news

It's prigover

Big Serge's take:

The distribution of who is celebrating, indifferent, or outraged by Prigozhin's death (or at least, feigning these emotions) is fascinating and bizarre. People in the Russian sphere nodding in tacit approval, western publications calling him a "dissident", it's all over the map. Personally, I tend to view things in a very mechanistic way, so rather than think of this as "good" or "bad" the word that pops into my mind is "inevitable".

All those who deliberately embarked on the path of betrayal will suffer inevitable punishment. The Russian Armed Forces received the necessary order.

Putin on June 24th, one day after Prigo’s farce. Putin’s words often take a while to sink in, but he’s not someone you should take lightly or ignore what he says. Everyone was saying his speech was underwhelming at the time because it got hyped up as being a big declaration, but it was low key just a stated death threat. Not even threat. Just a statement of fact that he would assassinate Prigo and his ilk.

I just spoke to brace (we’re close friends) expect Wagner two part episodes in the coming month

So apparently the entire command staff of Wagner might have been on that jet. Seems like an awfully convenient "crash" if that's true... https://nitter.net/ragipsoylu/status/1694405239820980509#m

Prigo is kill, elevate Putin to gigachad because he definitely purged the guy trust me.

Prigo wasn't assassinated, his plane just did that.

At Least 6 Soldiers Attacked by Coyotes, Treated for Injuries While Training at Fort Johnson

At least six Alaska National Guardsmen were attacked by coyotes during a rotation to the Joint Readiness Training Center, or JRTC, in Louisiana in July.

Soldiers assigned to the 297th Infantry Regiment were injured when they encountered up to four coyotes while training at Fort Johnson, Louisiana, according to a base spokesperson. The soldiers likely encountered a den and were attacked by the wild dogs, suffering bite marks to their arms and head.

The soldiers were all treated for injuries and released from medical care. Fort Johnson wildlife officials shot one of the coyotes and captured another for rabies testing. The soldiers were armed with rifles but were training with blanks, which is common in the training environment.

It's unclear if the soldiers provoked the coyotes. Service members are routinely briefed before trained events to not interact with wildlife.

Oh thank God, I thought I didn't actually understand modern Russian politics for abit there. Alright boys, it's business as usual.

It's going to be really funny if Pringles actually shows up alive after this.

At least Prigo finally got his ammunition

USS Howard sustained ‘soft grounding’ near Bali ahead of port visit

This is the fleet China is supposed to be afraid of

Are US officials signaling a new ‘forever war’ in Ukraine?

By Responsible Statecraft, the American realist camp.

A forever war seems to be brewing in Ukraine.

Last week, I argued that given the failure of Kyiv’s summer offensive to reclaim significant territory from Russia and given the maximalist rhetoric that the U.S. government and NATO allies had been using since last year to sell the public on open-ended military support, the war in Ukraine was in danger of being prolonged again, well past the date that the Biden administration had appeared to set last year.

This increasingly looks to be the case. On Saturday, the Financial Times reported that “U.S. officials are privately girding for what increasingly looks like a war of attrition that will last well into next year,” echoing an earlier Wall Street Journal report that “military strategists and policymakers across the West are already starting to think about next year’s spring offensive” and about “how to prepare for a protracted conflict.”

It may well become “a protracted struggle that lasts several more years,” the Journal warned on Sunday, noting that Ukraine’s goal of retaking all the territory it lost now “appears a distant prospect.”

...

In other words, the United States and NATO are moving the goalposts again in a war that has already been characterized by steady mission creep. At least some of their Russian counterparts appear to feel the same, with former Russian President and Deputy Security Council Chairman Dmitry Medvedev recently saying that “should it take years or even decades, then so be it.”

Yet this begs the question of when it will ever be considered a good time to wind down the war. The Ukrainian government and its supporters maintain that it’s a lack of advanced military weapons that have hobbled its offensive, even as military experts insist no weapon would be a “magic bullet” against the dug-in Russian defenses and that the reasons for Kyiv’s military failures run deeper. This is not an unreasonable take given the significant amount of Western-supplied heavy weaponry destroyed in the offensive’s opening weeks alone.

If the next offensive similarly fails, will a ceasefire be pushed back again? How many years might this go on for?

