alanjjohnstone
Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
UK-based health data firm Airfinity said about 9,000 people in China were probably dying each day from Covid, nearly doubling its estimate from a week ago.
Cumulative deaths in China since 1 December likely reached 100,000, with infections totalling 18.6m, Airfinity said
Airfinity expects deaths to peak on 23 January with about 25,000 a day, with cumulative deaths reaching 584,000 since December.
Airfinity expects China’s Covid infections to reach their first peak on 13 January with 3.7m cases a day.
Most military thinktanks are right-wing in ideology. It goes with the territory and that it is staffed by war-hawks and arm industry lobbyists shouldn’t surprise anybody. I hardly expected the analysis to come from pacifists.
The point being made, though, was that your own prediction that Bakhmut was about to fall did not materialise despite constant Russian attacks with sophisticated weaponry such as thermobaric rockets and is now likely to happen. The failure is confirmed by British intelligence.
But war is fluid. Maybe the situation might change in the future for some reason. However, your own optimism was proved wrong.
Bijou Drains – I always recall my father angrily criticising some in his farm-labourer family and many other folks he knew for touching the forelock to their “betters”.
For a very long time in Scotland, workers in the countryside would always vote Tory. (Countryside Alliance?)
He had an ingrained hatred for the affluent “gentleman farmer”.
He recommended I get a copy of Thomas Johnston’s Our Noble Families to discover the truth of their noble history which I eventually did get hold of with a degree of difficulty because when he became a respectable Labour MP and Minister, Johnston did his best to destroy copies of his book.
TS – ““We can’t defeat them in all directions comprehensively. Neither can they,” he said.”
Wanna bet?”If I remember some weeks ago your prediction was that Bakhmut was in the process of being encircled and was facing imminent defeat.
The latest analysis by the Institute for the Study of War believe that Russia has reached a stalemate in Bakhmut, with “several indicators supporting the assessment that Russian forces around Bakhmut have culminated”. Russian forces may continue to conduct ineffective squad-sized assaults against Bakhmut, though these assaults would be very unlikely to make operationally significant gains.
https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-december-28
The situation may well be very different and return to the Russian’s favour when the Russians launch their long-anticipated Sring offensive using many of the newly trained mobilised reserves.
My bet, however, is that will still not be the end of the war. Nevertheless, it may create the conditions for negotiations.
A summary of the very first days of Ras-Putin’s war
In The Art of War, Sun Tzu says, “All warfare is based on deception.”
Kyrylo Budanov, the head of the Ukrainian military intelligence agency, dismissed Russia’s activities in Belarus, including the movement of thousands of troops, as attempts to make Ukraine divert troops from the battlefields in the south and east to the north.
A train loaded with Russian soldiers stopped in a location close to the Belarus-Ukraine border and returned, several hours later, with everyone on board.
“They did it openly during the day, so that everyone would see it, even if we didn’t want to,” adding that he saw no real, imminent threat from the troops in Belarus. “As of now, I don’t see any signs of preparations for an invasion of Kyiv or northern areas from Belarus.”https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-64109024
“The situation is just stuck,” Kyrylo Budanov told the BBC. “It doesn’t move.”
“We can’t defeat them in all directions comprehensively. Neither can they,” he said.
Nuclear Fusion? Is it all hype?
Chilean President Gabriel Boric’s announced that his country will open an embassy in the West Bank.
“We are going to raise our official representation in Palestine from having a charge d’affaires,” Boric said.
Chile boasts the largest Palestinian community outside of the Middle East with 300,000 members living peacefully alongside Chile’s 30,000 Jews.
When we and WHO thought it was all over
https://www.dw.com/en/china-more-than-a-million-could-die-from-covid-in-2023/a-64175560
300,000 people could die from COVID-19 infections by April 2023 and 1.6 million people could die by the end of the year.
“Infections are steeply on the rise and hospitals are overwhelmed. It’s quite [certain] that the situation is spiraling out of control, at least in Beijing and other big cities,” said Björn Alpermann, a sinologist at the University of Würzburg in Germany.
A prominent epidemiologist, Eric Feigl-Ding, tweeted that the situation was “thermonuclear bad.”
Feigl-Ding predicted “over 60% of China’s and 10% of the Earth’s population likely infected over the next 90 days. Deaths likely in the millions — plural.”
