There's a thing, eh?
Nope: this is about the USD. Always the safe haven. Never underestimate ... etc etc.
OK - now back to all your favourite Ukraine themes.
ND
There's a thing, eh?
Nope: this is about the USD. Always the safe haven. Never underestimate ... etc etc.
OK - now back to all your favourite Ukraine themes.
ND
18 comments:
No thoughts on poor old Gorby? Detested in Russia, loved in the West.
A bit of a Chamberlain figure really - meant well but cocked up.
Meant well ?
FFS
Euro parity ? "Ah. Welcome to the Brexit." As the French border guard once said. *sarc*
----
Ukraine.
Peter Hitchens point was to tell us of the enthusiasm and jingoism leading up to WW1 among the British population - and then to point out the losses it led to. That group think was wrong then as it is now.
Now we have jingoism but only for a blue and yellow flag (we are not to have it for our own) But even in the darkest of those days (and in the '70s, which I recall) there were hearths in every home, chip shops and cosy, ancient pubs with communal warmth and banter... those are all to be ripped away from us. In the '70s there were communal swimming pools everywhere - ours has been closed down !
In order to defeat Communism we are headed ourselves for the bleakest of Communism.
Can we not at least agree. To make the EU dependent on Russian gas whilst prodding the bear was the height of stupidity. And there is your Euro parity, set to fall and fall.
If only Trump was there to offer his views on this ... as a Biden success?
"Fuck the EU" as one American said.
Ukraine, did you say, EK?
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/western-allies-led-uks-johnson-sabotaged-tentative-ukraine-russia-peace-deal
According Ukrainska Pravda sources close to Zelenskyy, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Boris Johnson, who appeared in the capital almost without warning, brought two simple messages. The first is that Putin is a war criminal, he should be pressured, not negotiated with.
And the second is that even if Ukraine is ready to sign some agreements on guarantees with Putin, they [the UK and US] are not. Johnson’s position was that the collective West, which back in February had suggested Zelenskyy should surrender and flee, now felt that Putin was not really as powerful as they had previously imagined, and that here was a chance to "press him."
But Putin will rampage through Europe up to the Portugese border if we appease him !!!
Which is it ? Is he powerful or not ?
Bear in mind that there will be no household hearths here, no chip shops, no pubs, boarded up high streets, mass unemployment, a housing crash and massive taxation of the cold, working poor to keep the central heating on of those on the dole.
We've seen all this before with Boris.
Defeat Labour by becoming more Labour than they are.
Defeat Communism by becoming more Communist than they are. Even the Boris police service is looking at criminalising the free press.
The man's a political genius !!!
I see the Lukoil guy has apparently been found dead in Moscow.
OK, he was in hospital for heart treatment, so it's POSSIBLE the unattributed reports of him falling out of a window are disinfo, those 56 PR firms have to earn their money.
Some commenters here think all Russia has to do is get rid of EVIL PUTIN and all will be sweetness - well Russia tried that before under Gorbachev and then Yeltsin - the economy was looted, babushkas were selling their possessions for food, oligarchs hitting the cocaine, the nightclubs, the thots - and each other of course.
Russia has no real traditions of democracy - serfdom still existed long after the Brits abolished slavery - and the Tsar who freed the serfs was assassinated for his good deed.
And our traditions of democracy are going down the tubes fast - though not as fast as Germany's. Yesterdays Guardian:
Germany’s economy ministry has asked the country’s domestic intelligence agency to investigate two senior ministry officials over allegations of spying for Russia, Die Zeit has reported. German intelligence services opened an inquiry after senior economy ministry staff shared their concerns, according to the weekly.
The two civil servants drew the attention of colleagues by showing “sympathy for the Russian view” on questions of energy policy, including on the decision to block the approval of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia to Germany, it said. The pair are said to have an “emotional proximity to Russia”, according to the report, though as yet authorities had no “hard evidence” of spying or corruption.
The "west" i.e. western elites - don't actually give a hoot about authoritarian states as such, or we'd have regime changed Saudi Arabia 40 years back.
"serfdom still existed long after the Brits abolished slavery"
That was in the West Indies. In Russia, serfdom was abolished over a period of years beginning in 1861, and so in the same decade as the abolition if slavery in the USA.
The big difference was that in Russia serfs and their bosses were the same race.
Don
"long after the Brits abolished slavery"
Slavery in the Kingdom of England was abolished by the Normans. Come to that, in any but a fleeting and unstable sense the Kingdom of England was established by the Normans.
What busy little bees they were.
Slavery in England itself had faded out before the Norman conquest.
But in the 16th century the transport of captured Africans to the West Indies as slaves became a flourishing business. There are plenty of documents about this in Hackluyt's "Voyages".
One might argue that William the Conqueror, who was a brutal fascist if ever there was one, enslaved the whole population of England. However, the tradition of freedom slowly revived under the Plantagenets.
Don
Russian sales of gas to China is up 60% and they are selling it to the EU @ 4x Nordstream prices I read. In which case Putin's beating us.
Hmm. Allistair Heath in the Torygraph is getting apocalyptic.
Britain is now in grave danger of falling into Vladimir Putin’s trap. His kamikaze economic war on the West will eventually take down his disgusting coterie of war criminals, but in the meantime it is beginning to inflict immense, permanent damage on the Western way of life, to the great delight of Moscow’s siloviki hard men. We risk ending up with calamitous poverty, civil disobedience, a new socialist government by next year, a break-up of the UK, nationalisations, price and incomes policies, punitive wealth taxes and eventually a complete economic and financial meltdown and IMF bailout. The situation in the EU is, if anything, worse.
Whose kamakaze economic war was it again? I could have sworn it was our lot!
"Cheap and plentiful energy is essential to our consumerist societies. We cannot be delusional about the scale of the developing catastrophe. Household energy and vehicle fuel costs will jump from 4.5 per cent of household spending in early 2021 to some 13.4 per cent by April next year, much higher than at any time during the past 50 years, including the 1970s, according to Carbon Brief."
Well, yes. Maybe we should have thought about that a bit more over the last 20-odd years, and especially since 2014.
After all, if NATO was consistent with Kosovo's breakaway from Serbia, they should have bombed Kiev for 86 days in 2014, not stuffed them with guns and missiles.
"Slavery in England itself had faded out before the Norman conquest. "
Nope - still 10% of the population in the Domesday Book.
"still 10% of the population in the Domesday Book"
You can check out your locality here
https://opendomesday.org/map/
And post-Conquest there was a roaring trade in Saxon slaves from Bristol to the Viking kingdom in Dublin.
https://www.thehistorypress.co.uk/articles/bristol-s-other-slave-trades/
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Natural-Gas/China-Is-Quietly-Reselling-Its-Excess-Russian-LNG-To-Europe.html
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