I'm back...sort of. Had to increase the pain meds for my knee, so I feel like I'm still in first gear. This morning here is the message from Sky News, click link for the video and more updates:
"Analysis: News blackout in southern Ukraine means 'something big is going on'
A news blackout in southern Ukraine means "something big is going on", military expert Professor Michael Clarke has told Sky News.
Professor Clarke, former director-general of the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), said: "The Ukrainians have conducted a complete news blackout on what is happening in the Kherson oblast because the Russians are holding a line between Snihurivka and Mylove, and that line they have been holding onto for over a week now as Ukraine moves south.
"When the Ukrainians have a news blackout it means something is going on. They have always done this before when there is a big offensive push on.
"I am guessing in the next 48-72 hours they might tell us what is happening.
"Now for sure, something big is happening. It might fail, it may not work, but in the past, it has worked.
"Standby for some more interesting information – I am guessing on this frontline between Mylove and Snihurivka."
Meanwhile, around 100 women – all from the Azovstal steelworks - have also been released in a prisoner exchange.
Showing footage of their release, Professor Clarke said: "These women are all coming out, some of them are in combats, they might have been given those combats, but they are walking in line – they are coming out they are almost marching.
"They are coming out in order, they are making a point. We are the women from the Azovstal steelworks.
"Civilians got mixed in with the troops towards the end, it was all pretty awful.
"But here they are, they are holding their head up, they are coming out with pride and that is making a point to the Russians and the rest of the world. "
~~~~~
Meanwhile, this really is the place to go for amazing information on the events; BTW, I noticed Tom Engelhardt is over there so that is a good signal - these guys are the brains:
Terrific reads, enlightening...you will be amazed.
Excerpt - 10/18/22:
Kos on the Kherson News Blackout & the Iranian Kamakazi drones:
"Full operational silence means we don’t know what’s going on around Kherson, but I’m less and less inclined to believe we’re seeing major advances. Rather, the weather has made movement difficult, so why not wait a month for the ground to freeze while systematically degrading Russian defenses? As the weather turns cold, we might even see more Russian surrenders, defections, and desertions.
Once the ground is frozen, Ukraine can advance with even larger force. Britain alone is training 2,500 Ukrainians every six weeks, with Canada, Denmark, Germany, France, and the Baltic countries recently joining the effort. More armored vehicles and artillery guns are arriving in Ukraine daily. Russia, on the other hand, is relegated to sending untrained, under-equipped, unmotivated mobilized conscripts to serve as speed bumps in miserably cold and wet trenches. While Belarus empties its armored vehicle stores for Russia, Excalibur and GMLRS rocket artillery systematically whittles away Russia’s capabilities.
Over summer, Ukraine was under pressure to prove it could recapture territory, lest Western allies lose Western faith throughout a cold winter. Those days are past. Ukraine’s capabilities have been well-proven. Now, it makes sense to wait for the more tactically advantageous conditions to press the attack."
..........
"I haven’t talked much about the Kyiv Blitz—Russia’s Nazi-like effort to break Ukraine’s spirits be using Iranian suicide drones to strike both energy infrastructure and civilian targets. I suspect those civilian targets are accidental, given the shitty quality of Russian (and Iranian) gear. Russia couldn’t have possibly wanted to waste an $18 million cruise missile on a playground swing set. Those Iranian drones don’t even have cameras.
Thing is, despite the attention those Iranian drones are generating, they’re militarily irrelevant. Hitler was able to reduce much of London to rubble using his V2 rockets, these Iranian drones are causing limited damage. A large percentage have also been shot down, with more air defenses arriving soon.
If anything, those cheap drones (reported cost, around $20,000 each), deployed by the hundreds, might overwhelm Ukrainian defenses, causing shortages in expensive surface-to-air missiles. But in Russia’s best case scenario, what could they ultimately accomplish? Each civilian target, whether intentional or not, merely intensifies Ukrainian resolve and builds more pressure in the West for long-range rockets like ATACMS for HIMARS launchers, as well as NATO tanks and aircraft. Maybe Russia manages to take down significant portions of Ukraine’s power grid, making the Russian milbloggers like Rybar happy? Yeah, that would suck. It would mean lots of cold people this winter, but Ukrainians aren’t soft people. They'll adapt and survive, just like they did last February and March in places like Mariupol, Sumy, Chernihiv, and Kharkiv.
