@yellopig
when it comes to keeping trying to keep a failing Empire alive. The EU has already been thrown under the bus by obediently toeing the Russian sanctions and seem to be facing a very cold and hungry winter.

Treating its ‘friends’ so poorly, it makes me wonder if the US wouldn’t also offer up its own population in defense of it’s hubristic claim to global preeminence and a unipolar world economy.

Something's got to give.

The next proxy has already volunteered: Lithuania https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/lithuania-says-sanctions-goods-kali...!

For those of you checking your maps right now, Kaliningrad is Russian territory separated from the mainland by Belorussia & Lithuania, similar to how Alaska is separated from the lower 48. It’s like if Canada cut off land and air routes from Washington state to Alaska. Sea routes are available, but why would the guy in the middle suddenly become such an a$$hole? Oh yeah, because our favorite Uncle told him to.

That’s power: when you can just point to a whole country and tell them to commit suicide, and they do it! Even after watching the whole Ukraine thing go down!

Here’s the bonus part: Lithuania is NATO. So if anybody hits Lithuania, Article 5 kicks in and all of NATO gets to go to war. Whee!

@Cassiodorus

about Washington's wars. It’s very challenging to know that the US government/military is totally de-sensitised to killing and humiliation; and that financial benefit to the few matter more than the life of so many, worldwide.

I thought they were merely meant to be prolonged, so that Congress could maximize the amount of money it prints and hands to rich people. Wasn't that, for instance, the point of staying in Afghanistan for as long as the US did?

@The Wizard  
become an innovation hub for Latin America!

And then Alaska secedes and begins working with Russia and China, and engineers from all three countries build a system of tunnels and bridges across the Bering Strait, as part of the Belt and Road Initiative!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bering_Strait_crossing

Which subset of Americans, realizing the present setup is failing, will be the first to ditch the war-and-empire-chained status quo and embrace a new, more harmonious way forward for the planet based on sovereignty and mutual respect?

Ukraine is a NATO trained and armed nation. When Russia wins this Special Military Operation some conclusions are not very positive for the US/EU.

- Russia militarily beat NATO in a European ground war. This outcome should have been obvious. No amount of training and arming could bring Ukraine up to the level of Russia. This clearly had to be a result of dismissing Russia by virtue of Rusophobia. In any land war near Russia it is now likely that NATO could not prevail. NATO membership for the Baltic states decreases their security

- Both Ukraine and the US and NATO have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that they are collectively agreement incapable. Poroshenko just admitted publicly that Ukraine never intended to implement the Minsk Accords. The West never intended to force Ukraine to adhere to the Accords. This makes a negotiated settlement extremely unlikely and guarantees the virtual end of Ukraine as a Western asset.

- Russia has come to the conclusion that their move towards the West in the 1990s was a mistake. They are now fully behind creating an non-Western world with China, India, and all of the Global South. This will be a huge blow to US economic and military hegemony and the US dollar.

-

@Pluto's Republic amerika is lead by failure and therefore will soon be a failed state if not already. Privatizing everything from the govt on down has turned everything into shit.

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2022/06/two-big-errors-about-russia-by-hel...

Two Big Errors About Russia - By Helmholtz Smith

by Helmholtz Smith

American and Western policy towards Russia is founded on two serious errors. (A considerable understatement, of course – the past thirty years show that conventional Western ideas of Russia are almost completely wrong.)

But these two are endlessly repeated and, no matter how many times they are proven wrong, they remain the foundational assumptions of the West's attempts to change or control Russia.

First is the idea that the Russian economy is feeble, unbalanced and dependent on income from the West. The second is that Putin is the chief of a band of thieves who, who if made to feel pain, will get rid of him. Sanctions will collapse the first and bring the pain to cause the second. (Another delusion is that once Putin goes, everything will be to the West's liking – but I did say there was a multitude of misconceptions.)

First let's consider Russia's economy. Op-eds that say that the Russian economy is the size of Texas or Belgium or Luxembourg or whatever simply translate rubles into dollars and gallop to their preassigned conclusion. They never ask how big the space program of the country Russia is compared to is, or how many nuclear submarines it makes, or new subway stations, airports or bridges it opens, or whether that country makes all kinds of airplanes and trucks, or how much food it grows and exports or anything else that actually measures a real economy.

As soon as they did, of course, they would see that the Russian economy is much bigger than the puerile ruble-dollar comparison suggests. And, a slightly closer look would reveal that Russia's economy is almost self-sufficient. But the West carries on confident that Russia is a "gas station with nuclear weapons" and its feeble economy can be easily collapsed. RAND based a whole strategy on "Russia’s greatest vulnerability... is its economy, which is comparatively small and highly dependent on energy exports

They persist in the face of all experience to the contrary. The EU cut food exports to Russia to, I suppose, bring people out into the streets protesting the disappearance of exotic cheese (remember Masha Gessen's heartbreak about my little cheese?) Russia responded intelligently and is now self-sufficient in food and Europe has lost that market. Biden was going to reduce the ruble to rubble but Moscow effortlessly countered him and the ruble is now tied to energy – one of the strongest foundations a currency can have.

