop with in some cases a result expected the other side of Christmas. Are we being shaped up to accept another steal where winning the House on election day is somehow reversed after a necessary number of recounts or Democrat election officials staggering in with cardboard boxes of freshly discovered votes which only stops when the result has been reversed?

At this stage, your guess is as good as mine but if it does turn out that way then one thing is guaranteed – the GOP establishment will yet again fight it just enough to fail heroically.

©Pointman

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In this the last week before the election, I’ve seen polls being suddenly adjusted by nearly four percentage points, which is a huge admission. They’re abandoning their chronic political bias to preserve some sort of specious authority before the actual result makes their “predictions” laughable but don’t fret, the same set of false pollsters will be back for ’24. To illustrate, the Economist/YouGov are now calling it as 50:50 whereas last week according to them the GOP was behind 45 to 49, a miraculous leap of 4% in a single week! There are still one or two hopelessly committed far-left polls that still have the Dems on a 5% lead.

We must now accept that organised, systemic electoral fraud is now a major factor in US elections. To my mind, the GOP don’t seem to have done enough to face the problem head on because they’re scared of being called election deniers by the Dem’s fake news propaganda machine. Obviously people are much more aware of the issue but I’ve not seen much action to mitigate it. My feeling is that in the close run races, the Dems will use it wherever they can get away with it. Remember, back in 2020 we were supposed to believe Biden got 81 million votes …

Even with those considerations, it does seem reasonably certain the GOP will recapture the House and there’s a fair chance they just might secure the Senate too. Bear in mind that these elections are not just for seats in Congress but also for less senior posts such as state governor which given the constant tug of war between states and federal power do command a lot of local influence. Again, the GOP gubernatorial candidates do look good to take some big scalps.

A convincing win by the GOP would form a good platform for the 2024 presidential election. Already some substantial benefits have aided the party. It’s cleared out a lot of rubbish people. RINOs like Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger and Lisa Murkowski either got the boot in the primaries or did an early retirement from politics because they knew they stood absolutely no chance of being run as candidates after their treacherous behaviour over the last two years. Being a republican never Trumper in Congress actually turned out to mean no republican voter would ever vote for them again. Despite what most politicians think, people have long memories. It wasn’t just Trump who felt stabbed in the back by some congressmen of their own party they’d actually voted for.

Getting rid of them has magnified a new look, America first party with a lot of unfamiliar faces who will be a breath of fresh air. I’m thinking here about people like JD Vance, Kari Lake, Blake Masters, Joe Kent and Dr. Oz. There’s also a few people like Desantis who’re already shaping up pretty well for a presidential run in ’28. Nobody in fake news dare say what’s obvious. The assorted RINOs, Mitch McConnells and do nothing flatulent bums on seats in Congress are in full retreat before what is essentially a red wave that’s being driven forward by MAGA flavoured candidates who know exactly what’s vexing ordinary people.

All the Biden campaign wants to talk about is abortion and Nancy Pelosi’s hubby having a two o’clock at night altercation with another man dressed only in his underwear has to be some sort of new low in American elections. The fact that there are now about eight different muddy the water narratives about the latter while the police department and DA are rigidly enforcing a kind of Californian version of Omertà, only convinces everyone of what’s most likely the case – Hubby popped out while wifey was away, picked up a male prostitute and while they were having great drunken fun with Hubby’s hammer (let’s not go there) it all got noisy and a bit out of hand, so his neighbour called it in. Cue a lot of emergency fixing, narrative shaping and fun and games. Apparently, the spin doctors grew it into a threat to American democracy itself. Either they’re brilliant or they think America is the home of stoopid.

Despite some shenanigans, the red wave looks like making some significant gains. Anywhere from a “predicted” 15-45 pickups in the House and mebbe 4 in the Senate, those being Arizona, Nevada, New Hampshire, and Georgia. In the governors’ races, the GOP is predicted to pick up 5, those being Nevada, Wisconsin, Michigan, Kansas, and Oregon. If you didn’t know it, the Dems losing Michigan, Nevada, and Oregon would have been inconceivable a couple of years ago, particularly Oregon.

The GOP as a party have managed to strike a familiar note with electorates by simply campaigning on issues that are relevant to them, not abortion or hammer wielding maniacs in split-crotch knickers chasing Pelosi’s Hubby around the house somehow being a clear and present danger to democracy. Instead, they went with boring old rubbish like soaring crime rates, the price of gas, an unchecked border invasion, consumer price rises across the board, their children being groomed, men pretending to be women muscling into women’s toilets and changing rooms and a dollar whose buying power seemed to decrease week by week. Just silly issues like that.

Anyway, that’s my ten cents on the whole thing. If by some miracle the voters are not again cheated out of making a legitimate choice, I’ll have my usual opinionated stab at what I think the GOP should do after the election. However, if all the ballot counting suddenly stops for three hours overnight, you’ll know that going out to vote has been a waste of your time.

©Pointman

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We’re told that the purpose of sanctions is to engender regime change and that has certainly turned out to be the case but not in the way the masterminds who’re crafting them intended. Putin’s approval rating is still in the stratospheric 80% region while EU heads of state are dropping like ninepins and the upcoming mid-term elections in the US are set to be a harrowing experience for the Biden administration unless they can cheat their way out of electoral disaster like they did in 2020.

The western European political landscape has come to resemble something akin to a Mack Sennett comedy two reeler. It’s like the Keystone Cops with horse drawn wagons packed with cops careering around town and men being hurled off at every corner. Those who haven’t already been fired by national electorates are the walking dead plodding towards their own extinction at the next general election.

All they seem to do is come out with highfalutin speeches about fighting for freedom, democracy and sacrifice while the increasingly restive natives are either going on strike or turning out by the thousand to protest the cost of living rises and what’s starting to look like runaway inflation. The elites are simply not listening, increasingly out of touch and their so-called solutions to the problem are definitely in the Marie-Antoinette tradition.

A shining example of the political elite’s determined refusal to understand either the situation, realpolitik or the mood of their electorates was given by Michael Kretschmer who’s the prime minister of the German state of Saxony, which is a small place located south of Berlin. His solution, outlined in the tabloid Bild, was that the Nord Stream 1 & 2 pipelines should be repaired and Germany should resume buying natural gas from Russia, but only after the war is over. He even goes on to say the unsayable – sanctions against Russia have brought more harm than good to Germany.

My goodness, some common sense at last and coming from a normally sleepy little pimple on the bum of Berlin of all places. Who is this Michael Kretschmer I’ve never heard of and who could prove to be not only Germany’s saviour but the EU’s as well. I want his babies. Be still my foolish heart.

As I read on, my hopes for him were crushed underfoot like unnoticed spring bulbs in a lawn. He thinks in future Germany should get its natural gas from the US, various Arab countries or simply start drilling great big holes in the North Sea for it. Respectively and in other words, at a quadrupled US price especially designed to destroy the EU as a competitor, at not quite quadrupled prices from the hostile BRICS cartel who wouldn’t go out of their way to piss on a West block state going up in flames (ask Joe about how helpful they can be) or start a massive maritime project 50 years behind the thundering herd of the 70s when all the good drilling plots are long gone anyway.

The only hope I had left was what his ideas might be for ending the war and he outlined a delightfully simple if not outright childlike solution that could resolve the conflict overnight and deftly pluck Germany’s chestnuts (or something else) out of the raging flames of the de-industrialisation furnace it was heading towards. All Russia had to do was depose Putin, give back every square meter of territory gained and oh yes, pay to rebuild the Ukraine, then peace could be declared and the war would be over. Riffle through all the alternative realities that physics offers and there isn’t a single one where any of those conditions would be acceptable to Russia and its people.

