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NATO - the blue bits
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The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation was established on the 4th April 1949 by 12 countries: Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the United Kingdom and the United States. It was capitalists v. communists, and it was always the United States' creature, allowing it to place weapons in member states, to threaten the USSR. Article Five of the treaty states that if an armed attack occurs against one of the member states, it shall be considered an attack against all members, and other members shall assist the attacked member, with armed forces if necessary. NATO expanded over the decades, adding Greece and Turkey in 1952, West Germany in 1955, Spain in 1982, the former East Germany in 1990, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Poland in 1997. In 2001, Putin put out feelers for Russia to join NATO and become a part of a stable, wealthy West - after all, they were no longer a communist nation. These overtures, sadly for everyone, were rejected, Putin was snubbed and instead the fifth expansion of NATO in 2004 drew in Bulgaria, Slovakia, Slovenia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Romania. More than a bit of a slap in the face for Russia - as NATO expanded eastward towards Russia. The sixth expansion in 2009 included Croatia and Albania, the seventh expansion in 20017 included Montenegro and in 2020 North Macedonia joined.
Ukraine is not a member of NATO and Putin prefers that it continues as a buffer state - otherwise United States weaponry would be stationed on Russia's immediate border, which would be good for nobody. Unless you relish the idea of global thermo-nuclear total war.
As Ukraine is not a NATO ally, indeed, there's a strong argument that it is a part of Russia, that a large percentage of its population is culturally, historically, linguistically and ethnically Russian, I ask again, what the fuck are we doing messing about, in an irritating and embarrassing way, in Russian affairs? Why are we poking the bear?
Here's a quotation from Joe Biden, who stressed that the United States was committed to the
defense of its NATO allies and had stern words for Moscow's response to the
political upheaval in Ukraine: "Russia has chosen to respond with military
aggression, a referendum rejected by virtually the entire world, illegal
efforts to annex Crimea and now reports of armed attacks against Ukrainian
military personnel and installations in Crimea. I want to make it clear: We stand resolutely with
our Baltic allies in support of the Ukrainian people and against Russian
aggression." The CNN news feed went on: U.S. officials are keeping a close eye on the growing
number of heavily equipped Russian forces near the Ukraine border because of
concern the troops could move into Ukraine with little or no warning.
He seemed to be suffering from the same misapprehension that gripped Tank girl Truss the other week - that the Ukrainian mess was our problem. Biden could have said that yesterday - but the quotation is from March 19th 2014, when he was Vice President to Barack Obama. It is as if the Trump presidency and Trump's view that NATO was a relic of the Cold War simply never existed and we are back to the war mongering posturing of the Obama years. Maybe Biden has simply forgotten that it is not 2014 now.
Was nothing learned from the disastrous Afghanistan NATO adventure? Is it just compulsory that we have to be in a state of constant warfare? mr ishmael had some advice back in the 2014 Ukraine debacle:
MORE BACK IN THE USSR. 27/04/2014Speaking
from behind a massive, billion dollar security cordon, President
Barack "BankerBoy" Obama today criticised the taking hostage of some
people in the Crimea.
We expect better than this. This is not how we do things in the United
States, said Mr President. What you do with sonsafuckingbitches like
this, people who are different to you, is, well, the first thing is that
you get some monster mercenaries to snatch them off the streets of
their own countries and give them a good beating, just to soften them
up. Then you throw the nigger motherfuckers - they don't have to be
niggers, just as long as they're some kind of Others - then you throw
the nigger motherfuckers on a CIA jet plane and fly them to some dark,
secret place that no-one knows, generally by flying through a friendly
airport like Glasgow or RAF Brize Norton. Shucks, don't worry about the
Brits, they're all good Americans.
In our experience it is more effective, during this process, to keep
the sonsafuckingbitches hooded and shackled, thirsty too, maybe give
them a kick now and again and then when they get to these secret CIA
TorturePrisons, which categorically don't exist, you can really go to
work on getting information out of them. Or maybe, since most of them
are what misguided people call innocent, just have some good,
sadistic, All-American fun with their black asses.
......................................................................
An infected and inflamed sebaceous cyst is called a wen. They are pretty gross and need surgery to remove the mass that builds up under the skin, out of sight until it starts protruding unmistakably and a scalpel becomes necessary.
