What does Russia want?

I have just read a VERY long-winded article in the NYT which tries to answer the question above.  When people write at such length it generally means that they don't have any clear answers but hope that by covering a lot of ground the answer will be in there somewhere.  And such is certainly true of that article.

The answer has to be at the psychological level and some of the senior Russian officials the reporter interviewed did after a fashion tell the reporter what the answer was -- but she hardly seemed to notice it. 

What Russians generally and also their leadership  want is respect and acceptance that Russia is a great and important country. They are the world's largest country, stretching all the way across the Eurasian continent from the Baltic to the Pacific. And they have over the years made colossal contributions to the arts and sciences.   So when Russia lost control over half of the territory that they had controlled in Soviet times they saw that as a humiliation.

So the Russian leadership tries to restore a sense of pride in their own people and gain the international attention and influence it had in the Soviet era.  They do NOT see themselves as a failed state notable only for attempts at influencing  American Federal elections. 

It should not be forgotten that Russia had worldwide influence in the Soviet era.  It even had great influence and respect in the USA. The Democratic party at that time were shills for the Soviets.  The Donks did all they could to support Russia in any political controversy.  They were among Russia's best friends. 

Mr Putin would like some of that back. But instead he finds his country demonized -- criticized and marginalized on many fronts.  Recovering ethnically Russian territory in the Crimea seems a heroic and historic achievement to Russians but America has renewed the cold war on Russia over it.

Mr Putin has been very restrained over events happening in his own backyard (e.g. the independence struggle in Eastern Ukraine) so it is clear that countries further West have nothing to fear from him. He will however take opportunities that present themselves to get Russia noticed. A more cordial atmosphere between Russia and the USA would make such adventures less likely.  If America can remain friendly to the ghastly Saudis, friendship with Christian Russia should be no strain

********************************

Introducing Daisy Cousens

I put up yesterday a video of the very glammed up Blonde in the Belly of the Beast -- a great anti-feminist lady.  There is a rather similar youtuber in Australia called Daisy Cousens.  She doesn't usually glam up as much but her approach is otherwise similar.  She appears on Australian media a fair bit but I imagine she is not well known in America.  She lives in my town -- Brisbane -- but, as I do, she follows events in America as well as Australian events.  I give two links below -- to her introductory page and to her latest commentary -- on the Antifa outrage in Portland.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCw8rdbWx_3f0iIzL7OWYOcw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJt983sOMPM

I wrote more extensively about her last year, commenting on a video by her which was extremely "incorrect".

***********************************

Win for conservatives in Greece

Radical left-wing Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has conceded defeat after a partial vote count showed the conservative opposition had comfortably won a snap parliamentary election. 

The centre-right New Democracy party of Kyriakos Mitsotakis had 39.7 per cent of the vote compared to Mr Tsipras' Syriza party's 31.5 per cent after nearly 60 per cent of ballots were tallied. Turn out in today's snap election was around 57 per cent.

Mr Tsipras's Syriza party has held power in the country for nearly five years, making him Greece's longest- serving crisis premier and youngest in almost half a century at 44.

The result is a stinging blow to the outgoing Prime Minister, who had insisted he could overturn a sizeable gap in opinion polls running up to the election, which he asked to hold several months before his term expires in the fall.

'A painful cycle has closed,' prime minister-elect Mr Mitsotakis said in a televised address, adding that Greece would 'proudly raise its head again' on his watch. 'I will not fail to honour your hopes,' he added as early congratulation calls came from outgoing European Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Mr Mitsotakis is from one of Greece's top political families. He is the son of former prime minister Constantine Mitsotakis, one of the country's longest-serving parliamentarians.

'The citizens have made their choice. We fully respect the popular vote,' Mr Tsipras said in his concession speech from central Athens, adding that he had called Mr Mitsotakis to congratulate him.

Official projections based on early partial results also showed the extreme right-wing Golden Dawn party teetering on the lower side of the 3 per cent threshold needed to be in parliament.

