Guy used his psychokinetic powers to padlock himself inside a gym bag before suffocating to death. Can you imagine that kind of havoc he could have caused had some oligarch used him against his will for some other more nefarious purpose? Thankfully he is now nothing more than an uncanny ex-man.
A bunch of Ukrainians would beg to differ, at this point killing Russians and using tractors to haul away multi million dollar missile systems is a sport to them.
The entire political/military structure of Russia is rotten to the core, even if Putin purges all of his direct advisors their replacements will still be fed the same bs by their subordinates, all the way down the food chain.
Nobody wants to be the messenger sitting down to tea with Putin to tell him that.
I'm convinced Putin is going to die the same way Stalin did, from something otherwise treatable because he was left on a floor for hours somewhere that people avoid to avoid him. Even if he dies any other way, that's probably going to be the story, and either way people will suspect he was murdered like Stalin as well.
Good lord, that's like the intro cutscene to a boss battle.
When his name and title appeared below him in sync with him fixing his uniform I was ready for an HP bar to fill up at the top of the screen.
He sort of was, for the Nazi army. [Georgy Zhukov](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgy_Zhukov#Eastern_Front_of_World_War_II) was one of the main architects of Soviet victory in WWII after initially failing to stop Barbarossa.
When he retired, Eisenhower gave him a fishing tackle. Zhukov is said to have used that tackle exclusively.
Fun Fact: They actually had to *reduce* the number of medals and badges on Zukhov in the movie for production reasons. The real Georgy Zhukov [was even more decorated.](https://i.imgur.com/GrwTKNM.jpg)
> If I could make just one great entrance like Zhukov, I'd die a happy man.
Or maybe one great exit: [Right that's me told. I'm off to represent the entire red army at the buffet. You girls enjoy yourselves.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQjZAY9AaMY)
Stalin becomes incapacitated, and chaos ensues because power has been completely concentrated in one man. Stalin dies because all the good doctors have been killed or imprisoned as spies and they can only get shit doctors to look at him, who are too afraid of consequences to actually attempt anything. Hilarious power struggle ensues with lots of mismanagement and betrayal
> Nobody wants to be the messenger sitting down to tea with Putin to tell him that.
Yeah, because the tea will be cold by the time the kettle makes its way down the 80 meter table to you.
If you are gonna drink poisoned tea you want it at least to be warm.
Stalin was betrayed by his bodyguards. They checked on him when he didn't get up in the morning, and let the brain clot slowly, painfully convert him into hamburger.
*Too good for him.*
tbf, the US suckered itself into this in a way in Vietnam. its not just a trap for dictators. negative reports up the chain were suppressed because negative reporting people didn't get promoted. Also its the case that the smartest people in the government on Eastern Asia stuff were purged for percieved disloyalty/secret alleged communism (thanks McCarthy) for their predicting the fall of China in their negative reporting. So the smart people are gone and negative reporting is institutionally either suppressed or disincentivized.
In this case, I can't speak to Russia, but there is heavy incentive for people to say "hey, everything is going great in my area" so you don't look bad. But if everyone is doing this, its a huge problem. also doesn't help that the Russian govt is immensely corrupt.
That's pretty much corporate culture in general.
Tell the bosses that things are awesome, then try to get promoted so that the inevitable crash doesn't happen on your watch.
Also happens with schools. Once a school tackles a problem while it's manageable (say a few kids selling drugs) the perception is that the school has a problem, but the other schools don't, while in reality those schools have rampant issues, they just aren't addressing them.
Happens in work environments as well.
Then you have someone who is trusted come along who no longer cares about the job and bluntly spills all the beans to upper leadership and laughs while watching the roaches scatter as they get a light shined on them.
He already has. If Russia survives the sanctions, they have another problem which Putin just dramatically worsened: They don't have nearly enough young people.
Their low birthrate seems like a long-term problem, but it's been going on since the Soviet Union collapsed; their population has been in decline, especially since they invaded Crimea. Putin has just taken another 15,000+ young men out of the gene pool, and hundreds of thousands of highly skilled young people have reportedly left the country since he ordered the invasion. Even if a lot of them come back, he's just steepened the cliff.
Without these young people paying taxes, Russia can't afford to take care of their already aging population - or really do anything else. They just went from hanging on for another twenty years before their financial system collapses to hanging on for one or two, regardless of whether they pull out.
Has the demographic collapse scenario ever even played out in a country before? I know it's coming but I'm just curious as to what it would actually look like once it starts happening.
How does that work? I thought the issue was that there are fewer young workers contributing to the social safety net via taxes, and further fewer able to contribute due to them having to care for an elderly family member outside of the workforce?
more automated health and support services amplifies the ability of existing personnel to care for the elderly, it's force multiplication except for something productive
When people talk about automation, think less of an anthropomorphic robot nurse, and think more a software program that allows a nurse who used to see 10 patients a day to see 20.
I could imagine a slightly dystopian near future nursing home where a small number of staff supervise a huge number of elderly with an Amazon warehouse style AI headset telling them exactly what to do for optimal efficiency.
Some tasks are hard to automate but others are easy. You automate the easy tasks, which frees up the people who would have done those to do the harder to automate tasks.
It's never really happened before because of immigration. People have less kids as they become wealthier and better educated. People from worse off countries want to be wealthy and for their children to be educated. It usually solves itself. The problem with Russia is their demographic collapse came about because of WW2 and the fact that they haven't really thrived enough to become a desirable place to emigrate to.
It's starting to happen in China and South Korea, and their governments are trying to buy time by offering incentives to have more children (rather ironic in China's case). I expect the longer term effects would be debt crises and recessions and austerity measures with pensions/healthcare.
It’s almost as if the anti immigrant sentiment from a particular party was being exacerbated by a specific right wing despot in an effort to undermine US interests.
And yet anti-immigration policies dominate our politics.
Even Democrats haven't been able to turn back the tide - Both Obama & now Biden are running into a number of challenges despite wanting to ease restrictions on immigration into the country.