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The Great Wen
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William Cobbett, radical pamphleteer and champion of rural England, named London the Great Wen two hundred years ago. Extremes of wealth and poverty existed side by side. Graveyards were so overcrowded that they were muddy swamps of decaying bodies, which would occasionally pop up to the surface swollen by their internal gases. Armies of nightsoilmen were unequal to the challenge of removing tons of human faeces. Fogs and smogs created a miasma in which crime proliferated. 80,000 prostitutes worked the streets. In the notorious slums, infant mortality was 25%. Life expectancy for a male day labourer was 19 years of age.The Victorians sorted out some of these problems. London is still served by the great sewer system built in the late nineteenth century, graveyards became pleasant green places for a stroll under the great trees that sucked up the decomposing body fluids of the interred Londoners. Air quality had to wait for the Clean Air Act of 1956, enacted principally in response to London's Great Smog of 1952, in which 4,000 people died in the immediate aftermath and a further 8,000 in the next few months.
So Cobbett's diatribe against London in his 1830 book, Rural Rides, was entirely deserved. He wrote: "But, what is to be the fate of the great wen of all? The monster, called, by the silly coxcombs of the press, 'the metropolis of the empire?'
It would be nice to think that all that has been sorted out. That London is clean and bright, that all who live there have a good standard of living, can afford to live in pleasant, healthy homes and enjoy excellent life chances. That the 32,000 officers in the Metropolitan Police are fairly decent human beings and that you don't need to fear for your life when approached by one of these:
She never had a chance of sorting out the Met, Dame Cressida. She ticked a couple of diversity boxes, and it is said she was very well liked. But changing that behemoth of institutionalized and individual racism, misogyny, sexism, of corruption, violence, locker-room culture and self-protection - that task was way beyond her. It is probably beyond any leader. Like an infected and inflamed sebaceous cyst, the Met needs a scalpel taking to it. But, mrs ishmael, who is to police London when all the coppers have been sacked? Put London under Special Measures. Get the army in - oh, fuck - we're sending them to Ukraine. The Shadow Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper (really? Her again? How much in expenses? £152,659 in expenses and allowances alone in 2007/08), assured the nation this morning that although the Labour Party had clearly got it wrong about Iraq - well, there were no weapons of mass destruction, she said, testily, this time we will get it right and not oppose the Prime Minister whatever he decides to do about Ukraine. What, oppose? Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition does not do that. |
Yvette Cooper and Ed Balls - serial house-flippers
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..................................................................................
Should
you wish to read the thoughts of mr ishmael and his young friend
stanislav, there are two anthologies available, edited by mr verge: Honest Not Invent
and Vent Stack - which are available to buy for mere money from Lulu or
Amazon. It is cheaper to buy from Lulu. Register an account with Lulu to save a couple of quid, as going straight into the link provided below seems to
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The full title is "Vent Stack love from
stanislav" by ishmael smith, and the cover you'll see is red with white
titles and a picture of Buster the Previous Blog Dog having a green thought in
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Link for the paperback:
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paste it into an email and tell a friend:
https://tinyurl.com/naajavmu
Honest, Not Invent is available in
paperback or hardback.
Link for Hard Back :
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Link for Paper Back :
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With the 15% voucher, the book (including delivery to a UK
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31 comments:
It is widely rumoured that the Rooskies are going to invade on Wednesday, mrs i. That seems a highly bizarre idea to me. Rather like those pitched battles of mediaeval times. "We shall start the battle, Horatio, at 9am sharp. Have your chaps ready, will you? The missus wants me back to put the bins out before dark."
Even more bizarre - though not strictly relevant - is that my " and my @ swap places from day to day. It's the cat's fault. It sleeps FFS on the keyboard and she has obviously learned how to swap keyboard drivers while I'm akip. It is irritating and I am almost moved to an act of feline murder while Her Indoors is not looking. "It must have fallen in the river, dear. Never mind, you can get a collie dog now."
It's blokes, mrs i. The Met thing. Put ten blokes together and the conversation plummets into an abyss of depravity only matched by when you put ten birds together. (Am I still allowed to say "blokes" and "birds"? Or must I know be sacrificed to the great Electronic Reaper?" That they are so stupid, some of them, that they put all this down in electronic black and white should not surprise us. And we should never forget the ancient wisdom handed down from father to son since days of old - "All coppers are bastards!" They may not start out all bastards but they all end up such.
Sorry, forgot about the anagram, mr v.
The Russians don't want Ukraine - its a basketcase and Russia would have feed, clothe, heat, give them pensions etc, all while being hated by the Ukrainians. Its America that wants this war so it can finally cut off Russian energy supplies to Europe and put Europe even more under US control.
But, Russia will protect Eastern Ukraine (The Donbass) which is largely ethnically Russian and has seceded from Ukraine proper if its attacked by Ukraine proper, and it will never allow Ukraine to join NATO - which would mean American missiles on the Russian boarder. In those cases it will support the Donbass and/or attack Ukraine - meaning the end of Ukraine as a state.
