#Troop funding

[randowrites]

Pool Funds

Boys, there is no barrier to our fortune besides the presidency’s childish spending habits.

In summary,  the  pool entered into the account  remains although its safety is tentative at best.

One final splurge would sign its death warrant and our troop will have to ride off into the amber sunset penniless after-all.

Thank you randomwordgenerator.com

#randowritesphase1 #randowrites #writing #barrier #fortune #presidency #childish #summary #pool #account #pool funds #splurge #troop #amber

[humandisastersquad]

had a patient today who works for the nurses union. thank you for your service m'am

#yeah i respect the troops (union workers) #anyway had a great chat about the importance of unions and also properly funding/resourcing the health and education sectors #and how i was keen to join a union once i graduate and start working #holy personal post batman

[praetorianxxiv]

#welsh air ambulance #ambulance #wales #south wales #north wales #star wars #team swg #south west garrison #stormtroopers #stormtrooper #rebel alliance #the empire #cosplay #trooping #fund raising #charity #air ambulance

[sayruq]

A Girl Scout troop leader in Missouri was threatened with legal action by the organization after her troop tried to sell bracelets to raise money for Gaza, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Nawal Abuhamdeh said that it had been the children’s idea to sell bracelets to raise money for the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund. She said that the members of her troop, including her own 10 year-old daughter, had been deeply emotionally impacted by Israel’s brutal military campaign in Gaza, which has killed more than 29,000 people, and at least 10,000 children. “I’m grieving. We are all grieving. We literally couldn’t muster the energy to sell cookies,” Abuhamdeh said. Soon after making a post about the fundraiser, Abuhamdeh said she received an email from the Girl Scouts of Eastern Missouri organization, alerting her that her troop could not support “partisan politics,” and needed to “stay neutral.” The email said that the fundraiser had violated the organization’s governing documents, and that if the troop went forward with their plan, the organization would engage legal counsel to “protect the intellectual property and other rights of the organization.”

#yemen #jerusalem #tel aviv #current events #palestine #free palestine #gaza #free gaza #news on gaza #palestine news #news update #war news #war on gaza #girl scouts

[choerrys]

svt finally capitalizing off having those ugly ass men in their company 🙏

#troop funded dokyeom solo incoming

[radiofreederry]

To the Salvadoran military the Americans were too good to be true. The Salvadorans quickly figured out that they could do anything, really anything, and the gringos would cover for them. If they raped and murdered US nuns, Secretary of State Alexander Haig would testify that perhaps there had been an "exchange of fire," that perhaps the nuns were armed. When six Jesuit priests were killed in 1989 on a university campus surrounded by the army, Ambassador Walker suggested to the press that they had been killed by guerrillas dressed as soldiers. After each massacre or assassination US officials swore that this time they were serious, the money was going to dry up, that continued funding depended on a full investigation and prosecution for - and here the phrase varied over the years - the killing of Archbishop Romero, the nuns, the Sheraton Hotel murders, the murder of four Dutch TV journalists, the murder of civilians in the village of Las Vueltas, the village of Los Llanitos, the village of Las Hojas, Armenia, [El] Mozote, or San Sebastian, the murder of the Jesuits... Fourteen of the military's fifteen top commanders had, during the course of the war, led troops responsible for illegal executions or disappearances. But by 1990 not a single officer had been convicted of a human rights violation, and the money kept coming. The gringos were bluffing. They were always bluffing.

Tina Rosenberg, Children of Cain

#history #latin america #el salvador #cold war #quotes

[local-fire-dumpster]

Here is some fun facts about hamas and Israel that y'all should know about:

1. The hamas as they are now only exist thanks to Israel

Much like the Taliban and ISIS recieved support from the USA in their early stages, Israel was the one funding the Hamas before Iran.

2. Netanyahu supports Hamas as they give him an excuse to continue not acknowledging Palestine as legitimate state.

Not only can Israel continue doing that,it can also use Hamas as excuse to continue their bombardment of Gaza.

3. Netanyahu was warned by Egypt that something big was going to happen in Gaza 10 days prior to Hamas attack but he disregarded the warnings

Despite being warned about something grave happening soon, he was focused on the West Back. Hell the troops from the South were withdrawn.

