Who’s Running My World?

There’s a rise in the waterline;
people get swept away…no doubt
Well I’m not goin’ down.

Who’s runnin’ my world
Who’s runnin’ my world
Who’s runnin’ my world, anyway?

Thundermug, from “Who’s Running My World?”

“We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.”

George Orwell, from “1984”

Thundermug was a Canadian rock act formed in London, Ontario in the early 70’s. Critics said they were good but not great, and that for their style they were competent. Anyone remember the music magazine ‘Circus’? I used to buy it whenever I could, and devour it from cover to cover; I was crazy about music and idolized those who could make it. Anyway, their music critic had a code of symbols which designated his rating – a heart, unsurprisingly, meant ‘Loved It!’. The symbol for ‘Don’t Waste Your Money’ was a little boot.

The release by the Doobie Brothers of ‘The Captain And Me’ in 1973 received a ‘boot’ rating by this dork, I can’t remember his name now; Terry something. The album went double platinum, and was rated number 835 of the Top 1000 Albums of all time. Critics don’t know everything. Sometimes they don’t know anything.

Thundermug’s founding member, guitarist and main songwriter, Bill Durst, is – incredibly – still going. The band was active in the early 70’s, and I saw them live during that period at the old Halifax Forum; one of the best concerts ever in spite of the building’s legendary awful acoustics. I was there also for this concert in July 1977. Thundermug started up again around 1990, and that iteration produced “Who’s Running My World?”, which was a killer album, better than their early material. Durst’s clever use of pick-through hooks and suspended chords yields infectious melodies without descending to pop, while retaining a crunch like stepping on coarse-ground glass on a concrete floor.

Well, as you doubtless suspected, we are not here to talk about Thundermug or defunct Canadian rock bands; I just borrowed their song for the title, and the overall tone. Because most of us must be wondering, possibly several times a day, who is running this orbiting death star, this…this spinning shit sandwich. If I were wise at all, which I clearly am not, I would stay away from the news altogether, because every reading offers up a new revelation which makes me incredulous – I simply cannot believe that people behave as they do, right out in public or in print, and are not locked up. Every time I think, that’s it; people will just never stand for that…they do. In fact, it never seems to amount to more than a speed bump, as the great flaming tarball wrenches itself into another eccentric circle around the sun. Those who have maneuvered themselves into leadership positions and offices of influence over policy have reached a zenith of unassailable power where they could make you wear the ring of a toilet seat around your neck all day if they told you it would ‘keep you safe’.

There are a lot of things I’d like to get through today, because there’s a lot going on, and I wanted to start with the arrest of Pavel Durov, in France. Let’s be clear: Durov is the very image of a spoiled liberal dilettante, and it’s not my intention to rant about his cruel treatment – he is also a billionaire with the wherewithal to blast the French government’s petulant complaints to sand. The angle that interests me, as I suspect it does you, is the west’s determination to get control of his Telegram app, and thereby another outlet for ‘disinformation’, just another service by Government Incorporated to help keep you safe by regulating what you are allowed to see in your personal process of decision-making.

For their part, the Ukrainians are iffy on the Durov Affair; they love the idea of the west pulling the rug out from under another wealthy and influential Russian and frog-marching him off to cells…on the other hand, Durov has been as contemptuously anti-Putin as Khodorkovsky ever was, and the Telegram app itself was developed to facilitate communications out of reach of the Russian government and as a corridor for opposition. Listen:

“The controversy surrounding the messenger stems from its confidentiality. This was precisely Durov’s aim: to prevent state intervention and regulation.

He mentioned that the idea for the platform emerged during searches by Russian security forces due to his refusal to remove opposition groups from VKontakte. Pavel realized there was no secure way to communicate, so developing a program with encrypted communication seemed like a good solution.

In 2018, Russian security services threatened to ban access to Telegram in the country if Durov did not hand over the encryption keys. The court even fined the platform’s management 800,000 rubles for refusing to cooperate with the FSB. For a time, the messenger was blocked in Russia, but in 2020, Russians regained access to the app.

