USA started the war = Nuland, Obama, Biden and co and further back to starting the Syrian war by backing ISIS, AlQaeda and whatnot Islamic Jihadists against Assad and co, and further back. We have to go way back to USSR times when they were trying to "Bury you" - Nikita Krushchev, to see USSR being a big bully. Once Gorby had taken over, that was finished, and was gone once Yeltsin and co broke up USSR into little parts.
Gorby tried to keep USSR as a going concern but when organisation depends on brute force and fear instead of mutual admiration and co-operative enterprise, people will prefer to go their own way. Sometimes they'll just go their own way because many people like being independent explorers, adventurers, trying something new, and resist behemoth kleptocrats who invariably take over and try to become Marie Antoinette and Louis XIV.
USA is now acting as a world bully, kleptocrat, self indulgent totalitarian. They should ponder why India and so many other people prefer association with Russia and even China which threatens India and attacks them on the border. It's complicated because even before USA has given up being World Bully, China is trying to take over = threatening bulk murder and conquest of Taiwan if the lovelyTaiwanese choose to NOT be subsumed by mainland's murderous megalomaniacs. Maybe that woman athlete who accused one of the politburo of sexual attack was not exaggerating = it was complicated but obviously not a lovey dovey marriage. The politburo of China see relationships like that = we're the boss and you'll do what we say, or else, good and hard.
The genteel English are quite the opposite. Heck, they even set up Northern Ireland into an electoral system to determine alliances. And England has the complexity of Eurostan at the border with Ireland, with Eurostan threatening attacks on England over something to do with the border with Ireland.
Scotland had an independence referendum and opted to stay in cahoots with England, even while Scotland decades ago established an independent parliament for local matters or something. Similarly, England voted for Brexit and bailed out of Eurostan after 50 years of being in the EEC [European Economic Community] which became a kleptocratic monster that couldn't even defend their southern border, with tens of millions of swarming invaders replacing the local yokels. The EU is Big Brother kleptocratic suffocatocracy.
I had direct discussion with the EU as the diesel fuel guy for BP Oil International in an environmental conference in Rouen in 1988. EU wanted one diesel fuel to rule them all. I explained that a commuter in Stockholm in winter requires a very different diesel fuel from a huge transnational trucker driving from Madrid to Istanbul in summer. A single fuel could work, but at high cost and no advantage. A big truck, in the countryside in heat of summer, driving constantly, can happily run on high sulphur waxy cheap stuff without environmental concern, whereas a little motor in -10 degrees Celsius needs low sulphur, low wax, low aromatic good stuff with high cetane number to start nicely, run smoothly without the fuel freezing and price didn't matter so much as such a tiny amount of fuel was used for a 10 km journey, and sulphur matters a lot more in cities and in engines that cool down to the dew point frequently as the sulphuric acid damages oil and motors. I think now sulphur is stripped out much more to enable super low emissions.
EU gave up the single specification diesel fuel. But they make megatons of other rules, from the bend in a banana to the head on a beer [maybe I'm exaggerating there but not much].
Emissions from engines are now so low that tyre wear has become of more concern than engine output. Tyres wear to tiny particles of rubbery oily muck which hides in soil and washes off roads.
While driving recently I calculated how much tyre muck is going into the air and surroundings. It's not much but a collector system by a busy road with nasty chip seal stone surface would get plenty.
A nice smooth road is pleasant to drive on and also wears the tyres much less. Less rolling resistance, so less fuel use and less engine wear, less CO2 output, and other emissions, less noise for passengers and nearby people. We all like smooth, quiet, roads.
The war with Russia should be cancelled forthwith. Preparation for war with China over Taiwan and Hong Kong started. Heck, cut to the chase and start attacking China for making threats against the good people of Taiwan and for abrogating the treaty between Margaret Thatcher, Queen Elizabeth II and whoever was in charge of China back then.
In fact, Margaret Thatcher and China's bosses had no business deciding who should be the boss of the people of Hong Kong. Well, they did, but it's a question of degree.
In the 19th century, when the lease was agreed between some long-forgotten people from China and England, there was hardly anyone in Hong Kong [about 4000 as I recall]. For whatever reasons, millions of them, those few people turned into many millions of high GDP people in Hong Kong. Mostly escaped out of China but from around the world too, such as boat people fleeing from Vietnam.
