This post can be considered to be the extended footnotes for my fiction. Many of the comments were written shortly after the publication of the relevant story, with some of them having aged.
The demise and resurrection of North Korea is my hopeful vision of an implosion of North Korea. Originally it was the main narrative of a larger story called The war of immiscible ideas which was presented in multiple chapters. Looking back with 20/20 hindsight, it is obvious that TWOII was a terrible name, though not nearly as bad as Saucy Mugwump. I updated the narrative to reflect current events, added some characters, and improved the writing. It all started with a BBC News story on South Korean women becoming military officers after the sinking of the Cheonan and other provocations by North Korea. The concept of historical fiction came from B.R. Myers' book, The Cleanest Race, which noted that North Korea publishes sycophantic historical fiction regarding the life of Kim Il-sung, though I took it in a decidedly different direction. I continued my research in Could an implosion of North Korea result in WWIII? which speculated on the events which would follow a collapse of the DPRK.
Originally, Bling Ka-ching was meant to be a rip-off of Jang Song-thaek, Kim Jong-un's uncle, but I made him a minor character, the mayor of Pyongyang, after he was executed. Jang's real-life wife is Kim Kyong-hui who became Kim Tip-ple in the story. She is reputed to be an alcoholic and in poor health. The mayor and Aunt Kim are not related, though her snickering at dog food refers to the apocryphal story of him being eaten by dogs. Yoo Tok-ki (whose name was created using the Korean word for rabbit) was the woman seen in a surreptitiously filmed North Korean video, with her frail body just about to give out. The use of Anna Göldi is a sick joke considering she was actually the last person executed for allegedly being a witch in Europe. The scenes involving orphans originated from stories in Radio Free Asia, the Telegraph, and PBS Frontline. The torture house originated from descriptions from North Korean defectors. "Deep into the darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing" is a line from Edgar Allan Poe's poem The Raven. I obtained a point of view of China from a dissident, Bao Tong, via his Under House Arrest column. Christian Talvela is, of course, my Jack Ryan, albeit with little explanation of his background. This story just might be the longest blog post on the Internet.
The take-down of the labor camps was intentionally sparse because, for me, the immediate aftermath is the most interesting portion. Also, I do not believe I could do justice to the dynamics of a raid along the lines of the one at Son Tay. That said, it is fairly well accepted that prisoners in the labor camps would be executed during an implosion. A UN report stated that guards "received orders to kill all prisoners in case of an armed conflict or revolution so as to destroy the primary evidence of the camps' existence." The report "also explained that specific plans exist on how to implement the order and that drills were held on how to kill large numbers of prisoners in a short period of time." Kim Il-sung was the creator of that strategy, as well as for Songbun, the DPRK's caste system, and the scheme where one's relatives suffer the same punishment as the accused.
From a project management point of view, the removal of Kim is critically essential. He would need to be killed or at the very least, arrested and jailed, but Kim Jong-un has personal bodyguards in the Guard Command. Soldiers from the 43rd Infantry Brigade recently fired on a vehicle carrying soldiers from the Guard Command, killing one of them. As RFA noted, Kim "came unglued" and replaced the entire leadership of the Brigade. It is likely that the Guards are pampered and therefore loyal to Kim, in contrast to the Brigade which is a special forces unit. To eliminate Kim, one would need to penetrate the Guards. Given the problems with the Brigade -- "Gunfights within the army show how lack of discipline has become a serious problem," said a source -- perhaps there is great resentment within the regular army for the special treatment of the Guard. Or perhaps this was merely an incident of soldiers choosing to shoot rather than risk subsequent dereliction of duty charges if the vehicle had contained a lesser class of North Korean, similar to what happened in 2008 to when a South Korean female tourist walked over a forbidden line at the Mount Kumgang tourist resort.
China would not readily relinquish control of North Korea. As I first mentioned in North Korea is China's useful idiot, China uses North Korea as a buffer zone against the West. North Korea's rare earths deposits are essential to keeping China's industry humming. China has done whatever it took to maintain the status quo in the DPRK, including deporting North Korean refugees back to almost certain death, as my posts In memory of nine North Korean orphans and China is murdering North Korean refugees noted. And both China and Russia covet North Korea's ice-free port of Rajin. A likely scenario, in a Chinese remake of Sherman's March to the Sea, is that Chinese armored forces blaze a trail east, with the people trapped north of Chinese forces possibly doomed to die of starvation while the armies danced. U.S. and ROK forces intervening to prevent mass starvation could easily trigger a five-way war, including Russia trying to safeguard its railway to Rajin, given that China would not negotiate any line of demarcation and would demand that interlopers leave immediately.
