I have no idea what Amazon’s recent warning message to me was about, but it was apparently not about my review of The Global Currency Plot. After a week and a half, they finally posted it. You are free to follow the link and give it a helpful vote.
Here, as is often the case, the most important books are the most overlooked. The War against Whites is not a very good book but it will be widely read. Conversely, Philippe Rushton, who broke an incredible amount of new ground, is ignored as widely as possible. The Origins of Woke, also presenting a number of new ideas, is receiving only a moderately warm reception. I have seen more than one attack on author Richard Hanania, calling him an egoist and all sorts of other bad names. Could it have anything to do with the fact that he is a conservative Palestinian American?
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To me the news on the war front is big. Ukraine used ATACMS missiles, which have been under discussion for a long time now, to devastate two air bases from which the Russians had been sending attack helicopters to effectively deter Ukrainian tanks and other armor. America delivered the missiles in secrecy so they could have the most potent effect. They claim to have knocked out a goodly number of helicopters.
The Russians have thrown massive numbers of troops and armored equipment into the battle to slow the Ukrainian advance toward the Azov Sea, which would cut off their lines of communication with the Kherson and Zaporizhia oblasts. They have to have been demoralized by their recent losses in manpower – up to a thousand per day according to the Ukrainians. If they can no longer rely on helicopters to attack Ukrainian armor, and the Ukrainians can deploy newly acquired tanks, in particular the Abrams, they may yet be able to manage a breakthrough this fall before winter weather brings things to a standstill. Ukraine has been consolidating its position around Robotne and Verbove without making any significant new pushes. It may be that they were waiting for this moment, when the Russians would be in disarray without their most potent antitank weapons.
To repeat an observation that one of the analysts made a few months ago, the Ukrainian Army does not have to get all the way to the sea. All they need is to get close enough that their artillery can prevent Russian convoys from resupplying the two westerly oblasts. The experts estimated that another 15 miles would be more than enough for that purpose.
These distances are not all that great. In 2009 I rented a car in Zaporizhia and drove through Tokmak on my way to the beach in Berdyansk. The trip only took a couple of hours. The countryside was agricultural. Although military bloggers point out strategic heights here and there, to me it was fairly uniformly flat, without any interesting features until you got down to the sea.
The Azov Sea, as the map will tell you, is connected with the Black Sea only through the narrow straits of Kerch. Protected as it is, it doesn’t have much in the way of surf. Strong winds produce a lot of whitecaps, but they are only a foot or so high. The waves don’t roll enough to break up the clam and cockle shells which remain painful to walk on as you get out into the water. The water itself is shallow – you have to walk a couple of hundred yards before you can swim. I am sure that keeping the port open requires frequent dredging.
While I’m on the subject, I will note that the hotel keepers and restaurant people I met in Berdyansk, and of course the girl I was with, while they all spoke Russian, seemed to be happy being Ukrainian and ready to welcome an American. Perhaps all the more so because I spoke their language instead of Ukrainian. It does not surprise me to learn that Ukraine has very good military intelligence coming from this area and that partisans often successfully sabotage the Russian military. Russians are not very lovable people. All they have are the traditional Russian assets of bribes and brutal force. Some Ukrainians refuse to be convinced.
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Now that all except the most obtuse of the progressives have conceded that Covid 19 was invented in a laboratory, the panic was overblown and the shots were dangerous, attention is turning to how it happened.
Once again, Naomi Wolf, whom at least one of your readers is urgently trying to persuade me to ignore, has assembled some pretty good information. This long piece summarizes a large number of peer-reviewed studies that have been done on the brainwashing that was used to convince two thirds of the world’s population to get the shots. Among their other conclusions are that (1) liberals were easier to convince than conservatives just about everywhere in the world, and (2) the Poles, having had recent experience with communist brainwashing, resisted the jabs better than most other nations.
To me this is important because even though Covid is over, we are being subjected to similar brainwashing techniques on an ongoing basis. In fact, they have even increased the amplitude of with regard to global warming. After reading this piece you should be properly suspicious of everything you hear and read.
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That’s the news from Lake WeBeGone, where as the weather has fallen into the 30s the strong man continues to bicycle to kindergarten and school with the girls, the good looking woman is getting the garden in order for winter, and next week Eddie and Zoriana will enjoy a week of vacation after a strong start to the school year.
Winter is coming. Last night in Berlin, it was zero degrees. For those who don't know Celsius, that's cold, as in freezing.
I continue to be amazed by the number of those commentators who I respect who have been drinking the Kool-Aid. I listened to a talk by Godfrey Bloom who repeated the same old tripe about the Ukrainian war. Even someone who I respect for his vaxx knowledge, RFK, Jr, says that seven Ukrainians are killed for every Russian soldier. I don't know where he got this information, but it appears to come straight from the Kremlin.
Jordan Peterson, who I greatly respect, has criticized the war and the sanctions, saying that they were not working, yet it appears that Russia's income from oil and gas is shrinking fast and they've had to suspend sales of refined oil products in order to have enough for the domestic market. Peterson, to his discredit, also demanded to know the goals of the US in the war. He wants it stated publicly, but if Sun Tzu is right, you don't want your enemy to know your ultimate plans, right? I think in most cases that Peterson is the smartest man on the planet, yet he's getting the Ukrainian war wrong.
How can so many smart people get one thing right and another thing entirely wrong? This bears study. I guess you can't know every subject. You can't be an expert in every field. You can be a jack of all trades in basic knowledge, but not have insight into every single situation.
I do know one thing. Most people who are getting the Ukrainian war wrong are looking at the picture from the Russian/Geopolitical perspective. They don't understand the Ukrainian point of view and they don't consider it. For them, it's all part of the great game, the cold war revisited. And Russia has nukes so we should kowtow to Putin who is crazy and might blow up the world.