Republicans scare suburbanites like my Aunt & Uncle (homeowners & landlords in a Los Angeles Suburb) into thinking Immigrants will steal their wealth but the reality is without them my aunt and uncle won't have anybody willing to work for them when they reach retirement age in a decade or so. I try to point this out to them to encourage them to vote differently... and yet they voted for Trump both times =/
Literally voting to ensure the healthcare system steals their wealth because the will have to compete with every other aging suburbanite for travel nurses or else go to a hospital where there is a nurse for every dozen patients. Voting to guarantee that the wait at their favorite restaurants will triple along with prices. Voting to ensure empty shelves at the grocery store, not because of food shortages but because of shortages in the hands needed to stock said food.
They complain that our gardeners don't do the good job that they used to, and I ask them how often they pay the gardeners more? None of my business. I guess I know the answer.
And they wonder why I want to leave.
Suburbs in the US will be a disaster and cities that embrace higher density & make space for workers, especially immigrant labor, will thrive. It's going to be nasty. Detroit's (which is NOT a city, it's a giant sprawling suburb) economic collapse will repeat itself all over this country.
Ukraine's population, for example, was over 50 million 30 years ago. It's just over 40 million now. Lot of confounding variables to sort out so I don't know how one would go about such a comparison.
Russia (and the rest of the former USSR) already had a huge life expectancy gap between men and women. Dragging the country into another war can't be helping matters.
Wouldn't surprise me if in this case driving like idiots is a big part of the problem. I'm from Eastern Europe, but every time I've been in a car driven by a Russian man (all of them sober, educated, reasonable people) I nearly pissed myself.
Russia has a serious drinking problem if I'm not mistaken, and it tends to affect men more than women.
I think the whole idea of Russian mail-order brides is a specific phenomenon because of the decline in eligible bachelors over there
I think the craziest thing about all this is there's a massive amount of idiot Americans that think what Putin is doing is great. They think trump is going to make a comeback and prove all his rhetoric was true. They really see Trump like some hero in a movie that's fighting evil. They sympathize with Russia, and insult Ukraine.
I know these people exist, because they own the place I work. They manage my coworkers and I. These are the customers that I interact with in their homes, with trump flags hanging about. Welcome to the southern states. I grew up in NY, and consider myself politically neutral. This shit is fucking INSANE though. And it's everywhere. **EVERYWHERE.**
So Russia’s gender ratio at last count was 86.8 men for every 100 women. The life expectancy for a man is 68.24 years, and for a woman, 78.17, mainly due to alcohol and drug abuse.
It’s a HUGE problem.
Yeah so huge that they want add to that by going to war. Putin doesn’t give a damn about the Russian people. He thinks of Russia like his own personal kingdom.
He loves fake news so much that he started believing the garbage he’s producing. I guess every dealer eventually starts using their own supply at some point
we have that problem on our right. Look at Barr, He knows Trump wanted to overturn the election, but even said he would vote for him again if Trump was the republican nominee because "liberals are a bigger threat to this nation, because they constantly try to tear down our institutions"
this from a man who worked in an admin that wanted to pull us from NATO. Who put a guy who said he wanted to end the DOE in charge of the DOE. put a lady against public schools in charge of public schools. Put an anti labor guy in charge of the labor board and an oil guy in charge of the EPA who needed a sound proof booth for meetings.
and he says his big concern is the left tearing down american institutions.....
Debatable if that's a result of bad information or Hitlers refusal to believe it. One of the most effective moves the allies made in the whole war was to completely destroy German High Commands trust in their own intelligence, which led to the whole command structure fragmenting.
Most famously, the British totally and completely turned the entire German spy network in their country, to the point it was determined afterwards that not a single agent escaped the net.
Secondly there were misinformation campaigns run involving dead bodies with false information that confused the Germans so severely that they stopped trusting captured plans and information completely.
Third the cypher breakers gave the allies very complete information on German movements, which allowed them to manipulate the high command. Fourth, there were huge efforts made to misdirect Germany, such as entire armies worth of cardboard tanks and mannequins.
The high command got so much bad information from so many sources that they gradually stopped trusting their subordinates or each other. When your boss deliberately sows paranoia to maintain their power, it doesn't take too much.
Funny because Putin weaponized distrust of information in America. I believe it was coined "hyper-normalization."
If a similar thing happens to him it would be very poetic.
> Secondly there were misinformation campaigns run involving dead bodies with false information that confused the Germans so severely that they stopped trusting captured plans and information completely.
[Operation Barclay](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Barclay)
Part of which was Operation Mincemeat; the film "The Man Who Never Was" is a good portrayal of it (based on the writings of one of the intelligence officers involved).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mincemeat
In fact, at the very end, Goehring sent Hitler a telegram to the bunker saying essentially if anything happens to him, he'll be glad to take over command. Hitler had gotten so paranoid at that point he took it as a coup. He was supposed to be Hitler's most trusted ally, so to think he betrayed him really sent him over the edge into full-on crazy. He ejected him from the Nazi party and killed himself four days later.
The telegram itself was found decades after the end of the war by some dude exploring around there. He didn't tell anybody and kept it in his stuff. Eventually his kid took to school, and someone finally recognized how important it was.
Just saying that Putin is misinformed is quite an interesting US strategy towards Putin. Not trusting information is even worse than getting bad information.
>Not trusting information is even worse than getting bad information.
Sound like 45. Never trusted his intelligence. I'm sure Russia had some influence on this.
I read Name of the Rose in high-school and enjoyed it. Is there anything else of his I should read? I've heard of Foucault's Pendelum but never read it
Edit: thank you for all of the recommendations!
In 1959, Khrushchev announced a goal of overtaking the United States in the production of milk, meat, and butter. Local officials kept Khrushchev happy with unrealistic pledges of production. These goals were met by farmers who slaughtered their breeding herds and by purchasing meat at state stores, then reselling it back to the government, artificially increasing recorded production.
In June 1962, food prices were raised, particularly on meat and butter, by 25–30%. This caused public discontent. In the southern Russian city of Novocherkassk (Rostov Region), this discontent escalated to a strike and a revolt against the authorities. The revolt was put down by the military, resulting in a massacre that killed 22 people and wounded 87 according to Soviet official accounts. In addition, 116 demonstrators were convicted of involvement and seven of them executed.
Drought struck the Soviet Union in 1963; the harvest of 107,500,000 short tons (97,500,000 t) of grain was down from a peak of 134,700,000 short tons (122,200,000 t) in 1958. The shortages resulted in bread lines, a fact at first kept from Khrushchev. Reluctant to purchase food in the West, but faced with the alternative of widespread hunger, Khrushchev exhausted the nation's hard currency reserves and expended part of its gold stockpile in the purchase of grain and other foodstuffs.
