A Covert Action: Reagan, the CIA, and the Cold War Struggle in Poland

Shrug

The Eastern Block got the same fuzzy treatment from NATO that countries like Afghanistan and Columbia and Iran enjoyed.

Americans love a color revolution when your government aligns with Russia or China. But they have zero tolerance for dissent once their friends are in charge.

40 years ago poland was the most progressive country in europe regarding homosexuality because unlike everyone else they never criminalized it.

Damn, that’s wild. What was Poland like 40 years ago?

flips open history book

Omg, you’re a fucking tankie! TANKIE! TANKIE! Mods, get this guy out of here!!!

Unpopular American Opinion

Russia running into all the same problems of a prolonged ground war that plague any imperial power.

Strangely, I see so many of these posts indicating this as some kind of weakness Ukraine should be expected to exploit. However, you can see all the same problems of conscription on the opposite side of the front lines. Ukraine has increasingly turned to South America for expendables, with 40% of new recruits coming from across the Atlantic this year. Incidentally, a lot of these recruits are coming from the drug cartels.

Sort of like how “Al-Qaida in Iraq / Syria / etc” wasn’t a real organization, just a way of publicizing the War on Terror in a language Americans reflexively accepted.

We’re going to see random people persecuted as “Members of Antifa” in the same way we spied on and harassed anti-War Quackers and anti-Genocide college students by affiliating them with “terrorist groups”

Chinese/Russian which are obvious no

Say what you will about the MiG, they’re cheap.

Is this a contest to crash the most aircraft?

Because my man, the GOAT, John “New Plane” McCain would like to have a word.

There have been no confirmed downings of F-35’s.

Several “oops this plane just fell off the flight deck, oh well, shit happens” articles in recent memory. A great way to explain why the Navy is suddenly down a vehicle without having to explain to anyone in the general public what happened.

I wouldn’t lean on foreign propaganda any more than I would domestic propaganda.

Americans are putting these jets into service and a surprising number of them are failing.

Whether Iran/Yemen have successfully struck any of them or the Navy can’t get them on and off the flight deck reliably is almost a moot point. A downed plane is a downed plane.

the best way to deal with a bully is to tell them to fuck off

Works best when the bully isn’t stupid rich and surrounded by psychopath security guards.

A big reason why oil-rich oligarchies buy American military hardware is to avoid getting the heavy end of the “regime change” stick bounced off their heads.

USK

I sure do hope British politics doesn’t take a turn for the batshit insane over the next few years.

List of accidents and incidents involving the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II

At the price of $100M/jet you want to miss out on all this?

Why Drug Dealers Live With Their Moms

So the top 120 men on the Black Disciples’ pyramid were paid very well. But the pyramid they sat atop was gigantic. Using J. T.’s franchise as a yardstick – three officers and roughly 50 foot soldiers – there were about 5,300 other men working for those 120 bosses. Then there were the 20,000 unpaid rank-and-file members, many of whom wanted nothing more than a chance to become a foot soldier. And how well did that dream job pay? About $3.30 an hour.

A crack gang works pretty much like the standard capitalist enterprise: You have to be near the top of the pyramid to make a big wage. But selling crack is a lot more dangerous than most menial labor. Anyone who was a member of J. T.’s gang for the four years covered in the notebooks stood a 1-in-4 chance of being killed. That’s more than five times as deadly as being a timber cutter, which the Bureau of Labor Statistics calls the most dangerous job in the United States.

The one thing I have a problem with is this conclusion:

So if crack dealing is really the most dangerous job in America, and it pays less than minimum wage, why on Earth would anyone take such a job? Well, for the same reason a pretty Wisconsin farm girl moves to Hollywood. For the same reason that a high school quarterback wakes up at 5 a.m. to lift weights.

The assumption that people are just easy to hook on “Get Rich Quick” schemes is an easy and popular answer. But it belies a more depressing reality. I would argue that many of the people in this business are “unemployable” thanks to a combination of entrenched privatized segregation, criminal convictions from over-policing, and poor economic conditions in the immediate area. That gets us to OP’s headline. They aren’t doing this work because they want the job, they’re doing the work because they want any job.

Incidentally, one burgeoning jobs program in the modern American economy is… Paramilitary policing of low-income communities.

Not a coincidence that many of the folks at the top of the current state and national governments are, themselves, drugged out degenerates and mafia ringleaders in their own right. So we’re seeing the possibility of climbing out of poverty hedged by the same ladders being lowered into the scrum.

We are, quite literally, paying one half of the proletariat to kill the other.

