10 week “action” blog bucket #2 begins 2023 March 05 — reshape lifestyle (Amazon music library Prime shipping Prime video Plex.tv tv-stream/music better T-mobile quality data plan +35$/mo includes Netflix Prime music library), real retirement as after thought,
updated 2023mar12U11am
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Health non-routine:
10 - U boot gas Sakura Air4 gel rest able to shift with sandal M 269# V8 very tired like last week caught up apple no peanut butter 269# binge #3 ice chips cherries T two dumps promise return to normal began turmeric this week W R oats two jelly-filled milk cake apple peanut butter skipped boot for second time with risk injury sandal shifting F oats milk bread/butter donut apple peanut butter A TXRH foot pain and shifting is better for this third week of a six month healing adventure U
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Niceties non-routine:
10 - U M streamed Prime video Jim G. in car Eileen Jean update T arthritis talk W R Eileen came over from second shift bunko switch John/Jean encouraged sequencing not paralleling multiple malady Tx Jackie stroke Nancy says Hi Charlie shared that he had a current girlfriend Charles spry from gym workout did some sing along to Dock song Amazon Music froze F increased Tmobile 3G today took iPhone off silent on for weeks A got rid of cardboard box from trunk, Air4 moves closer to entertainment/backup old computer with seemingly healed screen, new U
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As-set Residence In Motion (RIM) non-routine:
10 - U M no COA M2 download/internet did migration at McD M2 is faster updated 13.2.1 T no messages in iCloud or M2 where app works M2 charges slowly got iMessages synced to M2 W iCloud Drive updated from Air4 and M2 R Air4 seems healed used for free music free video Sheen Hannibal Tmobile data plan is the quality pits F got into Netflix A Apple Personal Setup advises M2 w/power on 24hour wifi to solve no current texts on M2 then call back (hoping the problem would go away) got Apple to change forwarding texts from iPhone to M2 setting U
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Comment 23w10: Comfort eating chosen to ‘ease’ foot pain. Cruise Bypass construction daily. Perhaps cast instead of boot. May have lost some M+ blog info but it was posted to internet thus corrected. Real retirement was not the aim of the week, it resulted from the best salvage of a confluence of problems — an opportunity to reset/tweak Harv’s lifestyle. (1) car (2) climate (3) Sakura TXRH weekend rest (4) COA computer activity dine usually nap Walmart Roma tomatoes grapes (comfort/celebration binges should cease). U
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World War 3.
updated2023mar11A11am
In an early morning attack on targets across the country, Russian forces apparently added several hypersonic missiles, known as Kinzhals — or "Daggers" in Russian — to the lethal mix. Ukrainian forces say their defensive capabilities are not up to the task of taking out a Kinzhal.
Six Kinzhals were included in Thursday's attack, according to Ukrainian defense forces. Although Russia has used these weapons before, in the opening weeks of the conflict, Yuriy Ignat, an air force spokesman, told Ukrainian TV that the enemy had never fired so many of them in a single attack. Ignat said only 34 of the 81 total incoming Russia missiles were shot down.
