The big lie behind the Western narrative on Russia is leading us to World War III
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/the-big-lie-behind-the....
By Tarik Cyril Amar, a historian from Germany working at Koç University, Istanbul, on Russia, Ukraine, and Eastern Europe, the history of World War II, the cultural Cold War, and the politics of memory
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The current situation in the conflict between Ukraine, serving (while being demolished) as a proxy for the West, and Russia, can be sketched in three broad strokes.
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First, Russia now clearly has the upper hand on the battlefield and could potentially accelerate its recent advances to achieve an overall military victory soon.
The West is being compelled to recognize this fact: as Foreign Affairs put it, in an article titled “Time is Running Out in Ukraine,”
Kiev and its Western supporters “are at a critical decision point and face a fundamental question: How can further Russian advances… be stopped, and then reversed?”
Just disregard the bit of wishful thinking thrown in at the end to sweeten the bitter pill of reality.
The key point is the acknowledgment that it is crunch time for the West and Ukraine – in a bad way.
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Second, notwithstanding the above, Ukraine is not yet ready to ask for negotiations to end the war on terms acceptable to Russia, which would be less than easy for Kiev. (Russian President Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, reiterated in an important recent interview that Moscow remains principally open to talks, not on the basis of “wishful thinking” but, instead, proceeding from the realities “on the ground.”)
The Kiev regime’s inflexibility is little wonder.
Since Zelensky rejected a virtually complete – and very favorable – peace deal in the spring of 2022, Zelensky has gambled everything on an always improbable victory.
For him personally, as well as his core team, there is no way to survive – politically or physically – the catastrophic defeat they have brought on their country by leasing it out as a pawn to the Washington neocon strategy.
The Pope, despite the phony brouhaha he triggered in Kiev and the West, was right: a responsible Ukrainian leadership ought to negotiate. But that’s not the leadership Ukraine has. Not yet at least.
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Third, the West’s strategy is getting harder to decipher because, in essence, the West cannot figure out how to adjust to the failure of its initial plans for this war.
Russia has not been isolated; its military has become stronger, not weaker – and the same is true of its economy, including its arms industry.
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And last but not least, the Russian political system’s popular legitimacy and effective control has neither collapsed, nor even frayed.
As, again, even Foreign Affairs admits, “Putin would likely win a fair election in 2024.”
That’s more than could be said for, say, Joe Biden, Rishi Sunak, Olaf Scholz, or Emmanuel Macron (as for Zelensky, he has simply canceled the election).
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In other words, the West is facing not only Ukraine’s probable defeat, but also its own strategic failure. The situation, while not a direct military rout (as in Afghanistan in 2021) amounts to a severe political setback.
In fact, this looming Western failure is a historic debacle in the making.
Unlike Afghanistan, the West will not be able to simply walk away from the mess it has made in Ukraine.
This time, the geopolitical blowback will be fierce and the costs very high.
Instead of isolating Russia, the West has isolated itself, and by losing, it will show itself weakened.
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It is one thing to have to finally, belatedly, accepted that the deceptive “unipolar” moment of the 1990s has been over for a long time.
It is much worse to gratuitously enter the new multi-polar order with a stunning, avoidable self-demotion.
Yet that is what the EU/NATO-West has managed to fabricate from its needless over-extension in Ukraine in 2014.
Hubris there has been galore, the fall now is only a matter of time – and not much time at that.
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Regarding EU-Europe in particular, on one thing French President Emmanuel Macron is half right.
Russia’s victory “would reduce Europe’s credibility to zero.”
Except, of course, a mind of greater Cartesian precision would have detected that Moscow’s victory will merely be the last stage in a longer process.
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The deeper causes of EU/NATO-Europe’s loss of global standing are threefold.
First, its own wanton decision to seek confrontation, instead of a clearly feasible compromise and cooperation with Russia (why exactly is a neutral Ukraine impossible to live with again?)
Second, the American strategy of systematically diminishing EU/NATO-Europe with a short-sighted policy of late-imperial client cannibalization which takes the shape of aggressive de-industrialization and a “Europeanization” of the war in Ukraine.
Third, the European clients’ grotesque acquiescence to the above.
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That is the background to a recent wave of mystifying signals coming out of Western, especially EU/NATO elites:
First, we have had a wave of scare propaganda to accompany the biggest NATO maneuvers since the end of the Cold War.