So this man, who admitted that his government is using Hamas to justify violence against Palestinians, did absolutely nothing to evacuate or send futher protection to his own citizens in the settlements closest to Gaza despite being explicitly warned that hamas will do something 'big'

I can not even begin to explain the evil behind his actions so I won't.

Instead I'll say the following: The Hamas and all other terrorists in Gaza could dissappear of the face of the earth tomorrow and Palestinian civilians would continue to suffer. Israel has proven time and time again that they do not care about Palestinian lives. The hamas aren't even responsible for the West Bank and the Palestinians there are getting chased out of their own houses and land to this day.

#gaza #palestine #free palestine #israel #end apartheid #politics #Some of y'all need to get it through your heads that removing the hamas from power will literally amounts to nothing by itself

[plotjotsandespressoshots]

Reminders for Girl Scout Cookie Season

Do not mention your diet to the girls. These are girls still developing their relationships with food. They don't need to hear about your diet, you're not having them in the house because you will binge eat them and other disordered eating behaviors.

Cookies are how many troops fund their activities for the entire year. Yes, it's cute but it enables troops, especially in low-income areas, to do the activities to obtain badges and generally have 'the Girl Scout experience'.

Girls get credit for the cookies sold/ badges, rewards, etc. It is also to teach them sales, how to talk to people, and social skills.

Reminder to support older girls! It gets harder once you're not a brownie anymore and activities are so much more expensive.

Girls get 80 cents per box of cookies as of 2022. The rest goes to the council. However, if you donate to the troop, they get to keep ALL of it. I always buy a box so they get the sale but also donate the equivalent amount to the troop so they have the money to be able to take trips and do activities.

#girl scout cookies #girl scout

[em-dash-press]

How Authors Write Fictional Wars

Some of our favorite novels include wars. They might stretch over a trilogy or build within a single book. Writing one might seem staggering, but it just takes a different planning approach. Use these tips to write a fictional war for your next story and make your readers feel like it really happened.

Foundational Factors to Consider

1. Your Opposing Sides

Wars always have at least two opposing sides. Start there and develop them before deciding if you need a third or fourth side involved. Cover details like:

What does each side want?

What would each side settle for?

What is each side’s worst-case scenario?

What is each side’s hard no? (What wouldn’t they sacrifice or do to win their cause?)

2. Who Supports the Opposing Sides and Why

As a war progresses, each side loses resources. They start running out of money, soldiers, and whatever public support they had when they started the war due to citizens losing their loved ones or sacrificing for the cause.

Your protagonist and antagonist will need to ask for help eventually. Who would support them and why?

There are numerous reasons why someone might pick one side of a war over another. Politics and economics are often the first things leaders consider. The morality behind each side is another factor.

Consider the American Revolution. Many historians believe America would have lost without France sending money, troops, food, and supplies. Why would France support a budding nation over Great Britain? People argue it was because the French:

Wanted to humiliate the British king

Wanted to hurt their British military rival by partnering with America

Wanted to weaken the British kingdom by ending the colonial taxes they benefited from

Wanted to gain power on a global standing by overcoming Great Britain and rising as America’s first ally

These reasons are great examples of what your novel could include. Another country, kingdom, or group could rise in sudden support for your protagonist or antagonist, ultimately throwing chaos into the determined path of war for better or worse.

3. The War’s Terrain

People can break into battle almost anywhere, depending on your fictional world. Your characters could fight:

On land

On sea

In space

In the air

Underground

Online

Some terrain also comes with other considerations. If your war happens on an ocean, will storms and hurricanes affect battles or the ultimate outcome? How will the soldiers and leaders on both sides deal with the weather?

Note these possibilities as you plan your novel. You can add them in as background or crucial plot devices once you have a skeletal structure in place for your story.

Need help remembering everything you’ve imagined? Try making a map and keeping it wherever you write.

4. What Would Make Each Side More or Less Powerful

There’s always something that could give one side an advantage over the other. It’s often in an unexpected way, although you could make the advantage a goal. The bad guys might feel confident in their ability to win, but they have a secret mission to develop a new weapon just to give them a greater advantage.

Other factors to consider would be one side or another doing something like:

Discovering or enacting a magic system

Eliminating a crucial resource their enemy depends on

Removing funding that makes their enemy able to fight by befriending or overcoming their enemy’s financial backers

Changing the positive or negative public perception of the other side’s reason for fighting to change national morale

Doing something that makes one side’s leaders more or less moral (which could change public perception, the soldiers’ vigor, the leadership’s advisory team together, etc.)

