https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2023/03/16/23/68797949-11868975...
https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/nord-stream-pipeline-explos...
The US destroyed the Nordstream pipeline for certain and Sy Hersh has the evidence.
It is more than probable that this incident indicates possible collusion between the Chinese and Russian governments to sabotage European interests. The simplest fix is for Sweden and Denmark to ban Chinese and Russian ships from their territorial waters until they deliver accountable assurances that this sort of behavior will not happen again. Until then, they must be stopped and European countries must play hardball because that's the only language these criminals understand.
>he worked for a decade to get built
that is sweet of you. I just imagine Putin himself welding under water. Not the billions dollars steal by his childhood buddies what typically such Russian megaprojects are.
https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/how-america-took-out-the...
Snopes only offers FUD but not a single contradiction or refutation of any of Sy Hersh's reporting or claims other than it boils down to "it relies on a single source". Sometimes, in secret operations, that's the reality. There exist genuine anonymous sources who cannot be revealed themselves. Part of the principle of benefit-of-the-doubt is trusting that Sy Hersh isn't merely looking for a quick payday to sellout his journalistic integrity for a few dollars and that he isn't an easily-fooled novice when it comes to doing due-diligence on sources and facts. It's mostly a disrespectful hit-piece lacking in evidence. With all likelihood, like the identity of Deep Throat, the truth will come out once the source retires and write a book about it.
https://www.snopes.com/news/2023/02/10/hersh-nord-stream-sab...
(Could it be true? Maybe. IDK. No dog in that particular fight. But if you, as an anonymous source, go to Sy Hersh, you're an idiot or don't want large numbers of people to believe what you're saying. Occam's razor suggests the former)
Hersh's (good) works were truly monumental. I'm not aware of anything that Maté has brought to the table that would be even remotely comparable. And unlike Hersh (who for many years enjoyed a reputation seemingly beyond reproach), Maté seems to have started shooting himself in the foot pretty soon after he became widely known.
What a farcical depiction of the world. There is more to Russia than Putin's opposition to the west.
definitely. That "more" is the backwater Grand Duchy of Moscow how it was before Peter The Great.
Secondly, education is not a "european" value, as much as the west would like to claim it.
Russia Georgia Energy Crisis (2006)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Russia%E2%80%93Georgia_...
Turkmenistan (2009)
https://www.rferl.org/a/Pipeline_Explosion_Stokes_Tensions_B...
You will even see Kessler cited as some sort of barrier to leaving, which is nonsense.
Imagine there's a 1x1m spot where on average once per week, entirely at random and without warning a giant boulder falls from the sky and if you're there you will be crushed under the boulder. Clearly living on that spot is a terrible idea, you'd die. But merely running through it is basically fine, there's a tiny chance the boulder hits you by coincidentally arriving as you do, but we live with risks that big all the time. If you're an American commuter for example that's the sort of risk you shrug off.
Likewise, Kessler isn't a barrier to leaving, humans won't be leaving because there's nowhere to go. The only habitable planet is this one, and we're already here.
Edit: I guess I was assuming geostationary. There's a whole sphere of geosynchronous orbits to play with.
Edit2: I was right the first time, GEO (geosynchronous equatoral orbit) / GSO (geosynchronous orbit), apparently. Now my head hurts.
"cramped" the way that like, Alaska is cramped on account of how everybody has to live on the surface, not evenly distributed through the volume of the planet?
Like yeah, it's "just a circle" but did you check the radius of that circle?
Remember if there's debris, the debris isn't stuck in the circle, but, any time it's not in the circle it's harmless. This has the effect of significantly defusing the problem, so in total it's too low risk to be worth considering.
The most likely explanation for the unexplained disassembly is that Boeing made it. Second, most likely, is a collision with a hunk of something invisible.
Also, your focus on cost was not the point. The point was numbers necessary. You need $lots of bullets, but you don't need any where near the same number of jets/tanks. You don't need $lots of satellites. You need a much smaller number closer to the number of jets/tanks. At least based on Starlink constellation numbers.
That of course assumes that Putin stops at Ukraine. The point is that this isn't our war.
After the dust settles on the Ukraine war, if Putin still has the capacity to wage war, he will not likely stop with Ukraine. It is by now obvious that a limited incursion into Poland, for example, will not spark a global thermonuclear war.
Ukrainian suffering is both the litmus test and the vaccination against nuclear escalation that Putin needs to contemplate further expansion.
