https://scheerpost.com/2023/12/20/patrick-lawrence-what-ukraine-is-not-winning-the-war/
What? Ukraine Is Not Winning the War?
The Narrative Turns. Now What?
“Putin’s Russia is closing in on a devastating victory. Europe’s foundations are trembling.”
This was the headline atop a Dec.9 commentary in The Telegraph, the farthest right of the major London dailies. The subhead elaborated the theme in yet graver terms: “Kyiv’s counteroffensive has ended in failure. This could be NATO’s Suez moment.” The piece that followed included all sorts of goodies in this line.
It is not official, not yet, that Ukraine’s grand counteroffensive, the great Russophobic hope of the Zelensky and Biden regimes earlier this year, has proven a bust and that defeat is in the offing. The closest we have to such an admission came from Volodymyr Zelensky earlier this month, when the Ukrainian president declared that the counteroffensive “did not achieve the desired results.” I loved that moment, to be honest. It reminded me of Emperor Hirohito’s famous declaration on August 15, 1945, when he announced the surrender on Japanese radio. “The war,” he told his desperate subjects, “has not necessarily progressed to our advantage.”
O.K., let’s leave Zelensky to Zelensky, Joe Biden to Joe Biden, and Antony Blinken to Antony Blinken. We can count news of failure unofficially official when mainstream media start dropping such news on their readers and viewers. The Telegraph, so far as I know, was the first big daily on either side of the Atlantic to make such blunt admissions. Others have already followed, if in gentler, more oblique language—in Zelensky-speak, this is to say.
A significant moment may be upon us. What will follow once it is acknowledged that the Nazi-infested crooks in Kyiv have failed? President Biden, as is his consistently unwise wont, radically overinvested in the proxy war he chose to start with the Russian Federation as soon as he took office three years ago next month. Having defined the Ukraine conflict as a war in the name of democracy and freedom —“values” rather than interests, this is to say—he has left the U.S. and its European clients no room for compromise and nearly none even for negotiation. What is the next move when defeat is too obvious any longer to deny?
If we are about to enter uncharted territory, will it prove dangerous ground? It may, but this is not yet clear. It will be uncertain and probably unstable: This we know. Of the many things I do not like about this circumstance, I will mention a few straightaway. Biden may be the stupidest president of the postwar era on the foreign policy side: He exhibits no capacity whatsoever for nimble or imaginative thought. He is a warmonger of long standing, an election year is upon us, and he is by now in obvious danger of being impeached. His mental incompetence, atop all this, is plain for all to see.
There are also the national security people around Biden to consider. With the exception of CIA Director William Burns, who seems to dedicate himself to his career advancement, these are lockstep ideologues who share a Manichean vision of the world and how it works. And we had better think long and hard about these people now. I urge this because of an item in Politico two weeks back. The piece reported on the policy cliques’ thinking after recent Houthi attacks on U.S. warships in the Red Sea. Some officials urge a vigorous response, but the reigning view favors restraint for fear of enlarging Israel’s barbarity in Gaza into a wider war.
Then, well down in the story, this paragraph:
The military’s job is to present a variety of options to senior commanders, but the ultimate decision is up to the president and the administration’s political appointees. In multiple high-level meetings this week, the Pentagon has neither briefed President Joe Biden on options to strike Houthi targets nor recommended that he do so, two of the officials said. All were granted anonymity to detail sensitive internal deliberations.
The jaw drops. It is not uncommon for the mainstream media to bury vitally important news that reflects poorly on The American Way. In this case we appear to be on notice that the commander-in-chief is no longer commanding because, as Politico suggests, those around him think he is too trigger-happy and they would rather not hear from him. The topic is the Middle East, but netting out this extraordinary revelation, we can no longer be certain who is running the Biden regime’s Ukraine policy—or any other policy, for that matter.