6. What Kinds of Conflict You’ll Write

There are two types of basic conflict you’ll likely write when navigating a fictional war. You may not need both if your story is shorter, but adding both makes the plot more realistic.

First, there’s external conflict. You’ll have at least two opposing sides on some kind of battlefield, sneaking around on spy missions, planning surprise attacks, etc.

Secondly, there’s internal conflict. Soldiers might start fighting amongst each other, people in leadership positions could lose trust in each other, citizens might turn on their country’s cause for one reason or another, etc.

7. What Weaponry Your Characters Will Use

The weapons used in your war depend on numerous factors. It will draw from the genre you’re writing, the time period your story takes place, the advancements made in each civilization’s weaponry prior to the war, and any advancements made while the war goes on.

Examples of these could be:

Guns

Swords

Bows

Bombs

Drones

Armed ships

Armed space ships

You should also consider if one side’s weaponry is more likely to change during the course of the war. That’s more plausible if your story or characters change locations where regional cultures use different weapons. Also if the war spans years, people will naturally develop new weaponry during that time.

If you want extra details to daydream about, think about which weapons will become outdated during your story. Some will prove less useful due to complicated usage or cleaning. They also may not work, like if your science fiction characters follow their enemy underwater, but their laser guns require a dry atmosphere to function.

Include Emotional Plot Arcs

Writing always involves some kind of emotional work that results in a plot arc. It keeps the reader engaged by evoking their core feelings. That’s what makes a novel different from a textbook (in a very basic sense).

Work on details like these to find what emotions will be most present and relevant to your story:

Your overall theme

Your characters and what they experience

The action your characters will go through

How the above action will change your characters by affecting their loved ones

What your characters’ goals mean to them emotionally

If your characters’ will undergo things that change their perception of their world, leaders, country, or themselves

You don’t need all of these things to have an emotional plot arc, but they’re relatable human elements that can drive your plot right into your readers’ hearts.

Avoid Some War Story Tropes

Tropes have a bad reputation that I don’t think is entirely deserved. People recognize them as overdone stereotypes, but sometimes they’re useful.

When you’re writing a war, you’re going to have necessary tropes like:

The hero

The unit or squad

The antagonist

What they undergo and who they become is how you make them fresh concepts for your readers.

Some tropes aren’t helpful because they’re what readers expect from every story. If you give them what they expect, your story isn’t as engaging (unless you get the occasional reader who exclusively reads war novels and never tires of overdone tropes).

Keep these in mind as things to avoid, unless you have an ingenious way to make them a brand-new experience:

One soldier dying in another’s arms

A character dying by going out “in a blaze of glory”

Characters using guns in ways that are obviously wrong (i.e., firing more bullets than the gun-type/model holds)

Getting military rank incorrect (if your characters exist in a real-world, already existing military structure)

Injury-proof characters (even your protagonist will eventually encounter some physical harm, whether it’s illness in bad weather or getting shot on a battlefield)

You can check out this great resource to discover more tropes to avoid/consider as you draft your plot outline. 

-----

If it feels like writing a war over the course of a book or a series is challenging, you’re not alone. There’s a lot to consider to make it have an engaging flow.

Keep notes on things like these to develop your story as much as possible before starting your first draft. You can always go back and add or edit things out as needed while developing it. Writers do this all the time—you don’t need to get any manuscript perfect on your first try.

#writing war #writing warfare #writeblr #writing advice #writing tips #writers of tumblr #creative writing #writing #writing inspiration #writing community #writing help #writing resources #writing action #writing conflict #writing batlles

[qqueenofhades]

Hwy dod we even need to send more money to Ukraine tho like we’ve already supported them plenty! But let Europe pull their weight and we can go back to spending that money on American policies

Do you read like, any news outside Tumblr, any Ukrainian perspectives, any basic analyses of the conflict, any rationale from Democrats or Congress, or anything? Because, in brief:

Ukrainians are currently facing a full-scale genocide. It has been going on for over a year and Russian military leadership has every plan to continue until fruition. If they stop resisting, there will be no more Ukraine or Ukrainians. So all the "appeasers" or "realists" insisting that Ukraine should "give up land for peace" (which notably worked so well with Czechoslovakia and Hitler in 1938) are basically deciding that it's fine to let the genocide be carried out, if it's even minorly inconvenient for us. Putin and cronies have repeatedly stated that if they are successful in taking Ukraine, they will go further. This is the exact scenario that leads to the "escalation" and/or WWIII that various people keep wringing their hands over. It is far more just and safe for Ukraine to be supported now and to stop that before it gets even worse.