I imagine you saw right away that Durov’s brainchild was perfectly okay with official Ukraine, and with its western partners, as long as it was defiantly refusing the efforts of the Russian government to regulate and snoop upon its content.

“Overall, Telegram has become a convenient platform for tracking news and communicating with users from around the world, but it is also considered potentially dangerous due to its anonymous channels, where propaganda, calls for violence, and illegal activities can spread.

The British news agency The Telegraph describes the platform’s confidentiality as its “dark side,” making it a “safe haven for criminals.”

The Telegraph cites warnings from researchers that Telegram is a sprawling ecosystem of illegal and violent content linked to far-right conspiracy theories, extremism, terrorism, and child abuse.”

I don’t think I would be too far off the mark, then, in suggesting that what makes western governments nervous is Durov’s apparent unwillingness to treat them differently from the Russian government. In order for Durov to police the messenger service the way the west wants him to do, he would have to accept their guidelines on what constitutes ‘far-right conspiracy theories, extremism and terrorism’. The child-abuse item is just thrown in there to make the whole package sound wholesome and forthright. The accusations, then – I don’t think we can call them ‘charges’ just yet – against Durov are that by not agreeing to police his messenger service in accordance with western diktat, he is complicit in the allegedly illegal activity that occurs therein.

I’ve seen a few warnings directed to Elon Musk to stay away from France, lest he be arrested for his own unwillingness to police his own messenger service; the former Twitter, now known as X. I will go out on yet another limb and suggest that would never happen, for two reasons – one, Musk is not a Russian, and the whole of the west writhes in sensual enjoyment whenever another Russian is brought down, although if you expressed the same about Jews you would be an anti-Semite abomination; egalitarianism does not include Russians. Two, the western law-enforcement and intelligence services are already able to penetrate X to their satisfaction, where it is the encryption of Telegram which currently defeats them. In case I am not being sufficiently direct, the west wants covert access. They don’t necessarily want to regulate the traffic on Telegram – although that might occur in a few showcase instances to illustrate western altruism and fairness – as much as they want to find out who is posting what and where they are. There are already ample media assets in the west to denounce and repudiate perceptions of ‘propaganda’ and ‘disinformation’, and sometimes doing so is even more effective than if the public never heard them in the first place. Similarly, the west in general and Washington in particular were in the throes of a freedomgasm when the instigators of the ‘Arab Spring’ were using social media to foment rebellion and public unrest, and outmaneuver the clumsy plodding of their autocratic, authoritarian governments – it’s completely different when it is done in the name of freedom and democracy, and needn’t be regulated. And that would probably not be a problem if western governments were always motivated solely and honestly by the desire that people everywhere be free and have representative government. Is that really the case? Insert scornful laughter here.

The situation poses a fairly-ironic conundrum – shouldn’t law enforcement and national security be able to see and read all traffic accessible to the general public? In a perfect world, yes, and I’m talking not only about the content – which both can already read – but the identity and location of who said it, when. But the world we live in is not only imperfect, perfection is so far out of sight, it’s…I know! It’s like Joey Tribiani said on ‘Friends’, upon discovering his roommate is dating his former girlfriend; “You’re so far over the line, you can’t even see the line…the line is a dot to you!!” Precisely. Perfection, which is to say truly-equitable freedom, has receded to a dot for the west. And western governments’ increasing totalitarianism is not bringing it any closer – quite the reverse, in fact.

Telegram ‘does not moderate criminal content’ – don’t make me laugh. Oops; too late: I was thinking about that reprehensible celebration of indecency that was the Paris Olympics’ opening ceremony. No event is now complete without catering to the ‘queer’ community, never mind that they make up less than 10% of society, over the objections of those who consider it blasphemy – what will be the next ‘red line’ we cross? What deviation will we be next compelled to celebrate: people who become aroused when being urinated upon? Come on – you can’t say that’s not normal.

That’s not even the funny part, which is the expressed opinion of the person responsible – Thomas Jolly – that France is a country which epitomizes freedom of creation and artistic expression.

