The Mariupol Plan

For years, many Americans weren’t able to connect the dots between Russia and Trump. It was obscured by that huge hissy fit that Trump made of the Steele Dossier. But it takes a historian to cut through the smoke and mirrors to piece it together and show that Putin just wanted Ukraine and was determined to get it. He used Paul Manafort, the campaign manager on Trump’s first run for president to do it. But it wasn’t Manafort’s first gig at setting up a country to be a vassal state of Russia.

Ukrainian defender in Azovstal steel plant, Mariupol, Ukraine 2022.

Here’s Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American who puts it all together.

The media really let us down.

UK MPs support rejoining the EU after Burnham speech.

“It’s happening, Reg! It’s really happening!!”

Yesterday, a petition with 100,000 signatures was delivered to the UK Parliament requesting to rejoin the EU after the UK voted for Brexit in 2016 and Andy Burnham suggested that talks at a November 20 EU/UK summit will explore options.

See, Keir Starmer, was that so hard??

Brexit has been a disaster for the UK and it comes on top of years of Tory imposed austerity.

What’s really hilarious and gobsmacking about Brexit is, aside from the lies that people like Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson spewed about the illusory benefits, you only had to do ONE ad to blow up the entire concept. It’s the one that says, just because you voted to leave the EU’s regulations doesn’t mean they’ll go away. If you do this thing, you’ll pay more to do the paperwork for goods to cross the trade barrier, BECAUSE THE EU IS YOUR CLOSEST GEOGRAPHIC TRADING PARTNER.

Use a visual aid, like a map, to drive home the point.

It’s like voluntarily imposing tariffs at Dover on everything that comes into and goes out of the UK. And the multinational corporations suffer not a whit. Do you think stock traders on the FTSE care about some fisherman in Scotland? No, they do not.

Get it done before the country looks too closely at the fine print that says, “thou shalt give up the pound for the euro and allow EU members from other countries to stay in the UK for up to 3 months at a time” Watch the 30% hard line Brexiteers lose their collective sh*t.

“Oh, we didn’t the Brexit that we got. We voted the other Brexit. Clearly, this Brexit suffered from faulty implementation.”

The UK media will hate it. The Brits will be climbing an uphill battle with roller skates on. But if it took a simple majority to get into this mess, then have a vote and let an overwhelming majority get yourselves out.

Acknowledge that Putin was behind it. Yeah, that’s the ticket! Blame it all on Vlad.

Give us hope on the other side of the pond.

Spelling it out to the Int’l media why Trump is buying Russian diesel.

European broadcasters are gobsmacked at Trump’s betrayal for his decision last Friday to buy Russian diesel. But Andy Burnham, recently elected prime minister in the UK has been hinting at the reason over the weekend without saying it directly.

Let me explain. This goes back to Ukraine bombing Yandex’s datacenters and wiping out 40+% of the bot traffic on X. Bots are active everywhere. I don’t like Facebook but I’m betting they’ve gotten around any roadblocks. Same with YouTube. Suddenly the number of pro Trump commenters seems to have gotten a lot quieter in the last few days.

Ukraine droned Yandex on Thursday, October 8, 2026.

The next day, October 9, Trump says we’re buying Russian oil. This after Trump recently bumped up the sanctions on Russian oil. The whiplash is striking. The Europeans are angry saying they feel betrayed. Welcome to the club.

Then on Saturday October 10, “Trump blamed Zelenskyy for high global energy prices, stated that Zelenskyy “better damn well stop” hitting Russian refineries, and remarked, “I think it’s time for Ukraine to get a new president… who can make a deal” (multiple YouTube sources)

Sure, sure. Russian oil refineries have been hurting for months and they now take their oil to Belarus to be refined. Lukashenko has been very good about that, charging Russia a nice premium for the service.

By the way, Trump also told Ukrainians that if they don’t stop using US intelligence for bombing targets in Russia, he’ll stop giving it intelligence. Yep, we give you intelligence but you’re not allowed to use it anymore or we’ll take it away.

Interesting. I wonder what Ukrainians were using it for?

