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And:
Did she lie?
https://www.breitbart.com/poli
Did she lie?
https://www.breitbart.com/poli
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An alternative view from a renegade thinker?Does the mass media want a war so they will have something to report on?
You decide.
Pearl Harbor My Eye!
We were already getting sick and tired of this Zelensky clown, but the sheer chutzpah of comparing Ukraine’s predicament with Pearl Harbor or 9/11 is just fricking outrageous. To paraphrase Senator Lloyd Bensten’s famous retort to Dan Quayle in the 1992 VP debate: We knew the United States of America and Ukraine isn’t any United States.
To the contrary, it is a cesspool of corruption, mal-governance and rank stupidity on the foreign policy front. For crying out loud, its situation is comparable to the drug cartels taking over Mexico, demanding the return of the Gadsden Purchase and then seeking to join a Russian-led anti-American treaty organization.
That is to say, Ukraine brought the Russian attack on itself by poking the bear in its eyes repeatedly since the 2014 coup. Yet now its leader has the gall to petition the US Congress to start WWII via standing-up a No Fly Zone in lieu of the obvious solution: Namely, Zelensky should resign and make way for a collaborationist government that will sue for peace on the following basis:
- Recognize that Crimea is Russian territory and always has been since it was purchased by Catherine the Great in 1783;
- Permit the separation of the Donbass Republics from Ukraine because the overwhelmingly Russian speaking populations there has been part of “New Russia” for more than 300 years and do not wish to be ruled by the anti-Russian fascists and oligarchs who control Kiev;
- Amend the constitution of the rump state of Ukraine to prohibit its joining NATO or any similar western alliance, while reducing its military to a domestic law enforcement agency.
Those terms may seem harsh, but it’s the only alternative to the complete destruction of Ukraine and an eventual Russian win anyway. The fact is, the NATO cavalry simply ain’t coming no matter how many standing ovations are stumped up by the armchair warriors of the US Congress.
That’s because even the bully boys of Washington and Brussels aren’t ready to trigger WWIII over the broken remnants of a country that never had been a country historically until Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev made it an administrative district of the Soviet Empire – the latter being a stain on mankind that thankfully disappeared into the dustbin of history 31 years ago.
Yet without direct US/NATO engagement with the Russian military forces now occupying growing segments of Ukrainian territory the expedient of sending arms – even highly advanced lethal anti-air and anti-tank weapons – is futile. Russia now has total air superiority over Ukraine’s skies, meaning that incoming NATO weapons (and the so-called “foreign legion” fighters, too) will be destroyed long before they can make a difference.
So for god’s sake Washington needs to stop standing on ceremony and leading the hapless Ukrainian government down the primrose path to national destruction. There is no way out of the current catastrophe except for Washington to:
- concede that recruiting Ukraine to join NATO and potentially putting NATO missile bases within one minute’s cruise missile flight time from Moscow was an egregious mistake; and
- that its demonization of Putin as a modern day Hitler on a quest to revive the Soviet Empire is just plain War Party hogwash and is no justification for its sweeping Sanctions War, most especially if Kiev capitulates to Moscow’s terms.
The truth, in fact, is more nearly the opposite. That is, there really are not two distinct nations there, one invading the other. Russia and Ukraine have never been neighboring independent states like Germany and France or Spain and Portugal or Columbia and Peru. To the contrary, they have been an intermingled territory and peoples for the last 1300 years with borders, governing arrangements episodic external invasions all over the lot.
The Ukrainian language itself is testimony to that history and geography. The dialects spoken in the Donbas (brown and yellow areas) are a mixture of Ukrainian and Russian; the old Galician territories of Western Ukraine centered in Lviv (red areas) are heavily influenced by Polish, Slovakian and Rumanian vocabularies.; and the blue areas of the North present dialects heavily influenced by Belarusian.
What is also true is that these segmented populations have never been united under a common polity except by communist arms between 1922 and 1991; then between 1991 and 2014 by tenuous and continuously shifting electoral balances after the Ukrainian administrative entity was arbitrarily disgorged from the old Soviet Union; and finally after the February 2014 coup by dint of a Kiev government based on central and western Ukraine that essentially declared a civil war on Crimea (which seceded) and the eastern, Russian-speaking Donbas regions that have tried to do the same.
So again, what’s wrong with partition? At the end of the day, Zelensky stood before Congress and had the gall to demand WWIII in behalf of an abortion of a nation that has virtually no chance of long-term survival in its present form. Yet the knuckleheads from both parties are in such war heat that they vociferously applauded the unctuous rantings of a clown who should have stuck to the comedy business.
Still, for want of doubt about the madness of defending Ukraine by economic warfare now, and military confrontation with Russia if the warmongers get their way, just recall how the arbitrary borders depicted above got here. If this mongrel merits all out defense in behalf of the “rule of law,” then the rule of law be damned.
Kiev Is the Ancestral Homeland of Russia
In the first place, Putin is essentially correct when he says that Russia and much of the Ukrainian territory have been one through long stretches of history. Ironically, therefore, the Kiev today being laid to waste by the Russian army is actually the birthplace of Russia!
As an excellent Washington post history recently explained,
The “Rus” – the people whose name got tacked on to Russia – were originally Scandinavian traders and settlers who made their way from the Baltic Sea through the marshes and forests of Eastern Europe down toward the fertile riverlands of what’s now Ukraine. Other Viking adventurers journeyed to Constantinople, the great capital of the Byzantine Empire, to find their fortune – sometimes as hired muscle.
The first major center of the “Rus” was at Kiev, established in the 9th century. In 988, Vladimir, a prince of the Kievan Rus, was baptized by a Byzantine priest in the old Greek colony of Khersonesos on the Crimean coast. His conversion marked the advent of Orthodox Christianity among the Rus and remains a moment of great nationalist symbolism for Russians. Putin invoked this older Vladimir in a speech when justifying his annexation of Crimea.
