william.scherk
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Status Updates posted by william.scherk
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Trump speaks to war, via Russian Media Monitor:
From Niki Proshin in Istanbul:
Spoiler -
Whenever storms hit the New Orleans area, I think of Deanna and check in with her.
Hurricane Ian is making landfall right how. I hope any and all OL members in the danger zones in Florida have evacuated safely.
The Canadian maritime provinces are in clean-up mode after Fiona roared through the region.
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I really get around in mentions. It bears a search now and again.
12 hours ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:On 9/19/2022 at 8:03 PM, Ellen Stuttle said:If you want an unvarnished view of William's opinion of Trump supporters, take a look at this crud William retweeted...
Ellen,
Let me add some crud he might like to retweet (not the tweet below, but information about the event).
When I discovered that Colleen Shogan had written a murder mystery called "Gore in the Garden," my imagination briefly went wild. The genre seemed more welcoming than a clotted-with-footnotes dense 'academic' style of writing under the long heading of "Anti-Intellectualism in the Modern Presidency: A Republican Populism."
I got as far as the introductory definitions, and posted them to a web page with a sound file via the tweet below. Shogan's stylized writing does not have the verve and flair at summarizing dense proceedings that the 11th Circuit court of appeals showed in its terse ruling, but setting aside her incipient RDS circa 2007, she gets to the point. Right or wrong, gapingly biased or morally squalid, she gets to the point.
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It's been a while since I watched this interview with Ayn Rand. "James McConnell interviews Ayn Rand about the New Intellectual."
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Sad to see the erudite Hanson prejudicially omit or ignore facts, mis-deduce and misinterpret motives. And so cast his moral judgments on one side alone. Another military historian who thinks that history determines future events. Rationalism, iow. (There was no attempt to "grab Kyiv". The Ukrainian army greatly out numbered the Russians. And so on.)
From the comments sidebar:
Brett Harris10 hours ago−
Hanson forgot to mention that the Ukrainian war started in 2014, after the US overthrew the democratically elected president Viktor Yanukovych, and installed a hand picked nationalist junta, that was not recognised by the majority of the people in east Ukraine.
A civil war began, the illegal Ukrainian government refused to implement the peace process known as the Minsk Accords.
In eight years, with massive US support, the war killed over 14,000 civilians in Donbass.
On 20 Feb 2022, the Ukrainian army began a massive artillery attack on cites in the Donbass, as recorded by the OSCE monitors.
Three days later Russia intervened to prevent a massacre.
This was no “unprovoked invasion”
it was Russia being provoked by the US and NATO.
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Tuesday is my "explore new sources" day, when I try to futher crack open my "silo".
Some here will no doubt be famiiar with the duo of Natali and Clayton Morris. They have a fairly slick production level, but not too slick, and they put in time gathering materials for commentary -- and also give a clarifying intro to the stories they will be covering.
On the whole, they are very Trump positive, not too Q-pilled, cynical about and critical of 'endless wars' and NATO imperatives, skeptical of Western claims. They cite sources ranging from Paul Joseph Watson to the Grayzone and Moon of Alabama, and include screenshots and video excerpts to their not-too-long commentaries. This is from my Tuesday queue. It was uploaded February 16 2022. It scopes out pre-invasion political and military wag-dogging. "We have training progams on how to lie to the American people."
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From Mike Adams the Health Ranger's latest podcast: "As the Queen dies, so does Luciferian-dominated Western Civilization"
- The death of the Queen is a cosmic indicator of the death of Western Civilization - Western civilization is now almost entirely run by satanists and luciferians - First the British Empire, and later the American Empire, PILLAGE the world - Every institution of luciferian western nations is anti-human, anti-truth, anti-liberty - The fall of luciferian Western Civilization is a necessary step for humanity to achieve freedom - BILLIONS will die in the next phase of the engineered global collapse - Prepping is necessary to survive the global war on humanity and help REBUILD civilization - The future for humanity is bright as we rebuild civilization based on morals, reason, family values and honest money.
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I am sorry to see her go, but now the world has King Charles, and Prince William next in line for the British throne. I guess Harry renounced "it all" but what if something incapacitates King Charles and then Prince William? King Harry and Meghan . . . consort? That consort title sounds a bit Frenchy to me.
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Modern English is shot through with words derived from or borrowed from French or Norman French. Consort looks like it entered the English lexicon from Old French by the 1500s.
From the Royal Court of Arms: Honi soit qui mal y pense.
