Ales Dvorak

Yugoslavia 1999-2000. Very serious list.

You really need to allow yourself growth and accept nuance in your world view. It's not always US bad - other side good.
You're right, US is much better.

You really need to allow yourself growth and accept nuance in your world view. It's not always US bad - other side good.
You're right, US is much better.

You didn't answer my question, though. The fact that the Australians want nuclear submarines can have a lot of good (and some bad) reasons but is in itself no evidence of Chinese expansionism. I also didn't say that the Chinese government doesn't act aggressive. They are aggressively establishling presence, militarily and otherwise, in a number of regions. But so do a number of other countries, the USA being a prime example. But where do you see the Chinese actually expanding their territory? Hong Kong used to be Chinese and was given back by the UK, so that doesn't qualify. Taiwan is, well, complicated, in the sense that most countries for whatever reason don't have official diplomatic relations with them and so accept that Taiwan is still somehow Chinese. You don't have to agree with that but that's why Taiwan is also not a good example for expansionism. So, honest question because maybe I'm just missing it, where do you think China is going to expand its territory?

Gonna contend here that condemning china or the US or anyone else for imperial behavior is coming fron a place of team sports and not principled opposition to their hegemonic tactics, ambitions, or violations of sovereignty. So move on. 

Wait, didn't t you know that China has over 750 military bases all across the globe and is enforcing chinese language, chinese currency, chinese culture and chinese weapons everywhere?
But it's too difficult to write in chinese so we all continue in english here. 

The other big thing about this war is that no one thought it would go this way.  Even if Big Mil Contracting had the ability to stage such manoeuvres the community of expertise that could make a prediction that this war would turn out as it did, with high accuracy, is almost non-existent.  In fact, most of the experts - both mil and academic - were predicting a pretty short sharp  "Russian-win" affair and long insurgency; we definitely saw it through our own lens of experiences over the last 20 years.
So unless this profiteering cabal was somehow hooked into some serious counter-thinking, and were willing to bet the political capital they would need to spend on that, well the idea kind of falls apart.  It would have been an extremely high risk wager that Ukraine would somehow be a larger western market after a Russian intervention.  That gets pretty "out there" very fast.  I mean if a company has that level of accurate predictive analytics, why go through the bother of a war?  They basically could own any market they want already.
No, this was a sad scared little man with way too much power and no real feedback loops.  He decided that for "reasons" the time was right to show that he was a still a "big boy" and talked himself into a really bad plan - he has been "digging upward" ever since.  His military ran headlong into 21st century warfare, even though this is really a very early version of it, and got crushed pretty badly.  It is now all about simply trying to stay in power and staying alive.
No star chambers or CIA plots, just people doing "people".

Well it seems to start out just a little eccentric but gets progressively weirder.  The gist of it is that US/NATO pushed Ukraine into a ware with Russia so that they could use the crisis to accelerate digitisation of the UKR government and then use Google/Azure/Amazon tech to control the country.  Also that Covid wasn't really that bad and governments were scaremongering to control citizens.  Sure, UKR gov't uses cloud services but so do lots of companies and governments, that doesn't mean these tech giants cooperate to undermine democracy or that UKR is no longer sovereign as a result.  They also say that Zelensky banned all opposition parties, not just some Russian-linked ones.
I thought the presenter's style sounded a bit Tucker Carlson and guess what, he's an ex-Fox presenter and ex-real estate investor/promoter.  The channel even states that it's not presenting news but entertainment.

Russian T-90 Tank From Ukraine Mysteriously Appears At U.S. Truck Stop
The folks at Peto’s Travel Center and Casino in Roanoke, Louisiana see all kinds of vehicles pull up, but Tuesday night was different. What ended up in their parking lot is certainly something of a mystery, to say the least.
Someone left a Russian T-90A tank, which open source intelligence (OSINT) trackers say was captured by Ukraine last fall, on a trailer after the truck hauling it broke down and pulled into this truck stop off U.S. Interstate 10. An employee at Peto's, and the individual who first posted the images on Reddit, shared them with The War Zone.
more pics at the link

