Cousin Ricky <ric### [at] yahoocom> wrote:
> On 3/6/22 13:54, Leroy wrote:
> >
> > When this all started a few weeks ago. When The US said we know what your doing
> > pretending that your protecting Russian people that are trapped in a hostel
> > country.  I thought they agree on something!?
> >  When Russia went ahead and attacked, My first thought was 'does the west have
> > the will to stand against this?' Well Do WE?
>
> When the USSR dissolved in 1991, the USA declared victory over communism
> and celebrated the end of the Cold War.  My thought--and I seemed to be
> alone in this--was, wait a minute, not so fast!
>
> The dissolution of the USSR, along with the fall of most other communist
> governments around the same time, showed one thing: that the Leninist
> model of socialist governance is unsustainable.  What it did *not* do was:
>   - Eliminate nuclear weapons.  This was foremost on my mind.  They were
>     now less likely to be used, but as long as they remained, I could
>     not agree that the Cold War was truly over.
>   - Insure that Leninist governments would be replaced by democratic
>     governments.
> Since then we have seen, in Russia and around the world, including the
> USA, that the presence of a democratic government today is no guarantee
> that said government will be democratic tomorrow.  While I did not
> foresee Russia's backslide into dictatorship, I did see that we should
> not have dropped our guard.
>
> During the MAD of the Cold War, the USSR pledged no first use of nuclear
> weapons, a pledge that the USA never made.  Now, with Putin, we cannot
> be sure.
>
> I haven't seen world solidarity on this level since 9/11.  But President
> Biden and the rest of the world are in a tight spot: how do we contain
> Russia without starting World War III?  This is why, as dire as the
> pleas are from Ukraine, NATO will not establish a no-fly zone.  It is
> plain to see that this war is bad for Russia.  But Putin is a madman and
> a kleptocrat who doesn't care for Russian lives, let alone Ukrainian,
> Syrian, or American lives, and we cannot appeal to his rationality or
> sense of decency.
>
> Another bind is our dependence on fossil fuels.  If we shut down
> Russia's pipelines, our fuel prices go up.  Even progressives are in a
> bind on this one, as this would hurt the poor the hardest.
>
> But why are we still dependent on fossil fuels, even after decades of
> warnings about climate change?  This speaks to Bald Eagle's point.
> Though his terse wording sounds like a conspiracy theory, the fact is
> that if American politicians cross American oligarchs (yes, let's start
> calling them that), they will lose their campaign funding--and quite
> often, media access, because the major media in the USA are owned by
> oligarchs--not to mention, that they milk the revenues from campaign
> ads.  Pay attention to how much the mainstream media focus on
> candidates' fund raising, and how little they pay attention to issues
> that affect ordinary Americans.
>
> Remember this the next time you see some TV ad from an oil company
> talking about energy independence.  Oil pumped in the USA goes straight
> to the international market.  They say the Keystone XL pipeline would
> help American energy independence.  But follow the oil: drilled in
> Canada, piped through the USA (with a temporary stop in Oklahoma), and
> offloaded onto tankers in Texas.  When a bill was introduced into
> Congress to keep that oil in the USA, it was voted down--by Republicans.
>  Remember, when an oil company says "energy independence," they are lying.
>
> After the fall of the Berlin Wall, I remember Europe got super nervous
> about the prospect of German reunification.  But Germany has done an
> exemplary job of facing its horrid past, certainly better than the USA,
> which cannot face its own present, let alone its past.  It was not
> Germany we had to worry about; it was post-communist Russia.


Sorry I didn't read the whole topic, just this last one, and meant to also
ponder the debate with a point, just in case no one already made it:
The worry is not russia alone, it's russia AND china, as the aledged goal of P.
is to pipeline fuel and sell it to china... Now if the current popular movement
was led by all the mandarin speaking individuals of the planet alone,
threatening to boycot that bloodstained energy, THIS could be the game changer.
(sorry for any grammar or typo from non native speaker, and sorry for any
misinformation from some naive human)

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