However, successive Mongol invasions beginning in the 13th century subdued Kiev’s influence, and led the Russians to eventually migrate north. That led to the rise of other Rus settlements including Moscow, while the Turkic descendants of the Mongol Golden Horde formed their own Khanate along the northern rim of the Black Sea and Crimea.
During the next several centuries the Ukrainian territory was a no man’s land, hosting successive invasions and occupations by external forces. The land that’s now Ukraine lay on the margins of competing empires, making it a region of permanent contest and shifting borders.
At length, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which, at its peak encompassed a huge swath of Europe, dominated much of the land. But over the centuries Ukraine would also see the incursions of Hungarians, Ottomans, Swedes, bands of Cossacks and the armies of successive Russian czars.
By the late 17th century after much of Europe had congealed into today’s borders, there was still no nation of Ukraine. Instead, as these meandering borders appeared and disappeared repeatedly, Russia and Poland (Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth) eventually split much of the territory of what’s now Ukraine along the Dnieper River, as shown in the map below. Approximately 355 years ago (1667), to be exact, the areas to the east of the Dnieper, which now include the Donbas, were acquired by Russia and incorporated into the Russian State.
So, yes, the current day rebel provinces in the Donbas, which were giving partial autonomy from Kiev by the Minsk Agreements of 2015, have actually been “Russian” for more than three and one-half centuries and “Ukrainian” for about 31 years. Or as Secy Blinkey would say, because it’s borders.
The Rise of New Russia
Russia’s advance continued a century later during the 18th century rule of Catherine the Great, who proclaimed her domains along the Black Sea constituted “Novorossiya” or “new Russia.” Back then, the Russian court even harbored dreams of collapsing the Ottoman empire entirely, extending Moscow’s reach to Istanbul and even Jerusalem.
The infamous architect of Catherine’s imperialism, Grigoriy Potemkin, thus told his sovereign:
Believe me, you will acquire immortal fame such as no other sovereign of Russia ever had,” when offering the empress counsel in 1780 on plans to wrest Crimea away from Ottoman suzerainty. “This glory will open the way to still further and greater glory.”
Meanwhile, the partitions of Poland in the late 18th century led to the city of Lviv– once a major regional hub and a center of Jewish culture in Eastern Europe – falling under the rule of the Austro-Hungarian empire. So even in the west there was still no state of Ukraine, but as the Washington post further noted,
It was there in the mid-19th century where Ukrainian nationalism began to take hold, rooted in the traditions and dialects of the region’s peasants and the aspirations of intellectuals who had fled the stifling rule of Russia rule further to the east.
The State the Commies Made
The striking thing is that as of 1900, when much of Europe was fully formed albeit in part under the rubric of the Hapsburg’s empire, there was still no nation called Ukraine. In the east, Russia and today’s Ukrainian territories were one, while in the west the Galician territories were part of the Hapsburg Empire.
Needless to say, World War I and the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 triggered more traumas and upheaval in the areas that now constitute Ukraine. The new Bolshevik government was desperate to end hostilities with Germany and its allies and signed a treaty in the town of Brest-Litovsk in 1918 . As the Washington Post further amplified, the treaty ceded,
….some of Russia’s domains to the Central powers and recognized the independence of others, including Ukraine.
The terms of the treaty were nullified by Germany’s defeat later in the year, but the genie of Ukrainian nationalism was out of the bottle. Independence movements of various stripes sprung up in cities like Lviv, Kiev and Kharkiv, but were eventually all swept away amid the wider struggle for power in Russia.
That struggle was mightily fueled at the misbegotten Versailles “peace” conference where the long dead nation of Poland was revived by Woodrow Wilson. The latter nearly single-handedly resurrected the nation of Poland, doing so with a keen eye not to the historic maps of Europe but to the polish vote in Cleveland, Detroit and Chicago.
Soon thereafter a revived Poland reclaimed Lviv and a chunk of what’s now western Ukraine on the grounds that this was sacred Polish, not Ukrainian, territory.
In any event, the region became a key battleground of the Russian Civil War, which pitted Bolshevik forces against an array of White Russian armies, led by loyalists to the old czarist regime as well as other political opportunists. After a lot of bloodshed – and other battles with Poland – the Bolsheviks emerged triumphant and officially declared the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic in 1922.
At long last, therefore, the maps of the world now at least had something that roughly resembled modern Ukraine – even if it was wrested by Bolshevik rifles.
The years that followed, however, would be even more traumatic. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Ukraine suffered heavily under the rule of Soviet despot Josef Stalin. A vast segment of Ukraine’s rural population was displaced and dispossessed by Stalin’s aggressive collectivization policies. A man-made famine (the Holodomor) in 1932-3 led to the deaths of some three million people.
To make up the numbers, Russian speakers from elsewhere immigrated to eastern Ukraine’s hollowed out towns and cities, leaving a demographic footprint that defines Ukraine’s divisive politics to this day.
As shown in the map below, the tiny principality of Ukraine as of 1654 (dark blue area) had not been much to write home about until the Russians – Czars and Commissars, alike – bestirred themselves with nation-building. Russian nation-building, that is.
The yellow areas being the winnings of Catherine the Great and other Russian Czars over 1654-1917, while the added territories seconded by Lenin’s Red Army are represented by the purple area of the map below. These were historic “new Russia” territories added to the Ukraine administrative entity for ease of Communist rule.
Later came the rest of Ukraine proper via added gifts from Stalin’s Red Army (light blue area, 1939-1945) . These territories were stolen from the modern artificial state of Poland confected at Versailles. And the previously mentioned gift of Crimea (red area) was added by Khrushchev in 1954.
In short, it needs be recalled that America’s borders were established by democratic politicians and have stood the test of 167 years of time during which they have been perfectly fixed. By contrast, today’s Ukraine depicted below is the handiwork of tyrants and commies, which changed by the decade.
So the question recurs. Who in their right mind would select the historical mongrel depicted below to bring the world to the brink of nuclear war in order to establish the purported universal rule of law and sanctity of borders?
