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This is just make believe. If you want to pretend that Germany would not honor the NATO alliance in response to Russian aggression then go for it.
disagree. NATO would never take Russia up front as Germany would never allow it. USA would have to go vs Russia on their own. And as said above, this would cripple the US economy to its demise. not going to happen.
This is just make believe. If you want to pretend that Germany would not honor the NATO alliance in response to Russian aggression then go for it.
LOL Honor
NATO did not honor when US went solo in Iraq. Even NATO member Turkey said no to US troops entering Iraq through Turkey.
So no, NATO will never(unless directly attacked) go to war with Russia. (mainly because of Germany, Germany is one of the few countries that are not complete US puppets)
but why listen to me, let's hear from the experts
7-reasons-why-america-will-never-go-to-war-over-ukraine
http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelp...-over-ukraine/
Russia is a nuclear superpower. Russia has an estimated 4,500 active nuclear warheads, according to the Federation of American Scientists. Unlike North Korea or perhaps Iran, whose nuclear arsenals couldn’t inflict substantial damage, Russia could totally devastate the U.S. as well as the rest of the planet. U.S. missile defenses, assuming they even work, are not designed to stop a massive Russian strike.
Russia has a powerful army. U.S. forces are more capable than Russian forces. However, better is not good enough. The Russian military is not composed of lightly armed insurgents like the Taliban, or a hapless army like the Iraqis in 2003. With advanced weapons like T-80 tanks, supersonic AT-15 Springer anti-tank missiles, BM-30 Smerch multiple rocket launchers and S-400 Growler anti-aircraft missiles, Russian forces pack enough firepower to inflict significant American losses.
Ukraine is closer to Russia. The distance between Kiev and Moscow is 500 miles. The distance between Kiev and New York is 5,000 miles. It’s much easier for Russia to send troops and supplies by land than for the U.S. to send them by sea or air.
The U.S. military is tired. After nearly 13 years of war, America’s armed forces need a breather.
The U.S. doesn’t have many troops to send. The U.S. could easily dispatch air power to Ukraine if its NATO allies allow use of their airbases, and the aircraft carrier George H. W. Bush and its hundred aircraft are patrolling the Mediterranean. But for a ground war to liberate Crimea or defend Ukraine, there is just the 173rd Airborne Brigade in Italy, the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit sailing off Spain, the 2nd Stryker Cavalry Regiment in Germany and the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
The American people are tired.
America‘s allies are tired. NATO sent troops to support the American campaign in Afghanistan, and has little to show for it. Britain sent troops to Iraq and Afghanistan, and has little to show for it. It is almost inconceivable to imagine the Western European public marching in the streets to demand the liberation of Crimea, especially considering the region’s sputtering economy, which might be snuffed out should Russia stop exporting natural gas. As for military capabilities, the Europeans couldn’t evict Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi without American help. And Germans fighting Russians again? Let’s not even go there.
Government Likely Hiding Truth in Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 Crash
August 7, 2014 – The U.S. government5016239182_e58d8c9abf_z has grown strangely quite on the accusation that it was Russia or her allies that brought down the Malaysian airliner with a buck anti-aircraft missile.
The little that we have heard from U.S. intelligence is that it has no evidence that Russia was involved. Yet the war propaganda were successful in convincing the American public that it was all Russia’s fault. It’s hard to believe that the U.S., with all of its spy satellites available for monitoring everything in Ukraine that precise proof of who did what and when is not available.
When evidence contradicts our government’s accusations, the evidence is never revealed to the public—for national security reasons, of course. Some independent sources claim that the crash site revealed evidence that bullet holes may have come from a fighter jet. If true, it would implicate Western Ukraine.
Questions do remain regarding the serious international incident. Too bad we can’t count on our government to just tell us the truth and show us the evidence. I’m convinced that it knows a lot more than it’s telling us.
why is this frost king always talking , salty ass old man
because noone else in his status dares to
Did somebody say Rand Paul? how about drive- slapping of him and liberterianism?
Phosphorus and Freedom
The Libertarian Fantasy
In the latest Times Magazine, Robert Draper profiled youngish libertarians — roughly speaking, people who combine free-market economics with permissive social views — and asked whether we might be heading for a “libertarian moment.”
Well, probably not. Polling suggests that young Americans tend, if anything, to be more supportive of the case for a bigger government than their elders.
But I’d like to ask a different question:
Is libertarian economics at all realistic?
