PUTIN'S SPECIAL UKRAINE OPERATION: HE CONTINUES TO DIG DEEPER INTO A HELLISH PIT, AND WINTER IS HERE!

The Perched Eye blog is 12+ years old, beginning from 2009 with President Obama's election. Our focus has been eclectic ...  the shapes and directions of American politics and culture, with occasional comments on the potential impact of new technologies. Pericles21's observations sometimes attract a critical eye, but the 'pen' remains unblunted. 

Putin’s Ukraine debacle has turned into a more giant flop than it looked 2 weeks into his February 24, 2022 "Special Operation" (i.e., the invasion of Ukraine). 

And, Putin's big 'Fail', it seems, is because he did not see how fully he had already conquered his demons (the fearful anxiety from the days of the French-speaking Russian court that Russia was inadequate when compared to western civilization, i.e., that Russia wasn't really 'western' enough..just as Russia wasn't really Asian enough to play marbles with China.)

But despite the good position Russia was in domestically, internationally, and economically...and getting better with every barrel and liter of crude oil and gas that were flowing through the pipelines from Russia's Artic oil fields to Europe ... Putin still made an ill-conceived move that has substantially damaged Russia's global political and economic goodwill (and stability) built up since 1990. 

Putin set in motion a downhill rolling of a heretofore magically expanding, social-economic-political snowball full of riches. Things have steadily worsened since the Special Ukraine Operation began..

But Putin's latest move is perhaps more disastrous than the others that came before - his so-called "mobilization" of "300,000" patriotic fighters (read, 'untrained and physically doubtful') to go immediately to the Ukraine battlefront...often with just a few days of 'training', and badly equipped with WW2 (or even WW1) rifles...and virtually no winter clothing. (Conscripts have been 'asked' to shop for essential battlefield equipment themselves or funded by their families!)

I predicted the lack of training and support for these patriots in my September 21, 2022, post (UKRAINE: THE LAMENT OF NEW RUSSIAN CONSCRIPTS) ... which was a very truncated (arrogant even?) prediction of a disaster,... for the conscripts. But I was not prepared for the truth as it turned out. From that post: 

"The lament of a new Russian conscript headed for Ukraine — cotton shirt and pants (& winter’s coming), sneakers, a canteen of meth-laced weak tea, a WW2/1 rifle, and 30 bullets… you won’t last long enough to even use that. But, 'Rodina'."

But there is more. Putin's Problem is not just his current failures in Ukraine.

While Putin is virtually an absolute ruler, his absolute powers have led to a grandiosely myopic complacency that has prevented him and his generals from modernizing their leadership styles and especially updating Russia's political-military strategies and objectives. Russia has failed especially in keeping current with the tactical field operations of the Russian military itself. 

Combine these failures with the FACT that for the last 30 years or so, Russia’s generals and officer elite have been willing, if not initiating, factors in selling Russian technology and military equipment on the global black market. This has made the Russian army a paper mache' Tiger that in reality is a carnival ask made of gum wrappers and old rubber bands.

In terms of economics, Putin nearly had it all but threw it all away...the fox was in the hen house but greedily pounced too soon and for no good reason. 

Up until February 24, 2022, with his "Special Ukraine Operation," Putin had won Russia's 21st-century war - an economic, political-energy resource-intelligence dominance over the western world, including manipulating the political clockworks of America itself. 

Did Putin fail to recognize how fully he had conquered his demons? The answer has to be, "Yes". Western Europe was dependent on Russian fossil energy, the Russian people were pacified by the commercial detente that brought McDonald’s into their world at home, and perhaps the best of everything was that Russia’s satellites were happy, or at least not terribly unhappy, being commercial partners with what they thought was Putin’s modern leadership based on enlightened economic partnerships.  

In February 2022, Putin’s stupid invasion of Ukraine swiftly erased much, if not all goodwill (and apparent stability) built up since 1990. 

But Russia's loss of face and respect happened so swiftly that it raises QUESTIONS as to what exactly was happening underneath the Russian mask?  (we have a good idea that there was all along much less than we thought, or feared.). The big question now is, "will, or can Putin save his, and Russia's skin?"

UKRAINE: THE LAMENT OF NEW RUSSIAN CONSCRIPTS

 The Perched Eye blog is 12+ years old,  from 2009 with President Obama's election. Our focus has been eclectic ...  the ways and directions of American politics and culture, and occasionally commenting on the potential impact of new technologies. Pericles21's observations sometimes attract a critical eye, but the 'pen' remains unblunted. 

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Putin has declared a call-up of maybe 300,000. Sad. Putin doesn’t have to train or equip them (naive western reasoning).

The lament of a new Russian conscript headed for Ukraine — cotton shirt and pants (& winter’s coming), sneakers, a canteen of meth-laced weak tea, a WW2/1 rifle, and 30 bullets… you won’t last long enough to even use that. But, 'Rodina'.