Indeed, we’d say it’s only folks who have lost their minds to the TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome). This entire imbroglio, in fact, is not about the nation of Russia, the rule of law, foreign policy or the genuine safety and liberty of the American homeland.
To the contrary, it’s about a single member of the 7 billion-strong human race – the utterly demonized, vilified and reviled Vladimir Putin. The Biden mainstream of the Dem party is still not over the shock of November 2016, and apparently mean to do battle permanently with the ogre of Moscow whom they falsely hold accountable for their own self-inflicted defeat.
As it happens, their endlessly repeated mantra that Putin’s expansionist intentions were revealed when he “seized” Crimea in 2014 tells you all you need to know. That claim is so hypocritical, threadbare and tendentious that only minds possessed with TDS would even dare to peddle it.
That’s because it amounts to saying is that the dead hand of the Soviet presidium must be defended at all costs – as if the security of North Dakota depended upon it!
As previously mentioned, however, the allegedly “occupied” territory of Crimea was actually purchased from the Ottomans by Catherine the Great in 1783, thereby satisfying the longstanding quest of the Russian czars for a warm-water port. Over the ages, Sevastopol then emerged as a great naval base at the strategic tip of the Crimean peninsula, where it became home port to the mighty Black Sea Fleet of the czars and then the Soviet commissars, too.
For the next 171 years Crimea was an integral part of Russia (until 1954). And that’s a fact that you can look up in the Google/CIA archives!
In fact, that span equals the 170 years that have elapsed since California was annexed by a similar thrust of “Manifest Destiny” on this continent, thereby providing, incidentally, the United States Navy with its own warm-water port in San Diego.
While no foreign forces subsequently invaded the California coasts, it was most definitely not Ukrainian rifles, artillery and blood that famously annihilated The Charge of the Light Brigade at the Crimean city of Balaclava in 1854, either: The defending combatants were Russians fighting for their homeland against invading Turks, French and Brits.
At the end of the day, security of its historical port in Crimea is and long has been Russia’s Red Line, and thereby none of Washington’s business.
Unlike today’s feather-headed Washington pols, even the enfeebled Franklin Roosevelt at least knew that he was in Soviet “Russia” when he made port in the Crimean city of Yalta in February 1945.
Maneuvering to cement his control of the Kremlin in the intrigue-ridden struggle for succession after Stalin’s death a few years later, Nikita Khrushchev allegedly spent 15 minutes reviewing his “gift” of Crimea to his subalterns in Kiev.
As it happened, therefore, Crimea became part of the Ukraine only by writ of the former Soviet Union:
On April 26, 1954 The decree of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet transferring the Crimea Oblast from the Russian SFSR to the Ukrainian SSR. Taking into account the integral character of the economy, the territorial proximity and the close economic and cultural ties between the Crimea Province and the Ukrainian SSR….
So, yes, there is every reason for a Kiev government which finally sues for peace to return Crimea to Russia, which owned it all along; and in which Ukrainians accounts for less than 15% of the predominant Russian speaking population. For Washington to claim otherwise and encourage Zelensky to hold out is tantamount to a naked case of hegemonic arrogance.
After all, during the long decades of the Cold War, the West did nothing to liberate the “captive nation” of Ukraine – with or without the Crimean appendage bestowed upon it in 1954. Nor did it draw any red lines in the mid-1990s when a financially desperate Ukraine rented back Sevastopol and the strategic redoubts of Crimea to an equally pauperized Russia.
In short, in the era before we got our Pacific port in 1848 and even during the 170-year interval since then, America’s national security has depended not one whit on the status of Russian-speaking Crimea and the Donbas regions of eastern Ukraine. The fact that the local population of the former in March 2014 chose fealty to the Grand Thief in Moscow over the ruffians and rabble that have seized Kiev amounts to a giant, “So what?”
Still, it was this final aggressive drive of Washington and NATO into the internal affairs of Russia’s historical neighbor and vassal, Ukraine, that largely accounts for the current dangerous confrontation. Likewise, it is virtually the entire source of the false claim that Russia has aggressive, expansionist designs on the former Warsaw Pact states in the Baltics, Poland and beyond.
The latter is a nonsensical fabrication. In fact, it was the neocon meddlers from Washington who crushed Ukraine’s last semblance of democratic governance when they enabled ultra-nationalists and crypto-Nazis to gain government positions after the February 2014 coup, which threw-out Ukraine’s legitimately elected, Russia-leaning president.
In this context, moreover, the history of the 1930s and 1940s must never be forgotten. As indicated above, Stalin decimated upwards of 15% of the Ukrainian population during the Holodomer (starvations) and then moved huge numbers of Russian-speakers into the Donbas to safeguard its chemical, steel and armaments industries from the defiant locals who were sent to Siberia.
Thereafter, when Hitler’s Wehrmacht came charging through Ukraine on its way to the bloody battle of Stalingrad, it had no trouble recruiting hundreds of thousands of vengeance-seeking Ukrainian nationalists to its ranks to do its dirty work: That is, the brutal liquidation of Jews, Poles, Gypsies and other untermenschen.
In fact, during the fall of 1941 began the mass killings of Jews that continued through 1944. An estimated 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews perished, and over 800,000 were displaced to the east; at Baby Yar in Kyiv nearly 34,000 were killed in just the first two days of massacre – and all of these depredations were assisted and often executed by local Ukrainian nationalists.
Then, of course, the tide turned and the Red Army came marching back though the rubble of Ukraine on its way to Berlin. After their victory over the Germans at the Battle of Stalingrad in early 1943, the Soviets launched an equally brutal scorched earth counteroffensive westward, searching high and low for traitors and collaborators among the Ukrainian population who had allegedly aided the Wehrmacht.
The Germans thus began their slow retreat from Ukraine in mid-1943, leaving wholesale destruction in their wake. In November the Soviets reentered Kyiv, where guerrilla activity intensified amid bloody revenge killings which claimed huge numbers of civilian victims. By the spring of 1944 the Red Army had penetrated into Galicia (western Ukraine), and by the end of October Ukraine was a bloody wasteland, once again under Red Army control.