And still the sanctions pile on. But it's educational – now we know a lot more about what potash is used for and where it comes from. And neon – who knew that was important? Rare earths! Beer bottles! Moscow is only just now starting to counter-sanction and the world is discovering that Russia is a major producer of a lot of important things and if you sanction them, you will find yourself running short of lots of things you'd never heard of. (You'd think anyone who owned an atlas would be able to figure out that a country as large as Russia must be a big producer of most resources).

Biden can blame Putin all he likes, but sanctioning energy and potash is a certain way to drive up prices all round. Biden used to think that Russia had "nuclear weapons and oil wells and nothing else". Maybe the people running Russia are better at thinking things out and seeing reality than we thought they were. (Yet another mistaken Western assumption – what is there in the last twenty years that suggests we're smarter than they are?)

The idea that Russia is a big criminal conspiracy and Putin is the Boss of Bosses is the foundation of the personal sanctions strategy. So-and-so is deemed "close to Putin", whatever that means, and he's prevented from going to Paris to buy cheese and his yacht is stolen confiscated. Angry, he sits down with the other capos and decides it's time the Boss was found face down in a bowl of kasha and blood. The think tankers tell us that Putin is the Chief Thief holding onto power by spreading the loot around, fake elections and making critics disappear. (By the way, wasn't he supposed to have tried to kill Navalny, where's the oped savant explaining why he's still alive?)

All elections in Russia are fake, all opinion polls are fake, all media is controlled by the Kremlin, the underbosses are hurting so why is Putin still there? It surely couldn't be that he is the very popular and respected elected head of state – to suggest that would be to call into question three decades of US and EU think tankery. Therefore he must be just one more sanction away from being whacked out. And so more names – all "close to Putin" – are added to more lists. But nothing changes.

These two errors run on and on. Russia is now the most sanctioned country ever and Western politicians still think another round of "tough sanctions" will do the job. But the more sanctions it survives, the more sanction-proof Russia becomes.

Wars are irruptions of brutal reality into fantasy and the Ukraine war is laying bare the empty complacency at the root of the West's view of Russia. It's going to be a cold hungry winter in Europe and in parts of America. Can't blame Putin forever.

But the depressing truth is that minds are rarely changed, you have to change the man. How much longer will the West's leaders outlast their repeated failures?

...one may wonder how

All is well in the world when the US illegally invades as many as seven nations, waging a mix of wars over a twenty year period, with intense spending, endless money printing, loss of life, tens of millions of dislocated people wandering the earth, weaponizing both sides, turning cities to rubble, constant loss of life, billions of dollars worth of equipment abandoned, sanctions on any country that complains, embassies closed, diplomats expelled, treaties broken, oil stolen. assassinations, war crimes, chemical weapons attacks, drug running, arms dealing, nations destroyed, genocide, and every bit of it illegal.

During the wide spread endless US wars, not once did world's key critical supply chains break down around the world at the same time, resulting in empty shelves in the grocery store and shortages else where. During the long and pointless war on terror, Americans were never once told that they face death by starvation next year because of the war. A couple of months of US war never once resulted in sudden historic price inflation that instantly destroyed significant levels the dollar's purchasing power, both at the grocery store and the gas pump. Twenty years of massive US war spending never once caused an inflation that is so severe and unexpected that even the Federal Reserve can't figure out how to control it. Never during the corrupt US wars were people told they could be living the last days of their lives.

But four months into comparatively tiny war that the US pretends it is not fighting — Americans are told they are doomed to starvation or perhaps nuclear radiation from WWIII. It seems that the end of the world as we know it can only occur when Putin is fighting a small war with its neighbor just on the other side of a shared section of Russia's border. Doom is only predicted when Russia is fighting in a small area occupied by besieged ethnic Russians, while Russia is spending only a fraction of what the US spends on global murder and mayhem on any given day. Meanwhile, the EU chickenhawks are now certain they will be invaded by Russia because a fraction of Russia's army population is engaged in street fighting with NeoNazis in a small section of Ukraine, with virtually no support from air strikes. In the US, Americans are being cut off from medical support from pandemic infections, because the US gave its safety-net pandemic cash to Ukraine to kill Russians. Ukraine will ONLY spend OTHER PEOPLE'S money to arm its Neonazi militias to fight wars it cannot afford — wars that it could stop at any time by pledging NATO neutrality, instead of threatening to murder Russian speakers inside its borders.

Americans have so little curiosity.