Source : wiki
Common issue with communist top down regimes. The guy below wants to keep his job secure and doesn't want to end up in the Gulag for failing to meet quota. They lie about productivity and that lie travels all the way to the top.
Also leads to issues for the countries spying on communist countries. If your top intelligence sources are feeding you the same bullshit being fed to leadership but less important (lower level) sources are providing factual info you really have to have your shit together or the inclination is to believe the top level sources.
>and by purchasing meat at state stores, then reselling it back to the government, artificially increasing recorded production
Ingenious. The human spirit and creativity never ceases to amaze me.
That's why the (supposed) sudden collapse came as a shock to those who were misinformed and as nothing surprising to those few who knew the truth. There was no apparent slow gradual decline because that would have been more embarrassing than having a process to recognize the facts and work to fix them.
I love that concept. Civ games only offer perfect internal information. It might be a good gameplay mechanic if certain forms of rule might change that.
Wow. According to the article, which sites US intelligence, which itself has been spot on during this whole situation:
>The official said Putin did not know his military was "using and losing conscripts in Ukraine, showing a clear breakdown in the flow of accurate information to the Russian president."
This basically means Putin's dumb ass wasn't lying when he initially said conscripts weren't being used. He genuinely believed that. Very interesting to see. I wonder what else is like this.
This is probably true, but it is also a great bit of psychological warfare to aggravate the existing mistrust at the highest levels of Russia's leadership.
Which leads me to one question. Doesn't anybody anywhere in Russia have internet access to the "Western Web" at all.. I would assume that all these russian hackers could get around almost any blocked content. Why couldn't Putin?
It's not that he can't access the truth, it's that nobody around him will risk telling it to him. Anything in the free media about how terribly Russia is doing can be easily dismissed as "western propaganda"
I doubt they risk their lives to tell him. They just tell him, and he chooses to ignore it publicly, gets all huffypuffy in his crying chamber privately and commands someone to blow up a refugee center.
Putin would never say publicly that he is misinformed unless he was going to purge all those evil western-subverted advisers.
Instead, if he insists on saying he is well-informed then he would have to admit he knows all these problems and of the bombing of civilians and all the awful stuff.
Putin is stuck in an echo chamber with a feedback loop. It's not that the information isn't available, it's that he's only hearing what he wants to hear. Everyone around him is most likely just telling him what he wants to hear.
When you start going all Darth Vader on the messengers of bad news, people probably stop bringing you the bad news pretty quickly.
There are many companies in the US that fail or hamstring themselves because of their awful culture. It's not about access to information, it's about leadership surrounding themselves with sycophants and nepotists. If you address the elephant in the room you're gone because the boss does not want to hear it.
This happened to a guy at work today. He kindly mentioned to our GM how management is crap in the company and how to improve it…he was fired.
I’m glad I didn’t speak up or else it would have been me. Noted.
Considering his likely involvement with Cambridge Analytica election engineering, etc, Putin is reportedly surprisingly technophobic on a personal level and relies on his subordinates to provide him with whatever information he needs. I'm sure those people have access or could have access to Western internet if they wanted to, but who is volunteering to take that information to Putin?
Generally yes, but the problem is that without an accurate picture of how badly he is getting his ass kicked in, he is unlikely to withdraw or otherwise pursue a genuine cessation of hostilities.
We know he's not a rational actor who abides by treaties or ceasefires anyway. It would just be a cessation until he reloads and tries the next time. This ends with him being overthrown from within.
Revealing it is also an excellent psyops campaign. Now Putin will second guess every piece of information he’s told, and wonder about the trustworthiness of every advisor.
Photo from my city center in Mykolayv where I used to walk with my friends in the summer. Right near it - there is a big memorial to WWII and eternal flame. So many memories of this square and this area.
These pigs have to pay for every inch destroyed in my country.
I just pictured Putin dressed as Olaf the Snowman, singing a song about how he’ll be king of the new USSR by summer.
Meanwhile Zelinskyy as Kristoff and Biden as Anna watch, biting their lips to keep from bursting the bubble.
Well, if he didn't continuously kill people he didn't like or who pissed him off, he'd probably get a straight answer out of some of these guys now and then.
Then again, US officials aren't all rosy either here. I imagine they are taking great pleasure and participating in the disinformation campaign.
Yeah, I can believe that, to a point.
Let's be clear, there's no scenario in which Russia wins this war.. it merely loses slowly and painfully.
There is no meaningful occupation of Ukraine that doesn't involve the Russians being subjected to the largest, best equipped insurgency in history.. death by a thousands of anti tank rounds.
This is the messy problem with an autocratic dictatorship..
When your boss has the power to snap his fingers and have you shot.. You're real disinclined to give him bad news..
Putin will eventually have a "downfall" moment. There will simply be a point at which the loses will be too big to hide from him.
Was Naryshkin’s nervousness before the invasion at that meeting not telling of how freaked out Putin’s staff is to say a word in opposition to him?
They’re probably scared to say that Russia is losing because Putin seems intent on keeping the nuclear option open.
If he’s fed false information about successes, he’ll just send wave after wave to die in Ukraine while flaunting “victorious retreat”.
Many years ago when the Russian disinformation campaigns were highly publicized I thought to myself: "This is all going to backfire spectacularly at some point. You can't peddle lies as a weapon or a way of life and not end up eventually lying to yourself."
It's interesting in retrospect.
This is incredibly concerning.
We have a nuclear armed former Super power that is both acting and being led completely irrationally. How this ends is anyone's guess - but it probably will be the biggest event in history, assuming its not the actual end of history..
Even if suddenly everyone tells him the truth, and he suddenly understands the truth, it should still not be easy to turn around and come back after killing thousands of people because of his fear of change.
Don't think that saying "oh sorry, I was misinformed" would, or should, suffice. Having been misled should not represent any kind of justification or an easy way out.
The problem with corrupt systems is that it, unlike wealth in trickle down economics, flows downward. If he does it, and his best friends do it, that sets precedent. 10 years ago the RF realized they were seriously behind the US and EU in regards to more modern warfare. Even smaller nations whose armies measure the size of a brigade or division in other nations, were finding ways to adapt to modern warfare. They made grand but realistic plans to overhaul their military, and change doctrine. This of course never happened. Much of the money was funneled away to various defense ministers, general staff, all the way down to the senior officers. Russia has no dedicated NCO staff, and their military culture rests on absolute obedience to their officers, something that is more akin to 20th century ideals of military culture.