Wake up sonny boy Kretschmer and get out of your bubble. This isn’t the 90s where a helpless Russia on its back was treated abominably. A golden opportunity was lost, every promise the West made to them was to be cynically broken and now they’re looking exclusively eastwards for their future in something like BRICS. In this new Cold War II, the coming together of Russia, China, India and the third world into the East block looks to be in the ascendant while the West block in a paroxysm of self-destruction is tearing itself to bits.

All wars come to an end around a peace table whatever the result. The intransigent conditions set by the West block to end the war are only meant to prolong it until Russia somehow drops from exhaustion but already the opposite is happening. They’re doing things like lowering central bank interest rates whereas the West block is already ascending the rickety stairs of too little, too late interest hikes to avoid economic implosion. The longer the war carries on, the deeper the hole the West is spiralling into gets.

The danger for the US and western Europe of reaching peak stupidity and not making some accommodation with the Russians about the Ukraine is that it will almost certainly be impossible to make a deal to get them out of the economic hole they’ll have dug themselves into. The later they get to that table, the more desperate they’ll be and the worse the deal will be. The apparently inexhaustible amounts of commodities Russia used to ship westwards are not inexhaustible and by that stage Russia will already have found new markets for those commodities. It’s already happening.

Sino-Russian trade is already heading for a projected target of 200 USD billion this year, India and the rest of the BRICS combined are probably not far behind in terms of percentage increase. For Russia, that’s all trade of goods into new markets that used to flow westwards. It’s an emerging market with a population of about 3 billion people. Even if enough regime change in the West block finally permits some realistic peace talks and after some grovelling apologies about imposing sanctions, Russia won’t suddenly be able to double production of natural gas, oil, wheat, fertiliser and the mountains of other commodities we used to get cheaply from them. That ship will have sailed.

By then, the only way we’re realistically going to get out of the hole is to start doing a whole lot more digging, drilling and planting for ourselves, and that’s going to take years. It’s that or get used to living in a world with a lot less of most things.

©Pointman

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That common perception, right or wrong, reinforced the heavy reliance on nuclear generation which would also enable them to build a nuclear strike force, which again would remove France from any dependence on Britain or the USA for protection and was also the reason France refused to join NATO for years. They simply didn’t want to ever again rely on an exterior power for their security.

France was in a sweet position up until roughly two decades ago when all the nuclear plants started to show appreciable wear and tear. Currently, half of its 56 nuclear reactors have been shut down for maintenance mainly addressed at curing corrosion problems. Any industrial factory or complex after nearly half a century in constant use gradually becomes uneconomic anyway because the cost of increasingly heavy maintenance begins to outstrip its profitability and also its up time. The choice becomes make a very expensive refurbishment effort or bulldoze the whole thing and build a new one. The cost differential between either course is slight but the downside is both will also take years to complete.

In common with most EU countries, France started what turns out to be the strategically suicidal move of transitioning to renewable energy sources such as solar and wind while at the same time decommissioning boring old nuclear power plants like Fessenheim, which was taken out of service in 2020. Add into that mistake that the French power workers have been on strike for several weeks for wage increases and the net result is that currently about half of their power plants are either out of action or limping along.

As with most countries who walked over the green energy cliff, they’ve been forced of late to do a very quick rethink. The first step was to get nuclear quickly reclassified as a green power source, which neatly circumvented all those tiresome regulations about types of polluting power generation that would have prevented France scurrying back to nuclear. It was the quickest way of preventing what they wanted to do not being stuck in the EU regulatory committee stages for three years or so.

With help from the Germans, who desperately need power from any source even if it means burning the volumes of regulatory manuals the EU have came up with over the last twenty years, they rammed the change through despite a few squeaks from the green blob which were roundly ignored. No doubt the Germans have been promised a nice cut of the lubbely jubbly electrickery stuff by their neighbours on the west side of the Ardennes.

There’s only one snag in the whole cunning plan and it’s a grand one. Yes, France has lots of nuclear power generation plants but they don’t actually manufacture for themselves the fissionable material for all those wonderful plants to notionally burn. That ceased years ago. Nowadays it’s imported from the biggest producer and exporter of fissionable material for commercial use in the world and I’ll give you one guess who that party is.

Well done that gentleman at the back of the room wearing the funny chapeau for coming back with the correct answer so quickly, it is indeed Russia! The chances of Russia boosting production for France which would indirectly keep industrial Germany alive and therefore the EU afloat are zilch. Almost as good as Saudi Arabia boosting oil production to help out Joe Biden rather than cutting it back. Don’t forget, the EU’s foreign minister Josep Borrell has openly boasted on many occasions the we, meaning the EU, are at war with Russia. Well, welcome to the war Joe.

In professional golfing circles there’s a saying that you drive for show but you putt for dough. When it comes to winning, it’s all about the endgame. In a similar fashion, that’s how the Russians operate and you’d be a fool to ignore that deep thinking aspect of the Slavic approach to things. That accounts for their love of chess.

Western politicians think in relatively short election cycles forcing their strategists to do the same, but the Russians have no such limitation on the range of their thinking. They’ve always been quite happy to talk about what they call their “energy weapon” and with one exception, the Trumpie Monsta, western politicians have always dismissed that ever so slowly cultivated complete dominance over western Europe’s energy as a problem for tomorrow’s politicians, but unfortunately for the current crop, tomorrow has arrived.

There are lots of chess books written on opening moves and the middle game but very few on the endgame. The most attention that part of the game gets is in novelty problem solving. ie Find the mate in three etc. With the Russians and their energy weapon, we’re in the endgame phase of a twenty year game. France thought they had a neat way out of the energy dilemma but are discovering the Russians got there well ahead of them and had that escape covered.

Supply western states like France with extremely cheap fissionable material then after long enough they’ll fold their own production facilities to make such materials and in the end whether they’ll live in light or darkness of an evening is up to you. Endgame, zugswang, there isn’t a decent move left to them on the board.

Sure, there are patches, work arounds and palliative measures they can take, but like the natural gas and petroleum commodities formerly supplied by Russia, they’re band aids slapped over a sucking chest wound.

©Pointman

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He said the West would be “stepping on the same rake,” as they did in the case of sanctioning Russian natural gas. “The result will be the same – oil prices will skyrocket,” he observed. Nobody can deny the price of natural gas has gone through the roof and is still heading upwards at a rate of knots. Such a move predicted Dmitry Medvedev, Deputy Chairman of the Russian Security Council, would mean that a barrel of oil may well cost somewhere in the $300-400 range.

The US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, already infamous for her incompetence in not spotting the recession the US was already up to its armpits in earlier this year, has this week mooted putting a price cap of $60 per barrel on only Russian oil. Her timing as usual is superb, choosing to blunder into an already spooked oil market barely a week after the Saudis announced a two million barrels a day cut in oil production. The futures and spot markets in oil took fright, which is yet another timely kick in the bollocks for a Democratic mid-term election that is already in deep trouble. That fright will quickly feed through to pump prices.

It’s a consideration that would never to occur to a plank like Yellen because instead of the traditional type of holder of that office who had one foot in academia and the other one very firmly planted in the real world, she like so many of Biden’s “experts” behaves like an accident prone amateur learning on the job. Given the mess the domestic energy industry is already in because of work experience kids like her, you’d think such a disastrous move would have been let quietly die back in July, but no.

