D61 [any]

Ukraine legacy is on display as the Administration refuses to level with Congress and the American public about its strategy to win the war.

I guess nobody really cares to keep up the act that the USA had nothing to do with instigating this war and keeping it going all these years anymore, huh?

Second paragraph…

A former top U.S. commander and a senior [defense] analyst with deep ties to Ukraine both say no one should be quick to draw hasty conclusions from the events of the past two weeks.

heh.

In his nightly address on Sunday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said his country’s daring military incursion aims to create a buffer zone to prevent further attacks by Moscow across the border.

If you can’t keep your own territory, you’re not actually creating a buffer zone.

The first assumption demolished by this operation was that Ukraine wouldn’t be able to regain the initiative until next year.

Huh? Ukraine is currently in a holding position within its own country, throwing a bunch of troops at a bunch of small towns in Russia and claiming it as a strategic victory is right up there with the US military in Afghanistan parking a platoon of grunts in an empty house every 20 miles and coloring in the map of Afghanistan with the “secured” color on their PowerPoint presentations.

Some observers have speculated that Ukraine was trying to draw Russian troops away from the Donbas to relieve pressure on its forces there.

This is a reasonable assessment of the Ukraine gamble…

If that was the case, Karber said, the gamble “really hasn’t paid off” and he fears the Ukrainians will soon face a determined counterattack on one or both of the shoulders of the salient.

… and Ukraine seems to have lost their bet.

“I think that it’s been clear for some time that Russia does not have the ability to knock Ukraine out of the war as long as the West continues to provide even the modest amounts that we are providing now.”

Or we can phrase it slightly differently as, “to the last Ukranian.”

“It seems like they’re just trying to do more and more of the same, and certainly they will have lost thousands of experienced troops and leaders that are now being replaced by those who are not as well trained or experienced. Where is the bottom of that barrel for Russia?”

Where is the bottom of the barrel for Ukraine? So long as open warfare is happening, untrained troops are going to have “opportunities” to get experience. Until there aren’t any more bodies to throw into the meat grinder, nobody is going to see the bottom of the barrel.

Misread the post title, thought everybody jumped and left you all alone.

Hamas: Shit, one of our guys got upset and killed an Israeli prisoner. This isn’t good.

Israel: We have a moral right to r*pe any Palestinian prisoners we want to.

Self defense is self defense, would we expect some different behavior from a country being attacked from outside interests with publicly accessible end to end encryption services?

blocks appear to be part of a crackdown on internal dissent in both countries.

Or… you know… at least for Venezuela, the USA constantly fucking around with their elections and politics and local assets using Signal or something. Maybe, I dunno?

Depositing checks is about the only useful thing I’ve seen on my local bank’s app, but that only matters if you do business stuff with people who pay with checks.

…

I actually had that in the first draft of this comment but removed it for the less salacious “Track and Field”.

All they know is Foxy Boxing, Powderpuff Football, Women’s Track and Field, eat hot chip, and lie about a gender.

The Jaws prequels are pretty intense.

Hadn’t the Ukraine military been attacking its own cities in the border territories since 2015? Seems like the Ukrainians didn’t really want the areas that much to begin with, so why not let those areas be taken by Russia?

At minimum, it will be a draw.

That would be, as far as Ukraine’s current public statements and NATO’s as well, a loss.

Ukraine’s military can’t push the Russian military back to the Russian border and Russia isn’t going to agree to handing most of the places along the border that are currently being occupied by Russian troops back Ukraine/NATO.

Well that sounds about right… sighs

So you’re telling me that what I understand from reading the article is incorrect? Because my comment was based completely on what I read from the article.

Maybe my comment was poorly constructed. From reading the article, should my takeaway have been that the current use of the reference to the Yihetuan by the online trolls seems to be purely reactionary and not historical?

There has been a wave of online Chinese ultranationalism directed at Japan in recent years amid rising tensions between the two countries, especially over Tokyo’s support for Taiwan and territorial disputes in the East China Sea.

Some posts urged Chinese to “go against the Japanese and eliminate traitors” while calling to establish a “modern-day Yihetuan”, it said in a statement on Saturday night.