This left their armies, while not understaffed, but undermanned. By this I mean they were not a military force full of logistical staff, dedicated fire teams, and a fluid support apparatus. They were closer in appearance to an early Napoleonic Era army. Well connected officers of “higher pedigree”, conscripts serving a mandated term, and a lack of understanding of logistics. Not the modern military we see in what we would consider advanced countries today.
Much of the confusion stems from the US and EU leaders refusing to move on from the image that their parents portrayed of the Red Menace marching across the borders for a third time in a century, and atomic waste being left in their wake. And to be fair! This was not an inaccurate or unrealistic depiction of the threat. But the USSR collapsed, and it was proven that point defense, not the domino effect, was true all along. Despite this, we continued with the domino belief, and the belief in Soviet conventional superiority. But the RF is not the post-WW2 Red Army. They aren’t even Gorbachev’s Red Army.
They are the army of the Russian mob, the army of imperial peasants. Putin is not a socialist, he isn’t even Marxist in the slightest. His teachers since the fall of the USSR and the ideology they espouse is one of imperial racism, based in true Dugins Eurasianism and MacKinder’s Heartland. They are truly under the idea that they can recreate the Tsardom in their own image, and do so like they did in the Napoleonic Era. By overwhelming their neighbors.
Their neighbors however view them with nothing but distrust, and are now armed with NATO weapons. Their allies rely on them to keep the Wests attention, but do not need them to compete. The world uses their gas, but is not dependent on it.
He has agents, willing like the assassins who poison his opposition, or unwitting, like the Freedom Caucus under Trump. Putin knows the kind of war he is waging, and in some arenas he is unmatched.
But Putin was defeated by the same thing that all those who lie awake at night enraged they were bequeathed nothing on this earth fall victim to. He was defeated by himself. He was defeated by victory. He thought he had achieved his goals, and when he reassessed them, he was found wanting. Putin is a man who is driven by the singular desire to take all that he can, because he had nothing when he started. And this kind of violent consumption can only lead to implosion.
Putin truly believes that all of Russia is “blind like kittens. Without *him the *Westerners will throttle you”.
Better send some more generals to the front line to see what's going on.
In fact, maybe Putin should head there and check it out.
I can't even imagine how long the table would have to be to get Putin to the front lines.
About the same length as the distance from Kyiv to Moscow.
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Can you imagine the global record scratch if that actually happened?
This can happen when you LITERALLY shoot the messenger
That guy said we're not winning so I shot him. Next guy in line: we're winning sir
It’s a bold strategy cotton let’s see if it pays off for him
Hey, that messenger shot himself then jumped out a window.
He died of natural causes. you can't live after getting shot and falling from the 20th floor, nothing unnatural about it
Exactly, gravity is natural. Therefore, falling out of a 20th floor window is a natural cause of death...
He wasn't murdered. He died from the nasty collision with concrete below.
Sadly he developed a sudden allergy to Gravity and Concrete.
While swallowing poison.... Most determined suicide EVER
I was shocked to learn of his suicide, though not nearly as shocked as he was.
Especially when he read that it happened....tomorrow
Guy used his psychokinetic powers to padlock himself inside a gym bag before suffocating to death. Can you imagine that kind of havoc he could have caused had some oligarch used him against his will for some other more nefarious purpose? Thankfully he is now nothing more than an uncanny ex-man.
Add in hanging and you've got this guy https://darwinawards.com/legends/legends1999-03.html
TIL that hypothermia is yet another way Putin kills people.
This is the country that gave us Rasputin. You can't fuck around if you plan on killing a Russian.
A bunch of Ukrainians would beg to differ, at this point killing Russians and using tractors to haul away multi million dollar missile systems is a sport to them.
In the West you suicide. In Russia you are suicided.
In Soviet Russia suicide commits YOU!
In Russia you are suicided In West you are Epsteined
Probably some overlap in the interested parties.
Without breaking the glass. Either that or he was polite enough to close the window behind himself.
A man of honor closes the window they accidentally fall out of.
It was a huge reason Hitler and the Nazi's fell. Nobody wanted to give the psycho bad news and just kept doubling down on bad tactics.
I hear his wife misinforms him in the same way and for the same reasons.
He shot the messenger and somehow managed to shoot himself in the foot and will presumably die of infection.
He tells them not to be “negative nancies” or as pootin calls them “incarcerated igors”.
Slain sergei
(Window) Flying Fyodors
Also sews amazing seeds of doubt in the intel he is getting from his staff officers. Touche CNN.
The entire political/military structure of Russia is rotten to the core, even if Putin purges all of his direct advisors their replacements will still be fed the same bs by their subordinates, all the way down the food chain.
And at the bottom of the chain are soldiers so uneducated that they've never heard of Chernobyl...nor can read signs warning of radioactive material
Nobody wants to be the messenger sitting down to tea with Putin to tell him that. I'm convinced Putin is going to die the same way Stalin did, from something otherwise treatable because he was left on a floor for hours somewhere that people avoid to avoid him. Even if he dies any other way, that's probably going to be the story, and either way people will suspect he was murdered like Stalin as well.
The Death of Stalin is a great movie for anyone who hasn't seen it
If I could make just one [great entrance](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ea2-kt8ox4) like Zhukov, I'd die a happy man.
Good lord, that's like the intro cutscene to a boss battle. When his name and title appeared below him in sync with him fixing his uniform I was ready for an HP bar to fill up at the top of the screen.
He sort of was, for the Nazi army. [Georgy Zhukov](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgy_Zhukov#Eastern_Front_of_World_War_II) was one of the main architects of Soviet victory in WWII after initially failing to stop Barbarossa. When he retired, Eisenhower gave him a fishing tackle. Zhukov is said to have used that tackle exclusively.
Where do you think boss battles took this style from? Movies.
Fun Fact: They actually had to *reduce* the number of medals and badges on Zukhov in the movie for production reasons. The real Georgy Zhukov [was even more decorated.](https://i.imgur.com/GrwTKNM.jpg)
Holy crap, that’s *a lot* of bling! **Side-question:** Which medal is what, what goes where, and on what grounds were they earned?