Sixty years after the armistice that ended the fighting in the Korean War, there could be as many as 500 South Korean soldiers still being held captive by the DPRK, with Seoul doing little to obtain their release. And defectors from North Korea continue to inform us of the true nature of the DPRK, while apologists such Dennis Rodman and Alejandro Cao de Benós de Les y Pérez continue to deny the horrors there.
Operation Forget-me-not was originally published in October 2014, but I substantially rewrote it and republished it. The notes below are mostly from the original posting, but Embrace Kurdistan; purge Turkey from NATO contains a plethora of recent links concerning the subject. In that post, I mentioned al-Nusra, the al-Qaeda franchise in Syria, which likes to pretend it is "al-Nusra, the moderates." In truth, al-Nusra is just one of many brutal Islamist groups. with nearly half of Syrian "rebel" fighters being jihadists or hardline Islamists. The fact that Israel has been treating wounded al-Qaeda fighters is all the proof we need to put a permanent halt to aid for Israel.
The story describes what we should do for the Yazidi girls and women who have been kidnapped by Islamic State (a/k/a Daesh). Life is hell for everyone living under the medieval boot of Daesh, but especially for Yazidis. We should have rescued them as soon as they were taken, especially since they are now being sold in Islamic slave markets. There are many online articles regarding the kidnapped Yazidi females, but readers can peruse some of the best ones here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
"The international community isn't investigating. They don't believe such a large number of women have been kidnapped by IS," said minority expert Khidher Domle, with that number being around 3000. He has been able to talk to several captive Yazidi females via mobile phones. He verified that girls as young as nine have been sold as sexual slaves.
France24's Leela Jacinto blogged that rape-tourism is a prime reason why IS has specifically enslaved Yazidi girls, with most IS savages joining because it is their only chance to rape many girls, especially virgins. She noted that the IS publication "The Revival of Slavery Before the Hour" ends with the authors pining for the good old days of slavery and includes the following justification: "The desertion of slavery has led to an increase in fahishah (adultery, fornication, etc.), because ... a man who cannot afford marriage to a free woman finds himself surrounded by temptation and sin ... many Muslim families who have hired maids to work at their homes [face this problem] whereas if [the maid] was his concubine, this relationship would be legal."
This was not the first time that Islamists targeted Yazidis. In August 2007, al-Qaeda detonated four simultaneous car bombs, killing 796 and injuring 1562. It was the second-worst terrorist act in history, with only the 9/11 attacks surpassing it. The Yazidis did not release casualty breakdowns, but this was probably the largest death toll of children in the history of terrorism, exceeding even that of Beslan. Yazidis are specifically targeted because they are not "Peoples of the Book," i.e. Jews and Christians.
The Iraqi army is giving its military equipment to Daesh at a staggering rate. The Iraqi army's 30,000 soldiers in Mosul fled in the face of about 1,000 Daesh fighters. Ramadi was the same, where 10,000 Iraqi soldiers fled in the face of 400 Daesh fighters. And yet we continue to give Iraq Humvees, Mine Resistant Armored Personnel carriers, M1A1 Abrams tanks, howitzers, and trucks, not to mention mountains of ammunition.
Obama announced support for Free Syrian Army and Syrian Revolutionary Front, with the former being the group with which John McCain posed for photos, but they are not rebels from a Western point of view. The latter allied itself with al-Nusra in the past because both have the goal of removing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad from power, but al-Nusra is a franchise of al-Qaeda. Both groups applauded U.S. bombing of Daesh, yet they decried bombing of al-Nusra. Air strikes against Daesh were denounced by al-Nusra as "a war against Islam." Many people are opposed to arming any Syrian groups because it is likely that their arms will end up in the hands of Daesh just like it was able to acquire stockpiles of weapons from the Iraqi army after its soldiers ran away like little girls.
