F-35 to be combat tested in skies over Ukraine

That should be fun!

My hunch is the USAF and their NATO allies will be reverting to their tried and tested F-16s about twenty minutes into the dance.

And the dance is coming, at least if the usual US military experts and their war-mongering political shills get any traction for this absurd idea that America (and her allies) should impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine.

That would require asking the Russians to leave, as they are the ones controlling that airspace now.

Here's another hunch. Putin's gonna say nyet to that.

Then what?

HOLY ESCALATION, BATMAN!!!

Sniffing out Putin's propaganda

Not many days pass in these tense times that the CBC doesn't issue one or more stern warnings about Russia's propaganda push to brainwash us. Today is no exception. Putin's lies are everywhere. Lucky for us, elite professional fact-checkers are on the case.

Bellingcat, the collective of citizen journalists and computer nerds founded by Eliot Higgins.

Bellingcat has an origin story that gives the virgin birth yarn a run for the money. Eliot Higgins was an unemployed high school drop-out in England. He used his abundance of free time doing what a lot of layabouts do; binge watch YouTube videos.

Specifically, Eliot spent his long lonely hours watching videos from the war in Syria. Turned out he was something of a savant in the field of video analysis. Before long, he was making discoveries that had eluded the best and the brightest in military intelligence agencies across the Western world.

His career took off!

Eliot has been affiliated with the US think tank Atlantic Council since at least 2016. The Atlantic Council is funded by, among others, the governments of NATO member states Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Lithuania, Norway, UK, and the US, a gaggle of defence contractors, and Chrystia Freeland's favorite Ukrainian oligarch, Victor Pinchuck. The "honor roll" of major donors appears on page 54 of their most recent annual report.

So rest easy, folks! Independent non-partisan fact-checkers are on the job to protect you from Russian disinformation!

Putin reeling as sanctions from heck inconvenience some Russian banks

This is how their masters in the West "stand with Ukraine."

President Biden, leader of the free world, uncorks the "mother of all sanctions," but strategically omits Russia's main exports, oil and gas. Why? Because pain at the pumps would stir unrest among his populace, the vast majority of whom couldn't find Ukraine on a map and couldn't care less.

The raging chihuahuas of NATO's peanut gallery demand a ban on Russia's inclusion in SWIFT, the global interbank clearing system. Today's headlines inform us the deed is done.

Bravo!... well, not really. It's not Russia that's kicked out of SWIFT, nor the Russian banking system, but a handful of individual banks.

Oh wow! That's gonna give Putin pause...

Meanwhile, Uncle Sam's Club is promising to flood the country with lethal weapons. How those are to be delivered with Russia in control of Ukrainian airspace is a closely guarded secret. What we can be sure of is that any actual deliveries will either be seized outright by the Russians, or blown up in their warehouses.

That is of course a moot point for American arms manufacturers. There's plenty more where those came from!

And while the pundits wring their hands over the largest ground war in Europe since WWII, they should be grateful that Putin didn't take a page out of the NATO playbook, and simply bomb the country to ratshit as NATO did in Serbia over ten weeks in 1999.

 

Here's a fresh new voice in country pop you should be following

And she's from Guelph.

She went to the same high school I occasionally attended, except a while later.

In fact, she was there at the same time as my dear children, both of whom got to know her, even though my son only attended occasionally.  

Danielle Todd was my very first follower when I briefly had a twitter account. I only got up to about twelve before I got cancelled for being an asshole.

Fair enough. I only used it to spam the "experts" at the CBC and the Globe with my pithy take-downs of their moronic op-eds.

But back to that kid from Guelph who is making her mark.

Here's her latest thing.

You go girl!

Fraudster Bill Browder still a "Putin expert" at CBC

Bill Browder was one of the hyenas who swooped in on Russia in the '90s to teach the locals the ins and outs of the capitalist system. He was the front man for a couple of Israeli billionaires of shady repute, whose "Heritage Capital" took the struggling Russian treasury for billions.

Once Putin came to power, Browder was originally a fan. That changed when Putin began reining in the oligarchs and the foreign carpet-baggers. 

Things got a little too warm for the likes of Browder, and he soon enough skedaddled out of the country under a cloud of scandal.

Wanting to fluff up his PR profile, Browder retained highly-regarded Russian film-maker Andrei Nekrasov to make a documentary about how he had been hounded out of Russia by corrupt officials because he had exposed their corruption. Nekrasov, a well-know Putin critic, agreed.