The sensible thing to do was to hold a referendum such as Scottish, Irish, English referenda as for Scottish Independence, Brexit independence from Bruxelles, Northern Irish independence from Ireland, and Eurostan, and maybe England. No fighting needed. No Big Brother goose-stepping marching and tanks required from China.
It wasn't Margaret Thatcher's business to hand Hong Kong over to goose-stepping from China, rather than to happy little Taiwan. As the current ruler, accepting that what existed in 19th century had long-vanished, England should have held elections in Hong Kong for the local yokels to take over and decide for themselves what to do. There was no basis for Emperor Pooh Xi to go goose-stepping in and say "All of your money and buildings and roads and people are now mine, all mine. Now shut up and do as I say. Give me your money. Or else." That's no way to approach marriage or even a business relationship.
It's a common, almost universal, mistake for old geezers to think that young whipper snappers have to do what the bygone people thought, and obey previous ideas and rules. But youngsters reach young adulthood and take over for themselves and go adventuring and exploring how THEY want to. What went before is irrelevant. Some old ideas will be adopted and maintained, but much will be replaced by new ideas. Some of which will be stupid and even fatal. Such as the idea that Crimea and Russians in the east of Ukraine should be conquered and taken from Russia and subsumed into a Zelenskyite bribery and corruption New World Order run from Israel, Washington, or 10 Downing Street or maybe it's the good old Klaus Schwab WEF commie DAWSNAWD [Do as we say, not as we do] regime - "You will own nothing and be happy = as long as you follow our orders".
I think USA/NATO can easily roll over Russia if it went full scale deflection, but only if atomic bombs are kept out of play. Which is why Russia immediately explained that atomic bombs will be used, used early, and the UK will be leveled and cease to exist, and why Russia has for years done demonstrations as warnings that the threat is not imaginary.
Nevertheless, Boris [the south Caucasus revenge on Stalin and USSR fanatic] is carrying on full bore ahead despite nuclear Armageddon. And now Neo-Nazi Scholtz and Herr Gruppenfuhrer Stoltenberg and Ursula Van den Kraut and co are planning Operation Barbarossa II [apparently unaware of very recent history].
They just finished commemorating how bad WWI was and how they'll "Never Forget", "Never Again", waffle waffle waffle. And already they were firing guns into Eastern Ukraine and planning conquest of Crimea, while blocking trade with Russia. Boris has been anti-Russia for decades = I was puzzled long ago at his vituperation against Russia. I understand objection to polonium 210 in tea, and Novichok on door handles and other attacks on individuals in UK. Putin does like poison. But Boris seemed more angry than that.
He has ancestors from Caucasus and Turkey who had Russia problems = maybe it's from that. Feuds run for centuries in some backward-looking people. Where to from here is the way to look at things. Yes, the USSR and Stalin were horrific. So were Germans. Ukraine was famined. Jews and others were incinerated. That was then. That was them. Stalin died half way through last century. Heck, people are digging up Peter the Great or Catherine somebody. The Kaiser. Bismarck.
Come to think of it, I have a bone to pick with Bismarck. My grandmother Louise Laurent fled Alsace as a little child with siblings and English mother, French father, to siege of Paris, finally escaping to New Zealand though Prosper [the father] was dropped off the scene in Adelaide [great grandmother going her own way with children]. I should have been living in the lovely Alsace region, or maybe South of France. I want revenge. And against Boris for England shipping orphaned English children to New Zealand at the same time Louise was shipped out.
Or, what we could do is forget about the past, more or less, and think where to go from here. The 19th century has long gone. So has the 20th century. Heck, the early 21st century is prehistoric to young adults now.
Let's have elections in Luhansk, Donetsk, Mariupol, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and see what they think. We've had elections in England, Scotland, Northern Ireland, Quebec, New Zealand, Australia, Canada. USA went independent 4 July, but that took a war. Then they had the civil war = great carnage. Looks as though elections beat wars for deciding how to run the show. But Adolf did become total boss by way of electioneering - Germans got what they voted for. Good and hard. Barbarossa worked out very badly for them. Maybe Klaus Schwab, Scholz and Ursula are hoping to retake Kalingingrad. I have one word = Iskander.
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