We’re dealing with the Biden administration here. Like the Pope, it is infallible and simply cannot make mistakes, so therefore it doesn’t need a reverse gear. The closest it can ever come to anything like that is “walking back” some potentially catastrophic announcement or insisting that it was you that misunderstood whatever statement it was the bonehead in chief made. Yellen has all the makings of another misspeaking bonehead who should be surrounded with a competent staff who have some political nous and an ability to walk back even her most brainless pronouncements with a straight face.

There are so many reasons why this is a bad idea that most left-wing economists in America, that’s to say nearly all of them, recoiled with shock and horror at the idea even from a socialist administration like Biden’s. I’ll state but a few but feel free to add to the list yourself.

I’ll start with a subtle one but one that reinforces the growing idea that America is a dangerous friend to have. Many countries in Europe depend heavily on Russian petroleum and they simply have no viable substitute. If America bullies them into that sanction, then Russia will simply turn off their supply. It will eventually force them to rethink their allegiance between America and a resource-rich emerging East block.

If they go points eastward, they get the resources they can’t do without and a measure of protection from America’s revenge sanctioning, so they prosper. Staying with America would mean total economic ruin, since realistically not much practical help in replacing Russian oil can be expected. America charging the EU four times their domestic price for LNG has had a sobering effect on people’s unthinking willingness to sanction Russia expecting American help. The long term effect of such a drift eastwards will be to further isolate America from Europe and the rest of the world.

Setting a mandated low price for a particular member of a commodity cartel is firing a starting pistol for a price war that will only tear it apart, which might suit a certain party outside the cartel very well. If for some reason Russia decided to go along with the proposal, which seems highly improbable, it would inevitably start taking bread from the table of other members. Any move like that has to be quickly nipped in the bud to preserve the cartel.

The people who decide the price of oil are OPEC+ and not America, who is not even a member of the organisation. Letting America get away with dictating the price for even one member is a precedent they simply won’t accept because in years to come it’d open them up individually to similar treatment if they got involved in some dispute with America.

Over and above those reasons, Russia is a key member of the BRICS economic grouping and it’s quickly emerging as the East block’s super supplier of commodities into a trading area of approximately 3 billion people. Diverting that flow of oil from the West to the East will present exactly the same non-problem that diverting the flow of natural gas did simply because there’s a huge market there thirsty for it and once diverted, the chances of it ever being re-diverted back are slim.

Compared to what’s increasingly perceived as a warmongering America in decline that’s determined to gnaw off it’s own history, culture, religious tenets, the family, founding republican principles and its own wealth, economy and prosperity as well as taking everybody else down with them into a nuclear war, the future looks to be with East block.

In the last six months the Biden administration’s foreign policy has devastated America’s formerly cordial relationships with pretty much the whole of the world, including its allies. With one overly aggressive and provocative move after another, it has needlessly made enemies and destroyed other people’s economies. I cannot help but feel that if Trump had been in charge such mistakes would never have been made in the first place and if they had been, he’d be sitting around a negotiating table getting the problem resolved.

©Pointman

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Two questions should have been posed to yourself by yourself and answered in a realistic fashion. What do I do if it all goes badly wrong? What do I do if it all goes brilliantly? The fabled plan B. Within the context of what’s rapidly becoming the Ukraine war, the first question is trivial. What’s left of the Ukrainian military in terms of surviving personnel is simply no match for the Red Army and the Biden administration has no stomach for a direct war with Russia, preferring instead to fight a proxy one using Ukrainians as cannon fodder. Bear in mind that the Russian’s recent partial mobilisation of 300,000 men represents only 1% of the Red Army’s strength.

If America isn’t going to get directly involved, then you can bet the house that NATO won’t, especially as all their arsenals will stay empty for the next few years because they’ll simply be too broke to replenish them.

Despite a lot of dissembling, denials and muddying of the water, it’s clear to everyone over 12 years old who lives outside the sphere of fake news propaganda in America that it was the Biden boneheads who blew up the two Nord Stream pipelines. That attribution is going to grow the deeper Western Europe tips into economic recession. Never mind the arrant nonsense the NYT, BBC, Guardian and the like are spouting, the ordinary guy in the street knows it was done by the Americans because they are the only party with anything to gain from such suicidal vandalism.

You’ve got to see the irony in it. Suddenly pipelines submerged and on land are now being patrolled by NATO countries to protect them from the boss of NATO whom everyone knows was behind the sabotage. How long the Turk Stream and Ukraine pipelines will last is anyone’s guess but you can bet the Turks will be aggressively patrolling the entrance to the Black Sea from now on.

In a more immediate response, Germany has just announced it won’t be sharing any of its precious hoard of winter fuel with any other EU countries. The message is simple – with the destruction of the pipelines then from now on it’s every country for itself when it comes to fuel. The EU dies, not with a whimper, but with a vicious dog on dog scrap for every precious drop of Russian fuel dripping off the sanctions table.

At the start of this shambolic campaign by the West the strategy was quite simple. Destroy the Russia economy and defeat them militarily within a few weeks. Patently, neither of those objectives have been met and are unlikely to be. A secondary strategy evolved, or should I say just “growed” like Topsy, out of this dumpster fire. The West block would wage a continuous war of attrition in the Ukraine my supplying it with endless amounts of armaments and money and Russia would simply collapse at some point.

Let’s park all the propaganda bullshit to one side for a moment and take a cold reality shower. We were assured at the end of March that the Russians were running out of shells but here we are now in October and on an average day they’re shipping in about 300,000 shells to use on the Ukrainians. The only thing the Russians are in danger of running out of is Ukrainians to fire those shells at. What’s happening in the Ukraine is as murderously simple as that.

Like a broken clockwork toy that needs winding up, any sort of strategy has degenerated down to some sort of disorganised hybrid of name and shame, cancel Russia and all things Russian and to totally isolate it from the “community of nations” ie the Western hegemony headed up by America. This brain dead strategising on the fly is also extremely unlikely to work since Russia is already disengaging from the West and looking eastwards for its future. With the progress being made getting fully integrated in as a big player in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and BRICS organisations, this process is well underway.

Either way, this refocusing of Russia’s commercial future and military alliances eastwards was always Putin’s plan B. With Western Europe having destroyed itself economically and then emptied their arsenals for the Ukrainians to sell on the black market, it no longer poses a significant threat to Russia.

I said in a previous article that America under a Biden administration has become a dangerous and unpredictable ally to have. This latest escalation of unilaterally blowing up infrastructure its allies economies totally depend on has crossed the line from the oppressive exertion of influence to unnecessary active coercion, or in other words outright bullying. Add in the fact that Biden’s handlers seem hell bent on having a war, nuclear or otherwise, with Russia or China or even both at the same time, and it’s easy to see why smaller countries are beginning to distance themselves from a dangerous America and aggregate into alternative power structures such as BRICKS or the SCO under the protective wing of Russia and China.

Add in the collapse of the EU, several freezing unheated winters to come, shortages of everything, raging inflation fuelled by desperation money printing, the collapse in public confidence in the mainstream parties and their replacement with warring extremest groups from across the whole political spectrum all promising to fix everyone’s problems at a stroke, and Putin has a rare plan C opportunity should he choose to avail himself of it.

Into this general atmosphere, running a covert propaganda campaign in the West block that says all your troubles and misery were caused by your association with America and it doing crazy things like blowing up pipelines you depended on would find fertile ground. Even now, the 24/7 hate on Russia in the media is starting to show signs of fatigue and I can see blaming America for everything might easily become a very electable platform to run on.