Incidentally, When East Germany was allowed to join West Germany, and at the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union (actually, when Russia finally had enough of supporting all the other statelets), there were specific assurances given to Russia that NATO would not expand "an inch" Eastwards. This is in de-classified US documents and also enshrined in the subsequent treaties of Istanbul and Astana.
The reality is that no combination of NATO forces (including the US) that stand even a remote chance against Russia. If a conflict is provoked, likely by a false flag in Ukraine (there has even been speculation of a low yield nuclear bomb in Kiev), and things start escalating with the Donbass, or particularly Crimea (which is a major red line) then Russia could go in big. The 1st Guards Tank Army is currently on maneuvers in Belarus (the northern border of Ukraine), and it is said the 54th Tank Army is also there. Both Crimea and Kaliningrad has been re-inforced. The Black Sea Fleet is at sea and has been reinforced from the East. So there is effectively a massive front from the north to the south of Europe. The 1st Guards Tank Army threatens to encircle Ukraine from the north, before all Ukraine forces are then destroyed (inluding any US/UK etc forces that didn't get out - the "Golden Pheasants" as they are known. Last time when Ukraine was defeated - look up the Battle of Debaltseve - in 2015 they were allowed to quietly depart in green buses; not this time).
As an aside, a "Guards Tank Army" is a fully mechanised army of approx 100,000 with associated offensive and defensive missile support, air support and electronic warfare. The West simply has no such equivalent. And no means to fight such a force. The honorific "Guards" is a title reserved for elite formations which have proved themselves in battle.
Bloody hell, chaps, we're doomed. Battling Biden and his puppeteers will see us all off. Just a glance at the map of the swollen NATO encircling and threatening Putin's Russia tells you all you need to know about why and how Russia is menaced by the West. Russia may have a piddling little economy, but by Jove it has a monstrous death machine. And then there's Russia's new best friend, China.
Mrs I: re Russia's piddling little economy: forget GDP denominated in dollars as a metric of economies (mostly a fiction). A somewhat better metric is "Purchasing Power Parity" - ie what an economy can purchase with its income. Again not a perfect metric but in PPP Russia is world's sixth largest. By other real-economy metrics (energy consumption, steel production etc) Russia is 4th/5th. BTW China is by far the largest.
mr mongoose, do not damage your cat, whatever the provocation, or the video will go viral and football crowds will sing songs about you.
And I would like to think that you are wrong about blokes. I've known lots of good men, starting with my dear father, who would be no more capable of kicking a helpless prisoner or raping an incapacitated woman than they would be able to fly to the moon. I'd prefer to think it isn't the possession of male genitalia that has rendered the Met into the thuggish and criminal organisation that it undoubtedly has become, but the recruitment of the unintelligent and ethically challenged.
Sack the lot of them and recruit only graduates, (not Economics or PPE graduates as they are particularly ethically challenged). Have a 50:50 gender split. Introduce rotation into the provinces on a two yearly basis. Redesign their uniforms - better still, bin the uniforms as they are getting too much like armour.
mr mike, you are not helping. I'm more scared than ever. And its past my bedtime.
ah, the lovely yvette stuka - neo-liberal nazi number one - who, back in 2019, by proposing to ditch british democracy in favour of eu-totalitarianism, helped engineer the 'second referendum' sabotage of her own party's election-prospects - and all because the lady wanted rid of a leader who exemplified the very essence of socialism, anti-racism, and anti-war activism.
i'll put that simply:
he - corbyn - likes black people, she - stuka - doesn't
he - corbyn - believes in a fairer society for all, she - stuka - is a greedy, money-grasping snob
he - corbyn - is a committed anti-war activist, she - stuka - is an obsessive neo-imperialist war-monger with form from iraq to libya and syria, who, during the past two decades, has voted for every illegal oil-war in which britain has shamefully become involved
when this cia-super-mole - and one-time protégé of bill "nigger-killer" clinton - becomes prime minister, it will be in order to dish up iraq war 2, with congo war 2 as an afrocidal apéritif - mark my fucking words.
it's unfortunately all-too-easy to predict when the neo-colonialists have a war brewing, because in the roller-coaster run-up to such murderous mineral-grabbing conflicts, the british labour party always promotes its new labour nazis back into front-bench positions-of-power.
new labour war-criminals, like clammy and stuka - who served in the neo-imperialist blair and brown governments - should not be in parliament: they should be in prison.
I think that it is all mixed and conflated and generally rendered so FUBAR as a feature not a bug.