The answer is no.
And the reason can be summed up in one word: phosphorus.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/11/op...tasy.html?_r=0
Rand is as much of a joke as Obama. He cant hold his daddys jockstrap tbh.
both him and Obama power hungry s of the system
Rand Paul: Only Fetal Personhood Can Prevent Collapse Of Civilization
“I’ve introduced legislation called the Life at Conception Act, to define when life begins: at conception. I’ve also probably co-sponsored 20-some-odd pro-life bills, I have a 100 percent voting record for pro-life,” Paul said during the interview. “But I also have taken the time to go to the March for Life. When I was there, I was the only senator who showed up for the March for Life.”
“So I do think it’s important,” Paul added. “I often say in my speeches, that I don’t think a civilization can long endure that doesn’t respect the rights of the unborn.”
Paul’s Life at Conception Act would extend legal rights to humans “at all stages of life, including the moment of fertilization, cloning, or other moment at which an individual member of the human species comes into being.” In practice, the bill would outlaw abortion, in addition to embryonic stem cell research and many common forms of birth control.
http://www.nationalmemo.com/rand-pau...ization-video/
The So-Called 'Libertarian Moment' Is Engineered By The Christian Right
There’s been quite the buzz in the chattering classes this week over Robert Draper’s suggestion in the New York Times Magazine that the Republican Party, and perhaps even the nation, may finally prepared for a “libertarian moment,” likely through the agency of the shrewd and flexible politician Rand Paul. It’s obvious, in fact, that some of the aging hipsters Draper talks to who have been laboring in the libertarian fields for decades glimpse over the horizon a reconstructed GOP that can reverse the instinctive loathing of millennials for the Old Folks’ Party.
Unfortunately, to the extent there is something that can be called a “libertarian moment” in the Republican Party and the conservative movement, it owes less to the work of the Cato Ins ute than to a force genuine libertarians clutching their copies of Atlas Shrugged are typically horrified by: the Christian Right. In the emerging ideological enterprise of “cons utional conservatism,” theocrats are the senior partners, just as they have largely been in the Tea Party Movement, even though libertarians often get more attention.
More commonly, Con-Cons reinforce this idea of a semi-divine cons utional order by endowing it with — quite literally — divine origins. This is why David Barton’s largely discredited “Christian Nation” revisionist histories of the Founders remain so highly influential in conservative circles, and why Barton himself is welcome company in the camps of Con-Con pols ranging from Cruz and Bachmann to Rick Perry and Mike Huckabee. This is why virtually all Con-Cons conflate the Cons ution with the Declaration of Independence, which enabled them to sneak both Natural and Divine Law (including most con uously a pre-natal Right to Life) into the nation’s organic governing structure.
What a lot of those who instinctively think of conservative Christians as hostile to libertarian ideas of strict government persistently miss is that divinizing untrammeled capitalism has been a growing habit on the Christian Right for decades.
So perhaps the question we should be asking is not whether the Christian Right and other “traditional” conservatives can accept a Rand Paul-led “libertarian” takeover of the conservative movement and the GOP, but whether “libertarians” are an independent factor in conservative politics to begin with. After all, most of the Republican politicians we think of as “libertarian”--whether it’s Rand Paul or Justin Amash or Mike Lee--are also paid-up culture-war opponents of legalized abortion, Common Core, and other heathenish practices. As Heather Digby Partonnoted tartly earlier this week:
The line between theocrats and libertarian Republicans is very, very faint. Why do you think they've bas ized the concept of "Religious Liberty" to mean the right to inflict your religion on others? It appeals to people who fashion themselves as libertarians but really only care about their taxes, guns and weed. Those are the non-negotiable items. Everything else is on offer.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/libertarian-christian-right
Just another reason why libertarianism is total fraud, in theory and practice.
Remember Ron Paul saying he didn't read his racist newsletters?
Ron Paul: Black lawmakers oppose war because they want the money for food stamps
“I was always annoyed with it in Congress because we had an anti-war unofficial group, a few libertarian Republicans and generally the Black Caucus and others did not — they are really against war because they want all of that money to go to food stamps for people here,” Paul told Rockwell.
http://www.salon.com/2015/02/24/ron_paul_congressional_black_caucus_opposes_war_be cause_they_want_to_spend_money_on_food_stamps/
The downing of the jetliner was proven to be due to a Russian SAM.
, one rather brave soul even traced the exact launcher back to the exact unit in the Russian army that it went to.