Why not propose the eastern states of a now shattered EU join BRICS or some other type of loose economic union with Russia? The big carrot that can be dangled is that such an arrangement gets them off Russia’s “unfriendly country” shit list, which means they can get back to sucking on the teat of Russia’s energy and natural resources at reasonable prices again.

Beyond simply earning more money by the renewal of sales into western Europe, such a proposal would have several advantages for Russia, some being defensive and one other a very aggressive move against its mortal enemy. First of all, it would remove a rag bag of neighbouring states in political chaos and in effect give it back the buffer zone between it and the West it was promised after the fall of the Soviet Union. By alleviating the economic woes of these countries, it conceivably reduces the risk of another Adolph Hitler rising out of the heaving mess.

The aggressive part of such a move is that it starts to isolate America. West block countries, sick of the Biden administration’s bullying and dangerously unpredictable ways, are already switching allegiances because even at this early stage, the cracks in the unipolar world are becoming apparent. In the last six months, the effects of the Biden administration’s foreign policy have been catastrophic for America’s position in the world.

If you have any doubts about the winds of geopolitical change blowing across the world and how shaky America’s primacy has become in the last six months, consider that countries like Egypt, Turkey and Saudi Arabia are already applying for BRICS membership. If the latter’s decision this week, which could only come with a nod from Russia, to cut daily oil production by two million barrels isn’t a kick in the teeth for Washington a month before the mid-terms, then tell me what isn’t. It’s a definite shift of political alignment irrespective of America’s anti-Saudi policy towards Iran, which is itself lining up to do joint naval maneuvers with Russia and China.

©Pointman

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That process is already in progress.

Another advantage of the bleed them out option was that Russia, unlike the US and its lackeys, didn’t have to flagrantly break any international contract agreements they’d made, just get very picky about the details of who’d agreed to do exactly what according to the fine print. It’s a version of what used to be called “working-to-rule” in the strike-torn seventies which I feel will be making a return tour this coming winter.

However, be aware that when those contracts run out, Russia won’t be renewing any of them unless regime change has by then substantially redrawn the political landscape of Western Europe to a more Russia friendly one, otherwise it’s a no deal, even if the terms are massively in Russia’s favour. I’m not sure that Russia having by that time made the adjustment of bulk trading with the much more reliable emerging Eastern giant of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) or even a rapidly expanding BRICS, will be interested in trading with a volatile Western Europe.

Who’s interested in a trading partner who can overnight become a mortal enemy with one jerk on the leash by its thoroughly corrupt masters whose intentions towards any emerging trade competition are malevolent. Don’t let any of the cone-head “experts” tell you any different – Europe, and most probably the world to a slightly lesser extent, is not entering any quick dip into a v-shaped recession but a long slow scrape across the bottom that’ll last for years. By the end of it, there’ll be bits of it which will start looking distinctly third world.

The necessity to destroy the EU is for the same reason the organisation was already steering itself onto the rocks well before the Ukraine situation arose – its leadership. It’s unelected and therefore unaccountable to anybody, fundamentally detached from the changing sentiments of electorates, totally committed to the globalist agenda with no regard to the damage to domestic economies and left-wing to the very core.

Above all, the perception from within it and the reality is that they’re a dictatorship determined to crush any political dissent by economic sanctions, propaganda offensives or regime change as they did in Italy and are trying to do with not much success with Hungary. From Russia’s viewpoint, that alacrity to be part of the great re-engineering of societies using globalisation has made it an eager attack dog of America to crush Russia economically. It’s so far ahead of the global pack, it’s eagerly beavering away on its sanctions pack 7 or is it 8? I’ve lost count though what’s left to sanction I can’t imagine.

Add in the fact that Germans of a certain type now occupy most of the key leadership positions, and you can see why crushing it is on Russia’s agenda. I thought the type had died out but they’re now enjoying a resurgence of influence. The type that denazification never quite rooted out and still know in their hearts that Slavs are untermensch to be exterminated or subjugated and the Latins of the south are just garrulous children who are incapable of handling their own affairs without the help of a firm guiding hand. Putin served as head of the KGB in East Germany for years and knows the type well. It’s why he stripped them out of the Stasi and replaced them with people who leaned more towards Lenin than Adolph.

Getting their ass kicked by Russia for a second time and EU flags being ripped off balconies in Rome which has just elected a (God forbid) non left-wing government has gone some way to adding to the increasing insanity of the Führer directives emanating from the bunker of Brussels lately. Just last month its president führerin Ursula von der Leyen boasted proudly that under her leadership the EU had managed to reduce Russian imports of natural gas to only 9%.

Honestly, how out of touch do you have to be to polish an achievement turd like that and then stand up in public and crow about it to electorates who don’t believe a bloody word coming out of your mouth anyway.

It’s got a Foreign Minister Josep Borrell who’s inordinately proud of running around the EU’s capitals announcing it was at war with Russia. Needless to say, not a lot of the smaller EU countries fancy being at war with a behemoth like Russia which is a lot closer to their Eastern borders than it is to the plush suburbs of Brussels. At the same point, nobody actually asked them if they wanted to go to war with anybody or self-destruct their economies back into the stone age just to serve as America’s proxy dogs of war against a Russia it really doesn’t fancy taking on head-to-head itself.

For these reasons and some minor ones like the looming threat of hyper inflation, economies in the toilet, all prices sky rocketing while the buying power of their money is visibly shrinking before their downsizing paychecks, certain doubts are being muttered in the souks and grabens of post-islamised Europe about who really gives a dog’s turd about the Ukraine and can we have the good old days of six months ago back again?

Why can’t we just talk to the Russians, take our foot off the sanctions pedal, then maybe we might not have a nuclear war with them, they’ll sell us some natural gas as well as all the other goodies they used to supply us with until the start of March? As if to head off this growing groundswell of common sense, the Biden administration in one of its usual measured responses decided to blow up the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines to ensure the EU can’t go creeping back to the negotiating table with Russia. You darkies will do as the plantation massa commands or the bullwhip comes out.

It’s a mistake by the way, and unless I miss my guess plays exactly into Putin’s more fanciful longer-term plans. It’s become a hallmark of the Biden administration’s foreign policy – act first and think later.

Who’d ever have thought that all it’d take to de-industrialise the once mighty Deutschland and bring down the EU would be two relatively small explosions in the Baltic Sea? All Putin’s nefarious plans for the EU may now be placed on the back burner leaving him free to concentrate on his prime enemy.

©Pointman

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Instead it’s been the various Donbass militias, Chechens, a few Wagner division guys and some odds and sods such as even Cossack irregulars doing the infantry fighting. You don’t want to be mixing it with them in any season, but most especially Winter which is fast coming at us. The official Russian help has been confined to providing overwhelming air and missile superiority, absolutely dominant and massive artillery support and I suspect not only a large hand both in the day-to-day command and control of the war but also in its general strategy. Given such a disparate group of forces, they’d need a strong hand directing them.

As soon as the referendums in the new Donbass republics overwhelmingly vote for membership in the Russian Federation, their applications will be accepted immediately. To vote differently would be to abandon themselves to the tender mercies of the Ukrainians and the proven duplicity of Western powers such as the US, France and Germany. Between the lot of them, they’ve ensured the conditions of the Minsk 1 and 2 agreements have been comprehensively ignored and have been training and arming the Ukrainians to the teeth since 2014.