Then Andy Burnham revealed that Russian bots and propaganda were partially responsible for Brexit, Britains worst Clusterf*ck since the English let their shield wall break at Hastings. They voted for Brexit in 2016, the same year that Russian bots flooded social media for Trump’s first “win”. They were busy little bots that year. And each vote won by a squeaker. The UK didn’t need an electoral college. Brexit passed by a sliver of a simple majority. He said the Russians interfered in the 2019 election as well.

He said that yesterday, October 11.

Let’s pull it all together and speculate based on timing and Andy Burnham’s revelation.

Trump is a notoriously thin skinned person with a relentless thirst for retribution against his perceived enemies. He also has an upcoming midterm a few weeks away where it is becoming more certain that he will lose support in the Senate as well as the House. He’s only been getting away with his authoritarian power grab and superpower suicide because Republicans rubber stamped everything he wanted to do. They gave him everything. After January, his protection is gone. Maybe he doesn’t care about that but he does care about not losing the midterms.

So, let’s say that Trump was relying on the Russian bots to work for him in the upcoming midterms. Some parts of the American electorate are still not picking up what they’re putting down. They’re easy to provoke and infuriate and infuriated voters go to the polls. He’s going to need more than he anticipated to vote for Republicans because they are extraordinarily unpopular.

Ukraine just took a significant amount of bot traffic offline.

That’s gotta hurt. Trump can’t afford to let even one voter sit it out.

So, Trump does what Trump has been known to do. He strikes back. In this case, he has two reasons for buying Russian oil. He needs to bring down the costs of transporting food and he needs to teach Zelenskyy a lesson. That’s why he’s buying Russian oil and cutting intelligence to Ukraine.

If I were to speculate even further, I’m guessing that Zelenskyy and his intelligence guy, Budanov, have gamed this out. Taking out the datacenters was a brilliant move because Russia is almost certainly going to step up the pounding on Ukrainian infrastructure. So why not make it harder for Russia’s asset in the US to win an election? If the Democrats win, Ukraine may be able to eke out a few more months of this war without collapsing its economy. When they take office, they’re more likely to take on Trump.

Will it succeed knowing Trump’s propensity to do whatever he wants regardless of what Congress says? His behavior suggests that he’s fearful of that exact probability. So, it could be a win for Ukraine if the bots are struggling to rile up its audience with outrage over trans athletes getting to play in women’s sports. Wait. What did I hear about Title IX recently?

That’s my theory and im sticking with it. Yes, Trump is a traitor to the international community, but probably not legally in the US. He’s done a lot of impeachable offenses in the last year though.

Are the broken glass Democratic voters incensed by this even more motivated to reverse this disgusting decision to help Russia destroy Ukraine? Absolutely. I predict this is going to backfire bigly. How would we know? Hmmm, I would expect Russia to dial it back until after the midterms so as to not draw attention to itself. You know, fewer bombings of busses and other outrages.

If course, I could be wrong. We’ll see.

Prepping for the midterms

I just realized I hadn’t updated this blog for a couple of weeks. It’s probably because I have other things on my mind like looking up simple woodworking projects, looking for fabrics for my basement projects, trying to put together a plan to clean out my garage before winter settles in, prepping for chaos during the midterms. As one does.

I woke up this morning to some interesting news. Ukraine hit a major Russian data search provider, Yandex, knocking out 2/5 data centers. This happened a couple of days ago on October 8. Cloudflare has already noticed an astonishing effect on Bot activity on X. Check it out:

Another couple of hits like that and we might actually be able to communicate with each other without a lot of bad guys poking us into pie fights on the internet. I’d like to know how this will affect the midterms if the Russian bots can’t spread a lot of misinformation. Will the GOP be able to make up the difference?

The press better think of something fast. The DOJ has decided to investigate the biggest news names in the press pool for (don’t laugh) antitrust violations. I know. This comes a week after paramount solidified its merger turning cbs and cnn and all its local affiliates into Sundance. Hilarious.

It’s hard to feel sorry for the press these days. It really saw a business opportunity when it came to covering Trump. Now, all the great anchors and reporters have decamped to the web. So far, the powers that be haven’t gotten to independent news outlets but don’t underestimate the Trump administration.