When asked about the backlash July 27, the ceremony’s artistic director, Thomas Jolly, said at a press conference that he did not intend “to be subversive,” “mock” or “shock.”

“We wanted to include everyone, as simple as that,” he said. “In France, we have freedom of creation, artistic freedom. We are lucky in France to live in a free country. I didn’t have any specific messages that I wanted to deliver. In France, we are republic, we have the right to love whom we want, we have the right not to be worshippers, we have a lot of rights in France, and this is what I wanted to convey.”

Oh; you have a lot of rights in France. Including the right to not be worshipers. Implicit, evidently, is the co-right to mock and scandalize worshipers. You are free to love who you want, and this freedom simply must be celebrated by public demonstrations of every kind of bizarre affection and kink. But you cannot be anonymous. Moreover, if you operate a public media service which allows anonymity, you are a conspirator in every crime committed by the anonymous because you won’t help the police catch them.

Which brings us back to that perfect world of freedom, in which you could criticize the police, mock political figures and express your vehement disagreement with initiatives the government has chosen to back without your consent…and not be concerned about what those people would do with the knowledge that it was you expressing such feelings, when you did so and where you live. Is that the world we live in? I would have to say I do not believe so. Perhaps Jolly has showed us the path to freedom – you simply have to say “Oh, I didn’t intend to be subversive!”, why don’t you try that, Mr. Durov? If it works, remember I thought of it. Perhaps the last word on this controversy should go to the Roman Catholic Church: “Freedom of expression, which of course is not in question, finds its limit in respect for others”. The heart of the matter here is not that the French are trying on the same heavy-handedness with Telegram the FSB already tried and gave up, but that the French pretend it is about something other than control.

Moving on, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova puts her finger directly on an issue nobody wants to talk about – Ukrainian illegitimate president Zelensky does not really care about the Ukrainian people. Oh, he pretends to be some kind of super-patriot, perhaps he even believes it himself – he’s an actor, and it’s all part of ‘getting into the role’, like his ‘Action Man’ pseudo-fatigues and his combat boots, as if he might be called away from an international conference to lead his forces into battle. But if he really cared anything about the people he claims to represent, he would have gone for a deal back when Russia was in a benevolent mood. There are a number of sub-issues here which prop up the main issue, but all revolve around not simply protecting information for the sake of national security, but lying to the population so as to continue pursuing a hopeless objective; in this instance, the strategic defeat of the Russian Federation.

The first of these is the comical imbalance of battlefield casualties broadcast by the Ukrainian government and its press service, which is uncritically – at least until recently – retransmitted by the western English-speaking media to its audiences. As Simplicius convincingly argued at his own substack, these numbers just cannot be even close to accurate, and the Ukrainians admit that themselves if you know how to read. Ukrainian forces, in the field and at the sharp end of the front line, complain they are regularly outnumbered five to one in engagements. How is this possible, when it is likewise known that the Russian side has not carried out any mobilizations since the partial mobilization in September 2022, despite screaming from NATO leaders and pundits that Russia must surely declare a general mobilization due to the horrific losses in battle? Except for one administrative slip-up very early in the conflict, Russia has not used new conscripts in Ukraine, as policy forbids using conscripts outside Russia; a few people tried half-heartedly to showcase response to the famous Ukrainian ‘Kursk incursion’ as proof Putin was using conscripts in a combat role, but this is perfectly permissible inside Russia’s borders in defense of the Motherland, and why the fuck else would they have been conscripted if there was never an intent to use them to fight?