From that day onwards, one shell fired into any of the republics will be landing on Russian territory and will therefore constitute an act of war – no more hybrid war excuses. Concurrent with the referendum announcement a partial mobilisation of Russian forces was announced. That one shell landing means all out war between the Ukraine and Russia but for the moment the latter have only announced the call up of 300,000 experienced reservists. Bear in mind, that represents 1% of the strength of the Red Army that Putin can call upon.

Once again, Putin has wrest the initiative from the West. This single bold move opens up an array of options for him, each one of which presents a foreign policy Gordian knot for the Biden administration and its satraps. To illustrate, what if Russia takes the not unreasonable position they’re in a direct war with the Ukraine and a third party, namely America, who by supplying the Ukrainians directly with arms and support, has now made itself a legitimate target of war. All those big fat C-130 Hercules transports full of arms, flown by Americans and now getting blown out of the sky the minute they enter Ukrainian airspace would certainly represent a complete humiliation. It’d be put up or shut up time.

What’s the response? Armed escorts of American fighters? How would downhome America react to potentially getting sucked into a war with Russia? The NATO “allies” are already rushing to declare they’re not in a war with Russia. Pull up a chair ladies and gentlemen and watch dogfights break out all over Western Ukraine. The unknown here is what other surprises have the Russians got lurking in their arsenal because believe me, the West have got a few nasty surprises of some stuff like hypersonic missiles they though were sci-fi imaginings.

Sure, it’d be interesting getting confirmation that the much hyped F-35 Raptor is the very expensive lemon it’s rumoured to be but it’d be a more salutary piece of intelligence watching operational hypersonic missiles travelling at speeds well beyond any hope of interception decimating fleets of transports.

It’s a weapon we’ve seen in action that the West not only doesn’t have but they’ve no earthly chance of stopping either. Does this mean the end of the whole philosophy of MAD? Is the old 8 minute warning of Russian missiles heading over the north pole to hit continental America no longer a time interval to react in? Is it now down to two minutes, which is far below the spin up time of most ICBMs. Does it even exist if semi-autonomous missiles traveling at that speed can be fired and gone at the first sign of a launch bloom in America? That’s just one destabilising weapon nobody wants to talk about in front of the children. There are just too many unknowns coming out of that can of unknowns.

Remember, the Russians are the only party to the Ukraine conflict who consistently think ahead.

If you haven’t seen that already, contrast how foreign policy is currently being made in America with how it’s being done by Russia. Off the cuff soundbites. Last week Biden was wheeled onto some highly respected fake news show and asked a question about nuclear responses. He answered Yes to one question to which he should have said No, so the show immediately cut to commercials to get the real answer from his care givers in the WH. The handlers told the fake news whores the answer should have been No and if they asked again, their chimp would answer correctly. First thing after the break, they repeated the same question in a different form and the old fool immediately answered Yes again.

Again, two weeks ago, Russia introduced and passed a raft of new laws related to people intent on undermining the state in time of war. They’ve already got such laws I thought but now the laws have even more teeth and a lower standard of proof. They’re getting ahead of something I surmised. As if by magic, when the partial mobilisation was announced, crowds of “thousands” turned out to protest in major Russian cities. The reality was it was hundreds arranged by some shadowy, deniable CIA affiliate, but they’re mostly facing charges. They’d correctly anticipated how the Western propaganda machine would react two weeks ago.

You can find the full text of Putin’s speech on the Ukraine at various sites and I’d heartily recommend you read it, but for me the pertinent paragraph is the following, especially the last sentence.

“To those who allow themselves to make such statements about Russia, I would like to remind you that our country also has various means of destruction, and for some components more modern than those of the NATO countries. And if the territorial integrity of our country is threatened, we will certainly use all the means at our disposal to protect Russia and our people. It’s not a bluff.”

Be aware, Putin would rather die than be ruled by the West in whatever form. Remember, if there’s one lesson the West has learnt about Putin in the last six months is that he just doesn’t bluff. If he comes out with a shotgun, be in no doubt he’s prepared to use it.

©Pointman

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The Ukraine war – the military realities.

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If you flout these rules, you will gradually be excluded from these activities and in some cases even punished but the biggest punishment is in losing the undoubted benefits of being a part of a group of co-operating individuals who all have different skills, talents or trades to contribute to the group. That co-operation is the force multiplier of any group. By breaking the rules, you become a man alone and such men in reality never prosper in the long term.

The rules are invariably functionally appropriate to the activity the society or group pursues. Without them, the group could not exist. For instance, in the context of organised crime, gangsters are free to kill each other but never each other’s uninvolved family members. I recall a scene in the Godfather film where one gang is drawing up a kill list against the Corleone family. The name Michael Corleone, who is not involved in the family business, is mentioned. The person drawing up the list is immediately reminded – “he’s a civilian, you can’t touch him”. You can spend all your time doing business or protecting your family – but you can’t do both.

In that same milieu, any gangster harming a cop’s family will not only have every cop in the city after him, but every gangster will be working on handing you over to them as well. You break that rule, the gloves come off and nothing goes back to normal until the situation has been resolved. Cops who know what they’re doing operate a reciprocal policy when it comes to gangster’s families – they’re either in the game or they’re civilians.

The intelligence services of opposing countries operate a similar rule though there are some subtleties involved. For instance, if you’re an intelligence officer running a string of locally recruited assets in someone else’s country, you are liable to be arrested. Depending on whether you’re operating as a resident illegal or under diplomatic cover, you may be tried and imprisoned.

After a few years of high security jail, you’ll be swapped for one of their men. Local assets they’ve recruited are treated more harshly since they’re not opposition intelligence officers but are viewed more as traitors. If they’re smart enough to detect your activities and identify you, then it should be no problem in quietly picking you up, whether you’re illegal or not. Just gunning you down like a dog in the street will definitely provoke some sort of reprisal action.

The reality is most capable counterintelligence services have a fair idea of the activities of foreign intelligence officers at work in their country and much prefer to monitor them. That way they find out how money is funneled to the network, how stolen information is sent abroad, any new faces in town and to feed them the occasional nugget of iron pyrates misinformation.

Back in the day when the FBI actually did counterintelligence work and prevented things like 9/11 happening before mutating into America’s secret police, they actually let a KGB network run for nearly ten years before rolling it up.

About a month ago, a Russian journalist called Darya Dugina was assassinated in Moscow by Natalya Vovk, a member of the Ukrainian secret service who also has links to the Azov neo-Nazis there. As with most mainstream Russian journalists, she was nationalist, pro-Putin and anti-Western, sentiments which are widely shared. If she’d one claim to fame it was that she was the daughter of the political commentator Aleksandr Dugin, who was noted for his anti-Westernism and advocacy of a Eurasia-focused Russia.

He’s since been represented by the Western propaganda as the mastermind behind Putin’s activities in the Ukraine but this is patent nonsense. Russia is knee-deep in political theoreticians like him who are roundly ignored by the Kremlin and especially Putin who has absolutely no time for political talkshops who can endlessly debate about how many Ukrainians can dance on a pin head.

There are two things of note about this killing. The first is the victim was a civilian and the second is that within three days of her murder, the Russian intelligence service, in the shape of the FSB, took the unusual step of issuing a detailed account of what happened. Vovk had driven across the Donbass Basin in a car with Donbass plates using her 12-yo daughter in the front seat as cover. On getting into Russia, she had changed her plates to Russian ones and driven to Moscow and Dugina’s apartment complex where she surveilled her target.