Flouting international law, Netanyahu’s new Israeli regime plans to legalise dozens of illegally built outposts and annex the occupied territory. It includes a commitment to expand and vastly increase government funding for the Israeli settlements in the divided West Bank city of Hebron. Bezalel Smotrich, a settler leader who leads the Religious Zionism party, is given a newly created ministerial post overseeing West Bank settlement policy.
Also included is discrimination against LGBTQ+ people on religious grounds, as well as generous stipends for ultra-Orthodox men who prefer to study instead of work.
Will such counter-violence get the Israelis to negotiate?
I don’t believe so. And we have decades of previous armed struggles to base that view on. The Lions Den is the latest and an expression of the frustration the Palestinians feel at the lack of any political progress.
Negotiations mean compromise and concessions on both sides.
What have the Palestinians got to bring to the table that Jewish-Israelis are interested in?
Urban guerrilla warfare?
For many Zionists this is exactly what they hope for, to acquire Israeli popular support to permit pogroms against the relatively defenceless Palestinian population.
What has Israel to gain from talks? Absolutely nothing.
They have no need for talks as they hold overwhelming dominance. They have a docile Palestinian-Israeli population inside Israel, a subdued West Bank run by the collaborationist and corrupt PA, and in Gaza a Hamas administration dependant upon the patronage of Qatar to function.
The US the only country with a degree of influence will not pressure Israel to reach any agreement with the Palestinians.
As I said previously, all this is basically cost-free to Israel. The ordinary Jewish-Israeli is as unaffected by the situation as the ordinary Russian citizen is by the Ukraine war.
There can be no victory for the Palestinians when the existing status quo works so well for Israel.
Armed struggle isn’t going to work. BDS is toothless unless nations enforce real sanctions, which they won’t. Migrant labour means the Israel economy isn’t as reliant on Palestinian labour as it once was.
Will things change? First there needs to be a shift in consciousness and that isn’t happening. Opinion polls show the attitudes of both sides growing increasingly polarised.
Taiwan will extend mandatory military service from four months to one year, President Tsai Ing-wen has said. Tsai said conscripts will also undergo more intense training, borrowing some elements from the US and other advanced militaries.
TS – “Actually, the allegation is that eastern-Ukrainians shot down the plane in their battle with Nazi coup regime forces.”
MH17 – A criminal investigation and a legal process have been completed.
A Dutch court in November after a 32-month trial found Russian nationals Igor Girkin and Sergey Dubinskiy and a Ukrainian, Leonid Kharchenko, guilty in absentia of bringing down the plane and the murder of everyone onboard.
Prosecutors concluded that the four men did not “press the button themselves” but were responsible for taking the BUK from Russia and deploying it on the battlefield.
Girkin, aka Igor Strelkov, was a commander of the separatist-backed forces in 2014. Dubinskiy is a former military officer of the GRU and held a senior role in the Donetsk separatist forces. Kharchenko was a commander of a combat unit in Donetsk and took his orders from Dubinskiy.
A third Russian national, Oleg Pulatov, a former officer in the Russian Spetsnaz, was acquitted of the charges due to a lack of evidence about his role in the firing of the missile.
Case closed.
Similarly, if one supports the unilateral annexations of Crimea and Donbass, Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem and Golan Heights can be equally as permissible. In reality, the West Bank is already effectively annexed.
If a pre-emptive strike by Russia was acceptable then the 1967 war by Israel was also in self-defence.
All sides in wars seek legal and moral justifications to bolster domestic approval. Seldom do they stand up to scrutiny.
The most important issue right now for the Palestinians is, as you say, to bring the Israeli government seriously to the negotiating table.
The question is whether increasing attacks on Israelis accomplish that. I happen to think it will not.
Another Intifada may have a degree of success especially if joined in a general strike by Arab-Israelis.
Some say the crucial element is the USA propping up Israel. If support was withdrawn, perhaps there might be progress.
Violence begets violence and Israel has the ability and has shown its willingness to inflict far more force than whatever the Palestinians can ever aspire to use.
I have said that I don’t hold out any hope of any resolution to end the conflict. Both sides have grown more entrenched in their respective nationalisms and deepened their prejudices.
Sometimes there is a slight glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel, but I catch only a fleeting glimpse of it before other events extinguish it.
MODERATOR NOTICE
1. The general topic of each forum is given by the posted forum description. Do not start a thread in a forum unless it matches the given topic, and do not derail existing threads with off-topic posts.I suggest True Scotsman be given the last word on the Israeli-Palestine conflict on this thread.
If any poster wishes to continue the exchange, a new topic should started.