Respondents to the partial mobilization two years ago were mostly former military members with sought-after skills and experience, not greenhorns who don’t know one end of a gun from the other. Since that time the Russian army has had no trouble replenishing its ranks with volunteers, and the service regularly rotates its troops out of the front line for rest as fresh formations take their place. Some Ukrainian veterans who are still alive have been on the front lines for upward of 18 months without relief, as they will be glad to tell you themselves, because there is no relief, and Ukraine is eying coercive measures to return fighting-age men who were quick to leave for Europe when they saw trouble coming, back when forever-president Zelensky was still swaggering and boasting of Ukraine’s military power and drawing frankly-embarrassing comparisons to Churchill. Among these coercive measures is an inability to renew a Ukrainian passport from outside the country; those who are up for renewal must return to the country and will be prevented from leaving, while they must register with the draft board and await callup. As you can imagine, this initiative is not popular – what to do? I know: we’ll blame their reluctance on Russian disinformation! Works every time. Here’s a useful rule of thumb – when the allegation includes ‘Ukrainian military intelligence says’, mentally insert ‘led by General Pinocchio’ after ‘intelligence’. Apparently Russians posing as ‘journalists’ (but secretly from the GRU, one imagines) are warning Ukrainians that Ukraine is on the long-shot side of winning, and that those who return are likely to find themselves in the infantry on the front lines – and you know what? That’s a lie!

Speaking of the GRU, the USA is doing its heroic best against Russian lies and excuses, like just now, when it leveled ‘superseding indictments’, that’s another way to say charges against culprits who are…ah…not in custody and whose exact whereabouts are unknown – something the USA regularly laughs loudly about when Russia does it – against five GRU operatives and one civilian for alleged cyberattacks against Ukraine ‘and around the world’, that last mere window-dressing, because all the criticism is focused on what allegedly took place in Ukraine:

“Federal prosecutors unveiled new charges against members of Russia’s military intelligence service on Thursday, alleging they engaged in “destructive” computer attacks that targeted civilian computer systems in Ukraine and around the world.

Prosecutors announced a superseding indictment against five members of the Russian GRU and one civilian for their campaign to hack the computers of dozens of Ukrainian government entities before Russia invaded the country in February 2022. The U.S. is offering up to $10 million for information about the cyber campaign and the defendants’ whereabouts.”

Curiously enough, Ukraine’s mobilization of its own citizen ‘IT Army’, using DDOS attacks as their ‘cookie-cutter mechanism’ drew frank admiration in the west. Those applauding the bold American pursuit of justice do not say why Russia might want to electronically cripple energy infrastructure it is having pretty measurable success physically reducing to rubble.

Anyway, we’re wandering from the point of discussion, which was that Zelensky’s government conceals from the electorate, to the extent it is possible, the truly horrific costs of continuing the war. Given its fondness for projection – an admiration shared by the western media – it is usually in the ballpark to assume disasters attributed to Russia by Ukraine actually reflect Ukraine’s situation, and using that metric, I would put Ukraine’s irrecoverable losses (meaning dead) at around 600,000 and almost certainly over half a million.

Projecting this slaughter onto Russia is achieved through the irritating attribution of ‘meat assaults’ or ‘meat marches’, and this is done by western sources even while they are arguing that the Ukrainian position is unsustainable. Here’s an example, from “Ukraine’s losses outweigh Kursk gains, as Russia on cusp of taking Pokrovsk“.

“Pokrovsk, the administrative centre of a heavily industrialised agglomeration with a pre-war population of almost 400,000, is likely to be taken over by advancing Russian troops soon.

They are less than 10km (6 miles) east of it – and keep inching in every minute after months of heavy bombardment and “meat marches”, frontal attacks on Ukrainian positions that have cost Russian generals tens of thousands of servicemen.”