Do we count this as some kind of palace coup? Don’t let the question surprise you: The Deep State did this kind of thing to Biden’s predecessor time and time and time again. In Biden’s case, it may be no bad thing if he is cut out of the thinking on Ukraine to one or another extent, given his retrograde obsession with Russia as the root of all evil. But the thought of the president’s lieutenants, with their cowboys-and-Indians sensibilities, deciding what comes next in post-failure Ukraine is not soothing.
Less than a week after Daniel Hannan published his biting commentary in The Telegraph, The New York Times came across with a pair of pieces, a sort of one-two punch, that are four-square out of character for a newspaper that has spent the past 23 months trying to persuade us that Ukraine was on the way to triumph against those brutal—always brutal—Russians. The first of these, ‘“People Snatchers:’ Ukraine’s Recruiters Use Harsh Tactics to Fill Ranks,” appeared Dec. 15. In it, Thomas Gibbons–Neff describes how plainclothes goons have taken to kidnapping draft-age Ukrainian men, some with mental or physical disabilities, and forcing them into the military induction process. This is sometimes done at gunpoint. People are taken off the streets, at factory gates, from inside shops.
Gibbons–Neff’s work is too often compromised, as noted previously in this space. But this is very good reporting. Here is a passage from his piece, published after he reported from numerous Ukrainian cities and towns:
Recruiters have confiscated passports, taken people from their jobs and, in at least one case, tried to send a mentally disabled person to military training, according to lawyers, activists and Ukrainian men who have been subject to coercive tactics. Videos of soldiers shoving people into cars and holding men against their will in recruiting centers are surfacing with increasing frequency on social media and in local news reports.
The harsh tactics are being aimed not just at draft dodgers but at men who would ordinarily be exempt from service — a sign of the steep challenges Ukraine’s military faces maintaining troop levels in a war with high casualties, and against a much larger enemy.
Lawyers and activists say the aggressive methods go well beyond the scope of recruiters’ authority and in some cases are illegal. They point out that recruiters, unlike law enforcement officers, are not empowered to detain civilians, let alone force them into conscription. Men who receive draft notices are supposed to report to recruitment offices.
We are reading here about a desperate regime that has sent too many of its able-bodied to their deaths and is now running out of bodies.
A day later, Carlotta Gall, with several colleagues sharing the byline, published “Ukrainian Marines on ‘Suicide Mission’ in Crossing Dnipro River.” Here we read about incensed grunts at the front condemning the Kyiv regime’s incessant propaganda as to the military’s progress against Russian forces. Again this is very effective reporting:
Soldiers and marines who have taken part in the river crossings described the offensive as brutalizing and futile, as waves of Ukrainian troops have been struck down on the river banks or in the water, even before they reach the other side …
In the case of the Dnipro, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and other officials have suggested recently that the marines have gained a foothold on the eastern bank. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs posted a statement last month claiming they had established several strongholds.
But marines and soldiers who have been there say these accounts overstate the case.
“There are no positions. There is no such thing as an observation post or position,” said Oleksiy, who withheld his last name. “It is impossible to gain a foothold there. It’s impossible to move equipment there.”
“It’s not even a fight for survival,” he added. “It’s a suicide mission.”
Gibbons–Neff and Gall, as the archives show, know very well where the fence posts lie, beyond which they have dared not stray as they have reported from Ukraine. We have to conclude now that the fence posts have moved. The Times is not yet prepared to state plainly that Kyiv is not far from defeat. But, in that way, The Times thinks American readers must be gently prepared for bad news, as if we are a nation of kindergartners—well, let’s not “go there”—we are being so prepared.
A few days before publishing his piece from the field, Gibbons–Neff gave us a report of the kind we have come to expect of him. “U.S. and Ukraine Search for a New Strategy After Failed Counteroffensive,” published Dec. 11, is written in the cotton-wool English The Times has long favored, leaving us with the familiar impression we are being told something but we do not know quite what:
The Americans are pushing for a conservative strategy that focuses on holding the territory Ukraine has, digging in and building up supplies and forces over the course of the year. The Ukrainians want to go on the attack, either on the ground or with long-range strikes, with the hopes of seizing the world’s attention.
