Gubu.ie

I'm wondering if anyone is still glued to this and following daily updates on this?

I admit that I'm checking in with BBC news a few times a day for updates on how things are going. Anyone else as bad as me?

I'm avoiding looking at the likes of Reddit as its not as unbiased as I'd like.

Glued to what ?

Ukraine ?

Sick of it all to be honest,

I don't check in but I do catch glimpses of bizarre things like the army chief in the UK saying troops should be ready for a long land war against Russia or Russian generals saying the UK will be obliterated from the earth or Our Ursula running the EU with her beautiful hair while wearing a suit of Ukrainian colours or Zoolander looking manful beside Zelensky like they're in some kind of esoteric machismo initiation ceremony and the Russian rouble being king of currency and ordinary people struggling to afford fuel and food in Europe and the US.
And I think to myself how fucken odd it is that if I wake up some morning and hear there's been a nuclear strike somewhere in Europe that I won't be even a fraction as surprised as I once hoped I would be at such news.

Saint_Tibulas wrote: ↑Wed Jun 22, 2022 12:05 pm Glued to what ?

Ukraine ?

Sick of it all to be honest,

Oh I can see how that would happen alright.

Jaysis maybe you mean covid in which case from what bits I see I'm still mighty glad to be among the supposedly walking dead "unvaxxed".


I swear there's so much weirdness around at the moment that I don't know anymore what people mean when they say aren't things strange.

isha wrote: ↑Wed Jun 22, 2022 12:22 pm I don't check in but I do catch glimpses of bizarre things like the army chief in the UK saying troops should be ready for a long land war against Russia or Russian generals saying the UK will be obliterated from the earth or Our Ursula running the EU with her beautiful hair while wearing a suit of Ukrainian colours or Zoolander looking manful beside Zelensky like they're in some kind of esoteric machismo initiation ceremony and the Russian rouble being king of currency and ordinary people struggling to afford fuel and food in Europe and the US.
And I think to myself how fucken odd it is that if I wake up some morning and hear there's been a nuclear strike somewhere in Europe that I won't be even a fraction as surprised as I once hoped I would be at such news.

I learned that the BBC doesn't really go for the sensationalist story. I'm trying to avoid those and the Zoolander type story.

Hairy-Joe wrote: ↑Wed Jun 22, 2022 12:26 pm I learned that the BBC doesn't really go for the sensationalist story. I'm trying to avoid those and the Zoolander type story.

Still...it was hard to miss the multiplicity of photos of the fragrant Ursula looking disturbingly on brand.

I heard that UK army chief and his mad comment and at the same time the government is reducing the size of the British army by another 10,000. Depressing that a fool like him can rise to such a dangerous position, then again with Borris' finger on the nuclear button God help us all.

His great hero (and mine), Winston Churchill, for all his faults had military experience including taking part in the last cavalry charge in British military history at the Battle of Omdurman whereas Borris couldn't charge a rice pudding.

This extract is from Churchill's personal letters relating to the battle of Omdurman which took place on the 2nd September 1898 - can you imagine any current political leader such as Borris, Putin etc. being up to this?

"Now about the war: - Perhaps you will read my letters in the "Morning Post". They contain the best of my impressions put down as carefully, from the point of view of style, as I can. The military operations, though short, have been interesting. The Battle was a wonderful spectacle. The I had the good luck to ride through the charge unhurt-indeed untouched-which very few can say. I used a pistol and did not draw my sword. I had no difficulties and felt confident that I should get through if, neither my horse fell nor I was shot-for I must tell you the ground was execrable and there was the wildest shooting in all directions. Neither of these things happened and such of the enemy as approached me or attacked me I shot-three I think I killed. It is difficult to miss at under a foot's range. The whole thing was a matter of seconds-for as you may have gathered-we burst through their line and formed up the other side. The loss was most severe-1 officer and 21 men killed-9 officers and 66 men wounded and 119 horses out of only 320. Such a proportion and such a loss has been sustained by no regiment since the Light Brigade-forty years ago." https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/churchill/ ... c0020.html

The Battle was a wonderful spectacle.

I question the sanity of anyone who thinks a battle where multiple people (and horses) were slain and injured, is 'a wonderful spectacle'.

It is, IMO, a sick attitude.

Not sure I'd use the word "glued" but I'm still following developments, through various non-news sources, two or three times a day. I find it very interesting to compare the predictions and analysis from professionals/experts early on in the war with how things are unfolding, as it aligns with my own "day job" to a certain extent.

It's also been interesting watching the non-professionals jump in with wholly unreasonable suggestions of what needs to be done/not done without any understanding of why their suggestion is completely unreasonable. That's something that can be extrapolated to so many different scenarios, and it's useful to know the extent to which our society is becoming progressively more stupid in this (supposed) information age.

I got sick of watching war mongers. Not many people are focused on peace and how that is achieved or how this mess began. People are rightfully blaming Putin but there are a series of events that happened by our side that needn’t have that were provocations. To admit this and realise how peace is forged is the only way forward in my opinion. Doing so though gets you labelled some Putin bot farm troll.