My brother in law just died a needlessly horrible drawn out death, today. He fought for decades in a variety of ways to defend the USA. One person was directly responsible for how it went down. My sister is heartbroken, and enraged at what happened. I am in more than a foul mood. So my thoughts right now are colored in a certain way by this tragedy. Not particularly with distance, nuance and diplomacy. What happens when you are inside the box, not outside. My apologies if you don’t like them. I don’t either.
Lot of talk lately about Ukraine has GOT to produce big battlefield wins, now. Trying to put myself within Ukraine’s box:
1. Your country was suddenly invaded by one of the largest monsters in the world, ravaging your cities, raping and killing civilians. That is awful. We condemn it. You will collapse in three days.
2. We are NATO. We are a hugely powerful military alliance designed  to defend ourselves against that very same horrible monster.  Because we all fear trying to do so alone. Like you. Too bad you aren’t in NATO.
3. There won’t be any cavalry coming to your rescue, on land, sea, or air. But good luck, we support you brave people. Here are a lot of supplies and defensive short range weapons. You go fight the monster. We’ll cheer you on. 
4. OK, you have been doing a great job! Well done. Even with most of your cities and power grid regularly under missile and drone attack in the winter,  thousands of casualties, and smashed into rubble cities, you are still standing! Great job! Here are some more weapons, and one with a little longer range. It works really well so you can continue to not only survive but make some progress. Not too much progress though. Might be dangerous. So, no to your other requests for planes and long range weapons. We can’t risk getting attacked by the monster.. But we will open war crimes investigations into the massacres, rapes and civilian killings and targetings.
5. Hey, you haven’t won yet! We don’t think you can win although the monster has obviously already lost. You have really fracked up his army good. By the way, our patience is growing thin and you haven’t defeated one of the world’s largest military powers yet. After a whole year.  We are the richest group of countries ever on Earth.  We have awesome military capabilities beyond belief. And lots of nuclear weapons. If we lose interest and get tired, you probably will have to negotiate away big chunks of your country you fought and died for. If you only achieve a stalemate against the monster. Unless you defeat that monster, real soon now. Here’s a few older tanks we made a long time ago. And a handful of rusty old Soviet/Russian jets, some don’t work though. Please don’t complain. It’s ungrateful.
6. Oh, hey. Go out there as soon as the ground is firmed up and really tear apart the monster, the monster we are definitely not wanting to get any madder at us. No pressure, but if you don’t defeat the monster right now, you are pretty much up a creek because we’re tired and have real problems here in our nice undamaged, heated homes. By the way, we are worried about you defeating the monster. What will happen to the him? He might hurt us. But don’t forget, the monster has already lost.
7. I mean, yeah, the monster just threw a few hundred thousand troops at you and you survived and all. Well, most of you. But hey, they weren’t well-trained. And we all know the monster has already lost (as far as threatening us over here in NATO - yay).  So you better defeat this monster by yourself, Right now. We gave you a LOT of equipment so you should be able to do this on your own. We can’t get involved. But here are a few more old jets. Don’t work so good right now, but…
8. We just got Finland into NATO!  Mostly thanks to you!). Now we are even stronger, and NATO makes sure none of us have to try to defeat the monster on our own. Like you. Because we don’t think we could. We can’t give you more powerful offensive weapons because it would have taken you all last year to learn how to use them. And then you might have defeated the monster. And we are really really worried because that might be bad. For us. You understand. So go out there NOW and defeat the monster. Or we will probably have to reduce our support for you. Like, if things get really bad for you. Not winning. We might not be there. As much. Or something. Hard to tell. But go win. Now. OK? 

PS. I really am pleased at how the West has helped out. I just don’t think it’s been soon enough with enough of the right stuff to end it before the political rot sets in. So I’m ventilating how it might feel. While I am grieving.

Hmmmm ... manipulation?

Tanks sent in Ukraine won't change anything said croatian admiral Davor Domazet -Lošo in his 2 hours interview.  ( Problem - number of tanks and different systems )
( I can send link, but interview is in croatian language.)

I guess that's why he is an admiral not a general? 😋 Seriously though, I think most of us here agree that a few tanks won't be a game changer by themselves. Then again, I guess even if they are more symbolic in nature, for now, a morale boost from shiny new toys can have a very real effect.