Next Macron publicly declared , and has kept reiterating that the open, obvious mode, is now – deployment of Western ground troops in Ukraine is an option.
He added a cheap demagogic note by calling on Europeans not to be “cowards,” by which he means that they should be ready to follow, in effect, his orders and fight Russia, clearly including inside and on behalf of Ukraine.
Never mind that Ukraine is a not an official member of either NATO or the EU as well as a highly corrupt and anything but democratic state.
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In response, a divergence has surfaced inside EU/NATO Europe.
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The German government has been most outspoken in contradicting Macron.
Not only Chancellor Scholz rushed to distance himself.
A clearly outraged Boris Pistorius – Berlin’s hapless minister of defense, recently tripped up by his own generals’ stupendously careless indiscretion over the Taurus missiles – has grumbled, there is no need for “talk about boots on the ground or having more courage or less courage.”
Perhaps more surprisingly, Poland, the Czech Republic, as well as NATO figurehead Jens Stoltenberg (i.e., the US) have been quick to state , they are, in effect, not ready to support Macron’s initiative.
The French public, by the way, is not showing any enthusiasm for a Napoleonic escalation either.
A Le Figaro poll shows 68 percent against openly sending ground troops to Ukraine.
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On the other side, Macron has found some support.
He is not entirely isolated, which helps explain why he has dug in his heels.
Zelensky does not count in this respect. His bias is obvious, and his usual delusions notwithstanding he is not calling the shots on the matter.
The Baltic states, however, while military micro-dwarfs, are, unfortunately, in a position to exert some influence inside the EU and NATO.
And true to form, they have sided with the French president, with Estonia and Lithuania taking the lead.
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It remains impossible to be certain what we are looking at. To get the most far-fetched hypothesis out of the way first: is this a coordinated bluff with a twist?
A complicated Western attempt at playing good-cop, bad-cop against Russia, with Macron launching the threats and others signaling Moscow could find them less extreme, at a diplomatic price, of course?
Hardly. For one thing, that scheme would be so hare-brained, even the current West is unlikely to try.
No, the crack opening up in Western unity is real.
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Regarding Macron himself, too-clever-by-half, counter-productive cunning is his style.
We cannot know what exactly he is trying to do; and he may not know it himself.
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In essence, there are two possibilities.
Either the French president now is a hard-core escalationist determined to widen the war into an open clash between Russia and NATO, or he is a high-risk gambler who is engaged in a bluff to achieve three purposes.
1) Frighten Moscow into abstaining from pushing its military advantage in Ukraine (a hopeless idea);
2) Score nationalist “grandeur” points domestically in France (which is failing already); and
3) Increase his relevance inside EU/NATO-Europe by “merely” posturing as, once again, a new “Churchill” – whom Macron himself has made sure to allude to, in all his modesty. (And some of his fans, including Zelensky, a grizzled veteran of Churchill live action role play, have already made that de rigueur, if stale comparison.)
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While we cannot entirely unriddle the moody sphinx of the Elysée or, for that matter, the murky dealings of EU/NATO-European elites, we can say two things.
First, whatever Macron thinks he is doing, it is extremely dangerous.
Russia would treat EU/NATO-state troops in Ukraine as targets – and it won’t matter one wit, if they turn up labeled “NATO” or under national flags “only.”
Russia has also reiterated, it considers its vital interests affected in Ukraine, and that if Russian leadership perceives a vital threat to Russia, nuclear weapons are an option. The warning could not be clearer.
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Second, here is the core Western problem that is now – due to Russia undeniably winning the war – becoming acute.
Western elites are split between “pragmatists” and “extremists.”
The pragmatists are as Russophobic and strategically misguided as the extremists, but they do shy away from World War Three.
Yet these pragmatists, who seek to resist hard-core escalationists , and reign in the high-risk gamblers, are brought up short against a crippling contradiction in their own position and messaging: As of now, they still share the same delusional narrative with the extremists.
Both groupings keep reiterating that Russia plans to attack all of EU/NATO-Europe once it defeats Ukraine and that, therefore, stopping Russia in Ukraine is, literally, vital (or in Macron’s somewhat Sartrean terms “existential”) to the West.
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That narrative is absurd.
Reality works exactly the other way around
The most certain way to get into a war with Russia is to openly send troops to Ukraine.