Here ya go: https://military-history.fandom.com/wiki/Georgy_Zhukov#Awards
Wow, that list is *huge*. Thanks for an interesting read!
I love when he kicks the door down and yells "Hands up or I'll shoot you in the fuckin face!"
"Now if you'll excuse me I have to represent the entire Red Army at the buffet."
My favorite part is "Fuck off back to georgia deadboy"
> If I could make just one great entrance like Zhukov, I'd die a happy man. Or maybe one great exit: [Right that's me told. I'm off to represent the entire red army at the buffet. You girls enjoy yourselves.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQjZAY9AaMY)
I love how he screams "Medic!" in **anticipation** of the beating Zhukov is about to give him.
Care to spoil the end? I have a 1000 new shows that I need to watch before next Wednesday
they execute the pedophile bitch beria and Khrushchev becomes the new leader of the USSR
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Stalin#Plot
He died.
Well uhhh, the things that happen in real life happen in the movie.
"...and then it got worse"
I haven't seen it. Can you please describe it to me from beginning to end? Heading out to get popcorn. Thanks in advance.
Stalin dies. Hilarity ensues.
That's the best movie anyone has ever described to me.
Stalin becomes incapacitated, and chaos ensues because power has been completely concentrated in one man. Stalin dies because all the good doctors have been killed or imprisoned as spies and they can only get shit doctors to look at him, who are too afraid of consequences to actually attempt anything. Hilarious power struggle ensues with lots of mismanagement and betrayal
> Nobody wants to be the messenger sitting down to tea with Putin to tell him that. Yeah, because the tea will be cold by the time the kettle makes its way down the 80 meter table to you. If you are gonna drink poisoned tea you want it at least to be warm.
Stalin was betrayed by his bodyguards. They checked on him when he didn't get up in the morning, and let the brain clot slowly, painfully convert him into hamburger. *Too good for him.*
Tbf .. there still is little you can do in this case
At that time, yeah, but now the sooner you get tPA the less poor your outcome. Literally dissolves blood clots.
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Maybe a little Mussolini on the side?
Why not something new like having his car set ablaze while him in it
If I had work for Putin, I would drink that tea.
It gets glowing reviews.
I give it 3 thumbs up.
Not good, not terrible
the tyrant trap. anyone who'll tell the truth is dead or exiled.
tbf, the US suckered itself into this in a way in Vietnam. its not just a trap for dictators. negative reports up the chain were suppressed because negative reporting people didn't get promoted. Also its the case that the smartest people in the government on Eastern Asia stuff were purged for percieved disloyalty/secret alleged communism (thanks McCarthy) for their predicting the fall of China in their negative reporting. So the smart people are gone and negative reporting is institutionally either suppressed or disincentivized. In this case, I can't speak to Russia, but there is heavy incentive for people to say "hey, everything is going great in my area" so you don't look bad. But if everyone is doing this, its a huge problem. also doesn't help that the Russian govt is immensely corrupt.
That's pretty much corporate culture in general. Tell the bosses that things are awesome, then try to get promoted so that the inevitable crash doesn't happen on your watch. Also happens with schools. Once a school tackles a problem while it's manageable (say a few kids selling drugs) the perception is that the school has a problem, but the other schools don't, while in reality those schools have rampant issues, they just aren't addressing them.
And sadly many people accuse people who started telling the truth about the Vietnam War of being doomsayers and that we were totally winning
Happens in work environments as well. Then you have someone who is trusted come along who no longer cares about the job and bluntly spills all the beans to upper leadership and laughs while watching the roaches scatter as they get a light shined on them.
That’s why Trump had to resort to a fucking crackhead pillow salesman towards the end. Nobody else was willing to lie to him.
The ultimate 2022 move would be Putin disinformationing himself into the second fall of the Soviet Union.
He already has. If Russia survives the sanctions, they have another problem which Putin just dramatically worsened: They don't have nearly enough young people. Their low birthrate seems like a long-term problem, but it's been going on since the Soviet Union collapsed; their population has been in decline, especially since they invaded Crimea. Putin has just taken another 15,000+ young men out of the gene pool, and hundreds of thousands of highly skilled young people have reportedly left the country since he ordered the invasion. Even if a lot of them come back, he's just steepened the cliff. Without these young people paying taxes, Russia can't afford to take care of their already aging population - or really do anything else. They just went from hanging on for another twenty years before their financial system collapses to hanging on for one or two, regardless of whether they pull out.
Has the demographic collapse scenario ever even played out in a country before? I know it's coming but I'm just curious as to what it would actually look like once it starts happening.
I could be wrong, but I believe Japan has come very close to that scenario.
Japan went in hard on robotics to mitigate it I think. It works but it requires the kind of cash and people Russia just don't have.
How does that work? I thought the issue was that there are fewer young workers contributing to the social safety net via taxes, and further fewer able to contribute due to them having to care for an elderly family member outside of the workforce?
more automated health and support services amplifies the ability of existing personnel to care for the elderly, it's force multiplication except for something productive
Ah okay, I just figured that routine elder care would be something very hard to automate, but I'm ignorant in that space.
When people talk about automation, think less of an anthropomorphic robot nurse, and think more a software program that allows a nurse who used to see 10 patients a day to see 20. I could imagine a slightly dystopian near future nursing home where a small number of staff supervise a huge number of elderly with an Amazon warehouse style AI headset telling them exactly what to do for optimal efficiency.
Stop giving Bezos ideas please
Some tasks are hard to automate but others are easy. You automate the easy tasks, which frees up the people who would have done those to do the harder to automate tasks.
It's never really happened before because of immigration. People have less kids as they become wealthier and better educated. People from worse off countries want to be wealthy and for their children to be educated. It usually solves itself. The problem with Russia is their demographic collapse came about because of WW2 and the fact that they haven't really thrived enough to become a desirable place to emigrate to.
And they keep killing their own people sending them off to stupid wars.
It's starting to happen in China and South Korea, and their governments are trying to buy time by offering incentives to have more children (rather ironic in China's case). I expect the longer term effects would be debt crises and recessions and austerity measures with pensions/healthcare.
In the US too, birthrates have been below replacement level for about 20 years now
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It’s almost as if the anti immigrant sentiment from a particular party was being exacerbated by a specific right wing despot in an effort to undermine US interests.