There is a growing movement to kick Turkey out of NATO for its explicit support of Daesh (view France 24 video of Daesh recruits crossing the Turkey-Syria border). Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his predecessors have fought with Kurdish groups for many years even though Kurds and Turkey are both Sunni. Erdogan dislikes Syria's Assad because Erdogan is an Islamist Sunni and Assad is Alawite, a version of Shia, with Assad having the audacity to crack-down on Sunni "rebels" who threaten his hold on power. Erdogan supports Daesh even though it has buried alive some of its victims, including women and children, as well as sexually enslaving hundreds of women and girls. He has refused to allow the U.S. to use Incirlik air base to fight Daesh, even though it is by far the closest base. Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that the vehicle used in the latest car bombing came from Turkish territory.
Erdogan has not forgotten to pamper himself, having just unveiled his new presidential palace with 1,000 rooms, costing in excess of $615 million and built in a national forest, similar to how Russian President Vladimir Putin built a personal palace on the Black Sea. Erdogan gave us a window into his soul when he ludicrously proclaimed that "Muslims discovered America in 1178, not Christopher Columbus." He gave us another with his misogynist comment: "You cannot put women and men on an equal footing. It is against nature." He referred to a female journalist as a "shameless woman," telling her, "Know Your Place!" He pines for the return of the Ottoman Empire, just as Putin pines for the return of the Soviet Union, with Assad stating that "he [Erdogan] personally thinks that he is the new sultan of the Ottomans and he can control the region as it was during the Ottoman Empire under a new umbrella. In his heart he thinks he is a caliph." There's a lot of that going around today.
Erdogan's war against Kurds is typical of his hypocrisy. He declared in front of a Turkish audience in 2008 in Cologne, Germany: "I understand very well that you are against assimilation. One cannot expect you to assimilate. Assimilation is a crime against humanity." Yet Turkish leaders have insisted for years that Kurds are not actually a separate people, called them instead "mountain Turks," prevented them from speaking Kurdish, and forced them to assimilate into Turkish society.
Erdogan and Obama are two peas in a pod. In his first presidential campaign, the latter promised to recognize the Armenian Genocide in which almost two million Armenians, Assyrians, Greeks, and other non-Muslims were annihilated by the Ottoman Empire starting in 1894 with the Hamidian and Adana Massacres, but then he failed to make good on his promise. He had another chance with the Armenian Orphan Rug, woven by 400 Armenian orphan girls living in exile in Lebanon. It was originally given to Calvin Coolidge in 1925, with his family donating it to the U.S. government in 1982. Since then it has mostly been in storage. It was scheduled to be displayed at the Smithsonian in 2013, but the Obama administration cancelled it for reasons of their own, but certainly having to do with the fact that Turkey denies that its ancestor, the Ottoman Empire, committed genocide. The rug is now on display in the White House Visitor's Center, but it is mixed together with other foreign gifts to the White House in a display called "Thank You to the United States: Three Gifts to Presidents in Gratitude for American Generosity Abroad."
After a woman is raped in Islamic countries, she has little chance of marriage, with rape victims viewed as outcasts, even as prostitutes. Obama could give these girls and women a second chance by opening the immigration door to non-Muslims, especially Yazidis and Christians (Coptics, Armenians, Assyrians, and others) who have been the victims of Islamists. He should even things out by closing the door to any more immigrations by Muslims, as we have had too many instances of local jihad as it is.
The last work day at the last factory in America mixed recycled and new jokes in a highly politically-incorrect, governmental farce. In many ways I came full circle back to my first published fictional story, a farce on the subject of religion, only then I was skewering the right. I borrowed the names of journalists Veracious Tidings and Doughty Communique from my previous stories because I find them to be amusing. Prissy Lipsmacker is a thinly veiled reference to Valerie Jarrett, the agenda-driven advisor to and personal friend of Barack and Michelle Obama who has Secret Service protection in violation of federal law. Aqua Buddha is a transparent allusion to Senator Rand Paul. His father, Ron Paul, has said on occasion that we should return to the gold standard, but has also said that we should sell all the gold to pay off the debt (we can only do one or the other). Heidi Fleiss, a/k/a the Hollywood Madam, was the role model for Procurable Beaver, the secretary of the "interior." The name of a famous liberal is hidden in Dijon Ragoutart, but you will need a basic knowledge of French to find it.