Should Obama Lay A Wreath at the Confederate War Memorial? No Easy Answer!! (Some Background on Ole Dixie Might Help)

Pericles21 also posted this blog at the Daily Beast, but the blog has evolved.

The President will find it hard to win on this one. Whether he appears or not at the confederate war memorial, he will have opponents unless he finds a path to speak the truth about the confederacy (a slave system) while at the same time finding the words that heal. He should not omit mention of the slavery-based foundation of the confederacy - such omission would self-condemn him since he, as a person of color, could never be President under the confederate flag. At first glance, the issue is so full of ifs and buts, pros and cons, one is moved to just shout, "watch your step, Mr President!"

There is a background to Ole Dixie, a reality at the core of this issue, that makes a possible Obama appearance difficult. These truths hold no ambivalences, and no relativistic interpretations (read as: "constitutional rights to property", i.e., to own slaves, and so called "states rights").

Note well, some apologists for the Old South try to defend slavery and its abuses by using relativisms such as so-called constitutional-legal-writ "property rights" that supposedly excuse the immorality of slavery. This is an underhanded illogic that has, however, been engeniously taken up by some of the most evil government systems in modern history, notably South African Apartheid and Hitler's Nazi death programs against the Jews. Nazis and South African Apartheidists both used the American slavery system as a model to justify their own horrors. Both these systems copied in part from the American slavery system and following-on Jim Crow segregation practices, and used a plan that began with a bible-based inferiority hierarchy, deprivation of civil rights such as business ownership (with property confiscation), social isolation, separate but equal public facilities (drinking fountains, restrooms, schools and churches), ad-hoc poll-tests and taxes, and if all else did not succeed then use of physical supression and intimidation groups such as the KKK (Nazi Brown Shirts!), un-punished lynching, and other forms of police-tolerated terror, intimidation and on to guilt-free slave labor, starvation, and mass murder. All familiar stuff to survivors of Nazi "life-style", and as well to such true freedom fighters as Nelson Mandela who spent 26 years in prison for challenging South Africa's racial Apartheid system..

Robert Bronner writes that Hitler was an enthusiastic fan of the confederate "Lost Cause" largely as the result of the movie, "Gone With The Wind" ("Confederate Racialism and The Anticipation of Nazi Evil", a chapter in The Problem of Evil: Slavery, Freedom, and the Ambiguities of American Reform, Mintz and Stauffer, ed.s, U. Mass. Press, 2007, 115-124). Bronner says Hitler lamented the Union defeat of the confederacy as:

"the destruction of...a great social order based on the principle of slavery and inequality."

Hitler saw the defeated confederacy as:

"a real Herren-class [masters]..that would have swept away all falsities of liberty and equality."

Bronner also states:

"Adolph Hitler...admired the confederacy, arguing that it anticipated his goal of creating a society that rested on racial hierarchy and slave labor."

In raw truth, the confederate "Lost Cause" was a non-romantic, inglorious, evil and totalitarian slave system that intimidated and punished all challengers (even if non-slaves), and engaged in a high level of self-denial and rationalization: at first slavery was a necessary evil, then even this half-facing the truth was abandoned around 1840 to be replaced simply by a bible-based racial inferiority delusion. Further, the reality of the pre-civil War South begins with big agri-business (plantations)owning the labor (share cropping), if not the actual persons (slaves), of both Black and White poor. Very few poor Whites, much less Blacks, even got near to the plantation houses that appear in Hollywood movies. And there was constant white surveillance and fear of those "ungrateful, always-disatisfied" slaves. Since the Dixie plantation owners could not rationalze away the immorality of slavery, that it was wrong to own humans, they, like the Nazis resorted to focusing not on the actual sin of slavery but on the problems of non-cooperation (natural, non-acceptance) by slaves of their enslavement. Hence, a slave who appeared dissatisfied or angry was not God-entitled to freedom, but a socially disruptive element deserving to be whipped, hamstrung, or placed in isolation in a cage until broken of spirit.

The other truths facing any Obama gesture to the confederacy on Memorial Day:(1) there was and is no morally relative rationale for the pro-slavery, rebel cause; (2) the rebels are not heroes, they supported overthrow of the Union and lost (hmm, how about 911 terrorists?); (3) the rebel cause was destined to die - they were on the wrong side of moral and world political changes, (4) the least economically developed, and most under-educated region in the US continues to be the pro-slavery core of the former confederate South. And even now, in 2009, southern politicians seem to want to keep the current white people of the former, pro-slavery, southern confederate (dixie) states dumb, superstitious, living in the past, AND RACIST.