From those basic details a narrative was spun. The true target was supposed to have been her father whom she was supposedly driving home from the rally. The car bomb was of the simple timer variety and just blew up killing only the daughter and not her father as well. He’d decided to stay on at the rally for some reason.

Two weeks back, the FSB issued an update on how the assassination had been done. There was another Ukrainian operative called Bogdan Tsiganenko involved in the operation. His job appears to have been to provide logistical support and expertise to the lead assassin. He apparently had false number plates, assembled the not so simple IED device before making good his escaped from Russia into Estonia yet again. Estonia has definitely put itself into the punishment corner with Russia. It seems obvious to me the Russians were already watching Tsiganenko, which is how they got onto Vovk so quickly.

The latest version of the assassination has Vovk observing father and daughter and as the rally ran down, following the unaccompanied latter at some distance on the motorway. The bomb was not of the simple timer variety but a command controlled device. At some point, she detonated the bomb remotely, killing the daughter before also making her escape to Estonia.

In the rough and tumble times of the intelligence business – which are a lot more infrequent than Hollywood would lead you to expect – the Russians are used to having the occasional casualty, but never a civilian. Again, on the rare occasion that someone makes that mistake, the FSB, like their immediate sire the KGB, will go out of their way to make a suitably gruesome example nobody is going to forget in a hurry. There are many instances of such an example being made but I wrote of one a few years back that happened in the Lebanon in the bad old days. The highlights follow.

“At the height of the civil war in the Lebanon, four junior clerks from the Russian embassy in Beirut were kidnapped by Hezbollah. One of them was murdered to prove they meant business and the corpse left for the Russians to find. In response, the KGB kidnapped a nephew of one of the higher up leaders of Hezbollah.

They cut off his balls and had them delivered, together with an exhaustive list of all the names of the extended family members of the whole Hezbollah leadership. On a regular timeline, they cut off more pieces of him, and sent them back to other families as well. Within days, the three clerks were released unhurt and the KGB returned what was left of the body.

That happened in 1983. In the three decades since, no terrorist group has ever come anywhere near Russian embassy staff.”

I haven’t heard of any retaliatory action taken and in the light of the trailing update from the FSB about who exactly was involved in the assassination, my feeling is they’re taking their time and working their way up the responsibility chain of who ordered and who authorised the operation. As in Beirut, they’re after who specifically was behind it. What you can bet the house on is that something suitably biblical is heading towards the Ukrainian foreign security service, elements within its Estonian equivalent and the CIA who seem to be in charge of Ukrainian intelligence.

The Russians don’t forgive, they don’t forget.

©Pointman

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Somewhere at the start of Obama’s second reign, I noticed the first signs of both the weaponisation of the executive and subversion of the judicial branch of the government. The latter was being done by persons such as George Soros who had lots of money but whose only connection to party politics was the large amounts of money the politicians were on their knees begging him for. They got it just as long as they did things his way, which basically involved subverting the rule of law by various means. In the main, this involved ignoring his massive campaign donations to District Attorneys and judges who would ignore the laws already on the books in preference to picking and choosing which ones were to be enforced and on which parties.

The law, instead of being the great equaliser, was to become the rod to punish those who had the impudence to disagree with the ruling elite.

Progressively, the Rule of Law was eroded and as for Due Process, you could be arrested without any judicial basis, formerly called a scrap of evidence, for whatever the DoJ or FBI decided to make up about you. Somebody anonymously denounces you, you end up doing the perp walk in cuffs before a carefully tipped off media, in a prison cell that evening and the only two options open to you are to plead guilty to whatever charges they’ve cooked up about you begging for clemency by accepting some plea deal to something else you never did either or face complete financial ruin in legal fees as well as losing your living, liberty and never mind your reputation. Either way, your life is in ruins.

I’m somebody who against the odds has managed to live and survive very much more than the average person’s share of difficult situations. There’s a lot of self-flattering reasons I could put that down to but the reality has always been I’ve an unusually well-developed peasant instinct to spot approaching danger early and make a judgement call as to whether to fight it now or look for a better time and ground.

Way back then in 2012, if I’d written a blog piece about how I feared that if America wasn’t careful, it’d sleepwalk into a police state. At that time it would have been written off as a paranoid loony piece but I’m sad to say that’s exactly what’s came about in the intervening years. In 2019, I tip-toed towards those thoughts in an article entitled Is it time to break up the FBI? It got a very quiet reception either because people were already becoming fearful of coming to the the FBI’s attention or they thought I’d joined the tin hat brigade of blogging. By 2020 I’d taken the view that if people couldn’t see the reality of what the FBI had become, there was no saving them anyway, so wrote a follow up article entitled It’s time to break up the FBI. I also wrote a short story which I hoped avoided the usual disaster of mixing political preachiness with a good yarn.

We have a DoJ that partisanly prosecutes or not, an IRS service that’s just recruiting the equivalent of two infantry divisions with the proviso in the job advert they must be prepared to carry firearms and use lethal force and a secret police which have become indistinguishable from the Stasi or Gestapo. The founding fathers showed an almost frightening prescience when they fought against the establishment of any federal law enforcement body over the nascent nation because they knew it would inevitably be hijacked by political forces to enforce a police state.

The only miracle was that America and the American people managed to stop that happening for the best part of 250 years, but it and a lot more has arrived.

If the secret police can get approval by the judiciary to searching the residence of the leader figure of the opposition to them and the previous president that’s so vague and extensive it even included the wardrobe of his wife Melania, then law, it’s enforcement or any concept of democracy in America has become a sick joke.

Like their deviant master, I’m sure they enjoyed riffling through her knickers, sniffing any that took their fancy and who knows, perhaps even taking a few souvenirs.

©Pointman

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It’s time to break up the FBI

The rule of law.

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If you load up the balance scales with the benefits versus damage done, it’s hard to see many advantages accruing to the US. As I wrote previously, the administration already manufactured a proxy war with Russia to the point where Russia is seriously considering breaking off all diplomatic links with the US and the latest adventure merely serves to push China even closer to Russia, who haven’t been slow leveraging the diplomatic misjudgement in expressing their support for China in the dispute.

Before discussing the single benefit I think the administration hoped to achieve by it, it’s worth covering the immediate damage it did because that’s what will determine the intensity of Chinese responses to it over the coming years. Note, I said years not weeks. By keeping their heads and not starting WW III over the visit, the Chinese exercised considerable restraint but in doing so, they still “lost face” which is still a very important cultural consideration in that part of the world. Pelosi waltzing in over their protests and out with the parting insult thrown over her shoulder that their protests “did not matter” really turned the dagger.

The years ending in 1949 are known as the Century of Humiliation in China, and with good reason. Up until then, the country was treated like a dismissable colony by various western countries and the people regarded almost like sub-humans, both at home and abroad. Exploited, resource raped and with a huge proportion of the population victims of a very profitable heroin trade supplied by the West. These days, they won’t even have Occidentals as permanent residents.

The final piece of damage is that it’s a characteristic of all totalitarian regimes like China that it becomes obsessive about winning completely. They’re used to getting their way with nobody resisting them. Winning the sham elections they occasionally hold with 95% of the vote is simply not good enough – it has to be at least 99%.

It’s yet another confirmation of something those countries fleeing the western “rules-based” system for BRICS have come to realise about America – it can no longer be trusted, neither in its deals nor how it acts. Leave your money or assets in their financial system and it’s liable to be stolen at any moment. Enter into any partnership deal with them and they’re liable to duck out of it without any notice leaving a mess like Afghanistan is your lap. Long standing agreements like the one-China policy can be dumped without any consultation.