File:Royal Coat of Arms of the United Kingdom.svg - Wikimedia Commons
COMMONS.WIKIMEDIA.ORG
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In passing ... Ali Alexander and "Wild Protest" remembered.
So many "enemies of the people" to choose from in these latter days.
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A story with a few twists and turns, from an Estonian perspective, in Quillette.
'On another occasion, Lydia demanded to know why was I so into Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Didn’t I know there was something fundamentally unsavoury, something just wrong, about Russian culture however “great” it supposedly was? Her hatred was bracingly honest, but it was still hatred, and as someone with Russian friends I found it hard to take. She called me naïve—a “blue eyed Westerner”—and I responded that her blanket prejudice was just as unsophisticated.'
[...]
I recall Estonian PM Kaja Kallas’s words: “Everything is black and white in war,” and I quote a Ukrainian friend to Lydia: “Right now we need the binary. We need our anger and our hatred to survive.” Doesn’t Estonia—a country we’re frequently told is on Putin’s to-invade list—need it too? In case of an actual conflict, she agrees. “If you don’t draw a clear line, how do you fight? How do you avoid spies? Or keep secrets? It’s the hatred, the common enemy that best unifies a group of people.” This didn’t mean your previous understanding of the complexities would disappear. “You’d just have to deliberately put them aside. … The nuances are for peace time. When you have the luxury to observe a culture holistically rather than dig a trench to survive.”
“Are you with or against us?” Lydia concludes. “That’s the only real question in a war.”
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William,
There is a passage in the article that is indicative of a mindset. It's like when someone asks you, which do you choose, A or B? And the person scratches his head. It's neither to him. Or, maybe both.
The person asking the question has no mental conception that this is available in reality except in the very young, the mentally impaired and the ignorant (but, of course, the ignorant will come around once they know the score).
Here is the passage:
QuoteA Vlad, she elaborates, “is not kept in the dark. A Vlad is confident that the darkness is the truth. And a Vlad aggressively goes on to assert his ‘truth’: ‘Ukrainians are our brothers, they love us! They ARE us! We’re one big family. There must be someone deceiving them, either Americans or Nazis! So: Remove the Nazis! De-nazify Ukraine! And they’ll be good brothers again…’”
That felt familiar when I read it, so I did a little experiment.
I rewrote it.
A MAGA person is not kept in the dark. A MAGA person is confident that the darkness is the truth. And a MAGA person aggressively goes on to assert his ‘truth’: "Americans are our brothers, they love us! They ARE us! We’re one big family. There must be someone deceiving them, either Marxists or socialists! So: Remove the Marxists! De-Marxify America! And they’ll be good brothers again…"
There are people in the world who do not think like this. They do not look down on another group from such an attitude of epistemological arrogance. Look at them. They think XXXX because they can't help themselves, poor things...
That worldview is only present in those who think of themselves as innately superior to others as a class.
For those who prioritize individuals, their worldview is that we are all equal in terms of our ability to choose how we use our brain. But to the "one class is superior to another" view, they have no notion that this even exists. When they hear it, they think it is rhetoric to gain power, not a metaphysical statement.
And it is true that MAGA people do not like Marx. But the "one class is superior to another" people think the MAGA people are against a Marxist class (probably because they are stupid and even evil). The "one class is superior to another" people do not conceive that they are against Marxist ideas as they relate to individuals and to reason.
I base this on constantly reading and listening to them, just like the quote above.
That is what allows them to mischaracterize whole swaths of people and feel superior to those people about it, and feel superior to all other classes the world over for their ability to see this. Man, it's not easy being so awesome.
If I thought as such a collectivist (in the superior class, of course) and worried about hierarchy as my main inner concern with life, I would be wondering what we can do about this. That we have to fix this problem and find a way to make people see the light.
But as one who believes each individual has the same power of choice over his brain, I hold that those who believe in such false collective dichotomies will come around to a reality-based way of thinking--individual by individual--if they so choose.
And if they prefer their false dichotomy to reality, it's because they choose this--and they choose it as individuals.
Why would anyone choose that? To me, it's obvious. They like feeling superior. They are addicted to the neurochemical high this worldview provides.
Michael
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William,
The main point I want to make with this innately superior business is that this is a narrative. It is not reflected in reality. Every single person has free will.
Granted, we need narratives mainly because that's how humans think, but when something needs to be checked to make sure identification is correct, observable reality must trump narrative for eliminating contradictions and making correct identifications.
"Who what when where and how" we can observe in reality. And we do narrative with them. So when narrative and reality conflict on those things, we have to go with observable reality.