Do you feel the chaos building? The big orange is starting to lose it. Right about now is when early voting is happening around the country and Trump has lost almost every one of the cases he took to the USSC to suppress the vote. But he’s still got a lot of surprised in his bag of tricks.

So be prepared for anything. Have alternate forms of communication in case there are internet disruptions, watch out for sudden unexpected detours to polling places. Mine is within walking distance. Look out for swarms of poll watchers. The nice thing about living in PA for voting is we now have paper trails and there are thousands of precincts. Trump would have to send out a metric ton of ICE agents and for once in the last decade, PA isn’t in play. We also don’t have any vote tabulating machines directly connected to the internet. We don’t even have e-pollbooks where election workers can check you in. You still have to sign in on paper in a binder.

The only loophole is in mail in ballots where you can have someone else witness your vote and pay you accordingly. That could still happen but that could happen in any state and probably doesn’t unless you’ve got a trillionaire friend who can spend hundreds of millions of dollars to help you win. That’s probably what Trump meant when he said mail-in ballots are susceptible to fraud. He would know.

Anyway, be prepared for anything. Now is about the time when a panicky Trump is expected to pull something that will make the authoritarian followers quiver with fear for their lives. Timothy Snyder says terrorist attacks happen in situations like this. Putin bombed apartment buildings and killed a lot of people. He blamed it on the Chechens but we know it was him.

Speaking of Putin, now is about the time when he “grinds Ukraine into a fine, fine ash” as Julia Ioffe would say. He’s only got a couple of months to wrap this up before Congress turns over and the possibility of getting rid of Trump happens. This time, Congress HAS to act. Get it done fast.

I’m wondering now if Putin’s deal with Trump on diesel has anything to do with a threat on OUR data centers, infrastructure and financial systems. These days companies spend a lot of time and money scraping their systems for vulnerabilities and remediating them asap. But state actors are clever and motivated. Putin wants to stamp out democracy in Europe and disabling the US as an ally turned out to be an achievable goal. Who knows what are tech bros are planning.

Ok, I don’t mean to get apocalyptic. All I’m saying is don’t let your situational awareness slip. There really are ax murderers out there who want to destroy this country and they’re getting close to doing it. So stock up, replenish your prepper pantry, check your batteries in your bug out bag. Make sure you have cash, a paper map and a plan in case there is unrest where you live.

Plan, plan, plan. Luck favors the well-prepared. Run fast, run far in case of plague. A stitch in time saves nine. Live to fight another day. And all that.

Dominic Crossan, Naomi Klein and Peter Thiel.

This is bad, like snakes in a toilet.

Recently, Peter Thiel gave an interview saying the evil isn’t necessarily bad. Evil could be good because it make things happen.

It’s not lacking context. This is what Christian end timers believe as well. Take Trump for example. The Christian end timer knows Trump is evil. He’s the worst of the worst. He breaks every commandment. He’s cruel. He’s corrupt. But they are ok with it because god is using him as an agent. And what is agency? The ability to get things done. So the worse he makes living conditions here abd around the world, the closer we get to being saved by Jesus’s second coming.

That reminded me of that video on Fundamentalism by Dominic Crossen, the Jesus scholar, who said:

Now comes Naomi Klein who is doing a thought experiment on why the tech bros are so obsessed by bunkers. She calls it end times fascism and how it differs from regular fascism is the leaders of this movement aren’t using the tools of the state to deliver something of value to its base this time. They are offering nothing because they don’t need the base anymore.

Fascinating interview. Whatever you think about Naomi Klein, she was right about disaster capitalism. This time? It’s about the coalition of tech bros and fundamentalists and survivalist libertarians speeding things up. Peter Thiel is advocating using evil to break the log jam of dogooders who are holding this system of things together.

Let’s hope the midterms are going to work more or less as intended because the Thiels of the world need to be stopped. It’s interesting that he calls his company Palantir because looking into the future and seeing nothing but catastrophe is what Tolkien warned about when he created the Palantir. The danger is that someone else will create a vision for you that feeds on your greatest fears and leads you to self destruction instead of to the light.