In plain English, the kind you and I speak: The Biden regime has no idea what to do in the face of failure, but, as failure cannot be admitted, it must be dressed up as a new strategy. Kyiv would dare not do anything without the Biden regime’s permission—stealing most of the aid and military equipment the U.S. sends being the exception—but it must look as if it is fighting the life-or-death fight because the Zelensky regime is balancing on the head of a political pin at this point.
You have to love the Big Guy’s comment as these new realities take shape. “We can’t let Putin win,” Biden said in Congress as he pleaded for a vote authorizing a new round of aid. Is this big-time geopolitical strategy or what?
I hear a little Lady Macbeth in that remark in that Biden doth protest a touch too much. If “Putin” was not somewhere on the road to victory in Ukraine, there would be no need to say such a thing, would there? As it is, Zelensky flopped during his most recent trip to Washington, the new aid package did not pass, Hungary just blocked the European Union’s proposed new assistance, and Ukraine is altogether yesterday’s flavor as the reality of failure emerges from the mounds of, please excuse the language, bullshit that have propped up Western enthusiasm all these months. Israel may be genociding the Palestinians of Gaza, but at least here is the gruesome prospect that it will succeed and the West will for once prevail.
Until recently the orthodoxy required that “Putin’s Russia,” meaning the Russian Federation, was losing a war it waged with drunks, incompetent officers, and baby-snatchers. All of a sudden we read that Putin’s Russia has made the most of the sanctions regime the West imposed upon it and has a large, clear advantage on the battlefield—more soldiers, more artillery, more everything. In his year-end press conference last week, the Associated Press reported “an emboldened, confident Putin” announced that the war will end when Russia has achieved its objectives and these —the demilitarization and de–Nazification of Ukraine—have not changed. So does “the narrative evolve.”
Telegraph writer Daniel Hannan remarks that if any prospect of peace talks arises between Kyiv and Moscow, or between Kyiv and its trans–Atlantic backers and Moscow, “we risk a Suez-level disaster for the Western democracies.” Hannan, a Tory and a former member of the European Parliament, referred, of course, to Egypt’s defeat of British, French and Israeli forces after Gamal Abdel Nasser’s decision to nationalize the Suez Canal. It was an historic humiliation for the British and French.
“While we are not ourselves at war this time,” Hannan writes, “we are so invested in the Ukrainian cause that a Russian victory—and absorbing conquered territory is a Russian victory, present it how you will—would mean a catastrophic loss of prestige for the West and the ideas associated with it: personal freedom, democracy and human rights.”
Hannan has the magnitude of the balance of power in Ukraine exactly right. Joe Biden appears to be primarily concerned with going down as the worst president in postwar American history, and he seems to me to have little chance avoiding this distinction. But the larger significance here cannot be missed. Biden cast the campaign against Russia via Ukraine as his Great American President moment, and the rest of the West foolishly followed.
Now comes the bitter task of acceptance. It leaves us, for now, in a twilight zone. We have to hope that Joe Biden, as his political fortunes crash, is indeed cut out of the West Wing conversation such that he cannot make some desperate move to salvage himself. Go, Deep State, go, strange as the thought is.
None of what is now acceptable to say about the West’s failing fortunes in Ukraine can be at all news to those who have looked past the propaganda these past two years. The significance of the moment is in large part in the collapse of the propaganda. The Atlantic world rarely accepts the truths of the 21st century, typically denying them outright or blurring them beyond legibility. But this is always a question of expedience, it seems to me, and can in no case be sustained indefinitely.
“I was one of those who expected Ukraine to break through to the Sea of Azov, a move that might well have ended the war,” Hannan writes in a passage I find amusing. “Why did I get it wrong? I had been talking not only to Ukrainians, but to British military observers with direct knowledge of the battlefield.”