And what is really existential for EU/NATO-Europe is to finally liberate itself from American “leadership.” .
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During the Cold War, a case could be made that Western Europe needed the US.
After the Cold War, though, that was no longer the case.
In response, Washington has implemented a consistent, multi-administration, bipartisan, if often crude, strategy of avoiding what should have been inevitable: the emancipation of Europe from American dominance.
Both the eastward expansion of NATO, programmed – and predicted – to cause a massive conflict with Russia, and the current proxy war in Ukraine, obstinately provoked by Washington over decades (1990 to the present), are part of that strategy to – to paraphrase a famous saying about NATO – “keep Europe down.”
And the European elites have played along, as if there’s no tomorrow, which, for them, there really may not be.
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We are at a potential breaking-point, a crisis of that long-term trajectory.
If the pragmatists in EU/NATO-Europe really want to contain the extremists, who play with triggering an open war between Russia and NATO that would devastate at least Europe, then they must now come clean and, finally, abandon the common, ideological, and entirely unrealistic narrative about an existential threat from Moscow.
As long as the pragmatists dare not challenge the escalationists on how to principally understand the causes of the current catastrophe, the extremists will always have the advantage of consistency.
Their policies are foolish, wastefully unnecessary, and extremely risky.
And yet, they follow from what the West has made itself believe.
It is high time to break that spell of self-hypnosis, and face facts.
Comment
While US people were kept in an induced, feel-good coma for decades, courtesy of the public school system and the lapdog Mass Media, the evil doers, operating under a stone, were:
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1) Padding voter registration lists with much more names than people 18 and over, as in Michigan, Colorado, etc., plus
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2) Buying the police force, the post office and the courts, and almost all government employees, plus
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3) Controlling the counting centers, the rules of the game, and the printing press, in case more ballots were needed to get their favorite candidates over the hump, by hook and by crook, plus.
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4) Stuffing the ballot drop boxes in the wee hours of the day.
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Get those illegals into any legal housing
Get them on a list
Get those ballots in the system.
Get those ballots counted.
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They tell you over and over, the Election was free, open and fair, the best in the world, the most democratic. I have a bridge....
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Recently, the totally biased US Attorney General stated, IDs of any kind are not required, because that would be “discriminatory”
The US lapdog Media just nods and says nothing!!
A wide open invitation to even more Election fraud in 2024.
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However, every European country REQUIRES PHOTO IDs.
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THE FIX IS IN, PER ELON MUSK
NOTE: Padding the registration list with faux names was the primary strategy to "win" in 2020.
It was not just padding lists, such as 50, or so, people giving an office building as their home address.
Also, it was people who had moved out of the state and were voting elsewhere and It was dead people still on the lists
They were careful to pad the lists with just enough names to win.
Illegal ballots arrived after midnight, on the day after Election day, in four swing states.
Just enough illegal ballots were counted in four states, where Trump was leading.
These states were Michigan, Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin.
This likely will happen again in 2024, because very few people were punished in 2020 and 2021.
Trump will need a huge majority to win these swing states — enough so fraud could not reverse his lead.
Election fraud in 2024 may be even worse than in 2020.
Again, it will be very obvious.
There may be a second American Civil War
NOTE: Remember the frauds of Election 2020?
At least 4 states gathered enough ballots from wherever, after the polls had closed, so they could be counted, with windows boarded up, into Biden's total, 3 to 6 days AFTER the closing of the polls, a US historic first, to demonstrate its version of free, open, and fair to the world.
The US people were SOOO screwed, plus they got open borders as a big present, from the leftist cabal that uses senile, folksy, Biden as their front man; Biden kept his 10%, and gets away with it, because of a friendly US DOJ.
Trump needs to win by a landslide, so that any cheating will be drowned.
That way he can undo 4 years of idiocies of the Biden cabal.
Americans Ask If Biden Has Body Double After Face Looks Totally Different in 2 Different Vids Posted on Same Day
https://www.westernjournal.com/americans-ask-biden-body-double-face...
Many people are so brainwashed, so immersed in the Mass Media/WEF bull manure, from Kindergarten on, they are disturbed when faced with an alternative opinion
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However, that alternative opinion needs to be listened to, as many countries, including the BRICS-11 countries, have been saying.
The longer the West suppresses that opinion to its domestic audience, the worse for the West.