Here’s Naomi Klein on End Time Fascism.

Containment

Richard Gere, bless his heart, gave an interview recently where he says who would have thought the US would allow a maniac to take over the government and then very quickly destroy it. Then he turned around and blamed the rest of us for not speaking out before it happened.

Where has he been?? Was he not paying attention when Hillary Clinton was mocked for calling Trump’s red hats deplorables? Has there ever been a more accurate description? What about the Women’s March that happened three years in a row? How about the millions of us who lost friends and family members to the head deplorable who used every sophisticated cult technique to make his followers resist any communication from the real world and to stop them from thinking. How about Stephen Colbert who night after night warned the entire country about how awful “the former guy” was?

Richard Gere is sincere but a very naive person if he thinks anyone of us by ourselves or collectively could have gotten through to half the country who voluntarily joined a cult.

Take it from someone who grew up in one: cult members won’t leave until they feel personally betrayed. And many will never leave because they experience the sunk cost fallacy. They’ve spent so much of their lives and sacrificed so much and enmeshed themselves with the organization they willingly joined that they can’t leave without tearing themselves apart and leaving the family and friends who have been their cult companions for decades.

Not only that but even after the cult breaks up and leaves only the most faithful and deluded behind, or the ones who benefit from the exploitation of others, there will be no way to change them. Studies have shown that some people will believe false “evidence” even after the experiment ends and they’ve been shown it’s false. They are already invested in the lies. Think of all the people who won’t vaccinate their kids because some doctor in the UK published a paper about the MMR vaccine. He stood to benefit from that and even when it was proved false over and over again there are still millions of people who believe the vaccine causes autism and now kids dying from measles.

It’s almost like Trump went looking for people like that. You know, the ones who bought into the Great Replacement Theory or military gun nuts who wanted to prove how tough we were or that Christianity was under attack or that the libtards were trying to force everyone to have abortions or knew nothing about family values.

He went after those people and fed them lies because they believed them without question and created a community from them. They are, or were, the new E Pluribus Unum and when your own national mythology is used against that same nation not to create unity but to tear it apart there was nothing any of us could do about it until it burned itself out like some great awakening where the believers sold everything they owned to wait out an apocalypse that never saved the world.

We are living the slow defeat. Some people are leaving the cult because they now see that all the sacrifices they made for a lie have come back to bite them. The actual destruction is yet to come. But the rest of us can’t go back in time to recapture the beautiful parts. We can only go forward to save what is left.

But for the rest of them? That 30ish % that will never leave Trump and will blame the rest of us for stabbing him in the back? They are always going to be with us. We will not change them. They look for a leader to give them certainty because they fear so much. And the bad guys are always going to prey on that fear to make them restless and activate them with a new uniform whether it’s a red hat or a swastika or a cockade. They will do dreadful things.

We can’t change them. We can only contain them.

I hope the media who had such a field day over the last 10 years has learned its lesson. It spent a lot of time doing field studies of the creatures in the back of beyond diners, listening to them spew their unsophisticated hickish view of the world. It was all fun and games to mock Hillary Clinton and tell us all how unlikeable she was until we had our maps changed and lost our press passes, our safe food and quality of life.

Containment is a responsibility, it takes great effort and you can never stop doing it. The minute you let your guard down, some new manifestation, like the AfD in Germany, will be reborn with a new name. This is the lesson we needed to hear from Gere, a recognition about what we are truly up against for eternity. It’s not enough to speak up, we need to structure our cultures in a way that makes this monster hard to awaken.

Omens

A curious thing has happened in the last few days that is “an instance of the fingerpost”. Some high profile Republicans have endorsed Democratic candidates.

Two notable endorsements were from Monae Johnson, Secretary of State in South Dakota and Karl Rove in Texas who is voting for a Democrat for Texas Railroad Commissioner.

