We needed someone like Hillary in office to stop Russia :(
She couldn’t stop Trump, how can she stop Russia?
By the very simple fact of not being their lapdog. Russia is getting ready to bulldoze the Ukraine while we still have an infant in charge here. They know their window is slipping and will be looking to fully take advantage while the idiot is still at the reigns.
I’ve only got partway through but this seems very interesting so far.
Edit: American exceptionalism -
The pattern repeated itself when the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, following the original fatca example, took the congressional template and extended it: Each year, banks would report foreign accounts to the tax authorities in the account holders’ home country. If every nation had signed on to the OECD standards, the effect would have been a hammerblow to tax havens, shattering the vital infrastructure that allows kleptocratic money to flow unnoticed. In the end, the United States was alone in refusing to join the OECD agreement, finalized in 2014.
This obstinacy stood to subvert everything the country had done to lead the fight against dirty money: While the U.S. can ask almost any other nation’s banks for financial information about American citizens, it has no obligation to provide other countries with the same. “The United States had bullied the rest of the world into scrapping financial secrecy,” Bullough writes, “but hadn’t applied the same standards to itself.” A Zurich-based lawyer vividly spelled out the consequences to Bloomberg : “How ironic—no, how perverse—that the USA, which has been so sanctimonious in its condemnation of Swiss banks, has become the banking secrecy jurisdiction du jour … That ‘giant sucking sound’ you hear? It is the sound of money rushing to the USA.”
and Delaware is one of the most secretive company domiciles in the world.
The overall gist of the article is that America has made itself THE global haven for kleptocrats to stash and launder their money (especially through real estate). This has a corrosive effect on the ethical standards of all the elite professions (lawyers, bankers, real estate) dealing with this money. Plus the stolen money is handy for buying politicians.
Big surprise that Putin lied:
Not great, Bob!
One of the few times I am completely chill about Russia. You want to get into an open arms race with the United States? Sure you go ahead and do that, it worked out so well last time.
I mean, until this time around, the nutjobs in charge don’t want to go in the coup, and decide to start using them.
I am not nearly as sanguine as others are about nation-states without checks and balances having nuclear weapons. Particularly nation-states led by people who believe the fairy in the sky wants the world to end in fire and destruction for non-believes and things like that (not Russia here, but you get the point).
I am afraid that some day, we will get an autocratic ruler with depression or some similar mental illness who decides, “Fuck it, if I’m going out, why not kill billions for funsies.”
Imagine someone like Assad with nukes.
Except this time he’d be in an arms race with an adversary who wants him to win.
Here’s the thing… Russia is not in an arms race with us or anybody. They are trying to bankrupt us like we did to them. The problem is few are speaking up about the insane race we have against a foe that is playing us for suckers.
Every single time they boast about a new weapons system such as a new tank, a new aircraft, a new ship class, a new missile - Russia claims they’re going to produce tons of them, then they produce very few if any at all beyond test demonstrators. They’ve even gone so far as to fake footage of tests to trick the world into thinking a new weapon system is working and active when it’s going nowhere. But Putin knows what he’s doing. He saw the fall of the Soviet Union and why that happened. Part of the reason we bankrupted them was convincing them our stupid Reagan Star Wars system was actually going to happen. Putin wants to do the same to us, so how do you do that? You cater your broadcasts to the greedy hawks in Congress and those looking to get out of the military to become defense lobbyists and defense contractor specialists. They know that the initial (this is what we’re doing) will get us riled up spending money we don’t have to supersede a weapons system that doesn’t exist, and when Russia doesn’t produce… it won’t matter because that’s more sunk cost for the U.S. They (along with China) are happy to let the U.S. spend all its money on defense research and development, then they’ll just steal everything like they always do, saving them 90% of the work to get where we’re at. The defense contractors don’t care too much either because as the Russians and Chinese catch up, it means we need to “get ahead” so that means more money for defense development in a never ending cycle.
Russia’s spending on defense is 5th in the world. They spend less than Saudi Arabia now! Yet we treat them like the old Soviet Block. Putin doesn’t care how this looks to Russians. They fear him and won’t stand up to him. He’s playing a game and we’re losing. The same as we’re losing the information and manipulation game to them as well.
Russia and China will bankrupt us if we don’t normalize our defense spending. We should only spend what they do combined. Not a penny more.
Today is when Matt Gaetz truly became Presidential.
This is not really frightening at all. You notice that suicide bombers are always the pawns, not the actual leaders. None of them wants to be at the bottom of a smoking hole, so they are not about to use nuclear weapons against nuclear-armed countries or their allies in any way that can be even remotely tied to them. Remember what the US did to Iraq and Saddam after 9/11, and he wasn’t even involved. No autocrat is going to up the stakes.
Yeah, it would be something if a large, jihadi-supporting state with contested borders with a traditional (also nuclear-armed) enemy had a nuclear arsenal.
It’d really be some shit if that enemy state up and violated their airspace to blow the shit out of some jihadi training and stockpiling camps with laser-guided bombs.
Man, what a crazy world that would be.
I’m not worried about what happens when the autocrat believes he can hold on to power. I’m worried about what happens when he is losing it, and believes he has nothing to lose.
I agree. Bad thing hasn’t happened yet, which means it never can.
Heh, fair enough. I was mostly just clowning because the thing literally happened this morning.