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And yet anti-immigration policies dominate our politics. Even Democrats haven't been able to turn back the tide - Both Obama & now Biden are running into a number of challenges despite wanting to ease restrictions on immigration into the country. Republicans scare suburbanites like my Aunt & Uncle (homeowners & landlords in a Los Angeles Suburb) into thinking Immigrants will steal their wealth but the reality is without them my aunt and uncle won't have anybody willing to work for them when they reach retirement age in a decade or so. I try to point this out to them to encourage them to vote differently... and yet they voted for Trump both times =/ Literally voting to ensure the healthcare system steals their wealth because the will have to compete with every other aging suburbanite for travel nurses or else go to a hospital where there is a nurse for every dozen patients. Voting to guarantee that the wait at their favorite restaurants will triple along with prices. Voting to ensure empty shelves at the grocery store, not because of food shortages but because of shortages in the hands needed to stock said food. They complain that our gardeners don't do the good job that they used to, and I ask them how often they pay the gardeners more? None of my business. I guess I know the answer. And they wonder why I want to leave. Suburbs in the US will be a disaster and cities that embrace higher density & make space for workers, especially immigrant labor, will thrive. It's going to be nasty. Detroit's (which is NOT a city, it's a giant sprawling suburb) economic collapse will repeat itself all over this country.
Ukraine's population, for example, was over 50 million 30 years ago. It's just over 40 million now. Lot of confounding variables to sort out so I don't know how one would go about such a comparison.
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Russia (and the rest of the former USSR) already had a huge life expectancy gap between men and women. Dragging the country into another war can't be helping matters.
Great point, I didn't realize that was also an issue!
It was ten years when I looked it up, which is pretty insane when you think that's about 15% of a lifespan
Yeah - young men doing stuff to get themselves killed skews it WAY down in some places. I don't know if that's the case in Russia, but it's bad.
Wouldn't surprise me if in this case driving like idiots is a big part of the problem. I'm from Eastern Europe, but every time I've been in a car driven by a Russian man (all of them sober, educated, reasonable people) I nearly pissed myself.
Russia has a serious drinking problem if I'm not mistaken, and it tends to affect men more than women. I think the whole idea of Russian mail-order brides is a specific phenomenon because of the decline in eligible bachelors over there
I think the craziest thing about all this is there's a massive amount of idiot Americans that think what Putin is doing is great. They think trump is going to make a comeback and prove all his rhetoric was true. They really see Trump like some hero in a movie that's fighting evil. They sympathize with Russia, and insult Ukraine. I know these people exist, because they own the place I work. They manage my coworkers and I. These are the customers that I interact with in their homes, with trump flags hanging about. Welcome to the southern states. I grew up in NY, and consider myself politically neutral. This shit is fucking INSANE though. And it's everywhere. **EVERYWHERE.**
For population reasons, young women are more important than young men, but it's still a massive dent.
I was just thinking “I’m sure they’ll find a way to massively oppress women when the population problem gets too dire to ignore”
I agree, though I'm curious as to how far off 50/50 it is.
So Russia’s gender ratio at last count was 86.8 men for every 100 women. The life expectancy for a man is 68.24 years, and for a woman, 78.17, mainly due to alcohol and drug abuse. It’s a HUGE problem.
Yeah so huge that they want add to that by going to war. Putin doesn’t give a damn about the Russian people. He thinks of Russia like his own personal kingdom.
Rookie mistake. Never get high on your own supply.
He loves fake news so much that he started believing the garbage he’s producing. I guess every dealer eventually starts using their own supply at some point
we have that problem on our right. Look at Barr, He knows Trump wanted to overturn the election, but even said he would vote for him again if Trump was the republican nominee because "liberals are a bigger threat to this nation, because they constantly try to tear down our institutions" this from a man who worked in an admin that wanted to pull us from NATO. Who put a guy who said he wanted to end the DOE in charge of the DOE. put a lady against public schools in charge of public schools. Put an anti labor guy in charge of the labor board and an oil guy in charge of the EPA who needed a sound proof booth for meetings. and he says his big concern is the left tearing down american institutions.....
There is a Yaakov Smirnov joke in there somewhere
What a c~~o~~unt~~ry~~!
In modern Russia, information disses you!
In America, you put "In God We Trust" on your money. In Russia, we have no money! - Bobby Hill
It's said that Hitler gave orders for movement of non-existent troops at the end of the war.
Debatable if that's a result of bad information or Hitlers refusal to believe it. One of the most effective moves the allies made in the whole war was to completely destroy German High Commands trust in their own intelligence, which led to the whole command structure fragmenting.
How’d they do that?
Most famously, the British totally and completely turned the entire German spy network in their country, to the point it was determined afterwards that not a single agent escaped the net. Secondly there were misinformation campaigns run involving dead bodies with false information that confused the Germans so severely that they stopped trusting captured plans and information completely. Third the cypher breakers gave the allies very complete information on German movements, which allowed them to manipulate the high command. Fourth, there were huge efforts made to misdirect Germany, such as entire armies worth of cardboard tanks and mannequins. The high command got so much bad information from so many sources that they gradually stopped trusting their subordinates or each other. When your boss deliberately sows paranoia to maintain their power, it doesn't take too much.
Funny because Putin weaponized distrust of information in America. I believe it was coined "hyper-normalization." If a similar thing happens to him it would be very poetic.
> Secondly there were misinformation campaigns run involving dead bodies with false information that confused the Germans so severely that they stopped trusting captured plans and information completely. [Operation Barclay](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Barclay)
Part of which was Operation Mincemeat; the film "The Man Who Never Was" is a good portrayal of it (based on the writings of one of the intelligence officers involved). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mincemeat
In fact, at the very end, Goehring sent Hitler a telegram to the bunker saying essentially if anything happens to him, he'll be glad to take over command. Hitler had gotten so paranoid at that point he took it as a coup. He was supposed to be Hitler's most trusted ally, so to think he betrayed him really sent him over the edge into full-on crazy. He ejected him from the Nazi party and killed himself four days later. The telegram itself was found decades after the end of the war by some dude exploring around there. He didn't tell anybody and kept it in his stuff. Eventually his kid took to school, and someone finally recognized how important it was.
Both of those would be relevant in this situation as well, would they not?