In endorsement of Terence Davis over Republican Heather Baxter, a Trump toe sucker, Johnson wrote:

… she was endorsing Davis “with full understanding of what this endorsement may cost me” because he is the “candidate best prepared to protect the office and serve South Dakota with seriousness, steadiness, and integrity.” She urged voters to “to look beyond the letter beside a candidate’s name.”

Baxter is an election “integrity” nut case who seems to think South Dakota needs post election audits and hand counts. She won her party’s nomination by a very slim margin.

Rove’s endorsement was, well, almost unbelievable. This was George W. Bush’s Rat Fu#%er. I can think of few people I detested more than Karl Rove in the Bush years. His gleeful ruthlessness in campaigns for Bush enabled the unitary executive theory that Trump took advantage of.

Even though his endorsement is only for the Texas Railroad Commissioner, which may seem like low hanging fruit, the message couldn’t be clearer. Maybe he can’t go as far as endorsing other Democrats in Texas without drawing the wrong kind of attention from Ken Paxton but Rove is a master manipulator.

Our tin foil antenna should start to twitch right about now. Something’s coming. There are also Republicans in Congress who are starting to become restless. Thomas Massie side-swiped Mike Johnson last week when he entered articles of impeachment against Pete Hegseth. Johnson immediately closed up shop in the House and sent everyone home until after the election. That could be because of campaign season but I think Johnson doesn’t want anyone staring at the other droids that are starting to break away and join Massie. If Massie is not exceptional, that’s a signal that the Republican Party is starting to fracture. It’s one of the signs that an autocrats’ reign over a party is coming to an end and Johnson is trying desperately to prevent us from witnessing it.

Over in the Senate side last week, Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent was grilled by Senator Sean Casten about where the oil money from Venezuela is going. My SWAG about 6 months ago was that it was going into a private account in Qatar. I was kidding but it looks like that’s where it is going along with a good bit of Venezuelan gold. That’s right. We are cleaning out Venezuela’s Fort Knox. Take that in for a second.

You know, if we get enough senators in November, we can impeach Trump’s ass by February and this time he could get convicted.

As his power slips through his grasp, he’s going to lash out and blame us for destroying his beautiful wickedness. With the spike in diesel prices pushing the cost of everything, it’s going to get really ugly.

“Let all the poisons that lurk in the mud hatch out.”

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More on my French Connection:

I recently traced my roots back to 1695 in different parts of Europe and the person I find most interesting is on my paternal grandmother’s side. Our ancestor was an 18 year old woman who left Reims, France in 1793. That was the height of the Terror and Reims was particularly vulnerable because of its connection to the coronations of French kings and its location close to Belgium.

To escape from France in 1793 took nerves of steel and a lot of money. If she had been caught, she would have been executed and all her family’s property confiscated. Her likely route would have gone through Belgium and then by sea to England abd eventually Londonderry, Ireland that made and traded textiles. That’s probably her family’s trade in Reims as well.

She didn’t stay there long. She met her husband, a descendent of gallowglasses, in Ireland. In 1796 they immigrated to America. The French were about to invade Ireland and spread the Revolution. Or at least that was the plan. It didn’t happen but it freaked them out enough that they sold everything in Ireland and left for the edge of the frontier in Fayette County, PA.

Fascinating.

My family has been here longer than the Trumps.

Anyway, here’s an episode from The Rest Is History about Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette who also tried to escape the French Revolution through Belgium. Spoiler alert: they didn’t make it.

Why Buffalo Sang O Canada

It’s easier to sing?

It’s like telling your cousins you’re still there for them?

Because 10,000 Canadians are season ticket holders?

Jeez, MAGA, you guys have CDS. Get a grip.

Taking bets

There’s a protest growing at the Kennedy center, it’s a nice Friday night in the Northeast and MAGA is going down.

Somebody’s going to climb that scaffold, rip the curtain off, and tear Donald Trump’s name off the building before the weekend is over.

Donald and the terrible, horrible, no good very bad week

Adam Kinzinger sums up how much money Donald Trump has spent trying to bring the country under his control.

By the way, the thing with the Kennedy Center is particularly weird. Trump seems manically envious of a memorial to a president who was assassinated. What’s that all about? And how did JFK get under Putin’s skin?