Political alignments aside, if I were based in Europe I would be very, very concerned.
Ukraine is a corrupt third world country competing in the same league with Botswana and Zambia.
False.
Ukraine not only has everything to do with Europe -- it is unequivocally European in culture, language, historical involvement and (to the extent that Russia is also considered to be unequivocally European) geography.
It isn't something one can even have an opinion about. Any more than one can have an "opinion" about India being a part of Asia.
Ukraine's GDP is close to 10x that of Botswana, and in the last year has grown 10 percent over that of 2022.
To make your discussions easier and less embarrassing in the future, assume that 100 % of the time when someone speaks of GDP, they're speaking of GDP at purchasing power parity per capita.
And you can assume that 100 % of the time when someone speaks of the size of their gas tank, they're really talking about MPG while in cruise mode.
But given the wildly untenable opinion statement of yours that this now long-flagged thread started off with -- and the obvious irrelevance of any economic performance measures to the Russo-Ukraine conflict -- we see that the entire thread has been utterly silly, from the get-go.
" Think about comparing two families: the Smiths have 5 people and earn $100,000 per year, while Jones is just a couple earning $70,000. If you only looked at total household income, you'd think the Smiths were doing better. But when you realize the Smiths have to split that money five ways ($20,000 per person) while the Joneses get $35,000 each, the picture changes completely.
That's exactly what happens when we compare countries by total GDP. China's total GDP might dwarf Denmark's, but China has to spread that wealth across 1.4 billion people, while Denmark only needs to support 6 million. It's like comparing a pizza between a huge family reunion and a dinner date - the total amount of pizza matters less than how many slices each person gets.
This is why economists prefer to use GDP per capita - it's like looking at how much pizza each person at the table gets, rather than just admiring the size of the whole pie. "
I presented some hard to digest (for some) facts in my opening comment here. You'll only need to read European, Ukrainian, and Russian history for 30 minutes to know that. Of course you wouldn't, you're just a parrot repeating propaganda. You have no interest in the truth.
She is on a wartime footing, with her very existence as a country once again in jeopardy at the hands of a much more powerful, longtime aggressor.
Realigning political positions in a way that keeps them firmly aligned with the martial interests of the state is expected and required. For better or for worse, Ukraines civil government is, for now, primarily a military organization as the country and its people are fighting for their lives.
This is the one specific case where it is reasonable, just, and needed to require loyalty, focus, and vigor within an otherwise democratic system. There is a reason why martial law grants the president extraordinary powers. If Ukraine survives, she will have to sort out the return to normal democratic rule, but for now the government is at war.
Russia is clearly attempting to annex a neighboring country through military adventurism, and is doing so in contravention with all international law, and also in a way that is intentionally cruel and borderline genocidal.
Russia has lost all legitimacy as a nation worthy of being taken seriously as a global citizen, and has reduced itself to a kleptocratic mad-dog rouge state.
After all I mentioned that corruption has gotten better and you responded with a cookie cutter response about authoritarianism, which is not necessarily the same as corruption.
You've basically eaten Russian talking points and regurgitated them wholesale without even stopping to critically think about context.
While the EU may not be at war with Russia, Russia is already at war with the EU.
The purpose of this is to unite enough of the domestic population to suppress dissent and keep the current regime in power.
The reality is that it is actually at war with only one small neighbor, which is going so badly that they have had to import troops from North Korea. Embarrassing.
If they actually engaged in war with the EU, more specifically a member of NATO, they would lose quickly. So they stay well back from that line.
We might be able to stop it before it becomes a hot war, but the ambition is there, the indicators are there, the opportunity is there. Assume it's a war. (Unless you're German. I guess our national sport is now making excuses for Russia)
It makes it pretty real when 7 year old me is wondering if this one has any nukes on board, and if this will be the day that they drop.
Russia is not to be trusted, imho. They do not honor their international commitments in good faith, and they will expand their territorial claims if they are allowed to do so. Europe, like a frog in a pot, is in peril and they need to take steps to make sure that Russian war fighting capabilities are destroyed through exhaustion in Ukraine.
This of course is tragic for Ukraine, because it means that she will be utterly razed in the process. But if Russia prevails or backs down with strength, it will happen again. And again.
Russias ability to project force in a strategic way must be destroyed. They are not trustworthy stewards of coercive force.
