I get very mad when I read total nonsense on any subject I know fairly well. I have ranted about the nonsense I read on Covid.
A number of people with whom I agree on most subjects are radically, hopelessly wrong about Ukraine. The most highly pedigreed expert they have is retired Colonel, PhD, Douglas McGregor.
I do not stand in awe of academic degrees. So many highly credentialed people have been so incredibly wrong about Covid, sexuality and everything else that I am more and more inclined to look for common sense.
One of my favorite reads, zerohedge, is so consistently against the Biden administration that they follow their knee-jerk reaction to assume that the administration is wrong on the subject of Ukraine. Nope.
They publish this piece, which links to the original here, by the good Colonel. The man is absolutely wrong, and I enjoy pointing out why. I have laid out his arguments and my counterpoints side-by-side. You judge.
Camille Dietrich made a couple of intelligent, useful comments on my article on the advantages of marrying older men. A woman might be signing up not only for children but a senile, useless old man to take care of.
I offer dating tips for perspective May brides of December men. Surreptitiously check the number of bottles of pills in his medicine cabinet. Too many is a bad sign.
Ask him to do things like shovel snow for you, carry your luggage, get your cat out of a tree. If he isn't up to it, don't do it.
You can look at the actuarial tables. The average person my age has 8.6 years to live. Not an inconsiderable number. Moreover, in my observation the average person my age has a pretty good idea what's going to kill him in the end. The cancer, heart disease, emphysema or whatever is already underway. If you don't see those things, the number of remaining years is probably a fair amount higher.
In this modern age a lady will want to find out if her prospective groom is still up to making children. Being able and interested is in itself a pretty good measure of fitness.
Thanks, Camille, for raising the question.
On account of the war my bank has closed down all except one branch, clear across town, and they limit me to taking out $2,700 at a time. Thank goodness I live in a country where you can live for a while on that amount. I have to wind this up so I can make the trip.
That's the news from Lake WeBeGone, where the men are strong, the women good-looking, and the above average children looking forward to spring.
First, Germany does not have an army. It was Angela Merkel's policy to rely on US forces in
Germany to protect it. The Germans allowed their army to wither, and the new government at the start of the war realized that Russia has ambitions to take most of Europe. Putin himself stated that he wanted to restore the boundries of the Soviet Union, and that means taking back all the Baltics, all of East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Czechia, and Austria. But Putin's plan all along has been to cross Germany to the Rhine to establish a proper Russian border. Most people scoff when reading this, but Putin has stated many times that this is the goal. When Olaf Shulz came back from Moscow before the war started, he met with his government and they announced that they were spending 100 billion Euros to bring their army back to life. They also stated that they would spend the full 2% of budget from that point in the future that NATO desires.
Second, in order to understand Germany, you have to understand that there are conflicting forces within the German state. Some, and this is many Germans, want a relationship with Russia which they prefer over the US. They made a lot of money in Russia and some people have called this collaborative relationship the Schroderization of German politics. Gerhard Schroder, the former Chancellor has been co-opted by Putin and was a member of the board of Gazprom. The Germans actively undercut the independence of Ukraine by building the Nord Stream pipelines, in effect telling Putin that they would support Russia against Ukraine. Putin started this war as the completion of Nordstream II was completed, assuming I assume that the Germans would no longer need the extensive pipeline system that flows through Ukraine and thus would not support Ukrainian defense. There are at least two parts to the Russian gas deal. One is simply greed on the part of the Germans. Gazprom offers the best price available and Germany has built its industrial might on cheap Russia gas. Second, the Germans have been trying to be politically correct since the end of WWII and the latest idiocy is going green. Germany does have wind, but the country is not a feasible location for solar energy. Before the war started, Germany had the highest costs per energy unit in all of Europe, and now the prices are much higher and going still higher. Personally, I was stunned at their stupidity before the war when they shut down nuclear power plants at a time when it was obvious that something was going on. I didn't think that Putin would start a stupid war, but Germany had been begging for more gas and Putin would not sell them more even though the capacity was there. He was obviously using it as leverage. And something that most people don't know: Putin has a doctorate degree from some University in St. Petersburg, and he wrote his thesis on using energy resources as political power. I actually doubt that he wrote the thesis himself, and my sources tell me that it was largely plagiarized, but it exists and Putin has tried to use Russia gas and oil for political purposes as long as he has been in power. Ukraine had no problems with natural gas supplies until the Orange Revolution in 2005, but Putin has turned off the gas several times in winter to try to break Ukraine. In addition, he has been looking for other means to get the gas to Europe since 2005. There is more than enough capacity for all of Europe in the Ukrainian pipeline system, but Putin wanted to bypass Ukraine so that he could use gas as extortion in order to control the Ukrainian people.