"Why" we mostly infer through narrative.
So is one class of humans superior to another just because that class is innately more awesome?
So long as this question is relegated to non-observable innate things, but ones that can be compared (through story), it's narrative only. It's not reality, although a person may believe it is.
In fact, if you control that narrative, the one the "superior" person agrees with and believes in, you control that superior man and woman. You control them 100% of the time.
Hell, we are all controlled up to a point through narratives. Social media alone proves that.
But free will is not really part of the controlled "superior" person I am talking about. Free will is part of the members of humanity who question things and check them against reality. Notice that all of us can question things and check them against reality if we want. We are all equal in that respect. There is no class of humans that is so superior, it is the only class that can question things.
What's more, there's this. Tell a hayseed that a cow is a bird and no matter how intelligent you are and how stupid he is, no matter what tribes you belong to, you will not get him to agree (unless it is to get rid of you
). Why? Because he can observe reality, and what he observes from reality is contrary to your narrative.
I'm talking in general terms. I'm not talking about specific psychological experiments held under abnormal controlled conditions. And I'm not talking about changing a person's perception of reality on a basic level through drugs.
Michael
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YouTube throws recommendations at you, if you let them. Me re-watching videos of the recent historic flooding in eastern Kentucky and West Virginia may have triggered this one. The period visuals are quite something.
The channel is The Appalachian Storyteller.
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A couple of tweets that address the instant "evidence" offered as a solution to the assassination of Dugina.
Max Seddon:
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I searched for Alexander Dugin's name here, but found nothing. A lot has been written of him in the West, especially among those who try to discern/discover Russia's soul, but not yet on OL.
The "foreign policy wonk" community is well-funded and often seems to be at once Deep State, paranoid Intelligence Community and several other varieties of spook, nerd and mouthpiece of "US interests. Luckily, they never agree.
Alexander Dugin, in the paranoid spook mouthpiece community, is a source of Russian leadership's philosophy. Some of what he has written can seem insanely fascist to ... at least some American ears. But ...
Anyhow, defenestrations and assassinations are no surprise when they happen in Moscow (think Clinton Body Count), but this car explosion is shocking. In the context of war, maybe not completely, but if the early reports from TASS and breathless Twitter accounts, this explosion will make waves.
In other news from far away, another round of explosions of ammunition stores inside Russia near Belgorod.
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Glenn Beck has been talking about the danger of Dugin's ideas for years. I must have some old stuff here on OL about him. I'm pretty sure we have talked about him given the amount of coverage Glenn gave to him..
I just did an online search and Glenn never stopped talking about Dugin.
Sorry to hear about his daughter.
Michael
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From the folks who brought you a Донецкая Народная Республика ...
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Update on Russian official and free-media reaction to the destruction at the Saky airbase in occupied Crimea.
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Yesterday I did a sampling of Ukraine war-watchers commentary on Twitter, the subject being a 'small explosion' at the Saki airbase in Crimea. The Russian state media said munitions 'detonated' but that no aircraft were damaged. Videos showed at least three massive explosions, putting the lie to Kremlin remarks, at least yesterday. One person is said by the Russians to have died, and many residential buildings had concussion blast damage, necessitating an evacuation of hundreds.
This Google Earth image grab is dated to June 2021. You can see at least twenty aircraft.
The folks with OCD based on IDing aircraft had already explained what was on the tarmac and in slots from two days ago, and a Nozzi mouthpiece summed up those details here:
Yuriy Ihnat, the spokesman for Air Force Command, speaking on Ukrainian national television on Aug. 10, said Saki’s military airfield was a base for Russian Su-30SM, Su-24, Il-76 and other warplanes.
"The occupiers' planes were constantly taking off from this airfield,” Ihnat said.
“They are in the sky around Ukraine practically around the clock. Without flying to Snake Island, they patrol the Black Sea constantly, only changing planes and crews. Disabling the airfield is a good thing, and if a dozen more planes were destroyed there, that's a small victory.”
Satellite data overnight showed that the airbase had at least ten of its aircraft destroyed. I put here an image linked to someone who got a real charge out of the depictions.
I'd asked myself what this means to Russia. I'll check Telegram and see how far the repercussions have gone already. It's a heavy blow, delivered 120 miles inside Crimea. I have no idea what this means in terms of military reaction, public acknowledgement, TV broadcasts from Kremlin media ...
