Even With a Translator, The West Still Just Doesn’t Get Putin

Uncle Volodya says, “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”

I recoil in horror from the foulness of thee
From the squalor and the filth and the misery
How we laugh up here in heaven at the prayers you offer me
That’s why I love mankind…

Randy Newman, from “God’s Song”

To nobody’s real surprise, I suppose, Vladimir Putin easily won the Russian presidential election a few days ago, and is the Russian Federation’s president for another six years. And while it couldn’t have been a real surprise to the west – we’ve just established it wasn’t really a surprise, and while the western media tried to drag out the usual round-eyed horror about ballot-box stuffing and carousel voting, you could tell its heart just wasn’t in it – the west is having a hard time concealing its disappointment. Some western leaders have made it pretty clear they would rather dry-swallow a pine cone than congratulate him on his victory, while others have sounded more like they’re announcing someone’s funeral, but there is a pretty common theme of profound unhappiness.

Why is that, do you think? I mean, there can be little doubt that his tenure as leader of the country has been good for it. The year he took over the reins, 1999, Russia recorded a record low GDP of $196 Billion. In 2016, the latest year for which accurate figures are available, it was $1.28 Trillion. That’s a…let’s see…tap, tap, tap…a sixfold increase. Russians’ per-capita GDP adjusted for purchasing power parity doubled. Did your income double since 1999? I thought not. While western columnists and reporters love to howl about the death of free speech in Russia under Putin, his critics appear to be able to say just about anything they want – he showed up at Lyudmilla Alexeeva’s home to congratulate her on her 90th birthday last summer, and she proclaimed herself to be ‘very. very grateful’ for the visit and the gifts. “To have the president congratulate me…a lot has changed. I could never imagine that”, she said emotionally. Naturally, Human Rights Watch pissed all over it, complaining that if he really cared about Alexeeeva, he would honour her by repealing the laws Russia has put in place to safeguard itself from western-funded NGO’s stirring up insurrection and astroturfing opposition movements. Of course he wasn’t sincere, snarled Deputy Director, Europe and Central Asia Division Rachel Denber. She just knows. Considering Human Rights Watch is funded by George Soros’ Open Society, and George Soros never stops hopefully forecasting bankruptcy and political collapse for Russia so long as it is led by Putin, it’s not hard to connect the dots there.

It sure would be fun to go on snickering at the discomfiture of western leaders, pundits and what passes in the west for journalists. But given the ample evidence that his arrival on the political scene was a Godsend for Russians, it’s hard to draw any other conclusion than that the west just doesn’t want Russia to succeed.

Why doesn’t the west get Putin? I mean, seriously – he has greatly enhanced the quality of life for his people. Simpletons like Stanislav Belkovsky and Gleb Pavlovsky have joined with the caterwauling west to accuse him of plundering Russia of billions upon billions for his personal use, but there has never been any sign that he lives more luxuriously than western political leaders, and no trace of the supposed stolen billions has ever been found. Embarrassingly, the most concentrated attempt to do so – the Mossack-Fonseca ‘Panama Papers’ – ended up catching far more westerners (including cosseted western pet Petro Poroshenko) than Russians, with no scent of Putin at all. In fact, the revelations made westerners so furious that the Brookings Institution speculated the Russians had actually been behind the release. That’s after people who worked on them took to Twitter the night before they were released, openly gloating that the information revealed would bring down Putin. Instead he seems to live modestly, work tirelessly for the betterment of Russians, avoid the limelight (except for a little relatively harmless no-shirt posing and the occasional spin in a racecar) and earn the approbation he receives from the electorate. Overall, the west’s attitude seems kind of selfish, given all it does is blat about how terrible Putin’s leadership has been for the west.

Advertisements

International Bullying is the New Black, But Idiocy Begins at Home

Uncle Volodya says, “The more we hate ourselves, the more we want others to suffer.”