The idea for an LGBT wearing a wedding dress came from a regular Internet poster on a legal blog who referenced a homosexual brother who always wanted to wear their mother's wedding dress. As the poster described it, that habit eventually became a major problem because he could not control his urges to wear it. The few references to a beard on a person wearing a dress originated from the bearded, dress-wearing winner of the 2014 Eurovision contest, whose stage name is Conchita Wurst, with "Conchita" being South American slang for a vagina and "Wurst" being the German word for sausage. The reference to a transvestite using a lavatory intended for women came from an incident in Idaho where one would pee standing up in a grocery store lavatory, with women naturally complaining. If he truly self-identifies as a women, shouldn't he pee sitting down?
The book And the Band Played On by Randy Shilts, a gay journalist who later died from HIV-AIDS, described the scene in San Francisco bath houses, where gay men participated in rampant, unfettered sex, including the use of anonymous "blowholes," which resulted in an explosion of HIV-AIDS. Shilts put a lot of the blame for the HIV-AIDS explosion starting in the late 1970s on the media and local governments, but the lion's share of the blame must be placed on gay and bisexual men who have always been responsible for the vast majority of new HIV-AIDS infections.
My neighbor across the street in our suburban neighborhood for a time was an unfriendly, twenty-something man. On Saturday, Sunday, and Monday mornings, I saw an ever-changing car in his driveway, into which a young man would enter and drive away. One man, a slicked-back guy driving a White Toyota Camry, returned a few times. One day a woman appeared and became a regular fixture, with the oblivious couple selling the house soon afterward to live where his habits were not known. I'll bet my bisexual neighbor never told her of his nocturnal adventures, even though he was at great risk of contracting HIV-AIDS.
Similar to what we do with people under house arrest using GPS ankle bracelets, we should install GPS penis bracelets on bisexuals to prevent them from having sex with women, as it is clear that most cases of HIV-AIDS for women originate from bisexual men too selfish to admit their other life. This is manifested in statistics. The CDC found: "Gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men (MSM) represent approximately 2% of the United States population, yet are the risk group most affected by human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). In 2010, among persons newly infected with HIV, 63% were MSM; among persons living with HIV, 52% were MSM." Frighteningly, fewer than half of HIV-infected gay and bisexual men in the U.S. took prescribed HIV-AIDS medications in recent years, preferring to spread their "gay disease" like Gaetan Dugas, the Air Canada flight attendant who intentionally did so in the early 19080s before dying of an AIDS-related disease.
Apple and groupies thereof clamor for special rights for LGBTs, yet as I wrote before (read here and here), Apple does not appear to be concerned with the lives of its Asian workers, having indirectly killed at least 18 of them in the past five years, while Apple's direct competitor, Samsung, finds a way to keep its employees alive. Why are LGBTs more important than Asians or the middle class for that matter especially given that the percentage of LGBTs in the U.S. is at least one order of magnitude smaller than seen on television? But we probably should not expect too much logic from a generation which eagerly participates in sunburn art.
The LGBT community is celebrating the Supreme Court decision on gay marriage, but we have a much more important issue to debate, that of gay adoption. One NCBI study found that the "hypothesis that gay and lesbian parents would be more likely to have gay, lesbian, bisexual or unsure (of sexual orientation) sons and daughters was confirmed." The study "suggests intergenerational transfer of sexual orientation can occur at statistically significant and substantial rates, especially for female parents or female children." A later study found that "adult women who had gay or bisexual fathers suggested that they were significantly less comfortable with closeness and intimacy, less able to trust and depend on others, and experienced more anxiety in relationships than women with heterosexual fathers." Adults entering into marriage is one thing, but the children of these arrangements are not given the opportunity to choose whether they wish to risk becoming gay.
It took less than one week for the next shoe to drop after the Supreme Court decision, with a Montana polygamist asking the state to be allowed to marry a second woman. Next we will probably see Warren Jeffs, the imprisoned leader of the fundamentalist Mormon communities in Utah, Arizona, and Texas, applying for a pardon. Perhaps we'll also see the Bountiful, Canada, FLDS community which supplied Jeffs and his gang with teen-aged girls to marry recognized as a legal marriage agency.