Left hanging is the matter of delivery and what exactly was delivered. Lots of speculation, including 'partisan' sabotage, guerilla-style, as well as more prosaic guesses at rarely-fired Ukrainian missiles capable of shooting up to the stratosphere and coming straight down, and other armaments all except the OCD wonks are familiar with.
Here's a reasonably skeptical and broadranging thread from Twitter that uses the Bellingcat overnight investigation of the surprise attack as a jump-off point for answers to some of the questions.
Mistrust and verify ...
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Dry humour from Ukraine's military mouthpiece:
Two impressions: on the Russian side, news of small explosion of armaments, no aircraft damaged.
Tomorrow's satellite data will confirm that impression or not, but visuals indicate at least three large explosions. I don't know if the video is circulating widely on Russian social media ...
Word on the street and wonk-nerd commentary sprouts three shoots.
Firstly, if the officially small explosion occurred because of a Ukrainian attack, what weaponry was used? See the distance in scale in the next tweet.
Then, how will Russia react? -- what does this deep-behind-front strike mean to them (in terms of degrading military capabilities)? If the arms storage areas at the base were destroyed by mysterious Ukrainian armaments, what happened to Russian air defences?
I suspect shock and dismay, well-hidden from the Russian populace.
The third sprouting query concerns what this means in terms of Ukraine's war aims? Will there be more shocking destruction of arms dumps way beyond reach of HIMARS supplied by the USA?
My view is that Ukrainian patriots got a big boost of morale today, the Russian military got a bad shock. Supplying their frontline war machine just got tougher.
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Interesting prediction from Russian TV.
Demographic decline, sliced thick or thin. Several patterns may be discernable for those well-trained ...
Deep state opinion:
What has Russia won so far, all things considered?
I should revisit my ghosted audio report on Empathy. One of the Russian YouTube accounts I mentioned that I watch regularly is getting closer to the bone.
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Having some fun plugging together text-to-speech narration, titles, music and video inside the streaming platform OBS (Open Broadcast Software) -- and porting it through Twitter. The main benefit is double-edged: you can "broadcast" to Twitter for an hour or more, and the ensuing video is retained and will play inside a tweet on Twitter desktop version.
The editor appears to have some kind of fever, yes?
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Yeah, so Turkey, Sweden and Finland have signed a memorandum of understanding. The upshot is that both will be joining NATO in the near future.
QuoteNATO leaders will formally invite Finland and Sweden to join the alliance Wednesday after Turkey inked a deal to drop its objections, NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg said.
"I'm pleased to announce that we now have an agreement that paves the way for Finland and Sweden to join NATO. Turkey, Finland and Sweden have signed a memorandum that addresses Turkey's concerns, including around arms exports, and the fight against terrorism," Mr. Stoltenberg said on Tuesday after crunch talks in Madrid. He also called it "a historic decision."
Meanwhile, the crew at state TV are having some moments ...
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A sombre extract from Russian Media Monitor via Julia Davis. The intended audience is ...
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Donald Trump is on stage right now at the Faith and Freedom conference in Nashville. He has pointedly denied Pence claims made in yesterday's committee-of-benghazi hearings on The Hill.
I didn't hear anything about John Eastman so far. One of the tragi-comic aspects of "the Pence Card" ploy and Eastman is the contrast between his 100 "Fifth" answers to the committee questions (like "Q: Did you speak with the Vice-President's counsel on January 5th? A: Fifth") -- and the email from Eastman saying "I’ve decided that I should be on the pardon list, if that is still in the works."
The original uploader removed the YouTube video. I link to C-SPAN's page, where watchers can be readers, search the transcript and make clips for sharing or posting:
Former President Trump Calls Select Committee "A Witch Hunt"
WWW.C-SPAN.ORGSen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) delivered remarks at the Faith and Freedom gathering in Nashville, Tennessee.I was struck by two aspects of the speech's theme -- Trump's repeated denunciations of Pence (he argues -- contra every freaking person on his and Pence's legal staff who we heard from yesterday -- that Eastman's corrupt plan was legal, that Pence was weak, wrong, disloyal), and by his claim that he will pardon the January 6th Capitol breach defendants (and presumably those already convicted and serving time).
So, I wonder if this is going to appeal to folks in the "I didn't know that detail" middle. Is Trump become the arbiter of justice, one shelf above the Supreme Court?
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Behind the pay wall ...
What We Learned on Day 3 of the Jan. 6 Hearings - The New York Times
WWW.NYTIMES.COMAs rioters surrounded the Capitol, President Trump condemned Vice President Pence for failing to go along with a plan he’d been told would break the law, the House committee said. The plan’s chief architect...
