36 Comments

1. SWIFT has cut Iran payments: closing the stable door after the horse has bolted…

2. SWIFT has cut Iran payments: closing the stable door after the horse has bolted…

3. Sharing
   Excellent point of the Russian Pension fund reform & military connection. Another reason there is pressure for pension reform may be America becoming an energy exporter. Notice oil has dropped $10 in the last 6 weeks.
   Spiritual warfare. IMHO God desires a relationship with man and to have the freedom of having choice is foundational for that communication between God and man. Our choices shape who we are, every decision contributes to our moral development of our character.
   When there is an absence of choice there is no character. No choice one becomes a robot without question(s). Yes, people are waking up and realizing technology makes living more comfortable but at the same time enslaves thus losing the relationship with God. Garden of Eden was not about a fruit, but of choice.
   Seems to be monkey business in Georgia, Florida & Arizona with the voting tabulations.

   1. Whatever is going on the squeeze on retirement and pension funds is happening across the globe. All governments assuming that the older generation is expendable. Ugly picture. I used to have a friend who would say that to live well you want to be young in America, middle aged in Europe and old in China. No more!

4. Sharing
   Excellent point of the Russian Pension fund reform & military connection. Another reason there is pressure for pension reform may be America becoming an energy exporter. Notice oil has dropped $10 in the last 6 weeks.
   Spiritual warfare. IMHO God desires a relationship with man and to have the freedom of having choice is foundational for that communication between God and man. Our choices shape who we are, every decision contributes to our moral development of our character.
   When there is an absence of choice there is no character. No choice one becomes a robot without question(s). Yes, people are waking up and realizing technology makes living more comfortable but at the same time enslaves thus losing the relationship with God. Garden of Eden was not about a fruit, but of choice.
   Seems to be monkey business in Georgia, Florida & Arizona with the voting tabulations.

   1. Whatever is going on the squeeze on retirement and pension funds is happening across the globe. All governments assuming that the older generation is expendable. Ugly picture. I used to have a friend who would say that to live well you want to be young in America, middle aged in Europe and old in China. No more!

5. Honestly, I see US hostilities with Russia as being more like Sgt. Slaughter vs. Nikolai Volkoff. In reality they each understand their rivalry as the attraction while also understanding that their survival is based upon it, to take up @Najat Madry’s professional wrestling metaphor. Accordingly, they constantly each provoke one another and that gets the base revved up.

   Let’s face it, even though Nazi technology went east and west at the close of WWII, there has never been a real cessation of technological exchange between the US and its supposed Soviet enemy, whether truck factories, tank technology, nuclear weapons, submarines, rockets, computers and broadcasting. We’re the wind beneath one another’s wings.

   1. Yup. That is what I think. Saker takes it more seriously.

      1. Well, he has some understandable resentments of the West, given The Rape of Russia. On the other hand, I kind of bristle at the notion that the USSR won the war. Without a doubt their losses were staggering, but their geography itself played a significant role in overstretching the Nazi war machine. On the Western Front, Germany was able to utilize existing developed transport infrastructure to build powerful defensive fortifications and supply fresh troops and munitions to fight more effectively. At the end of the day, victory was a joint effort, and the USA proved the indispensable nation; who else would or could have handled Japan? As with all history, we are where we are now, not where our forebears were then. We have more in common with Russia than China, and we’ll be teaming up to thwart China’s global ambitions. Bank on it. Like the banks will.

         1. It is not my intent to be argumentative—just to point out that governments have these problems of scale and duration that make their virtue a mixed bag—same with people individually. In spite of having grown up in the Cold War and being thoroughly immersed in our own myths, I found it difficult to picture the USSR in its vastness and seeming poverty to be utterly evil at the individual level, perhaps because of what I had heard of my ancestry and seen of my Slavic relatives—warm, smart, creative people. I tend to think Russia is better as an ally than an antagonist. Some of our ‘friends’ are less favorable, in my view.

            1. My guess without having ever been to Russia and having limited experience with the Russians is that the divide here is related to Christianity – for members of the Russian Orthodox Church who really strive to practice the teachings of Christ – we have a great deal in common. The world is dividing into cultures that believe in and seek spiritual consciousness who are capable of transforming at spiritual warefare and hypermaterialists happy to implement transhumanism who will always be victims of spiritual warfare.

         2. Good points.

         3. Yes, I agree that we were the indispensable nation given size and manufacturing capability. However US interests were on both sides of the war – financing and helping the Nazis. It was the Russians who committed fully to their defeat and paid with their lives. The irony is that the Russians paid such an incredible price to put the Anglo American alliance on top. Remember – it was the Anglo American alliance who was vested in destroying and occupying Germany. They could have ended the war much, much sooner. And stopped if from happening if they had not financed Hitler. If you have not read Trading with the Enemy, strongly recommend.

            1. While I am sure Molotov was ambiguous towards the Reich for his own purposes, in truth the Russians as much as Neville Chamberlain infamously did, abetted early Nazi aggression with disastrous results, indeed engaging in duplicitous diplomacy until the last. It was, to be sure, an existential battle for the USSR, and its people pulled out the stops such as has hardly been seen in history. Still, the story is not an orthodoxy of virtue written in black and white as might be popularly believed, and the atrocities of Stalin were every bit the rival of Hitler’s, lacking only the same degree of coverage.

            2. Absolutely. The Russian history is long and ugly. If you have not listened to Ann Williams, it would not surprise me if the Rape of Russia killed as many as Leningrad etc. I confess to struggling why you think I am portraying the Russians as all good. They protected there turf.

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