A ‘meat assault’, the colourful modern label for frontal assault, is a technique used mostly in situations where the attacking commander has nothing in the way of armor or air ground-attack assets, but a surplus of expendable soldiers who are deliberately sent against a well-sited enemy so that they prevail by sheer force of numbers, kind of a fleshy DDOS cyberattack where too many ‘requests’ are experienced for the computer to respond; the guns simply cannot fire fast enough. But the cost is thousands of dead. And no modern force uses these tactics, not even the Ukrainians. Heavy losses experienced by Ukraine typically occur where there are orders to defend an objective with no option to withdraw. Soldiers are ‘expensive’, in that it costs a lot to train and equip them for modern warfare, and there is no longer any ‘expendable meat’. Occasionally groups of Russian soldiers are caught in the open while advancing, and fired upon from a concealed position of whose existence they were unaware, causing significant casualties. This is the business of war – wait until they break cover and get close, and then hose them. That’s not a ‘meat assault’, and the probing force quickly withdraws, what’s left of it, to regroup – it does not advance into withering fire and take senseless losses, and nobody has offered any example of this ever occurring. Continuing to press and advance despite losses, while taking advantage of concealment and making use of artillery, armor and ground-attack air support to attrite the defending forces is the way modern armies – including Russia – conduct ground warfare, and there is nothing ‘frontal assaulty’ about it. Everything associated with the phrase, as applied to this conflict, is a media trope designed to create the impression that Russian commanders care nothing for the valuable infantry they actually rely on to progress their aims. The Russian army has plenty of heavy artillery, armor and ground-assault air support which it uses, in the event of encountering a stubborn entrenched defender, to pound the shit out of the objective until there are no good defensive positions left. The ‘human-wave attack’ is a myth, which is a fancy Greek term for ‘bullshit’.

The manifest desperation of Ukraine’s position – and the furious concern of its western string-pullers – dictate that whenever the forward gears start to chug and slip, there must be some sort of escalation in order to recover momentum. As I’ve mentioned before, we’ve run the gamut from anti-tank missiles all the way up to fighter aircraft, each of which was a daring ratcheting-up at the time it was introduced. None has had any measurable effect on inflicting a strategic defeat on Russia, or the more social objective of wrecking its economy. The west is not a micron closer to casting Putin down and making Russia kneel in the dirt. Sounds like a good moment to introduce…(drumroll, please)…the BALLISTIC MISSILE!!!

Yes, Ukraine is now musing that it needs to skip over all the sweaty coupling on the battlefield, and go straight to long-distance indiscriminate murder with some serious long-range stuff; accordingly, Zelensky petitions the USA to send him the designs of something around the range and yield of the Pershing II. And, of course, the money to build it – Ukraine has come up short on solid-fuel engine designs, and nothing else will do for battlefield applications, liquid-fueled rockets take hours to prepare for firing, during which time they are vulnerable to an attack which, if successful, would visit most of the conflagration on the launch site rather than the target. Check it out:

“According to President Zelenskyy, the missile program is too expensive; the government has allocated all it can, and there is no money in the budget for it. Therefore, funding is being sought from partner countries.

Developing a ballistic missile indeed requires billions of dollars, emphasizes Valerii Romanenko. He suggests that the process could be accelerated by receiving the design documentation of an existing missile from Western partners.

“If we were indeed given something related to Pershing II—this is just my assumption—and if experimental launches have been conducted, then design and engineering work is nearing completion. That is, the Ukrainian missile is already flying and needs final adjustments. But immediately, the question arises: where to manufacture it? The plant in Dnipro is under constant shelling. It could be produced abroad, but that requires significant money and a separate high-tech production facility. We do not have such funds, and I wouldn’t hold my breath that our ballistic missiles will soon be produced in the necessary quantities to strike at the Russians,” the expert explained.“

I probably don’t need to point out that a ballistic missile of this size and weight is an indiscriminate weapon – the explosive yield of the Pershing II is up to 80 kilotons from a nuclear warhead, and while the Circular Error Probability (CEP) is only 30 meters – making it fairly precise if it hits its target accurately – an explosion that size even if targeted at a Russian airfield would cause a lot of collateral damage and death. Far more importantly, such a strike would immediately trigger a retaliatory counterstrike – possibly nuclear – such as would cause heretofore-imaginable destruction in Ukraine. Yet the fashion these days is to theorize that Putin – who on every other opportunity is cast as a psychopath who cares nothing for human lives – is a milquetoast humanist who would never respond to such a strike because his alleged ‘red lines’ are just bluff.