America is not actually giving over buckets of black cash, regardless of what various bad-faith takes claim. They are handing over weapons valued at various amounts of money, along with some financial and budgetary aid. A lot of these weapons are older and would cost more to decommission than they cost to give to a sovereign democracy fighting for its life against an imperialist autocratic neighbor. This is some tiny amount like 5% (if that) of America's bloated military budget. And again: it's actual weapons valued at a certain dollar amount. These cannot be spent on American domestic policies.

The idea that helping Ukraine is directly coming out of our own pockets or preventing us from spending as needed on our own needs is propaganda. It is not good to repeat it.

I wrote this post the other day about why Putin is trying so hard to break American/Western support for Ukraine, and why the hard-right MAGA has enabled him in it. Putin's Russia is the motivating nexus, coordination, and funding center for Russian/European/American far-right theocratic fascism. This whole "America Only" is the exact rationale that appeals to said far-right domestic fascists and gives Putin and other imperial expansionist kleptocrats the justification to just throw away post-WWII international order and declare that any larger and more powerful state can systematically eradicate any neighboring country, claim its territory, destroy its government, kill its people, and get away with it. Because why would they stop, if there aren't any consequences and they are rewarded for it?

Putin has repeatedly interfered in American elections to help Trump and the Republicans. That should tell you something about who he sees as most favorable to his interests and what he would do again if allowed to emerge victorious.

Europe IS actually pulling its weight! They just brought all 27 defense ministers to Kyiv, they have been working on Ukraine's accession talks, they have committed all types of weapons (including the long-range missiles that the US still won't clearly authorize), they've committed a new tranche of 5 billion euros in long-term assistance, etc. But the whole "we should pull out of NATO and leave Europe to fend for itself" was a key isolationist and xenophobic Trump idea. We can see what that led to.

American aid is vital to Ukraine's continued existence as a sovereign country, period, and it is in American interests to continue to provide it as agreed upon. Not least because such an egregious betrayal of a democratic ally would empower the fascists of the world, both Russian and American, and because as noted, if this conflict was not stopped and got bigger, it would then involve American troops. It is a moral, democratic, political, and ethical imperative. This is not a difficult call or a complicated situation, regardless of what the Online Leftist tankies and the MAGA-world nutcases (because horseshoe theory) want you to think.

Слава Україні.

The end.

#anonymous #ask #russia ukraine war

[dailyadventureprompts]

Villain: The Gleebringer Battalions

Gallard Gleebringer only ever wanted to make people happy. By using his skills as a toymaker and inventor he sought to fill the world with devices that would bring wonder, and save people from the drugery of labor to give them more time for play.

Seeking to save his neighbours from the horrors of war, and under the patronage of the battlehungry local margrave, Gallard has a constructed an autonomous army of toy soldiers that in some weeks time will go berserk and begin rampaging across the land, playing out an inexplicable war-game that will leave villages sacked and the entire region destabilized.

It’s up to the party to notice the looming crisis and do something about it before the toys begin their march, As the powers that be are not only blind to the looming crisis but actively dismissive of any

Adventure Hooks:

Scraping together enough coin to fund a construct army has left the margrave’s treasury more than a little tight pursed, leading them to skimp on things like repairing infrastructure, public festivals, and resupplying their garrisons. There’s plenty of opportunities for adventurers as bandits and monsters propagate through the wilderness, and the lesser nobles rely on mercenaries to guard their holdings. Its only so long before the cracks begin to show however, as roads wash out and the realms defenders turn to brigandry. 

The party end up in a tavern drinking with an old military officer previously employed by the margrave. She’s iresome and illtempered, but she’ll crawl out of her cups long enough to tell the tale of how after twenty years of loyal service she was let go for protesting when some of the troops under her command were killed in a training exercise.  If the party press a little she might just let it slip that it wasn’t training so much as a field test of Gleebringer’s machines, which her boss insisted be against real troops. Later on, they’ll find an official bounty posted for the woman, who’s rallied some of her fellow discontented soldiers and started on a campaign of sabotage. 