SOURCE 

*********************************

Neo-Marxism falls out of favour in Britain

Corbyn is a soulmate to Bernie

Labour have fallen so far in the polls that, despite being marginally ahead, they would still fall 100 seats short of a majority in a fractured new Parliament if a general election were called today.

The latest polling average has Jeremy Corbyn's party on 22.8 per cent, slightly higher than a new individual YouGov poll which had Labour on a historic low of 18 per cent.

Labour's 10-poll average is nearly a record low for the party, beaten only by the level seen in June 2009, when the party slumped to 21.8 per cent while dealing with the financial crisis and the fallout from the MPs' expenses scandal.

SOURCE 

********************************

Trump Lifting Obama’s Nonsense Restrictions On Truck Drivers

You can be five minutes from home and you still have to stop driving for 10 hours under the current rules. Even a one minute violation would be costly. Going over time results in being declared “out of service” for at least a day and if truckers aren’t driving, they aren’t making money.

The Transportation Department under President Donald Trump is trying to ease ridiculous rules burdening those who drive for a living. Rigid rules don’t allow for problems on the road. That’s not dealing with reality. Between weather and other drivers, anything can go wrong.

“You don’t want even a one-minute violation,” warns Lucson Francois, explaining an incident that a truck stop break five minutes from his home caused. After maxing out the day’s allotted number of duty hours and unable to leave the truck unattended, he was forced to sleep in the berth behind the cab, when he could have been in his own bed.

Highway safety advocates assume the drivers won’t exercise common sense, to not drive beyond their comfort zones. What’s not being taken into consideration is the need for flexibility.

The trucks involved in fatal crashes in 2017 is a 10% increase from the previous year according to a report from the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. A small percentage, or 60 out of 4,657, were described as fatigued or asleep.

The NTSB has declared fatigue to be a “large problem” and is trying to emphasize it on their “most wanted” safety improvements.

The trucking industry has an advocate in President Trump who is successfully rolling back stifling regulations. The Trump administration trusts truckers to do the right thing more than the prior administration.

Mostly Republicans had pressed for relaxing the rules a little to allow for more flexibility.

The independent truckers bristle at a bureaucrat sitting behind a desk telling him what to do, especially when that person doesn’t see what happens on the road. The “desk jockey” can’t know what the trucker deals with. “How can you judge me and what I do by sitting in a cubicle in an office?” asks Terry Button.

The burly upstate New York hay farmer owns his truck and estimates he’s logged about 4 million miles. He said “he’s never caused an accident, although he’s been hit twice by passenger vehicles.”

Current regulations insist on 11 hours of drive time within a 14 hour time frame. Ten consecutive hours need to pass before the 14 hour clock starts again.

More than eight hours of drive time requires a 30 minute break before that eight hour mark. Time is recorded automatically by electronic devices. The Barack Obama administration set this up in December 2017, the Trump administration has yet to overturn it.

The electronic device cannot be altered, it’s wired to the truck’s engine and there’s a display on the dash.

The inflexibility comes in when your time is up and there’s no place to pull over. That clock ticks loudly when faced with delays including cargo taking a long time to be loaded or unloaded.

The mandatory break is equally a problem, forcing them to pull over in unsafe places when they don’t feel they need a break.

An alternate to this that’s been presented, is that truckers be allowed to stop the 14 hour clock for up to three consecutive hours. Drivers could rest or wait out heavy traffic during this time.

It’s common sense. Drive when you’re up to driving, rest when you’re tired. Critics don’t think the truckers will use common sense.

SOURCE 

*************************************

Kamala Harris is NOT an American black but IS descended from a slave-owner

Kamala Harris has some family roots that are a lot more tangled than anyone ever imagined.

Harris was recently attacked by an African-American on twitter, which only started controversy because Donald Trump, Jr. re-posted the message asking if it was true.

"Kamala Harris is *not* an American Black. She is half Indian and half Jamaican. I'm so sick of people robbing American Blacks (like myself) of our history. It's disgusting. Now using it for debate time at #DemDebate2? These are my people not her people. Freaking disgusting."

It started a whole firestorm around the question of whether she was “black enough.” Jamaicans are apparently not considered “black” by some African-Americans.