My dear Hannan, in your question lies your answer, as so often proves the case. You had been talking to Ukrainians and British military observers.
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https://www.blacklistednews.com/article/85626/wef-and-un-join-forces-to-initiate-the-next-global-crisis-.html
In March 2023, the UN Water Conference was held in New York, co-hosted by the governments of the Netherlands and Tajikistan. It is the first time this conference has been held in 46 years; the first was held in Argentina in 1977.
“We hope it could result in a “Paris moment” for water – with outcomes as critical for water as the Paris Agreement has been for climate action,” Henk Ovink and Sulton Rahimzoda said.
Ovink is the Special Envoy for International Water Affairs for the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Rahimzoda is the Special Envoy of the President of the Republic of Tajikistan to the Water and Climate Coalition Leaders.
On the Conference’s website, the UN notes: “Water is a dealmaker for the Sustainable Development Goals … But our progress on water related goals and targets remains alarmingly off track, jeopardising the entire sustainable development agenda.” It titles its project as “Uniting the world for water.”
The same webpage showcases a suitably dramatic quote from UN Secretary-General António Guterres:
Officially titled the ‘The United Nations Conference on the Midterm Comprehensive Review of the Implementation of the Objectives of the International Decade for Action “Water for Sustainable Development,” (2018-2028)’, the UN Water Conference aimed to raise awareness of the global water crisis and decide on action to achieve internationally agreed water-related goals.
Well, that was the aim as stated in an article by Ovink and Rahimzoda and published by the World Economic Forum (“WEF”) in March 2023, a week before the Conference began. But according to a WEF press conference held six months earlier, they’re not telling the truth.
WEF held a press conference to launch its Global Commission on the Economics of Water during its 2022 annual meeting. At this press conference, one of the Commission’s chairs let the cat out of the bag as to why they were focusing on the world’s water supply.
The first clue is something WEF wrote about the launch in the summary at the top of Ovink and Rahimzoda’s article: “The Global Commission on the Economics of Water, launched at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in 2022, will report on game-changing ways to value and manage water as a common good.”
The key phrase is “common good.”
The common good is a collectivist term used for social control. Collectivism takes many forms: socialism, fascism, Nazism or National Socialism, welfare statism and communism. As German Nazi politician Hermann Goering said, the highest principle of Nazism is “common good comes before private good.”
Under socialism, a ruling class of intellectuals, bureaucrats and social planners decide what people want or what is good for society and then use the coercive power of the State to regulate, tax, and redistribute the wealth of those who work for a living. In other words, socialism is a form of legalised theft, according to the Ashbrook Centre of Ashland University.
Giving the WEF press conference was Alem Tedeneke and three of the four co-chairs of WEF’s Commission: Professor Mariana Mazzucato, Founding Director of the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose; Professor Johan Rockström, Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research; and, Tharman Shanmugaratnam, President of Singapore.
In March 2023, a week before the UN Water Conference, the Commission released a report titled ‘Turning The Tide: A Call To Collective Action’ At the time of the press conference, before its release, WEF boldly claimed that “the report and action plan will reshape how we talk about, value, and manage water in the rest of the 21st century.”
What’s interesting about this press conference is what Mazzucato said about how the “global water crisis” arose.
Shanmugaratnam had been saying that “the water crisis and the climate crisis” go hand in hand and that a shift in thinking was necessary; “equity is everyone’s interest, everyone’s self-interest everywhere in the world.”
Mazzucato interjected as she wanted to add something based on what he had just said:
“That’s also of course true with covid, right? We are all only as healthy as our neighbour is on our street and our city and our region and our nation and globally.
“And did we solve that? Like, did we actually manage to vaccinate everyone in the world? No.
“So, highlighting water as a global commons and what it means to work together, and see it both out of that kind of global commons perspective but also the self-interest perspective, because it does have that parallel.
“It’s not only important but it’s also important because we haven’t managed to solve those problems but which had similar attributes and water is something that people understand.