They arrange proxy wars such as Ukraine/Russia, Kosovo/Serbia, Hungry and whoever with their latest effort being Taiwan/China. They’ve developed the habit of announcing agreements and deals made with other countries when no such arrangement has been agreed. They’ve deliberately decided any sort of diplomacy is old hat, preferring instead to conduct it using soundbites without ever consulting in advance the party they’re supposed to be negotiating with.

It’s no surprise that Russia decided recently to all but sever any formal diplomatic ties with America and China’s initial response to Nancy’s visit was to start doing the same in certain specific areas. It’s only a matter of time until they sever all ties as well. You simply can’t trust America anymore.

The one and only benefit of the visit I can see and even then, it would imply it was a month or two premature, is downplaying Russia’s coming success in the Ukraine. Looking at the Ukraine situation, what’s becoming increasingly obvious is the war is lost whatever America does, so that’s the big presentation problem the Biden regime has on the near horizon. At some point they have to get out but if possible this time avoiding another Afghanistan type shambles. Put some distance between yourself and it before it happens.

Looking at the subtly changed narrative of late coming out of government mouthpieces masquerading as mainstream news outlets, you can’t but get the feeling the Biden administration is disengaging, and Zelensky has definitely been chosen as the fall guy. Suddenly we’re told 70% of the armaments supplied disappear as soon as they’re handed over to the Ukraine and magically reappear on the international arms black market. Well done Sherlock, we knew you’d get there in the end.

As for the money, nobody’s dared do any investigation of what happened to the bulk of it, but when you hand over amounts of money running into billions USD and allow them to get away with insisting they’ll monitor its disbursement themselves, you can be sure it went in the front door and out the back one to comfy nests in places like the Cayman Islands, especially when you’re dealing with one of the most corrupt countries in the world.

The whole thing was just an exercise in prestidigitation, legerdemain, sleight of hand. The magician holds a card high up in the air dramatically and says ‘look at this! The audience do, but what they’re not watching is what his other hand is doing.

©Pointman

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“The obvious way for Russia to eliminate the EU as a threat is to destroy Germany. Kill Germany, the EU withers. It’s a matter of how you time it for lasting effect. Turn off all supplies of all commodities to Germany Monday night, Germany dies Tuesday morning and then the domino effect kicks in right across the EU, especially the already vulnerable southern members like Italy and Spain. A more useful strategy would be to let them bleed out. Keep supply significantly below minimum demand and keep them paying the “unfriendly” country premium. You destroy their economy but not so dramatically. A steadily shrinking GDP also destroys the capacity to maintain a large standing army.

At the same time, the resultant economic hardship will hasten regime changes to more Russian friendly ones. Once you’ve humbled Germany onto the breadline and the EU has started to disintegrate with the southern states defaulting on debt as they secede from it, you can start talking about not only leaving the EU but another organisation as well.”

With the notable exception of PM Viktor Orban of Hungary, the leaders of the most prominent EU countries are not only mediocrities but chronically incompetent when it comes to basic politics. The leadership in Brussels is actually totally unelected but rather appointed by various unelected committees which are infamous for their opaqueness. Yes, I know, there’s what’s called an EU parliament which is full of elected members but since it can’t legislate never mind veto the various EU directives, it’s a pseudo-democratic oddity.

The net result is the EU is run by diktat with all important decisions being made by faceless committees and unelected presidents (at last count seven of them). Their idea of politics is just telling the 27 member states to shut up and do as they’re told. While this works most of the time internally, it doesn’t work when dealing with states outside the EU orbit. That developed reflex is why they jumped instantly on Biden’s bandwagon and indeed started doing their very own sanction packages under the fanatically Russian hating leadership of a German maniac called Ursula von der Leyen, who has all the bad bullying instincts of a power-crazed bureaucrat.

There are two great mistakes at work here. The first and most basic was that it’s the EU that’s totally dependent on supplies of energy and commodities from Russia, not the other way around. A ten minute pause to think through the boomerang effect of such sanctions on the EU economies would have would have avoided the self-inflicted wound it’s currently trying to slap a pressure bandage on. It was always Russia that could destroy the economies of the EU, which never had the slimmest prospect of destroying the Russian economy since it was totally energy and food independent.

Second, Putin is a tough guy who barely notices the threats and hostile actions of comparative minnows like the EU, especially when supposedly backed up by a weak American administration that seems determined to blunder from one foreign policy disaster to another. His instincts on the latter proved to be accurate – the Biden administration is already dropping the whole mess in the EU’s lap while moving briskly on to another foreign relations disaster with China.

One of Ursula’s first typically excessive moves was an attempt to totally ban by sanctions Russian natural gas and oil purchases by member states. This diktat was never going to work if she’d taken the time to consult with someone who knew the basics about the energy market within the EU. It instantly ran into furious opposition from all directions for the simple reason that it would destroy most economies within Europe, most especially Germany’s which is the goose laying the golden eggs that actually keeps the EU solvent.

The opposition amongst the smaller states was led by Orban of Hungary who pointed out they get 90% of their energy needs imported from Russia. How could they replace that in the short term? The other smaller member states in basically a similar situation all rallied behind him, which is yet another reason why the EU and the US are currently engaged in an ongoing regime change effort in Hungary. After a lot of handbagging, the mandate became an optional sanction which very few members took the trouble to avail themselves of. At that time Orban pointedly took a flight to Moscow for direct talks with Putin, the exact details of which are not all known.

After that, fate intervened in the whole natural gas situation in the shape of one massive Siemens manufactured pump breaking down and instantly reducing the flow to Germany through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline from Russia to 40%. Fine, the EU could live with that (meaning Germany) for a week or so, but after the pump was sent to Canada for repairs, it got snared up in a sanctions interpretation squabble between German and Canada.

When it became clear that the pump would not be returned to Nord Stream 1 anytime soon, Ursula’s response was to demand 15% of every member state’s winter reserve. No way was the general response by most of them because by now they’d worked out the coming winter was going to be very tough not only on their citizens but them getting through it without their government being thrown out of power. Cold and hungry populations change governments very quickly.

Her next proposal was that every state cut household supplies by 15% immediately, so they can collect the natural gas saved and distribute it evenly all over the EU ie to Germany to keep it afloat. Hungary and others said no and not only that, the latter sent their foreign minister to Moscow for direct discussions with Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov and even have another chat with Putin about securing a steady gas supply for Hungary. It’s an old-fashioned thing called diplomacy and it seems to be bearing fruit for them. I’ve no doubt other member states will soon be following suit at some time.

This proposal from Brussels was initially mandatory but in ran foul of political realities. Beginning August, the EU is now implementing a voluntary 15% reduction in member states’ gas usage but the reality is it’s the sort of porous agreement anyone can sign up to because there are so many concessions and special let out clauses like giving it their “best effort” in it that it’s essentially meaningless. Once the electorates of EU states start to complain of blackouts, power outs and no heating through winter, watch their local political leaders ignoring the EU’s “request” and instead concentrating on their own political survival.

Between Canada and Germany taking over two months to sort out a simple pump repair and the general reluctance of most EU PMs to take a domestic political bullet for Germany, I don’t think little Vladdi could believe his luck. They were actually using their own sanctions to hurt each other. I think it was at that point he decided he’d let Germany, and therefore the EU, bleed out. If they were going to be that stupid, he might as well begin bringing them to heel.