Having fighters scramble from Eilison was not unusual at all, and when hunting out in that area with my father we saw a few of those. It was pretty distinct from the training and combat training they did, so it wasn’t that hard to distinguish the intentionality and risk tolerance that was reserved for that kind of urgency.
Anecdotally, I’m pretty darn sure that I saw a bear flying overhead just a few miles east-southeast of Fairbanks. I watched it be turned by 3 F4 phantoms. I was with my father and a few of his friends, as well as my brother that would have been 13 at the time. Everyone there remembers the event, and it was talked about for days in Fairbanks, we even had a subsequent training the next week in my elementary school on survival in the event of a nuclear attack lol.
Perhaps it was some kind of clandestine fuckery, perhaps it was an authorized flight, or perhaps it would have been to embarrassing / inflammatory to make it an event of record? I’m sure the answers are quietly sitting somewhere in a musty filing box.
I for one am in favor of giving Wagenknecht a list of must haves for a ceasefire and peace treaty, which obviously will contain giving back all territory to Ukraine, costly reparation for many years to come, and denazification in Russia. With that list we send her to Russia to negotiate. She is only allowed to return, when the points on that list are achieved. She will be the negotiator, the change she will be the change she wants to see. (If it is not obvious to someone, this is rather a joke, since she cannot be trusted to have meaningful negotiations with her idol.)
Satellites can serve multiple purposes including communications, navigation, overhead imagery, signals intelligence, weather, etc. They are also vulnerable, but it's possible to launch replacements faster than repairing damaged cables.
Who is now threatening nuclear war?
Imagine the US engaging in an invasion of Mexico as equally stupid and unprovoked as Putin's invasion of Ukraine. Then not only would Mexico have a perfect right to seek whatever help it needed to resist the aggression directed at it, we would -- unless we were damned fools -- fully expect Mexico to seek and obtain that help.
I'd like to see your version of maritime law that doesn't allow freely roaming over important cables. Your country's enemies would gladly drop cables totally encircling you and say "uh uh uh, important cables!" if you tried to leave your perimeter
I realize US politics may suggest otherwise but I can't imagine the military is just gonna stand by and entertain such a farce..
and try to plot a path between them without crossing an undersea cable:
Yes, I know the undersea cables are privately owned too.
But that's an awfully gray area after the last few months
This happend a very, very long time ago. Destroing things years after the fact is not logical and is not longer a defensive response. Using this as justification is just trying to escalate.
> its reasonable to expect shortened lifetimes for undersea cables and sattelites
Why is this reasonable? It seems like a pointless attack that achieves little other than reminding the world that horrible, oppessive governments are dangerous to everyone. Oppression is incredibly expensive for humanity, and only benefits the few that are the oppressors.
It happened on 26. September 2022. That is not a long time ago.
> It seems like a pointless attack that achieves little other than reminding the world that horrible, oppessive governments are dangerous to everyone
It sends a message, as sabotaging communications is frequently done before an attack. Also it damages morale and is a show of power.
Yes. Saltellites.
But it's not really in the same category as casually cutting internet lines to your peacetime competitors out of pique or whatever.
Between this and the coyness of most European countries governments at the time to comment on investigation, it's not too far fetch to think that Ukraine might be involved.
A coup from disaffected underlings unhappy with the status of the Ukraine war is hardly a weird theory. He's fought off one already!
Russian involvement is a bit far fetched to me. It severely limited their ability to export at a good price when gaz sell is how they finance the war in the first place, and removed their main pressure point on Europe therefore making the war considerably harder to win.
A third party would be more likely (there is a long list: could be the USA, a European country which wants the block to align strongly with the USA, or another power benefiting).
Who did benefit most from the north stream sabotage?
At the end of the day -- nobody of course, as the whole idea that the sabotage could bring any significant strategic benefit (even in terms of the "psychological" front) was pretty much braindead from the start. Meanwhile all it seems to have brought to the table was added instability, more paranoid thinking all around (in addition to the quite substantial methane release).
But it's definitely easy to see why (at least some of) the Ukrainians thought their side could gain something from of it; or they may not have been thinking in terms of any specific strategic advantage, but rather simply spite.
Either way -- the decision was made, and the job was done.
I believe they are only wondering about details now and trying to hear the guys.
https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/nord-stream-pipeline-explos...
https://www.intelligenceonline.com/government-intelligence/2...
https://www.france24.com/fr/europe/20240814-sabotage-de-nord...