“You know, climate change is a bit abstract. Some people understand it really well, some understand it a bit, some just don’t understand it.
“Water, every kid knows how important it is to have water – when you’re playing football and you’re thirsty you need water. So, there’s also something about really getting citizen engagement around this, and really in some ways experimenting with this notion of the common good. Can we actually deliver this time in ways that we have failed miserably other times? And hopefully, we won’t keep failing on the other things, but anyway.”
[Note from RW: I have to confess I didn’t listen to the whole press conference. Listening or reading too much of WEF’s psychobabble isn’t good for anyone’s psychological well-being. But, if you choose, you can watch the entire press conference below which is embedded to begin with the remarks noted above.]
So, there you have it. Because the “covid crisis” and the “climate crisis” failed to achieve what they had planned, the Globalists are looking for another global threat to bring the world’s populations to heel, “for the common good” – a global water crisis.
We are reminded of a quote from President of the Club of Rome (1984–1990) Alexander King’s 1991 book ‘The First Global Revolution’:
In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. In their totality and in their interactions these phenomena do constitute a common threat which demands the solidarity of all peoples. But in designating them as the enemy, we fall into the trap about which we have already warned, namely mistaking symptoms for causes. All these dangers are caused by human intervention and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy, then, is humanity itself.
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https://brownstone.org/articles/what-will-become-of-cities/
What Will Become of Cities?
Everyone was supposed to be back at the office by now. It’s not really happening, however, and this has huge implications for the future of the American city.
Part of the reason is the cost, not only the finances of commuting but also the time. Another contributing factor is the crime and homeless population, which can be quite scary. Between inflation, rising poverty, substance abuse, and rampant post-lockdown incivility, the cities have become far less attractive. The impact on the commercial sector is becoming ever more clear.
Leases are coming up for large office spaces in major cities around the US. But there is a serious problem on the way. Occupancy of these offices is dramatically down in most places around the country. The decline is 30 percent on average and much more in San Francisco, Chicago, and New York City. That’s for now but many tech companies and others have laid off workers, meaning that even the companies that renew will be looking to downsize dramatically and with shorter-term leases.
Dylan Burzinski of Green Street writes in the Wall Street Journal:
“What began as a two-week work-from-home experiment in March 2020 evolved into an entrenched hybrid/remote work environment. Despite return-to-office mandates, office-utilization rates (how many people are physically in an office on any given day) have failed to pick up meaningfully this year and are still 30% to 40% below 2019 levels for most office markets across the country. Employers have shed office space as a result, helping send the amount of office space available for lease shooting up to historic highs across most major U.S. cities. The so-called availability rates are hovering at 25% on average compared with slightly above 15% before Covid—and things could get worse before they get better.”
You might say: there is nothing wrong with remote work. This would have happened regardless. Cities as we know them will pass into the night eventually as the whole world becomes digital.
That might be true in the long term, but it would have been far better to happen organically and not by force. That was the essence of what Burzinski calls the “pandemic” but of course it wasn’t a pathogen that sent millions out of the cities and leaving for the suburbs. It was the forced closures and then vaccine mandates and compulsory segregation by vaccine status.
For a time, cities like New York City, Boston, Chicago, and New Orleans were using state power to exclude shot refuseniks any normal public accommodations. The unvaccinated could not go to the library, the theater, restaurants and bars, and museums. It’s hard to believe that this actually happened in the land of the free but that is the real history of just two years ago.
Then once workers got a taste of remote work, and they fully realized just how ridiculously annoying the commute and office culture truly is, they would not and could not be pushed back into a full-time relationship with the office. That has left half and fully empty skyscrapers in multiple cities in the US.
The signs of doom are everywhere. A poll of New Yorkers has 60% saying that life quality is falling and this is in part due to far less quality foot traffic. San Francisco has record office vacancies. Even large cities in Texas have 25% vacancies. Population declines in many cities are continuing long after pandemic restrictions have been lifted.