Even if Kyiv does stage a successful operation against Russian forces in the future, it’s not clear it will lead to an end of the war. For one, Moscow may decide to launch its own counter-offensive to erase whatever gains Ukrainian forces have made, starting perhaps an endless cycle of military toing-and-froing. Or we could have a repeat of last fall, when Kyiv and its NATO backers, emboldened by the major gains made in Ukraine’s September counter-offensive, rejected the idea of talks to insead pursue “total victory,” at ultimately disastrous cost.

Even now, Ukrainian leaders and many of its Western supporters still maintain the maximalist goals of restoring the country’s pre-2014 borders, which includes retaking Crimea.

Ironically, a prolonged war is exactly what at least some NATO officials had hoped for from the start in order to trap Russia in its own Afghanistan-like blunder, with the New York Times reporting in March 2022 that the administration “seeks to help Ukraine lock Russia in a quagmire.”

But a prolonged war will not be good for Ukraine, which has already suffered breathtakingly vast human and economic costs from a protracted war, and which falls further and further into debt with every month. And it will not be good for the rest of the world either, feeding into worldwide cost-of-living shocks while carrying the already twice-averted possibility of a catastrophic NATO-Russia war that could turn nuclear.

Why would you not just enjoy your exile/retirement in Belarus? It's actually a gorgeous country with lots of nature and wildlife.

Teamsters just ratified their contract with UPS with 86% voting yes

It's something unpredictable

But in the end, it's right

I hope you had the time of your life

The gift of prophecy

Tackling corruption in healthcare is actually evil and communist

CNN - China is launching an ‘unprecedented’ crackdown on corruption in its health industry as economic woes pile up

Donald trump’s bail set to 200K in Georgia election case

Hogs will have that covered practically instantly

Germany's Baerbock decries weak impact of Russia sanctions

"Economic sanctions should have an economic impact. But that is not the case. Because the logic of democracies does not work in autocracies."

New economic theory just dropped.

"We have learned that with rational decisions, rational measures, agreed between civilized governments, it is not possible to end this war," Baerbock said in the interview carried out on July 10.

Again with the chauvinism. They don't say what her conclusion to this is, but I'll bet it involves kidnapping people and marching them into mine fields.

Channel 4 in the UK gave the predictable rundown on how Prigozhin's death will help Ukraine win the war blah blah blah but then had a slideshow of pictures and videos of him over the end credits of the news like he was a beloved celeb who just died, it was super weird lmao

Is the BRICS thing in Joburg? Maybe I should give it a visit lol. I'll be sure to be the most cringe crank leftist possible, in order to give us a good name

The building blocks of propaganda is focus, not lies. My western mainstream TV news had a segment about "patriotic" youth camps in Russia where pre-teens go to do flag-shagging and military larping. It is some truly fucked up chud shit and the "journalists" made every effort to hammer home that point. They even had an expert in Russian children's culture on to talk about how the Russian chud camps were a form of child abuse.

I have no reason to believe the "journalists" were lying, for all I know they were telling a true story about some fucked up shit in Russia.

However, the only reason they bring that story is because it happens in Russia. When similar forms of indoctrination happens in the Aryan "garden" countries it is reported in much friendlier terms, if it is reported at all. Things like American school children chanting a nationalist propaganda pledge or going to JROTC or the very similar camps in the Baltics are treated much gentler.

Oh and by the way, one thing that made me really sad was to see how the Russian youth chud camp used the same kind of red scarves the young pioneers did back in the days. It was sad to see footage of children with red scarves around their necks hoist the tsarist white-blue-red rag while singing a bastardised version of the Soviet anthem. It all gave the vibes of being a pale imitation of the USSR.

Prigo Dead.

Dreaming of a buddy comedy where Prigozhin and Trudeau fake their deaths and travel the world in disguises.

Owning the Revisionists by training hyper reactionaries

so BRICS was originally a term from western economists to highlight investment opportunities in growing economies, so the countries decided to form into a bloc that has at this point become the greatest alternative to the west-led international order?

common western economist L

thank you mr putin for showing your commitment to denazification by starting at home

https://www.rt.com/news/581894-biden-tiktok-control-censorship-bytedance/

Biden administration sought control over TikTok - report

The Biden administration sought to gain control over nearly every aspect of the inner workings of social media behemoth TikTok as part of negotiations allowing its continued operation in the US, according to a draft agreement obtained by Forbes last week.