More than all of these truths, is that Obama (representing how far ahead the rest of the US has moved from 1861) would look pretty silly lamenting a Southern philosophy of slavery and in-humanity that would make it a crime for him (a piece of property) to learn to read, would rip him from his mother's arms to sell him, would brand his mother for her interracial relationship, would castrate and hang his father for looking at a white woman in the eye, and then done to Obama and his folk (and friends)several other inventive punishments dreamed up by the noble Rhett's and Beauregard's of the old South. Then, since it would be a crime for any white person to have helped President Obama to learn to read, these white people would suffer as well (exactly as was done in Apartheid South Africa, and in Nazi Germany)! If Obama had the drive and ambition to continue to want to be President he would not have lived long, and both his white and black friends would have been punished along with him.

This is the raw truth of the confederate "cause" ...nothing is noble about any of this. The "Lost Cause" is not romantic except in the movies.

Runaway and angry slaves, or fear of such, were constant nightmares to slave owners... we wonder why? Could it have been displaced guilt? If slavery was so beneficial, why was the South obsessed with perceived threats from the slaves who simply did their tasks and did not smile a lot? Why the Underground Railroad?

If slavery was so wonderfully fulfilling, why wasn't there a mass exodus of whie northerners to become slaves in the South? Why didn't white southerners volunteer for slavery and arm wrestle slaves out of their slave status? Such a mystery!

Would current white celebrants of Old South Ways have voluntarily worn chains, and sang Epicopalian (or Lutheran) gospels every evening at the steps of the plantation houses? I truly doubt this would have happened. So why is it so difficult for Southern dixiecrats to understand that lot of people are happy with the passing of Ole Dixie, and don't like seeing the confederate flag. Slavery was not voluntary and THE CONFEDRATE FLAG IS AN AUTOMATIC REMINDER OF AMERICAN SLAVERY, AND HISTORY'S INVOLUNTARY SERVITUDE SYSTEMS SUCH AS HITLER'S NAZI REGIME.

And Ole Dixie was abetted by the dumb foolishness (gullibility and exploitation) of poor, uneducated, whites who swallowed the manipulative lie about defending a Southern "way" which was actually a system of economic impoverishment for all the poor (Black and White) in the service of big agribusiness (white aristocratic plantation owners).

Obama is walking a razor's edge this Memorial Day. If he even hints at support or praise for the confederacy, he will appear laughable and risk being reviled for trying to copy-cat the manipulations of the trickiest dixie politician.

It is time to bury the confederacy for good and move on. The confederate "cause" was not noble, it's cause did not inspire an equivalent of the french revolution but was intended to suppress freedom, it was Satanlike in its brutality of slaves, and in its economic exploitation of poor Whites by the sharecrop system, then later by the Appalachian coal monopolies, etc. The confederacy spawned the continuing sham of "states rights" that every duplicitous southern politician plays like "auld land synge" whenever forward looking southern folk (black and white)want to progress.

Last, if we lament the confederate deaths out of a misplaced romanticism for this evil regime, then shouldn't we also lament, or respect, the grieving mothers and families of the 911 "rebels". And if the confederate flag is shown, why not the Swastika flag of Hitlers Nazism?

Maybe Obama should give a speech at the Lincoln Memorial and put closure to the Civil War. Maybe he ought to give a prayer for the fallen of both sides and pray that the souls of all the fallen soldiers stand together with the living nation, and go forward in unity.

Along with this prayer by Obama, there should be no more rebel flags in offical grounds flying next to America's official flag. Individuals can fly the rebel flag in their homes. On lawns...?...would that imply support for the destruction of the union? (Sighhhhh - it can go round and round, can't it.)

MBA Follies Revisited: The Public Still Can't Be Treated as a Labor Pool

This blurb continues from an earlier commentary (MBA Follies #1, Feb 6, 2009) on the folly of business modeling in ignoring the importance of the citizen and the power of the vote, aka the public-as-labor fallacy.

Recently, Paul Krugman and Robert Reich convincingly observethat corporate America appears rosier and seem to be coming out of the Recession, i.e., "business" trends are positive. But they also admit that the big picture, which inludes the good of the public, is not so rosy. Like other economists, they lament that classical Economics' modeling doesn't provide the language to deal with how the public is getting along nor the power behind this lag. This is a truly great weakness in these times because a democratic nation is not just a business. The public can't fired or let drift like a labor pool without putting both business and governments in peril.

Why? Because the public (unlike labor), doesn't just go away to another country or a vague "elsewhere". This is the weakness of classical economics - it ignores the public weal and most importantly, the public vote which is the game changer from management vs. labor to the nation's reason for existence, to further the interests of the citizen..their quality of life, happiness etc. At the end of the day, the vote determines whether the nation's insitutions, government and business, have earned their right to continue, i.e., have they adequately contributed to the national good, the "common weal".