I am quite capable of holding the line on:
a) a man is not a woman even if he says he is, and vice versa,
b) there never has been, and never can be, any such thing as a vaccine against an mRNA coronovirus (as long as 'vaccine' is defined as it was prior to 2015, ie as something which 'prevented disease'),
(Geez, you see? How long b)? And I was about to launch into 'because...' That's the game!)
c) the Greenland ice cores show that the world has been warmer than it is now for over 10,000 of the last 11,000 years and we human beings can only have been affecting things for 200,
d) a heat pump is an expensive, inefficient stupidity in a warm temperate western margin,
And lots of other things. But the more ishoos upon which we choose stand and draw a line, the more time it takes to stay up to date and to rally one's arguments. And anyway, the argument has moved on and one has become a) a transphobe, b) an anti-vaxxer, c) a climate denier, and d) an angineer. All of these words are bandied about as simple dehumanising ad hominems.
And so you see, mrs i, I did it with the Met business. Couzens (sp?) did what he did to that young lady not because he was a copper but because he was a murdering, unnatural bastard who needs his goolies removing. He used his uniform and his apparent authority as tools in his wicked business, as all bastards always do. The priest abusing up choirboys, Shipman slaughtering the lame and elderly with his needles and potions, Couzens - they are all using what they have to get their jollies and evil achieved. And, yes, some of them choose their 'career' to get access and authority. But all of that is separate to the cultural decay that occurs in locker rooms and on hen nights.
That some horrible bastard detective can think it appropriate to so crudely proposition a female victim of crime the very day the crime occurs is frankly indicative of an arsehole rather than anything else. That the terminology used is repellant and not conducive to the outcome desired is fortunate for the lady in question. That the silly bugger types it out on some idiotgram platform is incomprehensible to the rest of us but demonstrates his level of entitlement and arrogance for all to see.
Yvette, eh? back from the brink of political death. What is she like?
in order to sabotage the inexorable economic burgeoning of east-west european unity, biden, it seems, wants to rewind to the second world war, and then re-run it - but irritatingly for this provocative american president, the russians and germans just aren't interested.
why can't this demented old museum-piece in the white house just keep his fucking nose out of european business? i mean, it's not as if putin wants to roll russian tanks across europe again, for, in stark contrast to the neo-liberal nutjobs running whitehall and washington, the top-brass in the kremlin have had their fill of empire-building - and let's face it, they even asked to join nato in 2004.
if biden pig-headedly persists in playing 'the big guy', it's all starting to look pretty bleak for our third world tribe of expendable european scum: either the bastard's gonna get us all killed in a limited nuclear exchange, or else he'll succeed in blocking the nordstream-2 gas-pipeline and just let us slowly chill to death.
tragically, whatever occurs, the eco-friendly krauts are gonna freeze their fucking tits off.
Well said Mr ultrapox. But Mother Rus has plenty of land and doesn't need Ukraine or Europe with all their attendant problems, but I suspect if Russian tanks decided to roll all the way to Calais - or even beyond - they may get flowers and kisses from the locals.
quite so, mr mike, if this stupid shit continues much longer, the only war we europeans will have to consider fighting is one against those neo-imperialist nobheads in the united states - and then another pact with our old friends, the russians, will come in very handy indeed.
moreover, in the face of a common american enemy, we can look forward to europe becoming one big happy family again - serendipitously armed with american nuclear hardware, of course...
however i don't actually reckon vlad would want to be kissed by a load of wanky frenchmen.
au contraire, mr ultrapox, i would relish being snogged by a pack of onion-odoured parisian pervos - it would make my day...
15 february 2022 at 03:01:
"in order to sabotage the inexorable economic burgeoning of east-west european unity, biden, it seems, wants to rewind to the second world war, and then re-run it - but irritatingly for this provocative american president, the russians and germans just aren't interested."
and frankly, the ukrainians don't seem that keen either...
Strangelovely, the only countries in Europe able to err weather a fuel-disrupted winter would seem to be Russia and France. (If one discounts Sweden and Norway for reasons of relevance, that is.)
I see that Trudeau has gone full-on jackbooted fascist. That's not a good look for a supposed Liberal. What days we live in, eh?
So it all turned out to be a bit of a damp squib. Just when I was getting the rosary beads out and laying in bottled water and baked beans, it seems the war has been cancelled. And Andrew has settled out of Court. So no salacious details there, although we can make some up. Nobody settles if they think they can win.
Mrs I: the only countries warning that war between Ukraine and Russia was NOT imminent were....drum roll....Ukraine and Russia.
mrs ishmael & mr mike,
i guess it's all been:
fake nooze
Certainly it explains the Wednesday kick-off rumour.