Yihetuan, also known as the “Boxers” from the martial arts they practised, were a Chinese nationalist secret society during the Qing dynasty (1644-1912) that supported imperial power and resisted Westernisation. Their slogan was “Support the Qing, destroy the foreigners”. The movement later led to the failed 1899-1901 Boxer Rebellion against Western and Japanese powers in northern China.

A right wing nationalist movement of the past that supported a monarchy being referenced by a small number of online trolls doing asshole things. Definitely not to be confused with general opinions of the greater Chinese population.

The measures were in line with the response from Beijing. In a commentary on Friday evening, Communist Party mouthpiece People’s Daily said that “Chinese people have the same standards on right and wrong”.

Probably an unnecessary use of the word “mouthpiece.” At least for this situation, there’s no need to give the negative connotation to the target audience of English native readers.

The draft guidelines would have lowered the age minimums to 14 for hormonal treatments, 15 for mastectomies, 16 for breast augmentation or facial surgeries, and 17 for genital surgeries or hysterectomies. The final guidelines, released in 2022, removed the age-based recommendations altogether.

The final guidelines, released in 2022, removed the age-based recommendations altogether.

The final guidelines, released in 2022, removed the age-based recommendations altogether.

Makes sense, a 6 year old won’t have boobs to mastectomy and any adult trying to get a 6 year old a breast enhancement needs to be [redacted], pretty much all of medical science advocates against surgeries of this nature before a body is fully grown unless there something really REALLY serious to modify the risk assessment so having some legislative ban is just fucking ridiculous, facial surgeries are given to literal babies with cleft pallets, and puberty blockers aren’t the same thing as E or T.

A two-page explainer on gender-affirming care that is frequently cited by federal officials stated that gender-affirming surgeries were “typically used in adulthood or case-by-case in adolescence,” leaving the door open to surgery for minors in some instances.

No shit, its all going to be case by fucking case. Transgender people aren’t a fucking monolith, there won’t be a one size fits all treatment that works for every transgender person. That’s the whole fucking point of a person going to seek medical professionals in the first place, to figure their shit out with the professionals whose whole job is to have a good idea what can/needs to be done.

That’s the whole problem of any type of legislation making a barrier between a patient and the whole of a nations medical system. You either make the rule because you’re a bigot politican, or you make the rule because you’re an ignorant politician. There is no third option

So, first, the invasion has already happened. So “not invading” isn’t an option any more.

Second, the USA by way of NATO has been antagonizing the “East” for… longer than I’ve been alive. Usually we just start one sided military conflicts in third world countries with such a lack of air power and anti-armor capability that our military just rolls through the country where the biggest loss of life and equipment on the USA’s side are after the occupation begins and the troops are just sitting around waiting to get sniped or drive near an IED.

It just so happened that antagonizing the second world country of Russia, thinking it was a third world country, finally wound up biting the ass of USA/NATO when Russia decided to invade Ukraine. You rattle your saber long enough and loud enough at a right wing government and eventually they’re going to pull out their sabre.

So, since nobody can unfuck this sheep, best course of action is probably to allow the Ukraine government to admit defeat and sue for peace instead of forcing them to keep trying to fight a war they can’t win (but military contractors will make mad money off of). They’ve lost a chunk of territory that will either stay Russian directly through open occupation or be Russian aligned autonomous states that will absolutely NEED to keep the Russian military around to help fight off the terrorist attacks either from Ukrainian actors or carried out by non-Ukrainian actors using Ukraine as the safe highway to get to Russia aligned states or Russia itself.

Ukraine Plans Privatization to Help Fund War Effort… (archive link)

scratches chin

Keep the NATO funding just high enough to keep the war going but not so high that Ukraine stops trying to sell state assets to private enterprises but managing the spread and escalation of the conflict in such a way that private interests don’t instantly value the auctioned items as “worthless” so nobody bids.

That’s a lot of plates to spin.

I remember the good ol’ days when the Ukraine/Russia war was absolutely not a proxy war between the USA and Russia.

Mr. Xi,

Our astronauts yearn for freedom!