So it may be fairly asked: What Washington lame brains did not understand that triggering “regime change” in Kiev in February 2014 would reopen this entire blood-soaked history of sectarian and political strife?
Moreover, once they had opened Pandora’s Box, why was it so hard to see that an outright partition of Ukraine with autonomy for the Donbas and Crimea, or even accession to the Russian state from which these communities had originated, would have been a perfectly reasonable resolution?
Certainly that would have been far preferable to dragging all of Europe into the lunacy of the current military showdown and further embroiling the Ukrainian factions in a suicidal civil war.
Needless to say, Zelensky gets none of this in the slightest – even though as a native and Russian speaking son of southeastern Ukraine, he actually grew up in a part of modern Ukraine that had been Russian for 370 years!
That’s right. He’s just the perennial short guy feasting on his 15 minutes of fame. But enough is enough already. In a rational world this double-talking creep should have been sent packing this morning by the US Congress, but these war-obsessed nincompoops can’t see the handwriting on the wall.
So once again, here it is. This is where the story ends – even as Washington wages Sanctions War on the entire global economy and thereby the American people as well.
How Ukraine Will Be Partitioned After Kiev Capitulates
In any event, a TV actor who has no script other than that handed to him by his Washington/NATO overseers is one thing. And at the end of the day, it small potatoes compared to the grotesque negligence and misdirection of Sleepy Joe’s own keepers.
That is to say, Secy Blinkey and Snake Sullivan should be bent over the above map in earnest conversation with their Russian counterparts as to the fine points of the partition, and the meaning of “neutrality,” “de-nazification” and “demilitarization” of the green area of the map, which is to become the future “Ukraine,” if there is to be anything left at all.
Needless to say, they are not even talking to the Russians. They are, in fact, so red in tooth and claw with the blood of economic warfare that they would drive the global economy to collapse rather than acknowledge that they – and they alone – brought this horrendous situation to the doorstep of the world.
David Stockman was a two-term Congressman from Michigan. He was also the Director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan. After leaving the White House, Stockman had a 20-year career on Wall Street. He’s the author of three books, The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed, The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America and TRUMPED! A Nation on the Brink of Ruin… And How to Bring It Back. He also is founder of David Stockman’s Contra Corner and David Stockman’s Bubble Finance Trader.
AND:
Biden’s Colossal Misreading of Putin’s Motivations in Ukraine - The American Spectator USA News and Politics
Putin is following the Russian “grand narrative” of war.
The prolific British historian Niall Ferguson, writing in Bloomberg News, concludes that the Biden administration “is making a colossal mistake thinking that it can protract the war in Ukraine, bleed Russia dry, topple Putin and signal to China to keep its hands off Taiwan.” If this in fact is the administration’s policy — and Ferguson relies on apparently well-sourced New York Times stories by David Sanger and unnamed senior administration officials — then Ferguson is right. It is a colossal mistake and a misreading of Russian history.
According to Ferguson, the Biden administration envisions Putin’s regime collapsing if the war in Ukraine drags on without Russia achieving victory. New reports have portrayed the Russian invasion as a quagmire — a sort of rerun of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. And while Ukrainians suffer, so the argument goes, Russians are suffering, too — both soldiers as a result of the Ukrainian resistance and civilians as a result of Western economic sanctions. Revolution is in the air. And there is some historical justification for the notion that an inconclusive war can lead to revolution — the Russo-Japanese War led to a revolution in Russia in 1905, and the colossal losses and shortages caused by the First World War led to the Romanov dynasty’s collapse in March 1917.
But there is another side to Russian history — one that glories in the heroic fighting of its brave soldiers and civilians in the face of hardship and the drudgery and horror of war. In 2017, Gregory Carleton, a professor of Russian Studies at Tufts University, wrote a book that Biden administration policymakers should read: Russia: The Story of War. Carleton’s book provides a cultural history of what he calls Russia’s “civic religion” and a “grand narrative of war” that goes back to Russia’s experience of war — against the Mongols in the 13th through 15th centuries, during the Time of Troubles in the early 17th century, and against Napoleon and Hitler.
Russia’s grand narrative of war — which is partly myth — includes references to invasions, stout resistance, self-reliance, and incredible self-sacrifice. And the most evocative of these historical experiences are the Battle of Borodino against Napoleon’s Grand Armée in 1812 and the Battle of Brest against the German Army in 1941.
At Borodino on the third day of the battle, Russia suffered more than 50,000 casualties in an unsuccessful effort to prevent Napoleon’s forces from reaching Moscow. French losses were estimated at 35,000. It was the bloodiest day of the Napoleonic Wars. Twenty-nine Russian generals died at Borodino. Carleton described the suffering and tragedy there as the nation’s “Golgotha,” which was forever seared into the Russian soul by Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Borodino, Carleton explained, was an example of defiance, resilience, and courage among Russian troops and civilians.
The World War II battle at Brest is less well known, but it is similarly evocative of Russian courage, defiance, and resistance. Hitler’s troops attacked the fortress there in June 1941, and about 4,000 Russian soldiers, Carleton noted, “held out for weeks against overwhelming German forces.” The garrison at Brest refused to surrender despite being weakened by hunger and thirst. “Outgunned, out-teched, and outnumbered,” Carleton wrote, “Red Army soldiers fought like superhumans.” The heroic fight was memorialized by Russian historian Sergei Smirnov in Brest Fortress, published in 1965 and still in print in Putin’s Russia. The battle at Brest is also the subject of movies and documentaries, and a portion of the fortress’s actual walls has been preserved as an historic site.
Carleton noted that Vladimir Putin appeals to Russia’s historic grand narrative of war. In doing so, Carleton explains, he touches feelings and emotions that “lie deep in the soil of Russian history.” It doesn’t matter that in the Ukraine war Russia is the aggressor and invader. The Brest myth, for example, lives on despite the fact that Stalin was Hitler’s accomplice in starting the European phase of World War II and despite the facts that Stalin gobbled up the Baltic states and invaded Finland in the war’s early years. In Russia, as in many other countries, myth and history become one. And leaders like Putin use mythical history to their advantage.