For his part Gleebringer is quite blind to the looming threat, having been carried by his ever shifting attention to yet another new project once the design and manufacture of the armies were complete. The party might get a chance to talk to him however if they manage to sneak into the excursive exposition he's hosting in the province's capital, either by riding in on the coattails of a wealthy patron, or by sneaking in among the serving staff. Actually getting an audience with the toymaker will be even more difficult as the margrave has set his agents to watch and protect Gleebringer, and it's only so long before they notice the uninvited guest have crashed the private function.

Setup: While many gnomes dabble in artifice, it was early in his apprenticeship with the village toymaker that a young Gallard discovered both his love and prodigious talent for the technical arts. It wasn't just a magical knack, it was an eye for detail that had people saying that the gnome's creations seemed to be alive long before he figured out how to make them move on their own.

Soon Gleebringer toys were in demand across kingdoms, and Gallard found himself not only patronized by innumerable wealthy merchants and nobles but sought out by engineers and craftsfolk of all kinds who realized the genius packed away in his creations.

Gallard didn't let the fame or the fortune go to his head, instead using his growing connections and commission budget to experiment with even more complex designs. For example: scaling up from music boxes to clockwork bands, and eventually an automated opera house.

As a man who dreamed all his life of building a flying town, it was safe to assume that Gallard had his head in the clouds. He hated to see people suffer but seldom thought through the implications of his inventions, Such as when an automated lumber mill intended to supply materials for his projects put an entire town of foresters out of work. This penchant for distraction was only encouraged by the margrave, who saw the military applications of Gleebringer's gifts from the moment a clockwork dragon bought for one of his children ended up badly maiming one of the servants who saught to tidy up the toyblock castle it had been charged with guarding.

Over the past ten years, the Margrave has become Gallard's most generous patron, supplying him with workshops ( staffed by apprentaces who's loyalty can be counted on) and an endless series of new projects ( which always end up increasing the margrave's power and standing at the cost of the common good).

Art 1

Art 2

#villain #villain noble #villain artificer #artifice #construct #bounty #city encounter #tavern encounter #town encounter #gnome

[zvaigzdelasas]

A new agreement between Germany and Lithuania will lead to German troops' first permanent foreign deployment since World War II. The announcement was made Monday in Lithuania, where Defense Minister Arvydas Anusauskas met with his German counterpart, Boris Pistorius, to outline a multiyear "Roadmap Action Plan" involving approximately 4,800 permanently stationed German soldiers. Both officials called the move a historical moment not just for their nations but for NATO as well. German troops, including those with families, will be stationed in the Lithuanian cities of Kaunas and Vilnius beginning in 2024, with most troops deployed in 2025 and 2026 and full-operation capability expected by 2027. In turn, Lithuania has committed to providing all necessary civilian and military infrastructure. The agreement was originally announced in June, but no timeline was presented at that time.[...]

Lithuanian lawmaker Laurynas Kasciunas, head of the parliamentary National Security and Defense Committee, said the country will allocate 0.3 percent of its gross domestic product over the next several years to help fund the deployment and to build housing, training grounds and other infrastructure for the German troops. Taxes will likely have to be raised to accommodate this plan, he said.

18 Dec 23

[fandomsandfeminism]

Thinking about the Library of Alexandria.

Or at least the *myth* of the Library of Alexandria. You know, the greatest Library in the world, a monument of learning and reading and culture, cataclysmically destroyed in one terrible fire, knowledge lost forever, etc etc. It feels like this great tragedy of history, this terrible loss to humanity.

And it's not...true.

We actually have a lot of sources that show that the library had been in decline for a few centuries before then. Between some scholars getting exiled, a general diaspora of the scholars who remained, lack of funding, and diminishing prestige, it seems that the library's collection and scholarship was already greatly diminished, moved elsewhere.

It's true that Caesars troops did set fire to some ships in the harbor in 48BCE, and that fire did spread through the city. The Library was likely damaged, and some of its materials likely destroyed... but not completely. And it was repaired or rebuilt not long after. (One source even hints that it wasn't the library proper, but some warehouses owned by the library near the docks that burned.)