Sitting on a sofa on a Sunday afternoon;
Going to the candidates’ debate
Laugh about it, shout about it,
When you’ve got to choose
Every way you look at this you lose…

From, “Mrs. Robinson”, by Simon & Garfunkel

“When all was well, you assumed that to suffer such a staggering blow would break you, but when such ills actually befell you, you somehow persevered. You didn’t survive to prove something to anyone, you didn’t press on simply because you wished to, and you didn’t endure because of what the preacher in church said. You survived because deep inside everyone was the simple, indefatigable need to press on, whatever the costs. And even if so much was stripped away that you no longer recognized yourself, the thing left was the part of you that you never understood, that you always underestimated, that you were always afraid to look at. You were afraid you’d need it one day, and it wouldn’t be there for you, but in fact it was the one thing that couldn’t be taken away.”

From “The Last Town on Earth”, by Thomas Mullen

I’m glad, in a way, that I waited to write a post on the bizarre incident in Salisbury, England, in which Russian former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia were whisked from sight – allegedly poisoned by a nerve agent many times more toxic than VX, but who unaccountably did not die – and are supposedly (but not verifiably) in hospital ‘fighting for their lives’. The blame was immediately and uniformly attached to Russia, and the crazed windbag currently serving as Prime Minister of the UK, Theresa May, discovered heretofore-unknown reserves of dramatic talent as she postured and pranced and threatened and vilified. Glad, because so much has subsequently come to light and the official British government line has changed so many times since the apparently-scripted event took place.

This is going to be a complicated post, I’m afraid, because there are a number of related lines of thought I wanted to pursue, and I hope to be able to tie them all together in a comprehensive conclusion which will be evident to everyone. To begin, let me start with a newspaper article here in Canada that marked the point at which I felt I had to write something. And while I love to write, I am sufficiently busy at other things and otherwise lazy that it reliably requires some powerful motivation to galvanize me to it. In this instance it was an article, unbearable in its smug prickishness, in the deeply-conservative National Post, by an unbearably smug prick named John Robson: “Putin the bully has our number. We need to do something”.

Now, the National Post in general seldom fails to make me marvel, upon reading it, what people feel they can get away with in countries that have such tight gun laws as Canada has. We’re supposed to settle our differences with words, and to keep our emotions in check as best we can while we try to let demonstrated and reliable facts speak for us. But the Skripal affair has finalized, it seems, the total dismissal of fact-based analysis. I realize the subject article is in the ‘Opinion’ section, and as such I should be able to just forget it with “that’s your opinion, Robson, you certifiable dolt”. And yet. I can’t do that, because his airy and infuriating presentation of certain allegations as facts just makes me want to shoulder-check him into an oncoming subway train. Let’s look.

What’s a Ten-Letter Alternate for “Hypocrite”? N-I-K-K-I-H-A-L-E-Y.

Uncle Volodya says, “It’s discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.”

Do as I say, not as I do;
Unto others as you wanna have done to you
If you don’t wanna sing the low-down blues
Do as I say, not as I do

From, “Do As I Say”, by The Fabulous Thunderbirds

You could just about put that on the USA’s national tombstone, as an epitaph; Do as I say, not as I do. Rules are for others who are not superpowers. Practice what you preach, unless you are the exceptional nation – if you are, do as you like. But be insufferably sanctimonious while you’re doing it, simultaneously claiming the moral high ground no matter how indefensible a position it might be, and pretending to the virtue of a martyr.

Perfectly embodying this grotesque assumption of moral authority is America’s representative to the United Nations, Nikki ‘Holier Than Thou’ Haley. Let’s take a look at her most recent prancing and bullshitting for the folks back home, in the National Post: “UN unanimously demands a 30-day cease-fire across Syria”, from the Associated Press.

The Trump appointee was in fine fettle on this occasion – she really does righteous anger very, very well. “How many mothers lost their kids to the bombing and the shellings?” due to the delay, she asked. “How many more images did we need to see of fathers holding their dead children?” This, of course, was all Russia’s fault, because it ‘supports the dictator Assad’, and because Russia has learned that the wholly-owned subsidiary of Washington known as the United Nations only yells for a ceasefire when its proxy forces are losing – and that it regularly and reliably uses these occasions, once approved, to re-arm the ‘rebel opposition’ and top up their ammo, and bring in fresh recruits. The UN, for the record, never once – not once – demanded a ceasefire in Syria when ISIS had the momentum and the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) was steadily falling back until it had almost nowhere left to retreat. Ceasefire demands are reserved for when the al-Qaeda militias are losing and about to be rolled over. Washington heartily and openly endorsed the so-called rebel opposition, although it knows full well that most of them are extremist militias affiliated with terrorist groups – in the hope they will win their way to the heart of Damascus and remove Assad, whereupon the government of the exceptional nation will swoop in and pick a new ruler who is more to its liking.

