Tuesday, May 24, 2022

Today's News: Hard to believe, isn't it, but Doug Ford seems to be winning

I still find it hard to believe that a lot of people in Ontario are still intending to vote for Ford and the Conservative party, in spite of his awful performance as premier. 
Then again, I also find it hard to believe that so many people in Saskatchewan can keep voting for the Sask Party. But they do. 
It's like people just don't believe that government could be done better. 
But it can be. Ontario and Quebec experienced a terrible derecho storm on Saturday, causing 10 deaths and millions in damages. Ford did his usual disappearing act on Sunday but Del Duca showed up! Ford did wander through the ruins today but this is what happened: Hey, if you've lost Mercedes Stephenson...
But here's another interesting comment about the PC polling problems:
And I am hoping this will prove to be correct:
Moving to Ukraine, here's what we all need to remember now: 
Russia has spent my entire lifetime building its networks of clandestine supporters around the world. Putin is now calling in those chips as he desperately tries to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat in Ukraine.
Keep this in mind whenever you hear the kind of talk like Kissinger gave at Davos today:
His talk will give permission to Republicans to flock to Putin's side, so it wouldn't surprise me to hear even more appeasement talk over the next few weeks, regardless of Ukraine continuing to make advances on the battlefields.  
Here's some more reaction to the appeasement idea: Kos writes
Within the next 4-6 weeks, if not sooner, I fully expect Russia’s offensive operations to fizzle, and for a transition to a full defensive posture. 
Putin will declare victory, claiming all he ever really wanted was a land bridge to Crimea. And then he’ll demand negotiations to cement that new status quo, much like 2014 cemented Crimea and the separatist Donbas regions as Russian territory. 
But why would Ukraine do that, as new armored brigades come online, and the overall size of its armed forces swells from 700,000 today, to over 1 million in a couple of months? What makes the NY Times think that recapturing Russian-held territory is so unrealistic, when Ukraine has already pushed Russia out from over half of the territory it captured at the start of the war, prior to receiving critical offensive weapons from the West? 
Ultimately, Ukraine will decide if and when to head back to the negotiating table. But given the atrocities Russia has committed, compounded by its eliminationist genocidal talk, Ukraine is more than willing to suffer horrendous casualties (50-100 dead Ukrainian servicemembers per day on the Donbas front, according the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy) in order to defend its freedom. 
For Ukraine, the war is existential, and freezing the conflict in place will only guarantee it will need to be rekindled again in the future. There is no scenario in which Russia willingly surrenders Kherson, Crimea, Mariupol, or the pieces of the Donbas it still holds. 
Why let Russia rebuild its army and fix its operational defects? Why scare off potential foreign investment out of fear of continued war? Ukraine really has no choice. 
Now is the time to press its advantage. If the West wants the war the end faster, there’s one way to accomplish that: speed up deliveries of the heavy weaponry Ukraine needs to liberate its territory. The sooner Ukraine can stand up new offensive units, the sooner we can get to the part everyone is desperately waiting for: peace, reconstruction, and the return of normalcy for the Ukrainian people. 
Putin is not the only monster in Russia:
All of the people who think like this must be defeated.

And on a lighter note tonight -- isn't this is a great song?

Finally, here's something funny: 
Remember two months ago when the Daily Mail created the "half a giraffe" asteroid measurement?
Well, now we have Bloomberg News creating the "cook raw salmon" temperature measurement:

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