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The lack of listening by the West, since 1990, is exactly the problem regarding the difficulty of starting and holding meaningful dialogs.
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The West has been making the rules, since 1945, and has been aiming to dictate/impose its “rules-based regime” onto the world for decades, as if one shoe fits all.
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By implication, the OP-ED distributed by Ed Harinck contains a lot of energy/environment issues, which likely was not realized by some people.
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That “rules-based regime” has been extended by the West into its “environment craze” to prolong the West’s domination/control of the world.
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The West uses its “rules-based regime” to more or less force BRICS-11, etc., to use expensive wind mills, and solar panels, and batteries, instead of plentiful, low-cost fossil fuels, which have been the main driver of the world economy since about 1850.
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About 80% of the world’s energy, for all purposes, is from low-cost fossil fuels, unchanged for at least 40 years.
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Prior to 1850, wood was the main driver.
Just imagine, if the world never had fossil fuels and had 8 billion people.
The impoverishment would be abominable.
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The West should be building one hundred, standardized, near-zero-CO2, 2000 MW nuclear plants each year. They are designed to last at least 60 years, to ensure there will be enough power:
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1) Prior to the world’s fossil fuel supply diminishing, and to
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2) Provide the steady power supply to synthetically produce the physical ways and means for building the various infrastructures, for mining/processing raw materials, for making tens of thousands of products, for transporting them, for distributing them, and for selling them, including the thousands of products we use, and come in contact with, every day.
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Expensive wind and solar, with crutches, such as super-expensive battery systems, with their short life times, could never economically do that.
When you have a lot of expensive wind and solar systems, that produce expensive wholesale electricity and need a lot of subsidies, eventually, you will need large-scale battery systems to counteract the ups and downs of wind output and the midday bulges of solar output, especially after the climate know-nothings, with basket weaving and rioting degrees, cause the closure of traditional power plants, as they did in dysfunctional Germany and California. Those traditional plants have proven for about 100 years, they can function on their own, without any need for wind and solar systems, at much lower cost per kWh, and requiring no subsidies.
BATTERY SYSTEM CAPITAL COSTS, OPERATING COSTS, ENERGY LOSSES, AND AGING
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/battery-system-capital...
EXCERPT
Example of Turnkey Cost of Large-Scale, Megapack Battery System, 2023 pricing
The system consists of 50 Megapack 2, rated 45.3 MW/181.9 MWh, 4-h energy delivery
Power = 50 Megapacks x 0.979 MW x 0.926, Tesla design factor = 45.3 MW
Energy = 50 Megapacks x 3.916 MWh x 0.929, Tesla design factor = 181.9 MWh
Estimate of supply by Tesla, $90 million, or $495/kWh. See URL
Estimate of supply by Others, $14.5 million, or $80/kWh
All-in, turnkey cost about $575/kWh; 2023 pricing
https://www.tesla.com/megapack/design
https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/2022-03-21_15-28-4...
https://www.zerohedge.com/commodities/tesla-hikes-megapack-prices-c...
Annual Cost of Megapack Battery Systems; 2023 pricing
Assume a system rated 45.3 MW/181.9 MWh, and an all-in turnkey cost of $104.5 million, per Example 2
Amortize bank loan for 50% of $104.5 million at 6.5%/y for 15 years, $5.484 million/y
Pay Owner return of 50% of $104.5 million at 10%/y for 15 years, $6.765 million/y (10% due to high inflation)
Lifetime (Bank + Owner) payments 15 x (5.484 + 6.765) = $183.7 million
Assume battery daily usage for 15 years at 10%, and loss factor = 1/(0.9 *0.9)
Battery lifetime output = 15 y x 365 d/y x 181.9 MWh x 0.1, usage x 1000 kWh/MWh = 99,590,250 kWh to HV grid; 122,950,926 kWh from HV grid; 233,606,676 kWh loss
(Bank + Owner) payments, $183.7 million / 99,590,250 kWh = 184.5 c/kWh
Less 50% subsidies (ITC, depreciation in 5 years, deduction of interest on borrowed funds) is 92.3c/kWh
At 10% usage, (Bank + Owner) cost, 92.3 c/kWh
At 40% usage, (Bank + Owner) cost, 23.1 c/kWh
Excluded costs/kWh: 1) O&M; 2) system aging, 1.5%/y, 3) 19% HV grid-to-HV grid loss, 3) grid extension/reinforcement to connect battery systems, 5) downtime of parts of the system, 6) decommissioning in year 15, i.e., disassembly, reprocessing and storing at hazardous waste sites. The excluded costs add at least 10 - 15 c/kWh
NOTE: The 40% throughput is close to Tesla’s recommendation of 60% maximum throughput, i.e., not charging above 80% full and not discharging below 20% full, to achieve a 15-y life, with normal aging
Tesla’s recommendation was not heeded by the Owners of the Hornsdale Power Reserve in Australia. They excessively charged/discharged the system. After a few years, they added Megapacks to offset rapid aging of the original system, and added more Megapacks to increase the rating of the expanded system.