But let’s look again at the trembling anger over the needless deaths of children. Sort of brings a tear to your eye, doesn’t it? Let’s explore that compassion for consistency. Cast your memory back and back, to 2006. Nikki Haley ran unopposed that year for re-election to the South Carolina House of Representatives, representing Lexington County, and was already well-entrenched in politics. She captured 99.48% of the vote; something you will want to remember later on around the time of the Russian Presidential Election, when she starts sermonizing about political choice and the need for a credible opposition. But for now let’s just stay with 2006, because that was the year Israel invaded Lebanon.

The Trickle-Down of Deliberate Ignorance

Uncle Volodya says, “We are in the process of creating what deserves to be called the idiot culture. Not an idiot sub-culture, which every society has bubbling beneath the surface and which can provide harmless fun; but the culture itself. For the first time, the weird and the stupid and the coarse are becoming our cultural norm, even our cultural ideal.”

Lining up, waiting on the trickle down
Something’s up, taking time to get around
Belly up, all the drinks are on the crown
It’s just a matter of the trickle down…

The Tragically Hip, from “Trickle Down”

I imagine most of you are familiar with the origin of the term “trickle down” as it applies to economics and its partner, the Laffer Curve. Like a lot of things which sound good in theory because the group who thought it up hyped it so enthusiastically, but which in  practice turned out like a fifty-vehicle freeway pile-up, it was designed to be beneficial to a fairly narrow group, but its success relied on massive buy-in by the much larger group which was not ever going to see sweet fuck-all but the taillights of their money. There’s a fairly good explanation of the economic theory here, but basically the premise is that if you give generous tax cuts to rich people who own large and powerful corporations,  they will hire more workers and spend more money on improving the corporation’s competitiveness (good for your country) and perhaps even give more generously to charity.  Anyone who believes that, understands how rich people think about as well as the average person understands the conjugation of Swahili verbs. Know how you can tell if a dead rich guy is really dead? Drag a twenty-dollar bill across his cheek. If he is alive, he will not be able to resist grabbing at it, and I understand that in classic oligarchy, a ‘muscle memory’ spasmodic clutching action can even survive cessation of the heartbeat by several hours.

Okay, I’m exaggerating maybe a little. But seriously; when rich people get a fat tax cut, what they almost unfailingly do is hide the money offshore, invest it in a takeover of a weaker business or otherwise maneuver to increase their personal wealth. What they do not do is skip through the streets of the town with a basket of money on their arm, dispensing drifts of bills to their fellow citizens and stimulating the shit out of the economy. Honestly, who really thought that would happen? Evidently, quite a few people did.

Anyway, as usual, I spent way more time on that than I intended, because I’m not really going to talk about economics. It was the trickle-down ideology I wanted to talk about, except as it applies to trickle-down idiocy rather than economics. In principle, I am fairly non-judgmental about idiocy, from the standpoint that if it were wiped out, I would have nothing to talk about. But I do find it somewhat galling when idiocy is trumpeted by people from this country, because I always hope we will be better than that. Public education is free in Canada – at least in the sense that it is furnished by the taxpayer through the government – and there is no excuse for being an idiot. Except in genuinely unfortunate and comparatively rare genetic/medical circumstances.

But idiocy persists, and may even be expanding its influence. And in this particular instance – Steve Simmons’ insufferably stupid testimonial to imbecility, “Canadians have nothing to apologize for at Olympics” – the influence springs from an apparently deliberate insistence on believing (and abetting) America’s reporting on Russia.

I guess it should not entirely come as a surprise to me: The National Post is the paper of the Conservative party, it caters to conservative tastes and espouses conservative values, and as Stephen Harper once said – to his almost instantaneous regret, since it cost him an election – the Conservative party are the Republicans of Canada. Not quite as ignorant, I would once have said. If I had, I would have spoken too soon.