Zelensky is just flopping about like a tuna on deck now, flailing all about him in his attempts to keep the western support flowing, and his egg-faced idiot western ‘partners’ are left mumbling and sputtering in confusion. The practice of pretending to be only supporting, not participating is impossible to keep up at the level of giving Ukraine deep-strike missile capabilities where there is every reason to believe Zelensky would immediately use them against large Russian cities like Moscow and St Petersburg. Initially the west was only supposed to be ‘helping Ukraine to defend itself’ by topping up its ammunition when it had blasted it all off trying to slow Russian advances. Enabling deep strikes – ideally, in Zelensky’s imagination, with 1,500 km+ ballistic missiles – is stretching self-defense far beyond the snapping point. Which is what people who can’t stand to lose because they have no experience in losing do.

And this is the heart of the NATO problem. It took an extreme position early on, based on its myopic perception of the Russian military effort as confused and fumbling, mistaking an unwillingness to inflict casualties carelessly and largely for effect as the inability to do so. Accordingly, NATO declared that Russia must not win, and that because NATO had proclaimed this, it would not. End of discussion. Non-military smackheads like Jens Stoltenberg and Josep Borrell announced solemnly that the question must be decided on the battlefield, thereby precluding the possibility of negotiation, and dear God, the demands by Russia at the time to satisfy its own security requirements look cheap today when weighed against the terrible price Ukraine has paid. But NATO, led as always by the United States of America – perhaps ‘managed’ would be a more accurate term – continues to bloviate about ‘red lines’ and the likelihood that Putin is ‘bluffing’ because every time another imaginary ‘red line’ is crossed, Ukraine gets hammered; it is whipping-boy to its western masters. Well, that doesn’t make Jens Stoltenberg’s sleep uneasy, does it? Nobody is making a credible threat to turn Josep Borrell or Ursula Von Der Leyen into a heap of ripped flesh that looks more like the butcher’s castaways than a human being…so ‘red lines’ are just a bluff!!

That’s the kind of thinking that will see Ukraine finish up as a wasteland of crumbling brick towers, barely glimpsed through swirling smoke. And more to the point – perhaps the only remaining argument that will move the west – all the money that was poured into the Zelensky Victory Parade will be irrecoverable, wasted, gone forever. Even as the west’s implacable enemy is undergoing an economic renaissance, if you are fond of irony. Naturally, western analysts posit that it cannot last – Russia’s shift to a wartime economy masks hidden and unaddressed weaknesses. And likewise bla de bla – if Russia is walking into a fiscal tiger pit, how come the countries where the wise financial analysts live are all saddled with crippling debt? Didn’t they see this coming? USA debt to GDP – 122%. UK – 97.6%. France, 111%. Germany, the developmental engine of the European Union – 63.6%.

Russia – 14.9%. Here’s what the west says about it: “Thanks to Russia’s shift to a war economy, the country’s gross domestic product is growing, and its unemployment rate is at an all-time low. But the future is far less rosy due to a number of unaddressed economic weaknesses.”

If you can see the future so clearly – rosy or otherwise – when the ratio of debt to GDP is less than 20%….why didn’t you speak up in your own press when yours went past 50%? If it’s not too indelicate to point it out, western debt-to-GDP ratios crossed the Rubicon under conditions in which all options to get the imbalance under control were open, and while the only serious considerations were profit and privatization. Didn’t you see your own unaddressed economic weaknesses? Russia’s GDP is growing and its unemployment rate is at an all-time low while the concentrated malevolence of the western alliance is focused on impeding it, dragging it down, ruining it. Seen in that light, what consideration ought to be given to your predictions of failure?

The political landscape in the west is shifting, and in Europe at least, right-leaning conservative candidates who want to see their countries free of the Ukrainian albatross, and to stop pouring money down a sucking hole, are making gains. Ukraine is not going to win, and every week of trying to prop it up is another week of throwing cash out the window into the wind – the sad part is that it is locked in mortal combat with an enemy which was once its best friend, and a far better partner than the west is ever going to be because the west is only interested in using Ukraine as a blunt instrument to flail against Russia. If you doubt that, watch and see how many western politicians show up at work wearing embroidered shirts on Vyshyvanka day after the horrible truth that Ukraine is not going to win has been confronted, and passed.

We might never be satisfied with who is running our world; but by God, we can do a lot better than this.