And the Library continued to exist for at least a few more centuries. Never at the same scale and prestige as it has at its height, but still there as a resource to scholars until at least the 270s CE.

But that's less exciting I guess. Less tragic, maybe. Less dramatic. That instead of it being a terrible accident, an act of the Gods, a perfect symbol at how the folly of war can tumble great monuments- Instead its just...about how underfunded Institutions and lack of support from the government towards academics will rot these great institutions slowly but surely.

And I wonder what it says about us that we find one of those stories more emotionally compelling and evocative than the other.

[sayruq]

Biden's visit has concluded. Israel has spent his entire visit trying to muddy the waters of what happened to Al Ahli Hospital and despite their cartoonish efforts, it hasn't worked

The Global South and especially West Asia know who is responsible for the bombing and no amount of AI voice recordings of 'Hamas operatives' can change that.

Israel war crimes continues to backfire on them even in America

Biden backing Israel has had an impact on America's image. Here's a Wall Street Journal article warning that America's continued support is turning countries towards Russia and China which is code for turning countries against America

An EU official said that the EU will pay a heavy price in the Global South for its continued, unabashed support for Israel

There's also speculation that the Biden administration knew about the bombing before it happened.

Countries that were/are allied with Israel continue to distance themselves from Israel like Russia. The reason I keep highlighting Russia is because the West has been running out of ammunition due to the Russia-Ukraine war and that includes Israel which is rumoured to have sent 80-90% of its ammunition to Ukraine. If this conflict lasts a long time, Israel will need to buy weapons and ammunition and Russia would be one of the countries they would turn to (same with China)

So, where are we in terms of the conflict? After days of waffling over a ground operation in Gaza, Israel postponed it until some time after Biden's visit and now we're back here again

Now I'm no military expert but constantly going back and forth on whether or not you'll invade Gaza is bound to do damage to your troops' morale. No wonder they're dealing with mass desertions while their citizens demonstrate on the streets. The Israeli leadership has no plan besides bombing Gaza.

I've seen people on twitter say that the hospital bombing was done deliberately to normalise IDF soldiers to mass civilian deaths in places like hospitals, schools, places of worship, etc. I don't know if I believe that - I think they wanted to push Iran and Hezbollah's buttons before hiding behind Biden. I don't think these people are thinking strategically.

As far as the possibility of regional war is concerned, all indicators show that the West preparing for the war to escalate

Seems to me the Israel has seen what Ukraine has received in just a year and a half of war. They're done receiving a paltry 3.8 billion every year and now prepared to drag out the conflict and I can't say I blame with Biden proposing a 100 billion package for both Ukraine and Israel. This will stretch America too thin as far as funding in concerned. Cracks are already showing

There are parts of the US government that is unhappy that the Ukraine war is losing attention. During the Ukraine war, you had parts of the government that wanted focus to shift from Russia to China. Because of that, the US government has spent the past year alternating between hostility to Russia and threatening to go to war with China over Taiwan. When Niger expelled France from within its borders, America was preparing to join that conflict until Mali and Burkina Faso declared they would fight with Niger. Now they're entering a third front in West Asia. In short, the mighty empire is expending a lot of resources right now and it is not the threat it was when it invaded Iraq and Afghanistan in the early 2000s.

At any rate, the ground invasion of Gaza won't go the way Israel and America hopes it will

The coalition of Palestinian resistance fighters are still patiently waiting for the IDF to come meet them. Their allies aren't backing down either

The reason I keep making these posts is to remind people that, while the genocide of the people of Gaza is horrifying, the war for the liberation of Palestine has not yet been lost.

Do not lose hope. From the river to sea, Palestine WILL be free

#palestine #free palestine #free gaza #gaza #colonialism #imperialism #genocide

[tanadrin]

This series of four videos on Ukraine and the Russia-Ukraine conflict is very interesting. The first is basically just a narrative political history of Ukraine from about 2000 to 2014, talking about different political factions that were relevant in the country in the period, and how different internal and external pressures shaped politics. It's very helpful for understanding the Ukrainian political context, including just how recent and just how shallow the supposed tensions between monolingual Russian and bilingual Ukrainian-Russian speakers was in 2014.