I’m betting Ukraine will figure out how to effectively combat those drones within the next 4-6 weeks, with both additional Western help (like anti-drone jammers) and domestic ingenuity. Meanwhile, the on-the-ground tactical and strategic situation will remain completely unchanged because even now, Russia still refuses to use its rockets, missiles, and drones to strike military targets. "
~~~~~
Now, more and more we are hearing about Iran's involvement in the Ukraine war yet very little if any information has been out there on the situation in the Middle East, and I mean from the MSM.
The absolute hands down best source imho is our fave brain with current updates on the environment to boot !
~ From Informed Comment:
Just received this on the email: - hit the link to watch the video.
"Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Barak Ravid at Axios reports that Biden administration officials are furious about remarks by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas saying he lacked confidence in the US as a mediator.
What Ravid does not say is that Washington has no right, none, to get on a high horse. Since the US sponsored and co-signed the Oslo Peace Accords in 1993, which guaranteed Palestinians a state in the West Bank and Gaza by 1997 in return for PLO recognition of Israel, Palestinians have been royally screwed over. Not only did the Israelis not withdraw from Areas C, B, and A in turn, as the accords specified, they doubled the number of squatters they sent from Israel to take over private Palestinian land just in the 1990s alone. That squatting process has accelerated in recent years. In the Trump era, the US cut the Palestinians off at the knees, defunding aid programs left and right.
The Biden people appear to think that Abbas owes them for restoring several hundred million dollars of aid to the Palestinians.
But, and I wish administration officials could hear this loud and clear, Palestinians don’t want to sell, for some aid money, their aspiration for statehood. They don’t want to sell their birthright to the land that their ancestors had farmed for, in many cases, thousands of years, and which has now been usurped from them by the Zionist movement, which originated among modern European Jews.
The US has played a very sinister role in prolonging and deepening the suffering and expropriation of the Palestinian people, clearly siding with the far right wing governments of Israel at every turn.
Is it any wonder that the Palestinians have lost patience?
On Thursday, Abbas had met with Vladimir Putin at a summit in Astana, Kazakhstan. Abbas said that he had lost confidence in the United States as a mediator in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The Moscow-educated Abbas said, “We have no confidence in America, and you know our opinion. We just don’t have any confidence in it and do not rely on it, and we don’t accept that America should be under any circumstance the only party in resolving the problem.” He added that the Palestinians would only accept American mediation if it was part of the Quartet that includes Russia.
The Quartet consists of the European Union, Russia, the United States, and the United Nations, and has conducted negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians since it was established by the UN Security Council in 2002. Its main principles are non-violence, recognition of Israel, and implementation of Security Council resolutions (on a two-state solution). I’d just make the editorial comment that the Quartet, and Putin’s Russia, has not been more effective as a mediator than the US, which is to say that both of them have completely failed.
Abbas urged a rebooting of the Quartet process, saying that the negotiations simply cannot be left to the United States on its own. Palestinians have complained for three decades that there is no difference between the US position and the Israeli one whenever they have engaged in negotiations, so that the US acts as an echo chamber for Tel Aviv rather than as an independent referee.
Abbas said during the meeting, “Mr. President, we are completely satisfied” with Russia’s stance towards the Palestinian people. He added, “Russia adheres to justice and international law, and that is enough for us.”
In the context of the Israeli aggressive theft of Palestinian land and settling of hundreds of thousands of Israelis on the stolen land, the comment about Russia’s commitment to international law (i.e. the two-state solution) makes some sense.
In the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, however, Abbas’ comment sounds tone deaf. You would think he would sympathize with another occupied people, the Ukrainians, rather than praising the occupier.
Except that the Ukrainians have no sympathy, either, for another colonized people and have been stridently pro-Israel. Kyiv seems hurt and upset that Israel has tried to remain neutral between Russia and Ukraine and to keep on Putin’s good side, but that hasn’t stopped President Volodomyr Zelensky and his cabinet officials from their strong backing for Israel.
So since he is getting no support from Ukraine, and since the US has its thumb on the Israeli side of the scale, it makes sense to Abbas to seek Russian support for the Palestinians. Hence, his attempt to turn to the Quartet."
That is right.
~~~~~
~ From CNN:
~~~~~
Over and Out for now....oh wait, there are notices on the telephone polls here at SADM about the contamination of the ocean water in front of us; Mike will take a picture and I'll post it, he says these do not look like they are notices from the government. But really, considering the population explosion all around and below us with no or extremely ancient and outdated infrastructure, I'm beginning to think they will never be able to address or fix the contamination problem, it is a monster.
...........
P.S. Making Stagecoach (cowboy) chile tomorrow if I'm not too spaced out, will send over the recipe.😮😮😮
No comments:
Post a Comment