NATO has the sensors that can detect and track such launchers, and had been watching the area with a lot of such sensors. Missile launchers are the kinds of things that militaries tend to pay attention to. This kind of data, however, would not be available to the public, for obvious reasons.
The crash investigators concluded the plane was obviously brought down by a SAM, especially given the shrapnel marks on a substantial amount of the debris.
Only an idiot like Paul would still think there is some other plausible explanation.
Might as well just give Putin a land bridge to the Crimea now. That will probably be the end game compromise anyway.
BS
never been proven like Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq was never proven.
You seriously are going to take a US-led investigation's conclusion as truth?
So whose investigation does hater trust? Putin's?BS
never been proven like Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq was never proven.
You seriously are going to take a US-led investigation's conclusion as truth?
Nope.
Usually you do your own research taking acceptable evidence from all parties involved and make an informed judgement. The information is out there.
you never take the conclusion from either the East of West at face value without looking further. never.
Actually, I came to that conclusion based on my own assessment of the data, without really relying overmuch on access to classified NATO data or any specific investigation, although I must say I have been impressed by what social media can do in getting at first hand, "on the ground" information.BS
never been proven like Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq was never proven.
You seriously are going to take a US-led investigation's conclusion as truth?
The overwhelming amount of available evidence says that the Russians are lying through their teeth, and expecting a lot of useful idiots to take it for the truth though, that and Putin is attempting to play out some serious cold war style realpolitik.
Well, where hater falls down in his analysis is that he is equating some past investigation to the current one, and appears to be doing the very amateurish mistake of thinking all sources making claims are equal, and the truth is somehow exactly between the two.
That does happen in reality, as things go, but it is also the case that two sides with opposing stories have some vast differences in overall credibility. North Korea claiming it does not violate human rights when accused by say Amnesty International springing to mind, as does 9-11 twoofers claiming inside jobs.
Correct. America is the least credible 1st World nation on the planet: junk food, light beer, ty cars. Should I go on?
Putin grabbed control of the 4 main media outlets for the former USSR in 2000. There is an excellent piece from a former Russian media executive over at politico. Part of critical thinking is vetting sources.
It was 2002, and I was just out of university, living in Moscow and working at a think tank meant to be promoting Russian-U.S. political ties. A friendly Russian publisher who wanted me to work for him had invited me to what would be my first meeting in Moscow. And that’s how I ended up surrounded by Russian media gurus tucked away on the top floor of Ostankino, the Soviet-era television center that is the battering ram of Kremlin propaganda—home to the studios of the country’s biggest channels. Here, Moscow’s flashiest minds gathered for a weekly brainstorming session to decide what Ostankino would broadcast.
At one end of the table sat one of the country’s most famous political TV presenters. He was small and spoke fast, with a smoky voice: “We all know there will be no real politics,” he said. “But we still have to give our viewers the sense something is happening. They need to be kept entertained.”
“So what should we play with?” he asked. “Shall we attack oligarchs? Who’s the enemy this week? Politics has got to feel like a movie!”
More than a decade later, that movie is increasingly dark and disturbing. The first thing Russian militias do when they take a town in East Ukraine is seize the television towers and switch them over to Kremlin channels. Soon after, the locals begin to rant about fascists in Kyiv and dark U.S. plots to purge Russian speakers from East Ukraine. It’s not just what they say but how they say it that is so disturbing: irrational spirals of paranoia, theories so elaborate and illogical one can’t possibly argue with them.
This is even before the bombs start falling on them: “Information war is now the main type of war,” says the Kremlin’s chief propagandist Dmitry Kieselev, “preparing the way for military action.” And Putin’s Russia is very good at it, having combined the dirtiest mechanisms of PR, brainwashing techniques pioneered in cults and a rich KGB tradition of psy-ops into a sort of television Frankenstein with which it controls its own population, conquers neighboring countries and attacks the West.http://www.politico.com/magazine/sto...tv-113960.htmlAs soon as Vladimir Putin assumed the presidency in 2000, he seized control of television, arresting and exiling the oligarchs who stood in his way. In a country covering nine time zones and one-sixth of the world’s land mass, stretching from the Pacific to the Baltic, from the Arctic to the Central Asian deserts, from near-medieval villages where people still draw water from wooden wells by hand, through single-factory towns and back to the blue glass and steel skyscrapers of the new Moscow—TV is the only force that can unify, rule and bind the people.