I think this is the forbes article:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilybaker-white/2023/08/21/draft-tiktok-cfius-agreement

A Draft Of TikTok’s Plan To Avoid A Ban Gives The U.S. Government Unprecedented Oversight Power

Maybe this was posted before?

There are protests levied against Russia because of:ukkkraine: during the BRICS summit and of course it's mostly :lmayo: suburbanites from Sandton.

The European economy continues to be crushed from losing their cheap energy supply from Russia and increasing interest rates to chase US Fed rate hikes with no end in sight, as detailed in the release of Flash Germany PMI and Flash Eurozone PMI yesterday.

Germany’s Composite PMI has cratered from July’s 48.5 to the current 44.7. Anything below 50 means production is shrinking, which is bad.

Note: Composite PMI shows the combination of both Manufacturing Output Index and Service Business Activity Index.

From the commentary:

Commenting on the flash PMI data, Dr. Cyrus de la Rubia, Chief Economist at Hamburg Commercial Bank, said:

"Any hope that the service sector might rescue the German economy has evaporated. Instead, the service sector is about to join the recession in manufacturing, which looks to have started in the second quarter. Our GDP nowcast model, which incorporates the PMI flash estimate, now indicates a deeper fall of the whole economy than it did before, at almost -1%.

“Stagflation is an ugly thing. However, it’s exactly what is happening to the services economy, as activity has started to shrink while prices have shot up again, even picking up pace. When inflation cannot be tamed in the eurozone’s biggest economy, this is bad news for the ECB.

“Manufacturing output took another hit in August, dropping even faster. Having said this, there is a glimmer of hope that the downturn in industry is nearing its bottom. Indeed, the downward trend in the PMI measures of new orders and stock of purchases have lost momentum. This could well mean that the inventory cycle is only a few months away from a turnaround.

“The rate of decline in new export orders eased in August, though demand from abroad is still shrinking quickly. We take this development as the first tentative sign that the global economy’s industrial sector is about to stabilize sooner rather than later.

“The fall in services activity has only just started as new business declined for the second month in a row and companies showed reluctance to hire new staff. However, services companies seem to feel surprisingly bold jacking up prices at an even quicker rate."

Eurozone is not doing any better either, as the bloc falls into stagflation (sharp rise in unemployment while inflation remains elevated)

Commenting on the flash PMI data, Dr. Cyrus de la Rubia, Chief Economist at Hamburg Commercial Bank, said:

“The service sector of the eurozone is unfortunately showing signs of turning down to match the poor performance of manufacturing. Indeed, service companies reported shrinking activity for the first time since the end of last year, while output in manufacturing dropped again. Considering the PMI figures in our GDP nowcast leads us to the conclusion that the eurozone will shrink by 0.2% in the third quarter.”

“ECB president Christine Lagarde sounded the alarm that the economy may be faced with higher wages and lower productivity, leading to higher inflation. It seems like those worries are about to turn into reality, at least for the vast service sector. For, in this sector input prices and thus wages increased at an accelerated pace in August. Meanwhile, stagnating employment combines with decreasing production and results therefore in lower output per head. As a result, the ECB may be more reluctant to pause the hiking cycle in September.”

“Is a bottom in sight in the manufacturing sector? Perhaps, as the PMI headline index, though still in shrinking territory, has increased somewhat. This happened on the back of a slightly better order situation as well as slower destocking. The higher confidence that output will be higher one year from now fits into this narrative. A real turnaround may only happen in the first quarter of next year, however, as the PMI starts from a rather low level.”

“The downward pressure on the economy of the eurozone in August stems mainly from the German service sector which switched from growth to contraction at an unusual pace, while the French service providers reduced their activity at a similar speed as the month before. In the manufacturing sector, Germany’s firms are reducing their output at a much faster pace than the French ones. This will only fuel the discussion of Germany being the sick man of Europe.”

The Flash United Kingdom PMI also showing the same trend - disaster ahead.

At this point, it is not even worth discussing about re-joining the EU, which is now a moribund case. Better look to Asia if they want to survive.

whether it was Russia or Ukraine that did it, if Utkin and Prigozhin are dead and it doesn't result in Wagner Mutiny: The Squeakquel, then I see this as an absolute win

(aside from the others who may have been on board, though if they're on Prigozhin's private plane then they're probably also Wagner chuds?)

She Prigozhin on my plane till I crashed

Bricsmaxxing

Woke: Epstein didn't kill himself

Bespoke: Prigozhin killed himself