The second video is an overview of the Donbass war from 2014-2022, which you might have been vaguely paying attention to at the time. But it's very helpful to have it all laid out in chronological order with the benefit of hindsight, especially due to the obfuscation of Russian operations at the time that made it hard to work out what, exactly, was going on. It's a combination of a good old 19th century-style filibuster (the military expedition, not the parliamentary maneuver), Fox News-style propaganda, and some (rather badly failed) attempts at astroturfing civil unrest--why Russia thought that would work becomes important in Part 4.

Part 3 is just an extended argument that NATO expansion is not relevant to the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, and while I already agreed with that assessment, it's nice to have it laid out in detail. The very very short version is that by NATO's own public criteria, Ukraine was simply not a candidate to join NATO, and had given up on joining NATO, and that had been painfully obvious since at least the Obama administration. Even more frustratingly, there were multiple points where Russia had an offramp to escalation, where it had gotten everything it could have possibly wanted from the conflict in Donbass, and it refused them all.

Part 4 is the author's attempt to explain why it refused them. The very short explanation is that Russia's government is led by idiots, who are very enamored of a flavor of conspiracy theory that has its origins in the LaRouche movement, and which has been bubbling in both left-wing and right-wing circles since 2000. In this worldview, the US government acting through the CIA (or the British royal family, or George Soros, or Jewish bankers, or whoever your bogeyman of choice is) has an almost supernatural ability to overthrow any government on earth by funding performance art groups (seriously), civil society NGOs, and protestors, and that almost every revolution, actual or so-called, since 1989 has been their direct work, from the post-Soviet revolutions, to Euromaidan, to the Arab Spring.

This belief, in its more overt or fragmentary forms, is incredibly popular, spurred on no doubt by historical instances of CIA malfeasance and actual aggressive wars waged by the Bush administration. But the problem is, it's bunk. During Russia's initial moves against Ukraine in 2014, they tried essentially the same playbook in the Donbass, and of course it failed miserably--you cannot actually astroturf a popular uprising. (The CIA has preferred to stage coups and assassinations, which are a different animal from color revolutions.) The separatists in the Donbass eventually had to be supported by a few thousand Russian troops and direct military aid.

But Putin, driven by his own paranoid misunderstanding of world events, the clique of yes-men he has embedded himself in, and his fear of gay Nazi Jewish CIA agents, simply got Russia in over its head. There is no offramp because Russia cannot articulate what its goals are, and because "stop trying to use George Soros to overthrow the Russian government" is not something the US can agree to, since they are not doing it. The only thing that might have prevented Putin fucking with Ukraine in the first place was maybe if rigging the parliamentary election in 2011 hadn't resulted in protests, in which Putin saw the specter of the hand of the CIA--but of course the US and NATO and the EU had nothing to do with that!

And to cap it all off, since the 2010s the LaRouche movement and its theory of color revolutions has been making inroads in China, so we have that to look forward to in coming decades.

[allthecanadianpolitics]

Montreal, Canada – Abdallah Alhamadni knows the clock is ticking.

Every day, the 51-year-old Palestinian father of three checks to see whether his efforts to bring his relatives in Gaza to safety have advanced. [...]

"We feel paralysed, depressed, frustrated, crying,” he told Al Jazeera. “Sometimes we feel we need to be strong to support them because we are the only hope for them. It’s a lot of things coming together, and we are alone.”

Originally from the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza, Alhamadni is trying to bring 61 relatives, including 27 children, to Canada through a new temporary visa programme for Palestinians affected by Israel’s military offensive. [...]

Continue Reading.

Tagging: @politicsofcanada, @allthegeopolitics, @vague-humanoid

Note from the poster @el-shab-hussein: So if it wasn't disgusting enough that they left Ahmed Kouta and countless other Palestinian-Canadians stranded in Ghazzah with no assistance WHILE THEY SEND THEIR TROOPS TO TAKE PART IN THEIR GENOCIDE. They want to cut off the funding to the means of survival not just of the Palestinians in Ghazzah but all the wretched segregated enclaves that everyone forced us into outside of our own land, they want to slowly kill and starve 6 million Palestinians. And now THIS? How many Indigenous populations does Canada want to wipe out?? Once a settler colony, always a settler colony.

#how am I supposed to stay sane when the entire Western world is wiping us out #cdnpoli #foreign policy #zionist occupation of Palestine #genocide #ethnic cleansing #western imperialism