It is television through which the Kremlin declares which politicians it will “allow” as its puppet opposition, what the country’s history and fears and consciousness should be. At the center of the great show is President Putin himself, nothing more than a set of colored pixels on a screen, morphing as rapidly as a performance artist among his roles of soldier, lover, bare-chested hunter, business man, spy, tsar, superman. “The news is the incense by which we bless Putin’s actions, make him the president,” TV producers and spin-doctors liked to say to me. In that smoky room, I had the sense that reality was somehow malleable, that I was sitting in a group of Prosperos who could project any existence they wanted onto post-Soviet Russia.
The 21st century Kremlin might be controlling the media just as it did in the Soviet era, but there’s one mistake today’s Russian will never repeat: It will never let television become dull. In fact, the goal is to synthesize Soviet control with Western entertainment—and for that it needs the help of Western producers who, Russians believe, know the alchemical secret of great television formats.
That’s where I came in. By 2006, I had moved from public policy consulting to media, working on do entaries for British and U.S. networks. I was invited to come and work for Russian channels, just one of dozens of Western producers tempted by the prospect of working in Europe’s fastest growing TV industry.
The networks I worked with were apolitical. Their mission was to churn out Russian versions of hit Westerns shows. One of the first shows I worked on was o-Goodbye, a Sony reality format previously produced in Holland and the United States, in which a presenter talks to passengers greeting and bidding farewell to each other in Moscow shiny new Domodedovo airport. There were stories about lovers saying goodbye as one left to work in San Francisco; lads off for a dirty weekend in Thailand; a secretary waiting for her boss, whom she is secretly in love with, to return from a business trip to London. An airport might seem a mundane setting for a Western audience, but for a country that had been closed to foreign travel until just over a decade ago, and where flying was still a luxury available largely to the growing but still small middle class, the show was full of social ambition. It showcased the new, globalized Russia, in a bright new airport in what seemed like a bright, “emerging” nation.
This Western model didn’t always go according to plan. When the entertainment network TNT, for example, made the Russian version of The Apprentice, the show flopped. The premise of the show is to reward the self-confident and self-assertive business mind. But in Russia, it is the grey apparatchik who is celebrated, while the independent, bright entrepreneurs end up in prison or exiled. The underlying ideology of the show was irrelevant in Putin’s Russia.
Plenty of other formats were more successful. Dancing on Ice tapped into Russia’s love affair with ice skating; reality shows like Survivor, which are based on humiliating contestants in extreme conditions, were hits in a country where being bullied by the authorities and the weather is the norm.
Then there was the television, which I never worked on, with a more sinister mission: political-psychological control. The approach could be deeply counterintuitive. NTV, for example, one of the country’s biggest networks, doesn’t try to pretend Russia is a rosy place like Soviet channels used to do—which is also how they lost credibility with viewers. Quite the opposite: It shows non-stop horror stories about how dangerous the country is, encouraging the viewer to look to the “strong hand” of the Kremlin for protection. Even supposedly “science-based” programs are used for manipulative effect. The most expensive do entary ever shown on Russian television aired in 2009 and was called Plesen (“Mold”). It argued that mold is taking over the Earth—an invisible but omnipresent enemy whose evil spores have been invading our lives, causing death and disease. When the film aired it caused a panic, with people running out to buy anti-mold machines and calling into the network from all over the country, asking for help.
There was another spate of prime-time do entaries about “psychological weapons.” One was The Call of the Void, which aired in 2009 and featured current secret service men who informed the audience about the new psychic weapons they had developed. The Russian military, the program claimed, employed “sleepers,” psychics who can go into a trance and enter the world’s collective unconscious, and from there penetrate the minds of foreign statesmen to uncover their nefarious designs. One had entered the mind of President George W. Bush, they said, and then reconfigured the intentions of one of his advisers so that whatever hideous plan the United States had hatched failed to come off. The message was clear: If the secret service can see into the U.S. president’s mind, they can definitely see into yours; the state is everywhere, watching your every thought.
Meanwhile in America news. We know who shot down the plane
Eyup. The propaganda efforts of the Russian government are pretty impressive, and quite effective.
I view it as akin to creating a Frankenstein monster though. If one keeps that many people in ignorance and lie to them, what happens when they find out they have been lied to?
Soooo, what do you make of the fact that Russia actually has an official propaganda department with full government control of media?
Thats more credible?
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