According to early surveys — conducted by Russian and non-Russian pollsters — recently analyzed by scholars at the London School of Economics, ordinary Russians in February and March “expressed support for the Ukrainian war and for President Putin.” There have been protests within Russia, and Russian police have detained thousands of protesters across Russia. But Putin’s regime puts out pro-war propaganda and censors news reports about the war, and that undoubtedly has an impact on ordinary Russians’ views about the war. Meanwhile the Guardian reports instances of low morale among Russian troops based on statements made by soldiers captured by Ukrainian forces — who, reports note, made those statements under obvious duress. The Daily Mail reported that intercepted radio messages among invading Russian troops similarly showed instances of low morale. These reports, however, are anecdotal. Most Russian troops are obeying orders. The invasion, shellings, and bombings continue. There are no signs of a general mutiny among Russian forces.
The Biden administration would be well-advised not to protract this war in the hope that Russian defeats and casualties and hardships at home will topple Putin. The longer the war lasts, the more Ukrainian soldiers and civilians will die. The United States should be encouraging both sides to negotiate an end to the fighting. As Ferguson says, it would be “wonderful” if the war’s drudgery and tragedy led to Putin’s downfall. But, he writes, “Prolonging the war runs the risk not just of leaving tens of thousands of Ukrainians dead and millions homeless, but also of handing Putin something he can plausibly present at home as victory.” And prolonging the war could also lead to escalation and World War III if the U.S. and NATO become field belligerents. As Ferguson writes, “History talks in the corridors of power.”
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Many years ago when I was a budding stock broker it dawned on me that in order to understand Wall Street you had to first stop in D,C and that is when I began to write memos. That was in 1960. I see that Ross tends to agree.
Up type little robots or wonderful little tykes? You decide.
The venture capital start-up world boomed like never before in 2021. The deal count was up over 40% from 2020, and the dollars were $329 billion, up from $166 billion in 2020. Half the deals were under $10 million. Over 4,000 new companies raised capital which is possibly partly due to a lot of young people not being able to go to the office and instead developing new ideas at home. It does speak well for the country that there is so much innovation going on. Most of these start-ups will fail or just bump along, but out of 4,000 there may be the next Apple or Amazon one day, but in new fields. There was also a very large increase in over $100 million per deal late stage funding deals. There was also a major increase in non-traditional venture investment sources including private equity and hedge funds, all looking for the next big hit. 700 of these other sources provided another $235 billion. Bottom line there was a lot of funding available last year. It is questionable if that will be the same levels in 2022 since the exit of a SPAC or IPO is no longer readily available. Thus far the venture funds have been able to continue to raise record amounts, and many are raising more than they expected. The problem is, each fund has a niche and strategy, so if they focus on start-ups and raise too much, they start to do deals they should not do just to move the money. Seems like there will be plenty of funding for new ideas for a while. There will be a lot of acquisitions of these small companies over the next few years if they are able to perfect their technologies. A lot of wealth creation will occur.
War impacts: Oil to stay high or higher, maybe going over $125 and maybe $150. As long as Biden sides with Iran, and not the Saudis, the risk of damage to Saudi production is high. It will take a long time to build out the added LNG and gasification terminals and plants, so EU energy costs to remain high. EU to suffer economically due to high energy costs and burden of refugees. Once war ends, Ukraine will require $20 billion a year for several years. Interest rates will rise further to fight inflation. Bonds will be an even worse investment. A default by Russia remains a real possibility. In 1998 that set off a financial market panic. The standard of living in Russia will decline a lot, and raise issues of an unhappy populace as they become aware of the consequences of the war. It will be impossible for them to conduct international transactions. EU factories depend on Russia and Ukraine for certain parts and raw materials that are no longer available. Energy security has become the number one issue for everyone. The EU will be a bad place to invest for years . Biden has made major errors in foreign policy in Afghanistan, Ukraine, Saudi, and Iran among others. The sanctions are not as tough as advertised. The Ruble has regained a material amount of its decline. Russia is still earning billions selling gas and oil to the EU. Biden’s very apparent weakness has emboldened all the bad guys, and we are now at huge risk. This is the follow on from the Obama appeasement policies and the never enforced red line, and this weakness makes WWIII even more possible. The national security team are all from the Obama security team. Standby for a lot more bad news.
Bonds have been big losers and will lose a lot more. Mortgage rates are now up around 4.75% and so house prices are going to begin to decline at the lower end as they become more unaffordable Bad for GDP growth. Fl house prices unaffected in high end locations like Longboat as sales are all cash.
An interesting observation. There has been a lot of speculation over the past few years that tech was going to create a lot of unemployment by replacing humans. What we see instead is that a growing economy creates lots of jobs for all levels of skill, and so now we have a need to fill 11 million jobs, and almost nobody left to fill them. While many people get replaced by technology, such as accounts receivable clerks or customer service operators, there are new jobs created in a variety of new fields, but especially in healthcare and technology, but also logistics. Computers will never be able to do everything. Humans are the creators and humans need services. Machines are needed to fill gaps in labor shortages, and to make people more efficient, but robots will not replace doctors and nurses, nor repairmen anytime soon. I am not concerned that technology will make humans obsolete.
It is certain now there will be a 50BP Fed raise in May. Likely another 50 in June. Now two FMOC members are saying they think it is needed. 50BP is already priced in by the market. One of the problems now is the two Biden nominees for FOMC are purely political, and not qualified to really be there, and so they will possibly vote no on the hikes needed because higher rates does not fit the DNC wishes before November. Bullard wanted it last meeting. When March CPI comes in it will shock everyone by being over 10%. The stock market will take a hit, and another hit when there is a 50 BP raise in May, and possibly another 50 in June. April CPI will also be over 10%, and could hit 12%. That will freak out the stock and bond markets. Government debt is now 105% of GDP and rising. We are now getting to the point where debt service will be so high eventually that we will not be able to pay for defense and all the crap the Dems want to add to welfare and other social spending . Just when we are entering WWIII. The PPI was 10%, so CPI is sure to follow. The market is ignoring reality in my opinion, and now may be a good time to sell some more and sit back and wait. Oil stocks pay 5% dividends, or more most likely as the year progresses, and those stocks should keep going up even after Iran is selling oil again. Until Biden lifts all the regs and charges and restrictions on pipelines and LNG terminals, oil goes up as the summer gets going. An attack on Saudi oil terminals would send oil up $20 more potentially. Better to take a loss on a stock you have lost confidence in, than hold and take a bigger loss later.