Oh, Boo hoo hoo!!! We Should Have Listened!!!

Uncle Volodya says, “All extremes of feeling are allied with madness.”

I like to believe that readers sometimes get ideas here for posts at their own venues, whether through the analysis of other commenters or from news items they may have otherwise missed. And turnabout being fair play, I am indebted to Paul Robinson (of IRRUSSIANALITY fame) for a news item I did indeed miss, but which – upon reading – opened up a whole new avenue of thought for me, not to mention a minor epiphany on the gumming up of the Washington Beltway’s gears through lavish applications of thick, glutinous stupidity.

I refer to the appointment of neoconservative necromancer Max Boot as special opinion columnist to the Washington Post. Perhaps it is his affectation of a Frank-Sinatra fedora that causes him to do it his way, but as I hope you will see, the effect of Max Boot’s influence on American policymaking spells trouble for Americans.

But before we get into it further, we can establish the reasoning behind this choice, and I can summarize it in two words: Fred Hiatt. The Washington Post’s Editorial Page editor never met a neoconservative hack he didn’t like, and as I hope people are starting to notice, that type never learns anything from being disastrously wrong.

That’s fairly evident in the opening paragraph: “A former advisor to military commanders and top-ranking Republican politicians, Boot will write a column focused on national security, American government and foreign affairs.”

I have to kind of wonder, given the track record of American military successes in the past couple of decades, if “advisor to military commanders” is the kind of endorsement you ought to put on a resume.

But instead of leveling off, the dive steepens. “Boot has advised military commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan, and his books have been assigned reading by the military services. He was a senior foreign policy adviser to John McCain in 2007-2008, a defense policy adviser to Mitt Romney in 2011-2012, and a foreign policy adviser to Marco Rubio in 2015-2016.”

Perfect. By that standard of measurement, Jeffrey Skilling should be a credible expert to write a column on safe investing. George W. Bush on English Grammar. Hannibal Lecter on kale recipes. I’m sure you get my drift. Afghanistan and Iraq were classic military victories like Kasserine Pass. Well, the latter was a classic military victory, but only if you were German; perhaps I should have said “classic American military victories”. The New York Times describes the war in Afghanistan as ‘unwinnable’, American aims as largely unachievable and Afghanistan’s future as only partly salvageable. And it has dragged on for 16 years. I, personally, would not like to be identified as an advisor who quarterbacked military involvement in a debacle like that one. But it actually looks like a chrome-plated success compared with Iraq, which has been more or less a hotbed of violence since the USA first put its vaunted boots on the ground in 2003. According to a Congressional Budget Office report published in 2007, the cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq would have reached $2.4 Trillion – with a ‘T’ – in 2017, mostly because of the whopping interest charges incurred by running wars on borrowed money. And in case I have not made it sufficiently clear by this point, neither of those wars is a victory – demonstrably not, as both are still ongoing.

Meditations in Blue and Yellow: The Re-election of Petro Poroshenko

Uncle Volodya says, “One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”

I’m your top prime cut of meat, I’m your choice,
I wanna be elected;
I’m Yankee Doodle Dandy in a gold Rolls Royce,
I wanna be elected;
Kids want a saviour, don’t need a fake,
I wanna be elected;
We’re all gonna rock to the rules that I make,
I wanna be elected…

Alice Cooper: “Elected”

Diane Francis is a busybody. Born in Chicago and holding dual American-Canadian citizenship, she has written for a living for most of her life, starting with a small-town newspaper in Ontario and steadily moving up the editorial chain to editor of The National Post. She’s also a prolific writer of books, authoring several about business and wealth in Canada – perhaps revealing which of her citizenships is dominant, in 2013 she published “Merger of the Century: Why Canada and America Should Become One Country“. The two countries’ business communities are the only ones who think that’s a good idea, and my theory for why is that wealth has no nationality, and those who are very rich and want to become much richer could not care less what country they live in so long as it’s comfortable, temperate and has a ‘democratic’ political system which is easily manipulated. Similarly, within a generation in such a fictional merged country, you would not be able to tell who had come from Canada and who from America, because the privileged and wealthy are basically all the same. That’s what certain people love about them.