For Putin, conditions for any kind of victory remain elusive, but there’s no indication he is ready for real talks. In his annual State of the Union address last month, he pinned blame for the conflict on the “Kyiv regime and its Western masters” and snarled defiance over the supposed inefficacy of Western attempts to isolate Russia’s economy. On the ground, Russia does not even fully control the four Ukrainian territories it illegally annexed last year, while U.S. and European officials remain insistent that a full Russian retreat is a prerequisite for a diplomatic solution. “To my view, it is necessary that Putin understands that he will not succeed with his invasion and his imperialistic aggression and that he has to withdraw troops,” German Chancellor Olaf Scholz told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria this weekend. “This is the basis for talks.” Russia’s military has lost half its tank stock and is wheeling out decades-old Soviet gear to the front lines. Russia’s relations with Europe have entered a deep freeze that could take years, perhaps decades, to thaw. If an expanding NATO posed a notional threat to the Kremlin before last year’s invasion, Putin’s gambit gave it far more teeth, bolstering the transatlantic alliance and pushing Finland and Sweden toward accession into NATO. At home, Putin and his allies doubled down on hard-line nationalism, squeezing the space for dissent further and “using the war to destroy any opposition and to engineer a closed, paranoid society hostile to liberals, hipsters, LGBTQ people, and, especially, Western-style freedom and democracy,”
In an Epic Battle of Tanks, Russia Was Routed, Repeating Earlier Mistakes
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) {Ukraine cost is 0.2%of US GDP} on Friday urged the United States and its allies to renew their resolve to help Ukraine as it stands up to Russian “thuggery,” tacitly pushing back against members of his own party who have become loudly skeptical of Ukraine’s fight as the conflict passes the one-year mark. “America and our friends need to finish waking up from our holiday from history, welcome Finland and Sweden into NATO by this summer, and make significant investments in military modernization and our defense-industrial capacities that are commensurate with the major challenges we face,” McConnell said in a statement, shortly before appearing alongside President Sauli Niinisto in Helsinki to support Finland’s bid to join NATO. The message marked a stark contrast to the one pushed by former president Donald Trump and some congressional Republicans, who criticized President Biden’s trip to Kyiv earlier this week and have called for ending or slowing aid to Ukraine. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/02/24/mitch-mcconnell-tells-us-wake-up-threat-russia-ukraine-war-anniversary/?utm_campaign=wp_post_most&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_most&carta-url=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.washingtonpost.com%2Fcar-ln-tr%2F3939193%2F63fa48711b79c61f87a8cf80%2F598b051fae7e8a68162a1429%2F27%2F72%2F63fa48711b79c61f87a8cf80&wp_cu=639b84fe3ddb27af65b99f6cacbf7a23%7CC0DBC114CDAE2BA7E0430100007FAD1A
One of the unanswered questions remains how, exactly, Prigozhin manages to operate openly, when mercenary activity is technically proscribed by Russian law. The New America report says groups such as Wagner are part of a “cartel-like structure” that intertwines them with the Kremlin, Russia’s power ministries, large state-owned companies, and Putin himself. “Although Russian citizens are prohibited by law from serving as mercenaries in foreign wars, a small number of Russia’s paramilitaries operate under a set of laws and executive decrees that allows them to provide services on contract to Russian state conglomerates that the Kremlin deems strategic in nature,” Rondeaux wrote. “These include Russia’s state arms conglomerate Rostec as well as energy industry giants Gazprom, Tatneft, Rosneft, and Stroytrangaz.
Analysts are now asking what options China might consider if it looks like President Putin is facing a humiliating battlefield defeat. Researchers in America say that Beijing is already supplying Russia with dual-use equipment, technology which can appear to be civilian but which can also, for example, be used to repair jet fighters. It has also not tried to hide the fact that it is buying up Russian oil and gas to make up for markets its neighbour lost because of sanctions which followed the invasion. In a way, the Kremlin is doing China's dirty work. It is draining Western military resources and putting pressure on Nato and if Russia's economy tanks because of it, does that really matter to Beijing? It will just need more Chinese products for the recovery afterwards. The problem is that Western countries have been quite united, Russia does not appear able to win and, increasingly, China is being seen standing side by side with a bully who forced a bloody, prolonged war on Europe. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-64735707
Bergen: How would you grade Putin in this campaign? Has he got anything right? Petraeus: Putin has earned a failing grade to date. Let’s recall that the first and most important task of a strategic leader is to “get the big ideas right” – that is, to get the overall strategy and fundamental decisions right. Putin clearly has failed abysmally in that task, resulting in a war that has made him and his country a pariah, set back the Russian economy by a decade or more (losing many of Russia’s best and brightest, and prompting over 1,200 western companies to leave Russia or reduce operations there), done catastrophic damage to the Russian military and its reputation and put his legacy in serious jeopardy. That said, we should not underestimate Putin. Putin still believes that Russia can “out-suffer” the Ukrainians, Europeans, and Americans in the same way that Russians out-suffered Napoleon’s army and Hitler’s Nazis. And the US and our NATO and western allies and partners need to do all that we can, as quickly as we can, to enable Ukraine and prove Putin wrong. https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/14/opinions/petraeus-how-ukraine-war-ends-bergen-ctpr/index.html