The Venn diagram of LGBT interests almost completely overlaps with libertarians and anarchists who believe that government regulation is always bad. Uber may be the best example. Its business model is predicated upon replacing the current scheme of licensed, regulated taxis with an unregulated one, as well as transferring worldwide profits to a handful of Bay area geeks. It was started by two ugly Americans from Silicon Valley who were oblivious to the metro and trains and believed that the entire world should look like California. However, as with all libertarian schemes, Uber returns us to the past. Many Uber drivers have raped their customers, from Seattle to Los Angeles to Chicago to Boston to Washington DC, not to mention the explosion of rape in India. Regulation is not always detrimental.
The Bush and Obama administrations allocated as much as $13.87 trillion to ensure that pampered bankers did not lose their yachts and third houses in the Hamptons, but the latter administration announced that the U.S. will not be bailing out Puerto Rico which is merely filled with ordinary people. The state of Puerto Rico's economy is dire, even comparable to that of Greece. Most millennials today have no idea that companies such as StorageTek had factories in Puerto Rico in the 1980s, but as soon as NAFTA was signed, the writing was on the wall in terms of job hemorrhaging. First the jobs went to Canada and Mexico, then Eastern Europe and Central / South America, and then after China was granted permanent normal trade relations and WTO membership, jobs flew there.
The day after the Supreme Court decision, two robots, Frois and Yukirin, were married in Japan. The celebratory kiss was a little awkward because Frois is not flexible enough to arrange his head properly, but the problem was solved via his detachable lips, similar to how lesbian couples solve the problem of their incompatible anatomies. Five years ago, another Japanese robot made history by conducting a marriage between humans, with that robot, embracing its inner Isaac Asimov, being named I-Fairy.
Everywhere is freaks and hairies,
Dykes and fairies,
Tell me where is sanity.
Tax the rich,
Feed the poor,
'Til there are no rich no more.
I'd love to change the world,
But I don't know what to do,
So I leave it up to you.
(lyrics from I'd Love To Change The World by Ten Years After)
Swan song of the Moon has echoes of The U.S. versus the accelerated dragon with its dark view of China's Moon exploration plans which progressed with a moon rover, Jade Rabbit, rolling across the Moon's surface in December 2013. China is planning to land another spacecraft on the Moon and bring back lunar soil in 2017. Some news reports suggest China is currently planning for a manned Moon landing in 2025-2030, but I did not want to place my story that far in the future. I actually wrote this story a few years ago and updated it. One name, Veracious Tidings, was borrowed from another story.
The NATO-EU coup is a prequel to Finland is persuaded to join NATO. I reused names from my other fiction -- Smegma Phallusconi, Byez Rubashka, and Mettle Snickersnee -- but only the last has continuity. Charilaos Florakis was General Secretary of the Communist Party of Greece from 1972–1989. Nikos Zachariadis was General Secretary of the Communist Party of Greece from 1931 to 1956 and a major player in the Greek Civil War. Mehmed Reshad was the Ottoman Empire sultan in command during the bloodiest years, 1909-1918, of the genocides against Armenians, Assyrians, Greeks, and other Christians, resulting in almost 1.5 million deaths. Abdul Hamid was the sultan who preceeded Reshad, in command during the Hamidian massacres of the mid-1890s when two to three hundred thousand Armenians, Assyrians, Greeks, and other Christians were slaughtered. Lucre Buchanan's first name is a synonym for money. Torygraph is slang for the Daily Telegraph, a newspaper which slavishly supports the Tories and Britain's version of Wall Street. Inorbit was the best I could do with the last name of Hungary's prime minister, Viktor Orban.
As is typical for him, Turkish President Erdogan blathered: "The West's hypocrisy is obvious. As Muslims, we've never taken part in terrorist massacres. Behind these lie racism, hate speech and Islamophobia ... Games are being played with the Islamic world, we need to be aware of this." Erdogan sided with the Charlie Hedbo murderers in Paris when he said: "French citizens carry out such a massacre, and Muslims pay the price. That's very meaningful." Many people believe that Barack Obama's politically motivated reaction to the Chapel Hill murders was precipitated by Erdogan. Erdogan and Obama are far more concerned over the murders of three Muslims in the U.S. than the genocide of Yazidis and Assyrians in Syria and Iraq. Don't ever say anything negative regarding Erdogan or you will end up in jail like the former Miss Turkey.