The vote is not just countervailing power that brings public labor into par with business, The vote is the can't-be-ignored economic factor even though it can't be modeled. The vote can dethrone businesses with regulations, and price-profit-salary caps. This is real Stopping Power. The vote is the true reality of American affairs.

It is difficult to model the interests of the citizen because the public weal is not completely measurable, i.e., it can't easily be be quantified. Reich and Krugman hint at this notion, but even tho they are empathetic they are still students of classical economic models. Galbraith, Samuelson?
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AMERICA MUST DO SOMETHING ABOUT OUR PESKY CHILD SHOOTERS ...BEFORE WE LOSE GUN RIGHTS

 The Perched Eye blog is near 14 years old,  from 2009 with President Obama's election. Our focus has been eclectic ...  the styles and directions of American politics and culture, with an occasional comment on the impact of new technologies. Our observations sometimes attract a critical eye, but the 'pen' remains unblunted.

America, Guns & Pesky Six-Year Olds

(excerpted from "pericles21 writes", on Medium.com, January 20, 2023)

Preface: American kids who pack guns. Should we get rid of them before we lose gun rights? All they do is eat and sleep, and cause 'issues'. Is it best just to get rid of 'em all before they turn six or seven? Some Americans seek to minimize their confusion and effort simply by eliminating six-year-olds. Kinda makes sense...after a nap and  Fenty refresher... don't it?

This is written to again lament America’s dis-ease about guns and gun control. And about its children. And about America's tendency to misdirect ‘blame and shame.’ And, once more, about Guns. Who is at fault? Certainly not the NRA. But let us make up our minds - 'what matters a few kids (and some teachers and school staff) wasted by gunfire when it comes to preserving our right to own guns,..as many as we want. That is American 'Freedom.'

Today, January 20, 2023, a six year old first grader at the Richneck Elementary School in Newport News, Virginia, shot its teacher …supposedly over a classroom disagreement between the two of them. RawStory reposted the shooting details to which this writer responded with several comments, one of which is pasted below:

GUNS & 6-YEAR OLDS — A TOXIC MIX (RIGHT??). (RawStory.com)
Let’s be clear. ‘America’ shot elementary teacher Abby Zwerner. A six year older, “the young man” shooter (police chief description), was then “held in custody” by police…? That doesn’t even make sense for two critical reasons. Since when is a six year old a “young man”? Two, “in custody” — does that mean jailed? Cuffed and chained? Was the six year old ‘read their rights’ to remain silent…and, for a child still learning to read, what would that even mean in a sane culture?The answer to all questions and concerns is “GUNS” and lack of gun control! Got to get rid of guns or 6-year olds…America’s top-o-the-head first choice wouldprobably be to get rid of 6-year-olds as a sacrifice for “Freedom” …whatever that means.

There are many follow-up comments in the RawStory piece to the descriptors and viewpoints expressed by the Newport News police, reporters, and town officials. 

But first, should America be proud of how one of its six-year-olds handled a gun so well...ie, without shooting itself first or wounding others ('secondary casualties' in combat terms). I think not!

Almost universally, the comments express the usual sorrow for the victim(s) and about the general lack of gun control, especially now in Virginia under the open-carry-favoring Republican governor Youngkin. And even greater concern and amazement is expressed in how ‘distanced’ and unfeeling are some media (and police) handling of a child who came into possession of a gun, knew how to use the gun…and used the gun to express a child’s disagreement with an adult. (I read only one dissenter who did not express sensitivity for the child shooter.)

America has a problem with guns. But the child (not a “young man” as the police chief describes it)  learned to use the gun from many examples on American TV that depict gun use as an appropriate way to show anger.

We shouldn’t be surprised that the child learned how to pull the trigger —by watching American TV broadcasts - a 24/7 stream of violent, blood-spilled mayhem delivered raw to all ages. (Did the child hold the gun horizontally ("OG" style) while pulling the trigger?  

America’s (mis) handling of its guns is a global disgrace. We lack an adult-level sensibility about our guns and confuse our right to own as many guns as we want with a child’s misunderstanding of “Freedom.”

As for the unfortunate child ‘perp’ — let’s pray for it now that the system has apparently gotten hold of 'it' ...and let's hope that the police and ‘justice’ system have better sense than to mete out ‘just’ punishment of a child by condemning the child to a term in the local ‘Juvi’ center. A six-year-older would not survive well under that ‘treatment’ (to say the least.)

But meanwhile, on the 'bright side', America now has the excuse to add a new, money-making fetish and cultural topic to make even more graphic and shocking TV series (and profit)— a new fetish, “Kiddies Toting Guns’. Or even new clothing lines — ‘Kiddie Jumpers with Gun Pockets’. America stumbles forward, eyes always focused on the prize regardless (more moola). This is progress.(?)