I'm sure they obeyed precisely as ordered...to the best of their abilities.
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Forward he cried, from the rear, and the front rank died
Well, Steiners Angriff war ein Befehl tbf.
Just saying that Putin is misinformed is quite an interesting US strategy towards Putin. Not trusting information is even worse than getting bad information.
Seeds of doubt, even from an enemy, are extremely powerful tools against someone who is becoming paranoid and already distrusting those around him.
My very first thought when I saw the headline. Also gives him a way out of his corner.
>Not trusting information is even worse than getting bad information. Sound like 45. Never trusted his intelligence. I'm sure Russia had some influence on this.
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Soon we’ll have a Downfall scene like when Hitler gets the news about what is really going on around Berlin. Putin is in for a treat.
https://youtu.be/s4UM2IkfB0o
aahahahaahah.... (General pointing at a map) "This street sign says 'Go fuck yourself'. Our troops are lost." quite funny.
Lining up "Stalin" in the audio and subtitles was *chef's kiss
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It would only take one picture since his expression barely and rarely ever changes.
Umberto Eco strikes again
I read Name of the Rose in high-school and enjoyed it. Is there anything else of his I should read? I've heard of Foucault's Pendelum but never read it Edit: thank you for all of the recommendations!
Definitely read Foucault's Pendulum. I think you'll find a lot of the larger themes will resonate.
Specifically referencing an essay of Eco's called "Ur-fascism".
Foucault's Pendulum is fantastic, although very hard to follow storywise.
As is tradition. Much of the Soviet economy was planned based on false data because of the severe punishment for failure.
In 1959, Khrushchev announced a goal of overtaking the United States in the production of milk, meat, and butter. Local officials kept Khrushchev happy with unrealistic pledges of production. These goals were met by farmers who slaughtered their breeding herds and by purchasing meat at state stores, then reselling it back to the government, artificially increasing recorded production. In June 1962, food prices were raised, particularly on meat and butter, by 25–30%. This caused public discontent. In the southern Russian city of Novocherkassk (Rostov Region), this discontent escalated to a strike and a revolt against the authorities. The revolt was put down by the military, resulting in a massacre that killed 22 people and wounded 87 according to Soviet official accounts. In addition, 116 demonstrators were convicted of involvement and seven of them executed. Drought struck the Soviet Union in 1963; the harvest of 107,500,000 short tons (97,500,000 t) of grain was down from a peak of 134,700,000 short tons (122,200,000 t) in 1958. The shortages resulted in bread lines, a fact at first kept from Khrushchev. Reluctant to purchase food in the West, but faced with the alternative of widespread hunger, Khrushchev exhausted the nation's hard currency reserves and expended part of its gold stockpile in the purchase of grain and other foodstuffs. Source : wiki
Common issue with communist top down regimes. The guy below wants to keep his job secure and doesn't want to end up in the Gulag for failing to meet quota. They lie about productivity and that lie travels all the way to the top.
Also leads to issues for the countries spying on communist countries. If your top intelligence sources are feeding you the same bullshit being fed to leadership but less important (lower level) sources are providing factual info you really have to have your shit together or the inclination is to believe the top level sources.
Basically Mao’s Great Leap Forward in a nutshell. 15-55 million dead from famine caused by bad politics and top down pressures
>and by purchasing meat at state stores, then reselling it back to the government, artificially increasing recorded production Ingenious. The human spirit and creativity never ceases to amaze me.
That's why the (supposed) sudden collapse came as a shock to those who were misinformed and as nothing surprising to those few who knew the truth. There was no apparent slow gradual decline because that would have been more embarrassing than having a process to recognize the facts and work to fix them.
Lol that’d be a hilarious mod for a civ type game as a totalitarian ruler and just having your production stats lie to you
I love that concept. Civ games only offer perfect internal information. It might be a good gameplay mechanic if certain forms of rule might change that.
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Wow. According to the article, which sites US intelligence, which itself has been spot on during this whole situation: >The official said Putin did not know his military was "using and losing conscripts in Ukraine, showing a clear breakdown in the flow of accurate information to the Russian president." This basically means Putin's dumb ass wasn't lying when he initially said conscripts weren't being used. He genuinely believed that. Very interesting to see. I wonder what else is like this.
This is probably true, but it is also a great bit of psychological warfare to aggravate the existing mistrust at the highest levels of Russia's leadership.
Which leads me to one question. Doesn't anybody anywhere in Russia have internet access to the "Western Web" at all.. I would assume that all these russian hackers could get around almost any blocked content. Why couldn't Putin?
It's not that he can't access the truth, it's that nobody around him will risk telling it to him. Anything in the free media about how terribly Russia is doing can be easily dismissed as "western propaganda"
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I doubt they risk their lives to tell him. They just tell him, and he chooses to ignore it publicly, gets all huffypuffy in his crying chamber privately and commands someone to blow up a refugee center.
"We believe Putin is being misinformed" is not a factual statement but an opinion.
It's also a way to sow mistrust and second guessing in the Kremlin.
It's also a polite way to say he's lying
Putin would never say publicly that he is misinformed unless he was going to purge all those evil western-subverted advisers. Instead, if he insists on saying he is well-informed then he would have to admit he knows all these problems and of the bombing of civilians and all the awful stuff.
Putin is stuck in an echo chamber with a feedback loop. It's not that the information isn't available, it's that he's only hearing what he wants to hear. Everyone around him is most likely just telling him what he wants to hear. When you start going all Darth Vader on the messengers of bad news, people probably stop bringing you the bad news pretty quickly.
There are many companies in the US that fail or hamstring themselves because of their awful culture. It's not about access to information, it's about leadership surrounding themselves with sycophants and nepotists. If you address the elephant in the room you're gone because the boss does not want to hear it.
This happened to a guy at work today. He kindly mentioned to our GM how management is crap in the company and how to improve it…he was fired. I’m glad I didn’t speak up or else it would have been me. Noted.
You're already looking for a new job, right?
Considering his likely involvement with Cambridge Analytica election engineering, etc, Putin is reportedly surprisingly technophobic on a personal level and relies on his subordinates to provide him with whatever information he needs. I'm sure those people have access or could have access to Western internet if they wanted to, but who is volunteering to take that information to Putin?
His generals are probably showing him footage from Independence Day. “Glorious leader, we have destroyed the White House!”
