As I wrote, there's no point trying to reason with you, Haim, Greenspirit etc. I've tried but I get the old obdurate approach. I figured out Greenspirit recently when he described his extended time underwater in military employment. Of course!! Being such a submerged employee, obedience to groupthink and following orders and believing in the tribal chimpoid hierarchy, ready to follow orders to end the world, he's not going to be amenable to actual thinking. Multitudes of others suffer such impediments to thinking. By the age of 5 I knew I didn't have that problem, and have gained expertise over many subsequent decades in dealing with such tribal group"think".
Fortunately for me, I'm fairly fatalistic these days having learned over many decades how "thinking" works in nearly everyone. Something like 95%, more or less, prefer to go down with the ship than change their thinking when somebody gives them better ideas, or facts that better match reality. I've suffered enough of my own bung thinking to be very aware that my model of reality is tenuous at best and subject to change without notice. I value the vast range of opinions and expertise in SI and have many times been corrected. One of my most valuable was deciding that TJ was probably right that following Y2K QCOM was likely to go down a lot further rather than back up. I sold Tonka Truckloads of QCOM at $66 which saved my bacon as it bottomed at about $20 [$10 split adjusted to latest price].
The peaceful end to the Cold War that was engineered... by sane people... was working out fine for everyone... including Russia... and China. But, insane people seeking to "win the peace"... will destroy far more than "the peace"... but, also, the prize.
Hopeless though it is, I'm happy to point out that the end to the Cold War was not engineered though dopey Yanks think they did it by out-spending USSR and causing it to collapse. Nonsense. Gorby ended it by being a civilized man who was obviously not going to go Stalinist on disaffected hordes and nationalities who were quite sick of being ruled, and murdered [as in Hungary, Prague Spring, Gdansk, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Russia etc]. USSR/Warsaw Pact local yokels simply climbed on top of the Berlin wall and throughout USSR, Yeltsin and others told Gorby it was game over and USSR was officially cancelled. USSR was not engineered out of existence. It fizzled out and was replaced by local yokels taking over.
That did not end or stop the Cold War, which continued apace, with USA being the PNAC hegemonist who could rule the world and attack anyone with impunity, though Osama bin Laden and others did demonstrate that mighty, violent, hegemonists don't get to have everything their own way.
USA bombed Serbia into submission [not strictly cold war, more like hot war] which Russia disagreed with. USA rampaged over Iraq, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, got a coup going in Egypt, Georgia, Ukraine = the cold war had not ended but continued, with hot weapons being deployed hither and yon by USA in particular, but with UK and others joining in here and there.
There's a "cold war" right now going between Russia and USA/NATO with lapdogs like Aotearoa-Zimbabwe. Just as with Syria, it's not directly between Russia/USA, but uses a proxy to suffer horrors galore and absorb the megatons of armaments and provide giga$bucks of profits.
This one looks much more like WWIII than did the many previous proxy wars, because this is actually IN Russia - namely in Crimea and against Russians in Donetsk and Luhansk etc who want to be independent or autonomous.
I note that Russia just launched their latest and greatest ICBM mirver, called Sarmat. Great news. Russia will be able to destroy multiple cities, military bases, launch sites, carrier fleets etc in USA or UK simultaneously with, I guess, 100 megatons of nuclear reactions spread over about 10 or a dozen payloads. That's great news because it might help Greenspirit, you and hordes of others to understand that warring is a bad idea. The current war is not like the cakewalk in Iraq [which wasn't such a walk in the park in the end, costing $trillions and many thousands of USA lives, not forgetting the millions of Iraqi lives ended, destroyed or disrupted, and not much achieved other than the usual profits for Congress people and armaments makers ].
Saddam would have been old and died by now if USA had done nothing.
Note that Vladamir Putin is nearly 70, so he's going to be conquering all of Europe, north Africa, south Asia and maybe USA only for another 10 or at most 20 years. At the rate he's been going since he took over as a youngster 20 years ago, he's going to need 1000 years to even get across the Baltic states and maybe Poland. So far, all he's done is take over Crimea, which was already a Russia military base so it was not really taking over, just changing the certificate of title from a long term lease to ownership in fee simple.
So he'll need 10,000 years to rebuild the USSR and Warsaw Pact territories. Even the dullards among us can probably figure out that that is not going to happen. For example, apart from Vlad Putin getting old, China is not an also-ran as it was 40 years ago. It's more likely that China will buy Siberia east of the Urals, than Russia will expand westwards.
I don't remember things "working out fine" for everyone since Gorby called an end to State thuggery and murder, and Yeltsin and co sealed the deal by cancelling USSR. Yeltsin and co should have put Crimea back into Russia, made Donbas autonomous etc but not all details could be figured out in such rapidly falling apart times. There's no need to kill 7 billion people because Yeltsin and co didn't get details right in the hectic times of the USSR end.
It's easy to fix. Crimea stays in Russia. Donetsk, Luhansk whatnot have a referendum or just declare autonomous statehood. Yankee Go Home. Boris bugger off. Kiev stop plotting to raze Russia [as Yulia said she planned to with a little help from friends].
Solved it, just like that. Total cost of my plan = $314,159.23 payable on adoption of my super sophisticated complex plan. What the heck, I'll do the deal for $31,414.16 = 90% discount
Noblesse oblige,
Mqurice |