Ukraine is never going to defeat Russia. It may have already turned into a war of attrition. Only peace or complete Russian victory will end this. How else can it end? To achieve peace concessions must be made. Instead there are further provocations like new members to the eu and nato. Had Ukraine promised to never join nato and remained neutral Putin wouldn’t have had his justification for war.

That is the way I feel. Just can't understand how so many people got so crazily het up in favour of war, more weapons, more money, more sanctions, more deaths, more rubble, more attrition, more suffering, more backslapping tours to meet the star of the show, Zelensky etc. It's been so weird that there has been very little attempt at urgently making peace and practising statesmanship. I find it insane.

As I posted elsewhere way back, the only person who has said anything sensible is UN head honcho when he called the war "absurd". It is 2022 and Putin is trying to drag us back to the 1930s. Most people have moved on save for the detached elites and the money grasping arms manufacturers. The latest EU sponsored provocation by Lithuania today is mind boggling in its stupidity and if things kick off they will be first to be flattened.

Ncdjd2 wrote: ↑Thu Jun 23, 2022 9:43 am That rail blockade with Kaliningrad could escalate very quickly.

Map for reference, surrounded by Nato members. Can't see this ending well.

images (1).jpeg

I can see that being a right flashpoint. It's full of Russians after Stalin did some ethnic cleansing getting rid of the Poles and Prussians. It's too small to survive economically and full of trigger happy Russians sitting on some of the Baltic Sea fleet. I can see a silly Russian general believing Putin's hype of the invincibility of Russian Army and decide to force a corridor across Lithuania into Belarus.

Hairy-Joe wrote: ↑Thu Jun 23, 2022 9:05 pm I can see that being a right flashpoint. It's full of Russians after Stalin did some ethnic cleansing getting rid of the Poles and Prussians. It's too small to survive economically and full of trigger happy Russians sitting on some of the Baltic Sea fleet. I can see a silly Russian general believing Putin's hype of the invincibility of Russian Army and decide to force a corridor across Lithuania into Belarus.

It’s quite scary that such a small error of judgement right now could start World War III.

Ukraine and Moldova both joined the eu yesterday(candidate status*). Apparently a Russian politician played it down saying something like, they’re free to join whatever economic union they like.

Another scenario I can see is like Vietnam. The large US army couldn't defeat the "underdog" NVA due to USSR and China support. I can see it going that way but with a role reversal, the Russia is the big bad army and the underdog Ukrainian getting support from the US.

Random thoughts.....

Alexander Dugin's daughter, Darya Dugina, has been blown up in a bomb attack in Russia.

It's been long said to be a conspiracy theory that Alexander Dugin's Eurasian geopolitical theories have been a huge influence on Putin, but I have friends from the general region who have studied around this subject and they believe that the men are close and share the same aspirations re the Third Rome etc.

Don't honestly know if this is so. There is so much we don't know about the background re Putin. But if this was an attack by Ukraine this is a strike at the heart of the ideological regime. She was driving Dugin's car, having decided not to use her own.

Guess we will see.

Heard a former head (?) of the Atomic Energy Agency on Drivetime this evening and he was pouring scorn on the visit by a bunch of accountants (his words) from the International Atomic Energy Agency to the Ukrainian Nuclear power plant today. Apparently out of the 14 who arrived to check on the cleanliness of the staff canteen only four remain on site and according to him all they can do with their useless area of expertise is look out the window and ring home if they see any missiles arriving.

Hardly a simpleton, he's a former director of the International Energy Agency. Here's a link to the piece in case you didn't catch it: https://www.rte.ie/radio/radio1/driveti ... mber-2022/ starts at 1.39.57 I found it alarming but not surprising.

Incidentally, I have had my suspicions about the Ukrainian government's right-wing policies reinforced in recent days from listening to a number of their politicians...truly depressing and as I said from Day,1, two former Soviet states at war with each other and we owe neither side anything. It's not that many years ago that the Ukrainians were armed to teeth with nukes aimed at us.

No need for any apology - I'm as confused as anybody and it's hard to tell the truth from the lies.

What I fear is that Putin and his cronies may go for a single nuclear strike on a Ukrainian target to cow the country into an immediate surrender in the same way that the US did to Japan at the end of WW.II. - although it took two bombs on that occasion.

The more I look things up online for this, the less I believe. The Russians are experts in online propaganda and have been doing it for years. Ukraine are imposing a media blackout which allows the Russian propaganda to take hold.

I'm starting to read known unbiased media (DW, BBC World) and they stopped saying how the ground war is going. I also look up the Institute for War and the NASA Fire warning website is useful for tracking where fires (and by implementation, the fighting) is happening. A look at https://firms.modaps.eosdis.nasa.gov/ma ... .6,46.4,7z shows fighting in two main areas northwest of Kerson