German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock on Monday called on Turkey and Hungary to quickly ratify Finland and Sweden's bids to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. “I made it clear over recent months with regard to all NATO members, especially the two who haven't ratified yet, that it is not only in the spirit of an alliance to ratify swiftly, but also that it will make us stronger as an alliance,“ Baerbock said during a joint news conference with her Finnish counterpart in Helsinki. The two Nordic countries announced their intention to join NATO in May 2022, ending decades of neutrality after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine caused a sudden shift in attitudes toward joining the bloc. (Harv thinks Nordics quickly realized the world war parallels presented.) https://www.cnn.com/europe/live-news/russia-ukraine-war-news-2-14-23/h_f31b9c1c8cc7724b1170f1ea228851c9 Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war has set off a historic exodus of his own people. Initial data shows that at least 500,000, and perhaps nearly 1 million, have left in the year since the invasion began — a tidal wave on scale with emigration following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991. Now, as then, the departures stand to redefine the country for generations. And the flood may still be in its early stages. The war seems nowhere near finished. Any new conscription effort by the Kremlin will spark new departures, as will worsening economic conditions, which are expected as the conflict drags on. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/02/13/russia-diaspora-war-ukraine/
...some Ukrainian units have been running short of munitions as the tempo of Russian operations has increased. “The key to success on the battlefield is effective fire damage, which requires an appropriate amount of weapons and ammunition,” said the commander of Ukrainian forces Valeriy Zaluzhnyi on Saturday. Analysts say the challenge for the Ukrainians is to resupply frontline units with shells and anti-tank missiles fast enough. Russian forces continue to have a distinct advantage in firepower. On Saturday they launched a barrage of thermobaric missiles at Vuhledar, a reminder that they are more capable of inflicting destruction than taking territory.
As the new year got underway in China, hopes appeared to be running high that an easing of tensions with the United States could unfold in the months ahead. China’s Foreign Ministry expressed as much late last month when it said China would “welcome” a visit from US Secretary of State Antony Blinken – an expected visit that analysts say Beijing viewed as an opportunity to help strengthen its economy and repair fraught diplomatic ties.
Steve Tsang, director of the SOAS China Institute at the University of London, said any surveillance operation involving US airspace would “almost certainly” have to get approval from top leadership, including Xi.
That suggests, according to Tsang, there was either a “total miscalculation” in which the Chinese leader and his advisers thought the US would not respond robustly to the balloon, or the top leaders failed to “join the dots” between various activities to realize dispatching a balloon would have the potential to impact the Blinken visit. “Xi wanted Blinken to visit and discuss issues of mutual interest. Xi is trying to patch up the economy after the disaster of the zero-Covid policy and US restrictions on semiconductors. So, he could not have wanted an incident over the balloon that would derail such a meeting,” he added. Chong in Singapore raised another possibility: Like many other big bureaucracies … the right hand may not know what the left hand is doing and there may be a simple matter of the lack of coordination,” he said. On Monday, China’s Foreign Ministry said the debris of the balloon does not belong to the US. “The airship is China’s, not the US’,” a spokesperson for the ministry said at a regular news conference, when asked about whether the US should return the remnants of the balloon to China. https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/06/china/china-response-suspected-spy-balloon-intl-hnk/index.html
Nearly 200,000 Russian troops have been killed or wounded in Ukraine, a stark symbol of how badly Vladimir Putin’s invasion has gone, according to Western officials. Moscow is sending poorly trained recruits, including convicts, to the front lines in eastern Ukraine to pave the way for more seasoned fighters, U.S. and allied officials say. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/02/us/politics/ukraine-russia-casualties.html
CIA Director William Burns. “The key is going to be on the battlefield in the next six months, it seems to us,” Burns said at Georgetown University. This involves “puncturing Putin’s hubris, making clear that he’s not only not going to be able to advance further in Ukraine, but as every month goes by, he runs a greater and greater risk of losing the territory he’s illegally seized so far,” the CIA chief said. Judging by the comments from senior Ukrainian government figures in the last few days, the government in Kyiv still doesn’t believe it has the military capability to achieve the kind of change to Putin’s mindset that Burns is describing. https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/03/politics/russian-escalation-western-arms-analysis/index.html Russia launched its bloody, full-scale invasion almost one year ago, prompting Western countries to send weapons and aid to the government in Kyiv. Speaking in Volgograd - the modern name for Stalingrad - Mr Putin hinted that he could seek to move beyond conventional weapons. "Those who hope to defeat Russia on the battlefield do not understand, it seems, that a modern war with Russia will be very different for them," the 70-year-old leader said. "We are not sending our tanks to their borders, but we have the means to respond. It won't be limited to the use of armoured hardware. Everyone must understand this."