The Atlantic Magazine, generally one of the more liberal ones, published a surprisingly honest article regarding the reasons for Daesh's actions, What ISIS Really Wants. To make a long story short, Daesh is interpreting the Koran literally. Erdogan has a similar view and probably thinks of himself as the true caliph.
Turkey really is considering the purchase of Chinese missiles, with a NATO official in Brussels understating the case by stating that "It is premature at this stage to say whether Turkey's acquisition will be able to operate with the NATO Integrated Air and Missile Defence System." Greece really has become a friend to Russia, playing Russia and Europe against each other for its own purposes. The part about Greece reducing the funding of its tax collection agency was the focus of a Deutsche Welle European Journal video piece a few years back, but European Journal appears to have bitten the dust.
Just as Vladimir Putin is leveraging Russians in Eastern Europe, Hungary Prime Minister Viktor Orban has granted ethnic Hungarians in surrounding countries, especially Slovakia, Hungarian citizenship. He has hinted, though never actually proposed, the reattachment of the "lost territories" of Hungary which were separated from the Austro-Hungarian Empire after its loss in WWI. Putin visited him in Budapest in February, just two days after the signing of the latest ceasefire, yet Orban stated: "Ukraine's territorial integrity was infringed. In violation of international law, Russia has launched an action against Ukraine. We need to support Ukraine in this matter." Orban has criticized sanctions against Russia, though, so far, he has supported them.
Speaking of the farcical ceasefire in Ukraine, a bomb exploded in a rally in Kharkiv, killing three people and injuring at least ten. Ukrainian forces cannot yet comply with the terms of the ceasefire, i.e. withdrawing its heavy weapons to specified lines, until the Russians stop shelling them. Russian forces are gathering to the east of Mariupol in anticipation of the battle there to complete the contiguous land bridge from Mother Russia to Crimea. And Lithuania is definitely worried about Putin turning his gaze to the Baltic States next and is reintroducing conscription.
Bulgaria's corruption is almost triple the EU average. The corruption is so entrenched, Bulgaria's judicial system has failed to ever find a top political figure guilty of corruption. Its citizens are so despondent over the situation that some of them have resorted to self-immolations as a form of protest, the same as is happening in Chinese-occupied Tibet.
Greece's debt is currently at 324 billion euros ($368 billion), with around 2/3 of that owned by the EU. Greece's unemployment sits at 25%, with youth unemployment almost double that, and debt of 175% of GDP. It is difficult to see how Greece can pull itself up by its bootstraps without being able to print its own money as the U.S. does. That said, Greece's exit from the euro zone, often called Grexit, would be problematic to say the least. Der Spiegel commented on the potential: "In order to prevent people from making a run on the banks, the country would have to temporarily introduce controls on money flows. Transfers abroad would be banned, limits would be placed on withdrawals from automated teller machines and supplier contracts would be suspended. It's possible that medicines and foreign food products would only be available on the black market and that they could be purchased exclusively with hard currencies." Still, Iceland essentially went bankrupt in 2008 but is doing fairly well today, though there is a vast difference in the honesty levels of Greece and Iceland.
The Russian President's last day in office is a sardonic, sometimes bawdy take on Putin's misadventures in Ukraine. Byez Rubashka translates to "without shirt," paying homage to Putin's practice of posing for photos without wearing a shirt. The president's floozie is modeled after Putin's rhythmic gymnastics girlfriend, Alina Kabayeva, with Gimnastka translating to "gymnast." Putin really does have a $1+ billion palace on the Black Sea. Boobs-R-Us refers to Femen, the feminist organization famous for displaying breasts as a political protest, with "boobs" having two meanings. The juxtaposition of Rubashka and Boobs-R-Us removing their shirts is intentional. Femen is originally from Ukraine, but is now based in Paris. Ubistvo Lyubovnik translates to "murder lover." Ciao Kakao is Russian, rhyming slang comparable to a 1950's song, "See you later, alligator," and cannot be taken literally. Kakao is the Russian word for "cocoa," referring to the chocolate factory Ukraine President Petro Poroshenko owns. Labia Likov's last name is pronounced "lick-off." Onher Chappedbutt was the best I could do with the name of Anna Chapman, the Russian spy and outstanding sex partner who was deported in 2010. Sneg translates to "snow" (then add "den"). All other names can be researched via an English dictionary.