It cannot surely be a stitch up to give Sleepy Joe some decent Press coverage. Surely they're not that mad.
Mrs I: can you explain the hoarding of toilet paper? Is it a woman thing?
I'm glad you asked me that, mr mike, as it certainly falls within my sphere of Special Competence, what with being a woman. And the widow of a survivalist. mr ishmael laid in stocks of everything.
Following the devastating days of empty shelves on the toilet paper aisle in Tesco (other supermarkets were and are available and also suffered the same failure of civilisation - I know, I checked out the Co-op and Lidl - we have no other supermarkets here in the Bracing Isles) Amazon now delivers to me every month a large cardboard box filled with 48 rolls of Andrex. Storage can be a problem - but better safe than sorry when it comes to toilet paper.
Toilet paper is the perfect product for dealing with the messy side of human beings. In addition to its designated uses for dabbing up wee-wee, and dealing with poo-poo malfunctions, it can be used for sneezing into, blowing one's nose, wiping up tears, dabbing off make-up, scooping up doggy-doos from the carpet when the lord of the household is displeased due to some imagined slight, wadded up and used as an emergency substitute for sanitary towels, folded up to deal with the slow dribble associated with ageing prostates, a scrap stuck onto razor cuts to staunch bleeding, a wodge for mopping up the products of propensity indulgence, a handful wrapped around a hand lacerated by a bread knife cut. Izal Medicated, back when I was at school and we had to trace maps and botanic sections of flowers and frogs - this was before-before, now teachers print them off for the little darlings - was totally useless as toilet paper (Summer with Stanislav, Ishmael passim) but made a great substitute for tracing paper. Andrex is no good for that, although you can write on it with biro.Should you want to.
And the totally brilliant thing about this super-product is that it is soluble. Flush the toilet, and it is away on its merry journey to the sewage treatment plant,taking with it all that human messiness, so that we can pretend we are cool, cerebral and spiritual, and never, ever, need toilet paper. Without toilet paper, we would have to employ little sponges tied onto sticks and sterilised in vinegar.
National emergency? Make sure you have a room filled with boxes of toilet paper.
And in Royal News, the nation demands to know where the ten million quid is coming from for Handy Andy's settlement with the woman he claimed never to have met. Right, Andrew, why are you giving a complete stranger ten million quid? Maybe Charles will ask one of his Saudi chums for the money and reward him with a seat in the House of Lords.
In case anyone wants to get a spare copy in before the vicar comes to tea, I just noticed that amazon have knocked a tenner off the HB price of Vent Stack, making it cheaper than the paperback for the moment. Algorithms, eh, what are they like?
v./
"thi-i-ings can only get bet-ter..."
if we bomb the wogs, deport dying africans, mortgage the nhs into pfi-oblivion, and pass laws to send afro-caribbean criminals back to the mother-country...
oh hang on a mo...
johnson and biden are going to get us all killed: the dogs of jaw-jaw should be put back in their kennels...
and keir starmer: what's the point of that...?
boris johnson's andrex?
shoot red brigade militants first and ask questions later...
whoops
yes indeed, mrs clanger...
first they came for the religious extremists...
then they came for the anti-vaxxers...
then they came for the anti-lockdown-activists...
then they came for the brexit-supporters...
then they came for the populists...
then they came for the climate-change-deniers...
then they came for the left-wing rabble-rousers...
then they came for the black lives matter protesters...
then they came for the climate-emergency-protesters...
then they came for the anti-war activists...
then they came for the trade-unionists...
then they came for the socialists...
then they came for the nigger-lovers...
then they came for those who just looked a funny colour...
and finally - thank fuck - they came for the fake reds sleeping in their comfy establishment-beds
i'll have you know, mr st jezza the socialist, that i'm a natural red...
"i'll have you know, mr st jezza the socialist, that i'm a natural red..."
i'm sure you are, mrs clanger...
but also a natural cunt
I see that another of the Epstein crew has unfortunately got himself suicided while the prison security cameras were off. That's a bit clumsy, I'd say. I hope that Ghislaine sleeps with one eye open tonight.
Critical insight that, Mrs I, re the toilet stuff of life. Age brings us always closer to the excremental essentials. "Man is a shit factory" was the legend I once saw inscribed at a football ground. True enough.
On a similar front: hey, Mr Mongoose, these prison suicides of people with address books can just happen. No need to go searching for bad people and bad reasons.
Indeed, mr BB, we women are earthy creatures. It's all the shit we have to clear up.
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