And here is Boston.com:
Absent flexibility from building owners, businesses worry that downtown will see even more vacancies and that tourists and office workers slowly returning to the neighborhood will have less reason to make the trip. Consider the worst-case scenario: Downtown falls further into post-pandemic disarray or a long-feared “doom loop.”
Like many big-city downtowns, Boston is still in the midst of its recovery after COVID. Many offices and ground-floor spaces remain empty, and buildings lately have sold for sizable losses. Fears about what downtown will become were only exacerbated by the bankruptcy of the coworking giant WeWork, one of the largest office tenants in Boston.
How far this will go and what the implications will be is anyone’s guess. Will the skylines change? Are we looking at demolitions of some of the grandest structures in the coming years? It’s not entirely out of the question. Economic reality can be like a brick wall: when the expense consistently outpaces the revenue, something has to change.
Why not convert office spaces to domestic apartments? It’s not so easy. The buildings put up after the Second World War were made for air conditioning and had wide footprints without windows in a large swath of the space. That simply doesn’t work for apartments. Cutting a giant hole down the middle is technically possible but economically expensive, requiring the rents in the resulting properties to be in the luxury range.
The next phase will be the fiscal crisis. Dying business districts, declining population, empty office buildings all mean falling tax revenue. The budgets won’t be cut because of pension obligations and school funding. The next place to look is to the capital for bailouts and then of course the federal government. But those will only buy time and certainly won’t address the underlying problem.
What bugs me most about this is just how much it fits with the dream of Anthony Fauci as he and his co-author explained back in August of 2020. Writing months after lockdowns, with American cities on fire with protests, he wrote that we need “radical changes that may take decades to achieve: rebuilding the infrastructures of human existence, from cities to homes to workplaces, to water and sewer systems, to recreational and gatherings venues.”
If your view is that the real problem with infectious disease traces to “the neolithic revolution, 12,000 years ago,” as they claim, you are going to have a serious problem with cities. Recall that this is the guy who said we need to stop shaking hands, forever. The notion of a million people working and socializing together in a few square miles of space is something that would run contrary to the entire vision.
Klaus Schwab of the WEF, too, has an issue with large cities, too, of course, with constant complaints about urbanization and the imagined world in which large swaths of our lives are spent online rather than with friends.
So a tremendous downscaling of cities might have been part of the plan all along. You will notice that none of the cities on the chopping block seem to be offering a viable plan for saving themselves. They could dramatically cut taxes, deregulate childcare, open up more schooling options, turn police attention to petty crime and carjacking instead of traffic fines, and open up zoning. That’s not happening.
New York is going the opposite direction, having effectively banned AirBnB in the city. Why did the city council do this? Because too many renters with space found it more lucrative to offer short-term rentals and overnight stays rather than make long-term contracts for residents. This is a sneaky way of pillaging property owners, not exactly a good plan for attracting real estate investment.
All of this speaks to a much bigger problem, which is that the whole political system seems to be engaged in an amazing game of “Let’s pretend” despite the overwhelming evidence of the disaster that has befallen us. No serious efforts are underway to reverse the damage of pandemic lockdowns and vaccine mandates and segregation. This is partly because there has been zero accountability or even honest public debate about what governments around the country did from 2020-2022. We live amidst the carnage but justice seems farther off than ever.
Yes, a complete reversal is possible but it seems ever less likely, especially with the continued efforts to purge from public life those who dissented during the crisis, as well as the intensifying censorship on all mainstream media platforms.
Once you step back from it, nothing really makes sense. One might suppose that when a whole society – and really globe – embarked on such a crazy experiment and utterly failed in every way, that there would be a major effort to come to terms with it.
The opposite is happening. Even with America’s treasured cities in such grave danger, so much of it provoked by terrible policies over four years, we are still supposed to either not notice or chalk it all up to some inexorable forces of history of which no one has any control.
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