When that hit the airwaves, people immediately started googling and it wasn’t long before someone stumbled over a genealogy that her father had posted online.

One of her hot button issues is slavery “reparations.” The idea has been on the table for a while and there is some serious discussion in Congress about actually writing checks.

According to her father, Harris won’t have to look too hard to find out who to start sending money to.

“My roots go back, within my lifetime, to my paternal grandmother Miss Chrishy (née Christiana Brown, descendant of Hamilton Brown who is on record as plantation and slave owner and founder of Brown’s Town)”

By studying his family history, he got well acquainted with the politics of the sugar industry. “I came then to understand its origin as a system of global production and commerce, based on slave labour, with Jamaica as a key component of that system from its very start.”

Born in Ireland, Hamilton Brown soon owned a Jamaican sugar plantation and is credited with founding “Brown’s Town.”

Brown was quoted as declaring that there was no way he or the other sugar planters would allow “the interference of the Home Government with their slaves in any shape.”

SOURCE 

**********************************

AOC just another lying Leftist. Hispanic Pastors Toured Same Facility As Ocasio Cortez And Came Out With Very Different Impression

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and the Democratic Party have been peddling some serious allegations about the detention facilities housing illegal aliens at the southern border.

Of course, they’re trying to paint the Trump administration or any administration that supports enforcing federal immigration laws as fascistic in nature. The overcrowding, the lack of basic supplies, no soap, no toothbrushes, etc. the outrage is deafening from the Left and their media allies. It’s very entertaining. Yes, it is—because these same clowns said that the border crisis and the horde of illegals swarming the border was a manufactured crisis peddled by the Trump White House. Nope. You’re wrong—as always.

Ocasio-Cortez recently threw a tantrum at Border Patrol agents, refusing a tour, but threw in the toilet water allegations that got the liberal media going. Allegedly, those detained were told to drink from toilets. That’s somewhat true in the sense that the sinks at these facilities are located on top of the toilets; they’re connected. Yet, AOC reportedly didn’t even go into the facility.

Sorry, I don’t believe it. These are the most partisan left-wingers on the Hill hell-bent on getting Trump. It’s an election year. And the fact that AOC wouldn’t say if she saw people drinking from the toilets is a red flag. We’re not Venezuela, folks or at least not yet. Hispanic pastors recently toured the border detention facilities and found that there were quite a bit of lies being pushed by the Left (via Fox News):

Rev. Samuel Rodriguez was “full of indignation” when he saw the reports and heard from politicians about the deplorable and inhumane conditions for illegal immigrants at an El Paso County, Texas migrant detention center. But what he saw at the same facility toured by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y. with a group of pastors was “drastically different.”

The president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, the world’s largest Hispanic Christian organization, and senior pastor of New Seasons Christian Worship Center in Sacramento shared his firsthand experience touring a migrant detention center during a press briefing Monday.

“I read the reports, saw the news clips. I just wanted to see what was actually happening in order to better enable our efforts to find a fair and a just solution to our broken immigration system,” Rodriguez, who has advised President Trump and both Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush on immigration reform, noted. “To my surprise, I saw something drastically different from the stories I’ve been hearing in our national discourse. Even as a veteran of immigration advocacy in the U.S., I was shocked at the misinformation of the crisis at the border.”

“We found no soiled diapers, no deplorable conditions and no lack of basic necessities,” Rodriguez remarked, adding he specifically asked border agents if they staged the facility in response to the negative press. “They unequivocally denied it — we were witnessing the identical conditions the attorneys saw when they toured the facility days earlier.”

In fact, some told him the sources from whom the negative coverage originated “never toured the areas of the facility that we toured” and speculated they might have had political motivations.

Shocker, these clowns lied.

SOURCE 

********************************

The boiling Leftist hatred never stops

The U.S. Women’s National Team won it’s second consecutive World Cup on Sunday. They defeated Netherlands 2-0 in France.

After the victory, some protesters found a Fox News camera so they could berate the most powerful man in the world.

News just went live from a bar in France after the #USWNT win and people started shouting "Fuck Trump" on air

SOURCE 

*********************************

For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

**************************