http://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/the-hornsdale-power-res...
COMMENTS ON CALCULATION
Regarding any project, the bank and the owner have to be paid, no matter what.
Therefore, I amortized the bank loan and the owner’s investment
If you divide the total of the payments over 15 years by the throughput during 15 years, you get the cost per kWh, as shown.
According to EIA annual reports, almost all battery systems have throughputs less than 10%. I chose 10% for calculations.
A few battery systems have higher throughputs, if they are used to absorb midday solar and discharge it during peak hour periods of late-afternoon/early-evening.
They may reach up to 40% throughput. I chose 40% for calculations
There is about a 20% round-trip loss, from HV grid to 1) step-down transformer, 2) front-end power electronics, 3) into battery, 4) out of battery, 5) back-end power electronics, 6) step-up transformer, to HV grid, i.e., you have to draw about 50 units from the HV grid to deliver about 40 units to the HV grid, because of a-to-z system losses. That gets worse with aging.
A lot of people do not like these c/kWh numbers, because they have been repeatedly told by self-serving folks, battery Nirvana is just around the corner, which is a load of crap.
U.S. Sen Angus King
Maine as Third World Country:
CMP Transmission Rate Skyrockets 19.6% Due to Wind Power
Click here to read how the Maine ratepayer has been sold down the river by the Angus King cabal.
Maine Center For Public Interest Reporting – Three Part Series: A CRITICAL LOOK AT MAINE’S WIND ACT
******** IF LINKS BELOW DON'T WORK, GOOGLE THEM*********
(excerpts) From Part 1 – On Maine’s Wind Law “Once the committee passed the wind energy bill on to the full House and Senate, lawmakers there didn’t even debate it. They passed it unanimously and with no discussion. House Majority Leader Hannah Pingree, a Democrat from North Haven, says legislators probably didn’t know how many turbines would be constructed in Maine if the law’s goals were met." . – Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting, August 2010 https://www.pinetreewatchdog.org/wind-power-bandwagon-hits-bumps-in-the-road-3/From Part 2 – On Wind and Oil Yet using wind energy doesn’t lower dependence on imported foreign oil. That’s because the majority of imported oil in Maine is used for heating and transportation. And switching our dependence from foreign oil to Maine-produced electricity isn’t likely to happen very soon, says Bartlett. “Right now, people can’t switch to electric cars and heating – if they did, we’d be in trouble.” So was one of the fundamental premises of the task force false, or at least misleading?" https://www.pinetreewatchdog.org/wind-swept-task-force-set-the-rules/From Part 3 – On Wind-Required New Transmission Lines Finally, the building of enormous, high-voltage transmission lines that the regional electricity system operator says are required to move substantial amounts of wind power to markets south of Maine was never even discussed by the task force – an omission that Mills said will come to haunt the state.“If you try to put 2,500 or 3,000 megawatts in northern or eastern Maine – oh, my god, try to build the transmission!” said Mills. “It’s not just the towers, it’s the lines – that’s when I begin to think that the goal is a little farfetched.” https://www.pinetreewatchdog.org/flaws-in-bill-like-skating-with-dull-skates/
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Hannah Pingree - Director of Maine's Office of Innovation and the Future
"Once the committee passed the wind energy bill on to the full House and Senate, lawmakers there didn’t even debate it. They passed it unanimously and with no discussion. House Majority Leader Hannah Pingree, a Democrat from North Haven, says legislators probably didn’t know how many turbines would be constructed in Maine."
https://pinetreewatch.org/wind-power-bandwagon-hits-bumps-in-the-road-3/
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