Mr Putin was in Volgograd to mark the anniversary of the end of the Battle of Stalingrad, the World War Two conflict which saw the Soviet army capture nearly 91,000 German troops and turn the tide of the war.
Over a million people perished in the battle - the bloodiest of World War Two.
Throughout the war in Ukraine, Mr Putin has falsely sought to present Russia's invasion as a battle against nationalists and Nazis - who he claims are leading the Kyiv government.
"Again and again we have to repel the aggression of the collective West." But he vowed that while it was "unbelievable but true" that Russia was again being threatened by German tanks, Moscow had an answer for any country that threatened it. Volgograd was temporarily renamed Stalingrad for the day to mark the occasion, and earlier this week a new bust of the former Soviet leader Joseph Stalin was unveiled. Stalin - who led the Soviet Union between 1924 and his death in 1953 - was accused of orchestrating a famine in Ukraine between 1932-33. The event - called the Holodomor by Ukrainians - killed an estimated 5 million people and was recognised as a genocide earlier this week in Bulgaria.
The U.S. plans to send M1 Abrams tanks to Ukraine, officials said, a big step in arming Kyiv in its efforts to seize back territory from Russia. The White House is expected to announce a decision as early as Wednesday, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity. One official said the number of Abrams tanks could be between 30 and 50. https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/01/24/world/russia-ukraine-news?campaign_id=60&emc=edit_na_20230124&instance_id=0&nl=breaking-news&ref=cta®i_id=91739846&segment_id=123408&user_id=c169c5df23b5bd14a95e704d648953e4
Despite German efforts to pressure the U.S. into providing Abrams tanks to Ukraine, the Pentagon’s top leaders are against sending them, three U.S. officials said. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/top-us-officials-dont-want-give-ukraine-tanks-rcna66753
Germany's foreign minister Anna Baerbock has said she "would not stand in the way" of Poland if they were to send Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine. Ukraine has called on the West to provide the German-made tanks which they say will help them defeat Russia. But Germany is yet to provide the armored vehicles, and its export laws prevent other countries from sending theirs. On Sunday, Ms Baerbock said Poland had not yet asked for export permission. "For the moment the question has not been asked, but if we were asked we would not stand in the way," she told France's LCI TV on Sunday. Poland's Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said on Monday the government would request authorisation from Berlin. But he said Poland would send the tanks to Ukraine, even if it was not granted. ttps://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-64370165 The German government signaled it may send its own Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine if the U.S. also agrees to send Ukraine the M1 Abrams, with Chancellor Olaf Scholz insisting Germany will only act in concert with allies. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/01/23/nato-unity-ukraine-tanks-lloyd-austin/?utm_campaign=wp_post_most&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_most&carta-url=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.washingtonpost.com%2Fcar-ln-tr%2F38ed07b%2F63cec208ef9bf67b236e3aac%2F598b051fae7e8a68162a1429%2F55%2F73%2F63cec208ef9bf67b236e3aac&wp_cu=639b84fe3ddb27af65b99f6cacbf7a23%7CC0DBC114CDAE2BA7E0430100007FAD1A
The impressive unity of the Western alliance against Russian aggression has been marred in recent days by an ugly and unnecessary spat over whether Germany will send tanks to Ukraine. But while that dispute needs to be resolved pronto, it should not detract from the Biden administration’s success in keeping a large group of allies marching largely in lockstep. The United States has assembled such a massive coalition only twice before in recent history: first in 1990-1991 to defeat Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War and then in 2014 to defeat the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. Lloyd Austin led the latter fight when he was the four-star head of U.S. Central Command. Now, as defense secretary, he is one of the behind-the-scenes architects of the pro-Ukraine coalition. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-64391272 After weeks of reluctance, Germany has agreed to send Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine, in what Kyiv hopes will be a game-changer on the battlefield. Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced the decision to send 14 tanks - and allow other countries to send theirs too - at a cabinet meeting on Wednesday. What the hell is the West waiting for? In an extraordinarily powerful - and emotional - rallying cry, BORIS JOHNSON implores Britain’s allies to give Ukraine all the weapons it needs to win NOW. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11667727/BORIS-JOHNSON-sooner-help-Ukraine-victory-sooner-suffering-over.html
World War 3 comment ends here