Can we all just take a moment to enjoy the irony of an American calling for more action by the ICC 🤣

Bureaucracy at its best...
 
 

The ones I've seen show the footage suddenly replaced by static. Not a mix of the footage and the static in the last moments. Also, to me it looks like it flew past, so unless it was remotely detonated...
Last frame before impact:

Impact frame

Frame after impact - now the camera is working again?

Several frames follow with a kind of "VHS filter"

Couple of frames later, still some of the original image remaining. How long does it take a drone camera to explode?

You mean like the 9/11 terrorists who conveniently managed to have a passport surface among the rubble of the twin towers? Usually that's a code for "we have intel but can't or don't want to share the source".

Even on the flag.
 

I think this is a really weak article. The basic fact that "Zeitenwende" is all talk with nothing actually happening is true and to some that may come as a surprise. But after all, Scholz was elected for being Merkel 2.0. That said, the fact that not more money was spent so far probably boils down to what I said earlier: more money won't make the Bundeswehr administration more efficient and at the very best it will just take more time.
The rest, I think, is very inaccurate and even naive. I'll just go over a few examples:
This is basically saying: Scholz promised 100 billion € for the army but instead spent 200 billions on German's energy bills. But in reality both is money Germany doesn't have, it is financed by credit. So, it is not like the government took money from one project and spent it on another. Moreover, the 200 billions were literally about families not being able to pay their energy bills. Does anyone think US voters would have looked kindly on arms deliveries to Ukraine when at the same time they didn't have electricity and/or heating ? The 200 billions, in parts, silenced the discussion about whether we can afford to take part in the sanctions against Russia and in that regard (I won't go into the actual details of spending the money) it was money that probably helped more in the current situation than the Zeitenwende-money ever will.
This is basically the same thing as with criticising Isreal. Not everyone who does is anti-semitic and not everyone who criticises US politics is anti-American. Many, many Germans protested against nukes on German soil back in the day which was part of a larger pacifist movement - many of the Greens (who are now very pro-weapons deliveries to Ukraine) were there, too.
This ties in with the above and is both naive and inaccurate. First of all, we tend to forget that Germany is West Germany + GDR. The latter was not protected by the USA but was their enemy. A detail but an important one. Moreover, during the Cold War, Germans didn't have that much of a choice: The USA were still an occupying power, not our friends. During that time many GIs were here and a lot of personal ties between Germany and USA were made. There were and are many personal friendships but that is a different thing. Of course most West Germans were grateful that US and NATO kept the Soviets at bay. But at the same time everyone was aware that even without global nuclear apocalypse, Germany was likely to end up as wasteland in case of the Cold War going hot. Better dead than red was something many here didn't subscribe to. Now, Vietman was a bit before my time. In my personal experience the real low point was the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Being bashed for not joining a war that violated international law and was based on lies and fabricated evidence doesn't make good friends. Do I need to go on with Guantanamo, water-boarding and stuff like that, that most here found entirely disgusting (possibly on a My Lai level)?
That only 46% think that the US are a reliable ally is related to the above but in addition Germans do watch the news. 😉 Even before Trump there was much talk (from the Bush and the Obama administration) about "Old Europe" and especially under Obama there was a perceived shift towards Asia instead of Europe. Then there were all the NSA-shenanigans. Tapping into our Chancellor's mobile? Reliable allies, for certain. (Remember that Snowden is considered a hero, not a traitor by the majority of Germans for exactly this reason.) 
I don't think I have to discuss Trump here. Suffice to say that it reminded many who were naive about states being friends that states interact based on interests and that the US (like probably all other countries in the world, this is not about US-bashing) would be a reliable ally for just as long as it is in their interest to be.
Apologies if my words hurt feelings. This is a difficult topic. Let me say that many Germans like US culture - um, no, US lifestyle, the USA are still too young to have something that qualifies as culture 😉 - have US friends, love to travel there and all that. This personal level is just not the same as trusting the USA as a state or the US government.

ha, my very first concert was Frank Zappa!

that's because every time German howitzers cross Slovakian border one way or the other - it doesn't end well

These are the real dividers in Europe:

 
and of course this:

 
From: https://atlasofprejudice.com/