Finally, many people bring up the idea of NATO pushing closer to Russia's borders and thus provoking Putin. First of all, no country would want to join NATO unless there was a reason, and the reason that most countries in Eastern Europe wanted to join NATO is to protect themselves from Russia. They certainly wouldn't have joined NATO if Russia was a friendly neighbor, and we can see from Russia's actions that they do not have a reputation for being friendly. Consider the Russian influence in Moldova, Russian troops stationed for the past 30 years on Moldovan territory. Consider the invasion of Georgia, the seizure of Crimea, the invasion of Donbas, the conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia. Lately, there was an invasion of Kazakhstan when a revolution broke out there. In the past, Russia has captured a vast chunk of Finland, the Baltics, Ukraine, and other territories from Japan. It's no surprise that countries neighboring Russia wanted to join NATO. It was for their protection, not a provocation.
As to MacGregor and the rest of American "conservatives", they seem to have swallowed Dugin's maskirovka - the Fourth Political Theory - hook, line, sinker, reel, and rod: "Foundations of Geopolitics is by far Dugin’s most important work. Dugin himself describes it as an “indispensable guide for all those who make decisions in the most important spheres of Russian political life – for politicians, entrepreneurs, economists, bankers, diplomats, analysts, political scientists, and so on.” In FoG, Dugin outlines his ‘Neo-Eurasianist’ geopolitical strategy, which includes a multitude of instructions on how to subvert, manipulate, and conquer various countries in order to create a Eurasianist empire.
As Dugin said, the book is highly influential among Russian elites, including the military, who used it as a textbook in their Academy of the General Staff. It was co-drafted by Colonel-General Leonid Ivashov, head of the International Department of the Russian Ministry of Defence. After writing FoG, Dugin was hired as a guest lecturer by the military, to explain his geopolitical Neo-Eurasianist theory to Russian officers and the likes. Seleznyov, a former Russian State Duma speaker and a buddy of Dugin, urged that FoG should be incorporated into the Russian school curriculum.
The most important thing about FoG is that it is, essentially, straight-to-the-point and completely “mask-off,” which you’ll see when we get into the contents of the book in the following sections. Fourth Political Theory, on the other hand, couldn’t be more different. You may have seen 4PT being praised by various nationalists in the West, as it has been heavily marketed to Westerners by Arktos Media (which publishes and translates Dugin’s work for Western consumption) and other “New Right” or “Alt-Right” influencers. 4PT is not designed for Russian consumption, but to be read by hapless Western nationalists. Dugin’s aim with 4PT is to ideologically subvert nationalists in the West, making them more malleable and likely to assist (passively or actively) him in achieving the political goals he laid out in Foundations of Geopolitics. 4PT is overflowing with psychobabble, verbose gobbledygook, and complete bastardizations of various historic right-wing thinkers — particularly notable is the manner in which Dugin mutated and completely inverted the Traditionalist School of thought. 4PT will be quoted throughout this piece, but for an idea of the sort of nonsense included in the book, chapter 13, “Gender in the Fourth Political Theory,” is devoted to arguing in favor of a-sexual transgenderism. Behind the shoddy and transparent mask of phony “Traditionalism,” nothing separates Dugin’s Fourth Political Theory from the extant ideology of the New World Order* that he claims to oppose.
* Often labeled as “Neo-Liberalism,” though I personally believe that this label is inaccurate and insufficient.
In summary:
FoG is Dugin’s political strategy document, in which he outlines highly detailed plans on how to create a Eurasian empire by subverting foreign nations, it was written for Eurasianists, to benefit Eurasianists. 4PT is an implementation of FoG’s political strategy, in that 4PT is a subversive book written for Westerners and disseminated in the West, to channel Western nationalism towards Eurasianist ends.
In brief:
FoG = Mask Off = Duginism-For-Me (For Eurasianists) = Influential among elites of Russia.
4PT = Mask On = Duginism-For-Thee (For the enemies/subjects of Eurasianists) = Promoted in the West by the Alt-Right, New Right, and Identitarians (specifically European Identitarians)." https://streamfortyseven.substack.com/p/heres-a-little-article-by-aleksandr
This was back before I actually read parts of FoG, got my ass kicked out of bed, and changed my mind about what was going on in Ukraine - I got suckered, too...