The whole world has changed permanently. Many of the metrics Wall St investors used these past few decades are now over. It will all be different, so your investing strategies need to change. We had mostly fairly stable or declining trend in rates since the eighties making bonds attractive. That is over. Inflation is the worst in 40 years, and is not going away for a long time. Geopolitical risks are as high as 1962 and the Cuban missile crisis. The US has a grossly incompetent administration, and the radical left has influence it never had. The government is pushing to end fossil fuels vs the past where we sought energy independence. We are in the early stages of WWIII, and nobody knows where it goes from here. The Fed has gotten it totally wrong, and is now just waking up to reality instead of trying to satisfy the White House misguided politics. You need to rethink your investment strategy and expected rates of return. Bonds are absolutely not what you want to invest in. Speculative stocks is not where you want your money. Annuities are not a good investment, nor are mutual funds due to fees and no control over what your money gets invested in. You do not need to pay a broker or advisor to put your money into a mutual fund or annuity so you can pay a second set of fees. It is a stock picking market from here. Everything has changed, and not for the better. Market risk is very high. Large numbers of S&P stocks below the top 15 are in a major loss position with a lot down 50%. The market indexes could go down another 10%-30% depending on oil prices and the next events in Ukraine. Risk is very high despite the talking heads and Powell saying the economy is very strong. Quality and cash flow matters more than ever. Mild recession risk in 22 is over 50%. I am not an investment advisor, so I am not going to say you should do this or that since everyone has a different personal situation.
The new thing of the moment is to use the SEC to force companies to report their carbon footprint all the way back to the raw materials stage and through the customer. What a stupid waste of time and money. They sell computer programs that supposedly measure how much carbon is used to produce whatever you make, even though there is no accurate way to measure such things since who knows what mine the minerals come from, and many come from offshore where nobody knows what goes on. Do they go into every parts factory in China to see how much carbon is used to make some tiny widget. Instead they should just look at what carbon it takes to make a windmill, or a battery , and what is the environmental problem of disposing of the windmills when they wear out in 20 years. Making a windmill uses more carbon than they save in many cases, and nobody knows what to do with used windmills. They have all lost their collective minds. The money and time would be far better spent on technology purchases to make the operation more efficient and raise productivity which helps hold down inflation and raise real wages. This is another Larry Fink special.
There will be no peace agreement or cease fire in Ukraine for weeks. Putin says he is pressing ahead, and he does what he says. Now he will try to just level the cities if he can’t occupy them. He is happy to kill thousands to try to either break their will, or just wipe them out. He couldn’t care less which it is. Now he is sending in more Chechens to kill more women and children. Any talk of a cease fire agreement is pure BS, so don’t react to it. Putin has nowhere to go but carry on until his army is broken and there are large scale surrenders of Russians. This is going nowhere good. Our problem is we can’t imagine how anyone can just murder thousands of women and children, but there are plenty of examples like Hitler, Stalin, ISIS and Pol Pot. Men like Putin simply are not normal, and exist in a world of paranoia and psychopath delusion. If you try to forecast what happens next you will be wrong because you can’t fathom how any human thinks like Putin. Keep in mind Russia has been run by dictators for 1000 years, and there is a centuries long history of constant war and killing. It is in their culture and almost all they know, so don’t expect any sudden morality from them.
Just to show how screwed up the kids in university really are, over 100 Yale law students drowned out a free speech debate because they did not think the conservative speaker had a right to have free speech. A federal judge then emailed all judges and said any law student who acted this way should NOT be hired as a clerk. These kids are so ingrained with left wing ideology they do not even think, they just say conservative-bad -stop from speaking. I was cancelled for a speech I was to give in Naples because the president of the golf club decided with no knowledge of me that I was unacceptable. Unfortunately Omicron stopped us from moving the talk and delayed it. Just shows how even grown ups are infected with cancel stupidity. Judging from the emails I still get from Sonnenfeld- the associate dean of the Yale management school who is the leader of the CEO puppets who want to look woke, Yale is a hotbed of misinformed people. Sonnenfeld is the one who now keeps the official list of companies who are pulling out of Russia and his little band of wimp CEOs rush to be on the list so they look good to the woke crowd instead of just doing it because it is right. .
Biden continues to project weakness and indecision. He has still not sent the Migs nor the full array of weapons they need in enough quantity. He sent only 100 of those switchblade drones. He should have sent 1000 so they could knock out all the artillery pounding the cities. He should send short range missiles to do the same. There are harpoon missiles to sink the Russian ships filled with soldiers before they attack Odessa. And this week we will have the Iran disaster deal which will mean more attacks on Saudi and Israel. Biden has trashed the Abraham accords which was the best hope for peace in the region. Now Assad has just visited UAE. That tells you the US has lost all influence in the Mideast. Biden is making the world a very unsafe place.
There is a new federal rule that the government has a right to audit your payroll if you are a federal contractor to make sure you are not discriminating in any way. What an invitation for a fishing expedition. You are also barred from finding out what the applicant is currently earning. More socialism interfering in private hiring.
In case you are thinking of a home on Longboat, it has become insane. An older home (30 years old or more) that has been renovated, 2500 +- sq ft, 3 Bd, ¼ acre, is selling now for close to $1200 per sq ft. Six years ago I bought a similar house which I totally gut renovated everything in and outside the house from the new floors on up through the new roof for a total all in cost of $375 per sq ft. The prices are going up by the week here, and the houses are selling in a week all cash. It is because there is no inventory.