Somewhere along the line, the PR project went off the rails. The Putin critic gradually came to the conclusion that Bill Browder was full of shit.

The doc that resulted, The Magnitsky Act - behind the scenes, has caused Browder no end of grief. His reputation in Europe has more or less gone down the shitter. No reputable news outlet there would call on him as a Russia expert.

But there he was on the CBC this morning, still being passed off as Putin's number one enemy.

Brodie Fenlon's team at CBC needs to take a few dollars out of the DEI training budget and put it into fact checking.

Against snowblowers

Regular readers will be acquainted with my beef with leaf-blowers.

I'd like to extend my contempt for "progress" to the snowblower.

It's easy to be seduced. I managed quite well without one for many years. But once all the neighbours had one, I'll admit, I succumbed to peer pressure.

Peer pressure will fuck you up every time.

I remember interrogating a student about why he threw his class-mates back-pack out the school bus window.

"Peer pressure, sir."

Yup, they still called the teacher "sir" back in the day, much to my amusement.

But how can you argue with peer pressure?

That's how I eventually came to spend almost three grand on a snowblower, to do the job I'd always done with a twenty dollar shovel.

Hey, if you're gonna go down conformity road, go down in style!

I've had a complete paradigm shift in how I view snow management. I think it's that mindfulness trip I've been on.

When you compare the shovel to the machine head to head, there's no doubt you get the job done faster with the machine.

You save time.

But what are you gonna do with the time you save? This is the critical question.

If you're a pediatric surgeon who can squeeze in an additional infant heart transplant with that extra time, by all means, get the machine.

If, on the other hand, that time saved is invested in playing video games or watching porn, well, give your head a shake.

Between the carbon footprint of building the infernal machine in the first place, plus operating it, you deserve to go straight to you-know-where for your climate crimes.

Spending an extra twenty minutes clearing the snow with a shovel, on the other hand, is a guaranteed ticket to heaven.

Not only that, but all that exercise is gonna give you the cardio health that'll make you live forever...

Unless you drop dead from a heart attack while shovelling snow.

When will the "allies" figure out Uncle Sam isn't worth the candle?

The current Ukraine situation was completely avoidable. 

Ukraine and its separatist regions negotiated the Minsk agreement seven years ago, in negotiations refereed by Russia, France, and Germany. It stipulated a degree of autonomy for the rebel provinces as a condition for the cessation of hostilities.

Unfortunately, although the deal was approved by the UN, it fell afoul of the folks who had engineered the coup of 2014 - the US government. 

And here we are!

The World Cop who worked tirelessly to prevent peace in Ukraine now leads the world in accusing Russia of an unprovoked attack on its neighbour! It has rallied its allies, also known as colonies, satrapies, stooges, dependencies, or flunkies, NATO and the EU, to stand strong against Russian aggression.

The European allies get to stand strong in Europe. They will make serious sacrifices. Double or treble heating bills for the average citizen. Billions of euros for the refugee wave soon to crash their borders, perhaps as large as the wave that came their way due to America's previous adventures in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. 

In the event this little war goes sideways, as wars have been known to do, Europe will be in the soup.

America, which has driven this conflict since the '90s, is leading the charge against Russian aggression. It is leading with the declaration of sanctions from hell, the mother of all sanctions, etc.

It is leading from the other side of the Atlantic, thousands of miles away from the hot war it precipitated.

While the European allies are making sacrifices, the Americans are willing to sell unlimited billions in US military hardware to the EU and our NATO allies, and of course, to the Ukrainians. Nothing like a war to goose profits at Raytheon et al.

The Americans will also pitch in by selling LNG to the allies to replace the Russian gas Putin now is free to sell elsewhere. The price will be several orders of magnitude higher than the Russian gas now sanctioned, but that's due to the free market, not US policy.

It's only coincidence that US corporations profit massively while the allies make sacrifices to preserve America's role as World Cop.

What I find utterly baffling, is why the allies refuse see that the American Emperor is buck naked?

If Uncle Sam were a proper hegemon, he'd be doing more than sanctions. Sadly, at least for the American Empire, that's all he's got.

Sooner or later,  our allies are gonna figure out they're the only thing keeping the empire afloat, and then the jig will be up.