Anyway, we’re not really going to talk too much more about Diane Francis. She is a devotee of the power of wealth and of the maxim that might makes right, and there is plenty of material on that subject for several posts. But it is in her capacity as a contributor to The Atlantic Council that I’d like to talk about her today. Like many western elites, she is fascinated with Ukraine and a staunch defender of the western plan to turn it into a tireless antagonist against Russia, all under the guise of rescuing it from Russian aggression and making it a prosperous European playground. I hope a little reading on her theories of how this is to come about will promote discussion of how well she really grasps what is happening there.

There’s no doubt she is conventionally well-educated. But sometimes there are none so blind as those who will not see, as the old chestnut goes. Her most recent effort for that controversial venue is “How Poroshenko can easily be re-elected”.

Why she would think this would be a good thing is open to debate – Poroshenko is a horrible leader. Pretty much his sole ‘achievement’ as president was securing visa-free travel to the EU for Ukrainians. The limited number with the means to enjoy it made it somewhat of a Pyrrhic  victory, and the lack of other practical achievements actually makes it a liability, in that Brussels can revoke it at any time. Poroshenko continues to own and operate a network of businesses and media which increase his personal wealth even as Ukrainians’ net worth collapses, in defiance of the state constitution. He and his family recently took an expensive vacation at an exclusive resort in the Maldives, traveling and booking under assumed names, which coincided with his country’s most prestigious university sending its students home until spring for ‘distance learning’ because it cannot afford to heat and supply electricity to the building. He is a human cluster bomb of greed, graft and disingenuously-smiling duplicity, and western leaders meeting him probably sew their pockets shut beforehand, rather than arrive home to find nothing in their wallets but his business card and fingerprints.

Made with 100% Pure Organic Nuts

Uncle Volodya says, “When a great genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign; that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.”

Some of you, perhaps most, saw Maria Zakharova accuse the British press of operating under state orders to generate as much negative reporting on Russia as possible, with the aim of spoiling the upcoming World Cup events in Russia. While I couldn’t stipulate to the truth of that – and frankly, it sounds a little incredible –  I am reminded of the Anglo-American crusade just a couple of years ago to ruin the Sochi Olympics, by accusing Russia of a draconian crackdown on homosexuals.

Remember that? The American and British news outlets were all-rainbow, all the time, wailing and gnashing their teeth about the plight of innocent gay folk in Russia, unable to publicly express their love without being dragged off to the clink as a bunch of degenerates, all thanks to Russia’s innate hostility and hatred of gays. I did a post then, too, on how stupid and deliberately misdirected that was. The Russian law which inspired all the breast-beating and soul-searching in the west actually only forbade propagandizing homosexual relations to minors, which in Russia is children under 16.

Anyway, that sort of makes the possibility of another organized media campaign against Russia, in an attempt to ruin a major sports event, more believable. Why? Because Britain could not give a tin weasel for the state of homosexual rights now. No more than our increasingly-wacko liberal society now demands, at any rate. The UK deported a gay man to Morocco last year, despite the probability he would face a possible 3 years imprisonment, and after the Moroccan Minister for Human Rights referred to homosexuals as ‘scum’. The Home Office, in rejecting his claim of asylum, said his claimed treatment ‘did not amount to persecution’. In Russia, those found guilty of propagandizing the homosexual lifestyle to minor children would pay a small fine. But that was unacceptable to the Home Office, and reeked of persecution.

I don’t want to take up any more of your time with that issue, because that’s not where we’re going. That was all just background, and I merely wanted to establish that the possibility of an organized campaign by the British media against Russia is believable. Although it would hardly be necessary, and would be tantamount to a state order for fat people to up their fast-food intake, since bashing Russia day in, day out is already a labour of love for the British press.

So with all that in mind, check out this incredible story. According to Andriy Gergert, commander of the Eighth Detached Battalion of the Ukrainian Volunteer Army, his pal Mikus Alps was tortured and  burnt up in a car…by the Russians. He has no doubt about it.