We criticize Russian media for not reporting the war honestly. The US MSM spent three years claiming Trump colluded with Russia, then they claimed, until recently, the Hunter lap top was Russian disinformation, or in the case of PBS, they refused to even cover the story. One could find many more examples, but we all know the US MSM is no longer a free press reporting the truth, and is now a politicized arm of the DNC.
War impacts: Oil to stay high or higher, maybe going over $125 and maybe $150. As long as Biden sides with Iran, and not the Saudis, the risk of damage to Saudi production is high. It will take a long time to build out the added LNG and gasification terminals and plants, so EU energy costs to remain high. EU to suffer economically due to high energy costs and burden of refugees. Once war ends, Ukraine will require $20 billion a year for several years. Interest rates will rise further to fight inflation. Bonds will be an even worse investment. A default by Russia remains a real possibility. In 1998 that set off a financial market panic. The standard of living in Russia will decline a lot, and raise issues of an unhappy populace as they become aware of the consequences of the war. It will be impossible for them to conduct international transactions. EU factories depend on Russia and Ukraine for certain parts and raw materials that are no longer available. Energy security has become the number one issue for everyone. The EU will be a bad place to invest for years . Biden has made major errors in foreign policy in Afghanistan, Ukraine, Saudi, and Iran among others. The sanctions are not as tough as advertised. The Ruble has regained a material amount of its decline. Russia is still earning billions selling gas and oil to the EU. Biden’s very apparent weakness has emboldened all the bad guys, and we are now at huge risk. This is the follow on from the Obama appeasement policies and the never enforced red line, and this weakness makes WWIII even more possible. The national security team are all from the Obama security team. Standby for a lot more bad news.
Bonds have been big losers and will lose a lot more. Mortgage rates are now up around 4.75% and so house prices are going to begin to decline at the lower end as they become more unaffordable Bad for GDP growth. Fl house prices unaffected in high end locations like Longboat as sales are all cash.
An interesting observation. There has been a lot of speculation over the past few years that tech was going to create a lot of unemployment by replacing humans. What we see instead is that a growing economy creates lots of jobs for all levels of skill, and so now we have a need to fill 11 million jobs, and almost nobody left to fill them. While many people get replaced by technology, such as accounts receivable clerks or customer service operators, there are new jobs created in a variety of new fields, but especially in healthcare and technology, but also logistics. Computers will never be able to do everything. Humans are the creators and humans need services. Machines are needed to fill gaps in labor shortages, and to make people more efficient, but robots will not replace doctors and nurses, nor repairmen anytime soon. I am not concerned that technology will make humans obsolete.
It is certain now there will be a 50BP Fed raise in May. Likely another 50 in June. Now two FMOC members are saying they think it is needed. 50BP is already priced in by the market. One of the problems now is the two Biden nominees for FOMC are purely political, and not qualified to really be there, and so they will possibly vote no on the hikes needed because higher rates does not fit the DNC wishes before November. Bullard wanted it last meeting. When March CPI comes in it will shock everyone by being over 10%. The stock market will take a hit, and another hit when there is a 50 BP raise in May, and possibly another 50 in June. April CPI will also be over 10%, and could hit 12%. That will freak out the stock and bond markets. Government debt is now 105% of GDP and rising. We are now getting to the point where debt service will be so high eventually that we will not be able to pay for defense and all the crap the Dems want to add to welfare and other social spending . Just when we are entering WWIII. The PPI was 10%, so CPI is sure to follow. The market is ignoring reality in my opinion, and now may be a good time to sell some more and sit back and wait. Oil stocks pay 5% dividends, or more most likely as the year progresses, and those stocks should keep going up even after Iran is selling oil again. Until Biden lifts all the regs and charges and restrictions on pipelines and LNG terminals, oil goes up as the summer gets going. An attack on Saudi oil terminals would send oil up $20 more potentially. Better to take a loss on a stock you have lost confidence in, than hold and take a bigger loss later.
The whole world has changed permanently. Many of the metrics Wall St investors used these past few decades are now over. It will all be different, so your investing strategies need to change. We had mostly fairly stable or declining trend in rates since the eighties making bonds attractive. That is over. Inflation is the worst in 40 years, and is not going away for a long time. Geopolitical risks are as high as 1962 and the Cuban missile crisis. The US has a grossly incompetent administration, and the radical left has influence it never had. The government is pushing to end fossil fuels vs the past where we sought energy independence. We are in the early stages of WWIII, and nobody knows where it goes from here. The Fed has gotten it totally wrong, and is now just waking up to reality instead of trying to satisfy the White House misguided politics. You need to rethink your investment strategy and expected rates of return. Bonds are absolutely not what you want to invest in. Speculative stocks is not where you want your money. Annuities are not a good investment, nor are mutual funds due to fees and no control over what your money gets invested in. You do not need to pay a broker or advisor to put your money into a mutual fund or annuity so you can pay a second set of fees. It is a stock picking market from here. Everything has changed, and not for the better. Market risk is very high. Large numbers of S&P stocks below the top 15 are in a major loss position with a lot down 50%. The market indexes could go down another 10%-30% depending on oil prices and the next events in Ukraine. Risk is very high despite the talking heads and Powell saying the economy is very strong. Quality and cash flow matters more than ever. Mild recession risk in 22 is over 50%. I am not an investment advisor, so I am not going to say you should do this or that since everyone has a different personal situation.
The new thing of the moment is to use the SEC to force companies to report their carbon footprint all the way back to the raw materials stage and through the customer. What a stupid waste of time and money. They sell computer programs that supposedly measure how much carbon is used to produce whatever you make, even though there is no accurate way to measure such things since who knows what mine the minerals come from, and many come from offshore where nobody knows what goes on. Do they go into every parts factory in China to see how much carbon is used to make some tiny widget. Instead they should just look at what carbon it takes to make a windmill, or a battery , and what is the environmental problem of disposing of the windmills when they wear out in 20 years. Making a windmill uses more carbon than they save in many cases, and nobody knows what to do with used windmills. They have all lost their collective minds. The money and time would be far better spent on technology purchases to make the operation more efficient and raise productivity which helps hold down inflation and raise real wages. This is another Larry Fink special.