It’s so surreal to see how the media treats relations between China and Taiwan (their second largest trading partner, with $290B in exports just last year on a $700B Taiwanese GDP). Over a third of their national economy is on civilian ships traveling across the Straight of Taiwan. Setting aside the obnoxious presentation of the article - making it very difficult to read and discuss - they’re effectively saying… what? Taiwan should strangle trade with its next door neighbor because China uses industrial freight ships to move military hardware and personal?

Meanwhile, the US maintains a suffocating embargo of Cuba, with the largest body of trade simply being resupply and transfer of troops between Florida and Guantanamo Bay military base - a location Cuba claims is illegally occupied, but the US refuses to divest from. I’ve never seen an American news journal report the torture prison as a possible means of infiltrating anti-Cuban rebels. I’ve never seen them suggest Cuban Exiles or their descendants preparing to reconquer the island. I’ve certainly never seen anyone suggest the US could do a rerun of The Bay of Pigs with Miami’s extensive fleet of civilian craft, despite this being central to Operation Northwoods and Operation Orsac.

What these articles always seem to breeze over is that China’s strategy towards Taiwan has historically been economic, not military. Chinese businesses have been buying up Taiwanese capital since 2014. Taiwanese businesses have been integrated into the Chinese export markets for even longer. FoxConn - the notorious manufacturing company for US and Japanese electronics - is one of Taiwan’s largest firms, but primarily employs Chinese workers in and around Hong Kong.

All the fearmongering around China as a military threat never seems to touch their economic sphere of influence. Perhaps that’s worth interrogating more thoroughly than the “flashlight under the chin” coverage of a few civilian transport ships.

Wait till you find out about Russian satellites and submarines.

Lasers, Radio Waves, Weather Balloons, Passenger Aircraft - its all an act of war!

War War War! Start the bombing immediately, Sir Kier! If you don’t, I’m going to vote for Reform and get Nigel Farage to do it!

This is a bit like when someone claims China has entered Taiwanese airspace, while neglecting to report that Taiwan claims airspace over mainland China.

Part of Taiwan’s air defense identification zone actually extends over the Chinese mainland, but Chinese flights are challenged by Taiwan only if they cross the median line – the halfway point between the island and the mainland above the Taiwan Strait.

Click-bait journalists love to print headlines that take advantage of their audience’s naive understanding of international law and gullibility when it comes to claims of foreign countries doing sinister things. In fairness to the Brits, anyone familiar with Russian media gets fed a similar deluge of “NATO is going to attack us at any moment!” scare pieces.

Great for ratcheting tension, driving up military recruitment, and galvenizing the public to hate anyone suspected of foreign origin or sympathies. Not particularly useful when informing the public of safety concerns.

They’ve been going tit-for-tat with flyovers and sail-bys for a while.

For the same reason Russians aren’t in a hurry to shoot down an RAF aircraft, Brits don’t really want to start a shooting war over some Russians with laser pointers.

My perspective was purely based on places like China and India.

During the famine of the 1960s, China’s population numbered around 400M and it was the poster child for “overpopulation”.

Sixty years later, they’ve functionally eliminated food insecurity. Nobody in China goes hungry because the shelves are bare. Their population now stands at 1.3B.

Maybe I’m indeed wrong and this is not a problem

Industrial agriculture has dramatically increased the agricultural productivity of post-WW2 China and India in the same way it transformed Europe and the US half a century earlier. Modern fertilizers, irrigation techniques, and ecological protective measures combined with industrial era logistics and transportation have ended the threat of famine at the national level… at least for the time being (squints at the impacts of climate change).

What famines we see in the modern era are fully the consequence of human policy. They’re either collateral damage - wars in Ukraine and Sudan and the Congo that disrupt agricultural and human traffic - or a deliberate consequence of imperial foreign policy - the '91 famine in North Korea, the famine in Iraq following Operation Desert Storm, the blockade of Cuba, the segregation of Hispaniola into Haiti and Dominican Republic, the genocide in Gaza.

What the article illustrates is the relative ease by which these huge (sometimes deliberate) logistical failures of food trade could be solved with a tiny appropriation of the military budgets that (sometimes deliberately) create them.

As usual, the problem isn’t lack of food or lack of money, it’s greedy people not wanting to share.

At this point, it’s white nationalists who want people to die. From Gaza to Haiti to Afghanistan, engineered famines are a tool of the powerful to subjugate and exterminate their geopolitical rivals.

Revelations is a revenge fantasy of an oppressed minority (Roman age Christians) aimed at the occupying imperial army (Rome).

It can be summarized as “When Rome fails, the world will end and everyone will get what they deserve”.

Meanwhile, there’s an extensive prior catalog of religious texts in the New Testament that absolutely do tell you to share the wealth, care for your neighbors, and pursue a utopian paradise free from inequality in God’s name.