Thursday, October 03, 2024

Busy busy busy! Here's some stuff about Trudeau, the Jack Smith report, the US election, the Russia-Ukraine War

I have a feeling that things are going to just be crazy for the next five weeks. 

Tonight I am reading about a whole bunch of things -- the pressure on Trudeau to do something something, the Jack Smith bombshell report, the dark underside of the US election, sane-washing Trump, the Russia-Ukraine war -- and it is, I have to say, impossible to pick just one thing to talk about. 
So here are some posts, some links and some commentary. 

Pressure on Trudeau to do something something 
Trudeau did an interesting interview on the podcast of MP Nathaniel Erskine-Smith  
Here are some excerpts:
...what drives Justin Trudeau? “Understanding that we are in a moment in this world where everything is changing. The way we work, the way AI works, the way geopolitics happens, the pressures on everything: The world is in a massive pivot moment right now. And we don’t know what the biggest issue is going to be.”
Here Trudeau is arguing that good instincts are better, in a storm, than easy remedies. ... “We don’t know what crises are going to hit the world. We only know there are going to be [crises]. And the question [is]: who has the capacity to respond?”
...“I do tend to get wrapped up in the long term,” he volunteers. This makes him brood about “the danger of squandering that lead we have, over so many of our competitors around the world — whether it’s on the environment and the green economy, whether it’s on child care and a responsible safety net, whether it’s on all sorts of different things.” If Canadians did something to blow that — “like electing a Conservative government that wants to bring us back to some past that never actually existed” — they would be jeopardizing “everything that we have been able to build that’s going to make the future so good for so many.”
Other comments: Basically, this sums up where we're at: The Jack Smith report landed like a bombshell this morning.
I'm not sure who to credit for this, but it's pretty great:


Even Fox News is covering it: And the Canadian connection: The dark underside of the US election: 
Justin Ling has a great article out tonight about Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars Peter Thiel: Puppetmaster and conspiracy theorist
...Peter Thiel and J.D. Vance... are, in a very literal way, the shadowy men behind a nefarious conspiracy. They are out to weaponize their power and influence — billions of dollars, high-level connections, state power, control of the media narrative — to dupe people. They want to siphon the energy of the masses, their attention, votes, and money, to give themselves more power. To enact their grand scheme for society: Call it Project 2025, call it the ‘Dark Enlightenment,’ call it fascism.
You saw it on the vice presidential debate stage last night. Vance refused to accept his party’s loss in the 2020 election, and refused to say if he would concede defeat if he loses this one.
Conspiracies exist. But they are always so much more crude, stupid, sad, pathetic, unambitious, and mean-spirited than they would have you believe.
Basically, I just don't understand how a nation like the United States can embrace a presidential candidate like Trump:

This is one that I genuinely think will be printed in history books one day to show how insane American media culture became. CBS News presenting ethnic cleansing as a housing policy to be compared with home construction tax incentives.

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— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw.bsky.social) October 1, 2024 at 8:19 PM
The stupid, it burns!!!!

more evidence for “undecided voters are actually inattentive voters who don’t care that much about politics”

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— jamelle (@jamellebouie.net) October 1, 2024 at 1:34 PM
Finally, moving on to the Russia-Ukraine War: 
At The Atlantic, Anne Applebaum writes The Only Way the Ukraine War Can End Russia has to stop fighting
...This war will end..only when the Russians run out of resources—and their resources are not infinite—or when they finally understand that Ukraine’s alliances are real, that Ukraine will not surrender, and that Russia cannot win.
...We have not yet reached that stage. The Russians are still waiting for the U.S. to get tired, to stop defending Ukraine, and maybe to elect Trump so that they can dictate terms and make Ukraine into a colony again.
...Should Ukraine finally lose this war, the costs—military, economic, political—for the U.S. and its allies will not go down. On the contrary, they are likely to increase, and not only in Europe. Since 2022, the military and defense-industry links among Russia, North Korea, Iran, and China have strengthened...
A failure to defeat Russia will be felt not just in Europe but also in the Middle East and Asia. It will be felt in Venezuela, where Putin’s aggressive defiance has surely helped inspire his ally Nicolás Maduro to stay in power despite losing an election in a landslide. It will be felt in Africa, where Russian mercenaries now support a series of ugly regimes. And, of course, this failure will be felt by Ukraine’s neighbors. I doubt very much that Germany and France, let alone Poland, are prepared for the consequences of a truly failed Ukraine, for a collapse of the Ukrainian state, for lawlessness or Russian-Mafia rule at the European Union’s eastern doorstep, as well as for the violence and crime that would result.
The means to prevent that kind of international catastrophe are right in front of us, in the form of Ukraine’s drone factories, the underground sea-drone laboratory, the tools now being designed to enable the Ukrainian army to beat a larger opponent—and also in the form of our own industrial capacity. The democratic world remains wealthier and more dynamic than the autocratic world. To stay that way, Ukraine and its Western allies have to persuade Russia to stop fighting. We have to win this war

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