There will be no peace agreement or cease fire in Ukraine for weeks. Putin says he is pressing ahead, and he does what he says. Now he will try to just level the cities if he can’t occupy them. He is happy to kill thousands to try to either break their will, or just wipe them out. He couldn’t care less which it is. Now he is sending in more Chechens to kill more women and children. Any talk of a cease fire agreement is pure BS, so don’t react to it. Putin has nowhere to go but carry on until his army is broken and there are large scale surrenders of Russians. This is going nowhere good. Our problem is we can’t imagine how anyone can just murder thousands of women and children, but there are plenty of examples like Hitler, Stalin, ISIS and Pol Pot. Men like Putin simply are not normal, and exist in a world of paranoia and psychopath delusion. If you try to forecast what happens next you will be wrong because you can’t fathom how any human thinks like Putin. Keep in mind Russia has been run by dictators for 1000 years, and there is a centuries long history of constant war and killing. It is in their culture and almost all they know, so don’t expect any sudden morality from them.
Just to show how screwed up the kids in university really are, over 100 Yale law students drowned out a free speech debate because they did not think the conservative speaker had a right to have free speech. A federal judge then emailed all judges and said any law student who acted this way should NOT be hired as a clerk. These kids are so ingrained with left wing ideology they do not even think, they just say conservative-bad -stop from speaking. I was cancelled for a speech I was to give in Naples because the president of the golf club decided with no knowledge of me that I was unacceptable. Unfortunately Omicron stopped us from moving the talk and delayed it. Just shows how even grown ups are infected with cancel stupidity. Judging from the emails I still get from Sonnenfeld- the associate dean of the Yale management school who is the leader of the CEO puppets who want to look woke, Yale is a hotbed of misinformed people. Sonnenfeld is the one who now keeps the official list of companies who are pulling out of Russia and his little band of wimp CEOs rush to be on the list so they look good to the woke crowd instead of just doing it because it is right. .
Biden continues to project weakness and indecision. He has still not sent the Migs nor the full array of weapons they need in enough quantity. He sent only 100 of those switchblade drones. He should have sent 1000 so they could knock out all the artillery pounding the cities. He should send short range missiles to do the same. There are harpoon missiles to sink the Russian ships filled with soldiers before they attack Odessa. And this week we will have the Iran disaster deal which will mean more attacks on Saudi and Israel. Biden has trashed the Abraham accords which was the best hope for peace in the region. Now Assad has just visited UAE. That tells you the US has lost all influence in the Mideast. Biden is making the world a very unsafe place.
There is a new federal rule that the government has a right to audit your payroll if you are a federal contractor to make sure you are not discriminating in any way. What an invitation for a fishing expedition. You are also barred from finding out what the applicant is currently earning. More socialism interfering in private hiring.
In case you are thinking of a home on Longboat, it has become insane. An older home (30 years old or more) that has been renovated, 2500 +- sq ft, 3 Bd, ¼ acre, is selling now for close to $1200 per sq ft. Six years ago I bought a similar house which I totally gut renovated everything in and outside the house from the new floors on up through the new roof for a total all in cost of $375 per sq ft. The prices are going up by the week here, and the houses are selling in a week all cash. It is because there is no inventory.
We criticize Russian media for not reporting the war honestly. The US MSM spent three years claiming Trump colluded with Russia, then they claimed, until recently, the Hunter lap top was Russian disinformation, or in the case of PBS, they refused to even cover the story. One could find many more examples, but we all know the US MSM is no longer a free press reporting the truth, and is now a politicized arm of the DNC.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Up type little robots or wonderful little tykes? You decide.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Our Ambassador to Israel - Stuff it!
Biden’s Israel Ambassador Tells BDS Group He Wants Jews Out of Jerusalem
“Your agenda is where my heart is.”
Daniel Greenfield, Mar 23, 2022
Biden’s ambassador to Israel appeared at a pro-BDS group’s webinar co-hosted by its CEO, who had described Israel as an “oppressive regime”, and told its audience that the real problem with the Palestinian Authority funding terrorism is that “it gives the ‘haters’ an excuse not to support the PA based on the argument that it is ‘paying for people who killed Jews.’”
…..Nides' main qualification for the job had been yelling “You don’t want to f***ing defund UNESCO" at a former Israeli ambassador. He had also vocally opposed efforts to defund UNRWA and stop subsidizing the terror refugee industry.
…..It didn't take long for Nides to justify their faith in his hostility to the Jewish State.
…..."When it comes to Israel, I have no ideology,"
……“I’m center-left,” he joked. “I’m left generally, but I put in the ‘center’ just to make myself feel better.”
……“You have a clear agenda. I think your agenda is where my heart is,” Nides told Americans for Peace Now.
What is APN’s agenda? The anti-Israel group opposes Jews living in Jerusalem, opposes anti-BDS legislation, and opposes Jews defending themselves against Islamic terrorism. CONTINUE
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Erick Erickson chimes in:
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Judge Jackson Doesn’t Know What a Woman Is
Erick-Woods Eickson
Comment
The coverage of Ketanji Brown Jackson’s SCOTUS hearing was nothing short of spectacular. Senator Marsha Blackburn asked Ketanji Brown Jackson if she could define the word woman. She could not. Senator John Kennedy asked her if she could say when life began. She could not. Senator Josh Hawley asked her to defend her apology to a child sex offender she previously sentenced. She was unable to. The media coverage was not on Judge Jackson’s response to these basic questions. Instead, it was to attack the Republican Senators and claim they wanted her killed. Where were these media pundits in the Kavanaugh hearings? Take a listen:
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 Also, you should be a subscriber because you will get access to my newest daily email. The Show Notes is my blueprint for radio. It is every story I cover on my radio show. It’s the only news aggregator you will need. |
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