Germany and Russia had been negotiating for an end to their part of WWI in December 1917, but the naïve Trotsky declared "no war, no peace," thinking he was so clever and would end the war without granting Germany any concessions. Germany just began invading again, forcing Russia to accept much worse terms, resulting in Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania and a few other areas becoming independent after the end of the war. Ukraine realized what was going on and declared independence just a handful of weeks (January 1918) before the signing of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty in March 1918.
Putin believes that the total territory ever occupied by Russia and the Soviet Union are his to control, so he has set the wheels in motion to retrieve that land. His former economics advisor, Andrej Illarionov, said, "Parts of Georgia, Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic States, and Finland are states where Putin claims to have ownership." Putin has already invaded the first two countries and the third is a charter member of his Eurasian Economic Union along with Kazakhstan. He is now working on Estonia, Finland, Latvia, and Lithuania. Russia's prosecutor-general is reviewing the legality of the 1991 decision granting the three Baltic countries independence, triggering an angry response from Lithuania's President Dalia Grybauskaite: "No one has the right to threaten [us] ... Our independence was gained through the blood and sacrifice of the Lithuanian people."
Currently there are more than 800,000 Russians from Ukraine who have moved to cities in Russia because their house or neighborhood was bombed. It is unknown if they will return, especially given the animosity which has developed between Ukrainians and Russian separatists. And the separatists who have stayed are ridiculing, beating, kidnapping, and imprisoning people with different points of view, as was true in the Soviet Union they idolize. Whether volunteer mercenaries or Russian regulars, troops with modern weaponry arrive via Russia on a regular basis. Some separatists fear that that the Ukrainian army will impress them into service, just as Bolsheviks did during the Russian Revolution, but as usual, the separatists have it backwards. Russian soldiers are being sent to Ukraine to fight, and if they are captured, Russia disavows all knowledge of their orders and declares them to be traitors, similar to what happened after the end of WWII when recently released Russian POWs were sent to the gulag after arrival back home for allegedly consorting with the enemy.
The murder of 333 children, parents, and teachers at Beslan was Russia's 9/11, just like the downing of MH17 via a Buk missile was the Netherlands' 9/11, with separatists not concerned that their side was responsible for the murder of 298 children, women, and men. And just like George W. Bush who attempted to derail the 9/11 Commission because he knew it would accentuate his incompetence, Putin never supported an honest investigation of Beslan. The mistakes made in Beslan ten years ago are many: ignoring warnings, allowing the savages to bribe their way through checkpoints, possibly allowing the pre-positioning of weapons in the school building, never securing the scene to prevent amateurs from triggering a bloodbath (there are photos on the Internet), and the lack of a coherent plan. To this day it is unclear exactly what happened. Another national screw-up was the Moscow Nord-Ost siege where many hostages died because Moscow planners failed to account for the highly toxic gas used to incapacitate the savages, with many hostages drowning in their vomit because no one was told to simply turn them onto their stomachs to allow them to vomit the poison out. For further insights into the people of the Caucasus, search for "kavkaz" (or "Кавказ") on YouTube to find lots of videos of dancing at weddings, but also some videos (here's one) of wolves, pretty local women, and minarets interspersed with drawings of assault rifles and other military weapons. Not surprisingly, the Islamic State has now declared the Islamic countries of the Caucasus, Chechnya, Ingushetia, and Dagestan, to be the location of their next Islamic war.
We have confirmation of George W. Bush's declaration that he saw a soul mate in Putin's eyes. The Atlantic Council's report, Hiding In Plain Sight: Putin's War in Ukraine, is the last nail in the coffin of lies regarding Putin's invasion of Ukraine. Russian troops use camps just east of the border to launch attacks on Ukraine often using Grad rockets. Commanders have ordered soldiers to remove all Russian insignia. And Russian weapons which Ukraine never had have appeared in the possession of separatists.
The West must draw a line and not one of Obama's amateur-hour red-lines. If Putin wants a proxy war, we must give him one. Supply Ukraine with missile-firing drones, hand-held anti-tank weapons, counter-battery radars, and other rele