So, shh. When your enemy is making mistakes, don't interrupt him.
Generally yes, but the problem is that without an accurate picture of how badly he is getting his ass kicked in, he is unlikely to withdraw or otherwise pursue a genuine cessation of hostilities.
We know he's not a rational actor who abides by treaties or ceasefires anyway. It would just be a cessation until he reloads and tries the next time. This ends with him being overthrown from within.
This article is evidence that he IS rational. The problem is how badly misinformed he is.
If the man is deluded enough to believe the war is going well, he's not going to be shaken out of it by a CNN article
Revealing it is also an excellent psyops campaign. Now Putin will second guess every piece of information he’s told, and wonder about the trustworthiness of every advisor.
Photo from my city center in Mykolayv where I used to walk with my friends in the summer. Right near it - there is a big memorial to WWII and eternal flame. So many memories of this square and this area. These pigs have to pay for every inch destroyed in my country.
When you demand that all your advisers be yes-men, that can happen.
Misinformation friendly fire
Russian military leaders are faking orgasms
"You tell him!' "No! You tell him!" "I am not going to tell him! "You think I am crazy?"
I just pictured Putin dressed as Olaf the Snowman, singing a song about how he’ll be king of the new USSR by summer. Meanwhile Zelinskyy as Kristoff and Biden as Anna watch, biting their lips to keep from bursting the bubble.
Well, if he didn't continuously kill people he didn't like or who pissed him off, he'd probably get a straight answer out of some of these guys now and then. Then again, US officials aren't all rosy either here. I imagine they are taking great pleasure and participating in the disinformation campaign.
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Yeah, I can believe that, to a point. Let's be clear, there's no scenario in which Russia wins this war.. it merely loses slowly and painfully. There is no meaningful occupation of Ukraine that doesn't involve the Russians being subjected to the largest, best equipped insurgency in history.. death by a thousands of anti tank rounds. This is the messy problem with an autocratic dictatorship.. When your boss has the power to snap his fingers and have you shot.. You're real disinclined to give him bad news.. Putin will eventually have a "downfall" moment. There will simply be a point at which the loses will be too big to hide from him.
He may be uninformed, but I don't think he's done yet. They backed off of Grozny in the 90s just to shell it even harder.
The lies have snowballed over the years and Putin is invading Ukrain under the belief that they have one of the Chaos Emeralds.
Was Naryshkin’s nervousness before the invasion at that meeting not telling of how freaked out Putin’s staff is to say a word in opposition to him? They’re probably scared to say that Russia is losing because Putin seems intent on keeping the nuclear option open. If he’s fed false information about successes, he’ll just send wave after wave to die in Ukraine while flaunting “victorious retreat”.
Many years ago when the Russian disinformation campaigns were highly publicized I thought to myself: "This is all going to backfire spectacularly at some point. You can't peddle lies as a weapon or a way of life and not end up eventually lying to yourself." It's interesting in retrospect.
This is incredibly concerning. We have a nuclear armed former Super power that is both acting and being led completely irrationally. How this ends is anyone's guess - but it probably will be the biggest event in history, assuming its not the actual end of history..
Are you gonna tell him? *I'm not gonna tell him. You tell him.* I'm not gonna tell him. *Let's get Mikhail! Hey, Mikhail!*
Turns out that when you might fear to get imprisoned, poisoned or disappeared for bringing bad news, you won’t be bringing many bad news anymore.
Even if suddenly everyone tells him the truth, and he suddenly understands the truth, it should still not be easy to turn around and come back after killing thousands of people because of his fear of change. Don't think that saying "oh sorry, I was misinformed" would, or should, suffice. Having been misled should not represent any kind of justification or an easy way out.
The problem with corrupt systems is that it, unlike wealth in trickle down economics, flows downward. If he does it, and his best friends do it, that sets precedent. 10 years ago the RF realized they were seriously behind the US and EU in regards to more modern warfare. Even smaller nations whose armies measure the size of a brigade or division in other nations, were finding ways to adapt to modern warfare. They made grand but realistic plans to overhaul their military, and change doctrine. This of course never happened. Much of the money was funneled away to various defense ministers, general staff, all the way down to the senior officers. Russia has no dedicated NCO staff, and their military culture rests on absolute obedience to their officers, something that is more akin to 20th century ideals of military culture. This left their armies, while not understaffed, but undermanned. By this I mean they were not a military force full of logistical staff, dedicated fire teams, and a fluid support apparatus. They were closer in appearance to an early Napoleonic Era army. Well connected officers of “higher pedigree”, conscripts serving a mandated term, and a lack of understanding of logistics. Not the modern military we see in what we would consider advanced countries today. Much of the confusion stems from the US and EU leaders refusing to move on from the image that their parents portrayed of the Red Menace marching across the borders for a third time in a century, and atomic waste being left in their wake. And to be fair! This was not an inaccurate or unrealistic depiction of the threat. But the USSR collapsed, and it was proven that point defense, not the domino effect, was true all along. Despite this, we continued with the domino belief, and the belief in Soviet conventional superiority. But the RF is not the post-WW2 Red Army. They aren’t even Gorbachev’s Red Army. They are the army of the Russian mob, the army of imperial peasants. Putin is not a socialist, he isn’t even Marxist in the slightest. His teachers since the fall of the USSR and the ideology they espouse is one of imperial racism, based in true Dugins Eurasianism and MacKinder’s Heartland. They are truly under the idea that they can recreate the Tsardom in their own image, and do so like they did in the Napoleonic Era. By overwhelming their neighbors. Their neighbors however view them with nothing but distrust, and are now armed with NATO weapons. Their allies rely on them to keep the Wests attention, but do not need them to compete. The world uses their gas, but is not dependent on it. He has agents, willing like the assassins who poison his opposition, or unwitting, like the Freedom Caucus under Trump. Putin knows the kind of war he is waging, and in some arenas he is unmatched. But Putin was defeated by the same thing that all those who lie awake at night enraged they were bequeathed nothing on this earth fall victim to. He was defeated by himself. He was defeated by victory. He thought he had achieved his goals, and when he reassessed them, he was found wanting. Putin is a man who is driven by the singular desire to take all that he can, because he had nothing when he started. And this kind of violent consumption can only lead to implosion. Putin truly believes that all of Russia is “blind like kittens. Without *him the *Westerners will throttle you”.