Magically, another pump on the Nord Stream 1 pipeline started to malfunction this week, so from from July 27th, Russia natural gas flow to Germany will be cut to 20%. That means their reserves to get them through winter won’t be filled and according to some analysts the result of selectively rationing gas supplies to some industries means about one fifth of German manufacturing firms will go bust. Call me cynical but I suspect there will be a steady supply of such niggling supply problems to Germany.

Whether the 15% reduction skim is still optional or now mandatory seems to change from day to day with all the dithering around the EU is doing but what is for sure is that there’s real opposition to it from countries like Spain, Greece, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, Portugal and others, some of whom get less than 15% of their gas from Russia anyway. They all know their gas would be going to Germany and there’s an element of payback to withholding it since Germany has been enforcing its own austerity regimes on other member states for the last decade. It’s high time they learnt for themselves how that feels.

The EU has no realistic solutions to the plethora of serious problems it faces, especially with the supply of natural gas this winter. Its best effort is to offer the latest in a long list of other countries that can supply the needed gas – Nigeria. The first was the US, then Azerbaijan and then Qatar. None of them can do it because they’re already at max production capacity and there aren’t enough LNG tankers in the world to move it to the EU anyway.

Short term there will be regime changes within the EU as we get deeper into winter. Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor, is almost certain to lose power. The EU president Ursula von der Leyen will have to be replaced with someone less virulently anti-Russian if there’s to be any hope of negotiating with them to walk back the sanctions and normalise supplies from Russia, but there are severe difficulties there.

First of all, Russia doesn’t have to supply the EU with anything since they’ve already found new markets eager to be supplied by them on the favourable basis of not being “unfriendly” countries. Second, the EU has pledged to supply forever an enemy on their border with an endless supply of weapons to attack Russia with, so it’s in Russia’s interest to crush the EU economically as it had tried to do to them. Last but not least, the pettiness and spite with which the EU has pursued sanctions against Russia has poisoned any relationship Russia ever had with western Europe. It’s now looking eastwards for its future.

Nothing lasts forever, not even seemingly huge powerful power blocks. Remember the USSR? It was gone within a year or two and it was the disastrous state of its economy that killed it off. A few more years of Russia keeping the EU on the rack and slowly ratcheting up the pressure will tear it apart.

©Pointman

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After the Ukraine, will Russia kiss and make up with the West?

Remind me again, which country’s economy was sanctions going to devastate?

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I’ve seen the number 100 billion USD as an estimate of how much money West block, that’s to say the US and EU, have given to the Ukraine in the last five months. That’s about 2,500 USD for every Ukrainian in that time period. As economic belts start to tighten in Europe, which is being hardest hit by blowback from the sanctions disaster, audit functions within even the EU are starting to dig their heels in about there being absolutely no accounting for what’s happening to the money as soon as it’s handed over to the Ukrainians.

For instance the EU amidst great fanfare recently announced a 9 billion euro donation but their own audit people refused to sign it off until some basic audit safeguards were finally put in place. The net result after a lot of internal screaming and shouting in Brussels was the Ukrainians would only get one billion euros for the moment until the audit guys were supplied with certain information about previous donations. Significantly, the Ukraine stalled and stalled refusing to supply the details the EU audit people wanted and then quietly dropped the whole issue. In the audit business, that’s not a red flag but a ruddy great polaris-sized rocket lighting up the entire night sky.

Another example is the Ukrainian government announcing they’d apparently sold off the country’s entire bullion reserve in an 11.9 billion USD transaction. Mebbe they needed the cash to keep the war going or meet the state payroll for a few months but one of the biggest bullion traders called the trade “murky” for a number of reasons. The first was they couldn’t find any trace of it and the second was the way the numbers didn’t quite make much financial sense. You see, the last official balance of Ukrainian gold reserves reported by themselves a year or two before the war broke out was 1.7 billion USD, which means this “murky” transaction nobody could find hair nor hide of was seven times the amount of gold officially held.

Gold has done its usual rise in value in economically uncertain times or when war breaks out, but certainly not a seven-fold increase. A more likely explanation for this ghost transaction is that someone has been quietly asset stripping the Ukrainian government and by a slip of the accounting pen simply got whatever assets they’ve just sold to be redesignated as held in the form of gold in the central bank. Suddenly, the books balance. Anyway, it’s all history now, because all the gold has vanished. What that indicates to me is a party or parties unknown have helped themselves to roughly 10.2 billion USD of assets from the government, plus 1.7 billion USD in gold bullion for some weekend spending money. Who says government is just a cost overhead that doesn’t generate money?

The corpse of the Ukraine hasn’t quite been picked clean yet but some large amounts of money can still be made off it if you’re nimble of foot and just as big a thief prepared to flout stock market abuse rules. There’s a particular way of manipulating the price of a quoted security that goes by many names but the usual one these days is “pump and dump”. Believe it or not, it didn’t used to be illegal but it certainly is these days. A real life example illustrates best the basic scam.

There was a journalist who wrote a stock tips column for one of the major British tabloids. As with most cons, it relied on the victim’s greed. This was somewhere in the 80’s and the greed is good craze had really taken hold of the public. He’d mention some penny stock in his column with an enigmatic phrase something like how market rumours were that something was afoot, know what I mean guv’nor, wink, wink, nod, nod. Time to get in on the ground floor was the none too subtle message.

Lo and behold, at market opening next day, the price had leapt upwards and the journalist would add in a smug I told you so to his daily column. Of course, the only reason the shares had risen was his tip and the small army of investors AKA suckers who followed it piling in. After a few days of constant rises the company in question would be forced by the regulator to issue a statement to clarify the situation, which usually went along the lines of they weren’t aware of any corporate interest in them.

With that, the over-inflated share price collapsed but by then, the con was already complete. Weeks before the tip was published, the journo and his cronies had been quietly accumulating substantial holdings in the security in amounts smallish enough not to raise suspicion, then when the stock tip was dropped, the value of their holdings increased amidst the buying frenzy. They rode the bull for a while and then in a timely fashion sold their holdings at a considerable profit, leaving nothing but an army of small investors clutching certificates in an essentially worthless company. In a similar but also illegal fashion, you can also make money artificially depressing the price of a company in order to scoop it up very cheap.

A good example of a pump and dump, occurred last week over the Ukraine. On Monday, Reuters – trusted news source (yeah) – came out with an article about how Russia was going to cut off all supplies of natural gas to Germany and they’d even see a letter to that effect, courtesy of Mr. Anonymous Source, received by some natural gas supplier in Germany. Imagine the spike that caused in natural gas prices and the various companies who supplied or traded in it. Big firms and commodities are not immune to getting the pump and dump treatment.

By Wednesday, more to calm internal markets than anything, Putin reiterated that Russia lives up to its contractual obligations, a none too subtle reference to the way international contractual obligations had become worthless when it came to the West block and the application of sanctions. Russian supplies of natural gas would resume on Thursday though with the useful caveat that the continued supply thereafter would depend on the quality of the repairs done to the pumps in Canada. If the work on the pumps was shoddy and breaks down, Germany is on her own. Russia supplies of natural gas did indeed resume to Germany on Thursday.

If that doesn’t look like a classic pump and dump, tell me what it was.

©Pointman

Related articles by Pointman:

The great global warming con.

Remind me again, which country’s economy was sanctions going to devastate?

The Ukraine war – the military realities.

All articles about the Ukraine situation

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