Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. by Irina Alksnis
[RIA] According to the Financial Times, the main achievement?__??_ of the meeting on Ukraine at the forum in Davos was the collective photo of the participants, since there were more people in it than at previous events. True, the publication was forced to admit that “no progress has been made on a real peace agreement,” which is unlikely to surprise anyone, given the format of these events. Bloomberg shares a similar opinion.
It got to the point that there, in Davos, Swiss Foreign Minister Ignazio Cassis directly stated that it was impossible to hold a “peace conference” without Russia. It seems that even the usual Swiss diplomats are fed up with the position of ridicule in which the West finds itself. There is a suspicion that most of the non-Western countries that took part in the meeting attended it in order to observe with their own eyes the theater of the absurd, which is currently turning into a circus.
The basic principle of conflict resolution is so simple and obvious that even two-year-olds who quarreled in the sandbox over a toy understand it: whoever wins gets a prize. In big politics, everything is, of course, much more complicated. Most military conflicts end in a complex negotiation process, often reminiscent of bargaining, the outcome of which greatly depends on the diplomatic skills of the participants. A much rarer case is the situation of total defeat of one of the parties, which allows the winner to completely dictate his will to the vanquished: the unconditional surrender and collapse of the Third Reich here is, of course, the most striking and famous example. Nevertheless, the basis is exactly the same as on the playground, the principle is that you must first win.
In the conflict over Ukraine, the West and Kiev put the cart well before the horse. European and American officials began to say that Moscow would pay for everything almost from February 24, 2022, and Zelensky presented his ten-point “peace formula” more than a year ago, in November 2022. And these were not just words: the enemy actually placed a bet on the crushing defeat of Russia, which would allow it to impose any, the most wild conditions - and our country would have no choice but to fulfill them.
Such self-confidence looked strange in 2022, but we will attribute it to the euphoria that was experienced in Kiev and Western capitals after the Russian army abandoned part of the territories in the Kharkov region and Kherson, as well as the grandiose hopes they then placed on the counter-offensive of the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
Now, the unchanged official position of the Ukrainian authorities and their Western patrons looks simply anecdotal. According to the most optimistic estimates for Kyiv, the situation at the front has reached a positional dead end. And the most sober-minded analysts believe that the developing processes are leading Ukraine to a complete - military, political and socio-economic - catastrophe, no longer in a very distant future.
And in this situation, Ukraine - like a year and a half ago - demands from Russia the withdrawal of troops, a return to the 1991 borders, astronomical amounts of reparations and other amazing things. The West actually supports this creation of heavy nonsense and even contributes to the process by organizing events like the Davos one.
And just yesterday, Reuters pleased Kiev with a new brilliant project for financing, proposing that it issue “reparation bonds.” The agency estimated the volume of possible fundraising at $300 billion, that is, the amount of frozen Russian assets, an acceptable way to confiscate which the West has been so actively looking for lately.
In general, it is not surprising that the meeting in Davos turned out to be so massive, despite the obvious failure. If a year and a half ago, in response to any attempts to involve it in the “negotiation process,” the Global South took the reasonable position of “you first defeat Russia, then we’ll talk about reparations and indemnities,” but now there are a lot of people who want to watch and laugh at the shame of the West that has come to a brilliant diplomatic concept: “Yes, Ukraine (and we along with it) is losing, but Russia still owes Crimea, Donbass and a trillion dollars. And the world is obliged to help us achieve this.”
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. by Petr Akopov
[REGNUM] Russians are kind, patient, united and generous - this is how we described ourselves in one of the recent surveys conducted by the Institute of Conflictology and Analysis of Russia (ICAR) together with the sociological company Info Sapiens. This is not narcissism or pride - these are precisely those values and bonds, the very presence of which among the people our elite denied. Which, although it partially came out of it, went infinitely far. So far away that these same people are no longer visible from there. Continued on Page 49
[NY Post] In "The True Believer," Eric Hoffer wrote, "Nothing is so unsettling to a social order as the presence of a mass of scribes without suitable employment and an acknowledged status."
We’re about to find out just how right he was.
From the 1970s to roughly now, offshoring and automation gobbled up blue-collar factory-type jobs.
Auto companies laid off workers by the thousands and sent factories to Canada and Mexico.
In 1977, on what Salena Zito calls "the day that destroyed the working class," Youngstown Sheet and Tube laid off 5,000 workers.
Within months U.S. Steel had shut down 16 plants and Jones & Laughlin laid off further thousands.
This went on for decades in industry after industry, with everything from textiles to semiconductor manufacturing closing or moving offshore.
White-collar types were notably unsympathetic, for the most part.
Berkeley professor and Clinton administration Labor Secretary Robert Reich declared the future belonged to the "symbolic analysts" — people who, in the words of a Steve Earle song, use their brains and not their hands.
Laid-off coal miners in the last decade were contemptuously told to "learn to code."
But the worm has turned. Google is looking at laying off 30,000 people it expects to replace with artificial intelligence.
The Wall Street Journal reports that large corporations across the board are planning to lay off white-collar workers.
Investor Brian Wang notes ChatGPT is already causing white-collar job loss.
In fact, ChatGPT can even code.
Sometimes its code is quite good. Sometimes it’s not so good.
(Though God knows, the latter is true of much human-generated software code too.)
It can write press releases, ad copy, catalog descriptions, news stories and essays, speeches, encyclopedia entries, customer-inquiry responses and more.
It can generate art on demand that’s suitable for book covers, advertisements and magazine illustrations.
Again, sometimes these items are quite good, and sometimes they’re not, but there’s a lot of less-than-stellar human work in those categories too.
Learning to code is bad advice now.
And the kicker is, AI is getting better all the time.
ChatGPT-4 has demonstrated "human-level performance" on many benchmarks. It's a lot easier to replace a white colar worker with an AI, than to replace a fix-it guy with a robot.
Some white collar jobs, anyway.
Posted by: Grom the Reflective ||
01/17/2024 02:40 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[44 views]
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#1
Well, they're about the reap the 'fruits' of allowing primary and secondary education to be contorted into a feeder system for universities. Similar in the manner that those same authors who contorted the socialists welfare system into an anti-family/anti-male subculture that breeds feral youths, crime and destruction of cities.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
01/17/2024 7:50 Comments ||
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#3
I taught programming for 40 years. There are many people who cannot code.
Posted by: Rambler in Virginia ||
01/17/2024 8:39 Comments ||
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#4
Don't worry, the Gov will decide these are 'essential' workers and can't be laid off. Large numbers will be paid to do nothing. Just like they are now.
Posted by: ed in texas ||
01/17/2024 9:12 Comments ||
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[Breitbart] Donald Trump’s blowout victory in Iowa and populist political victories worldwide have the globalist Davos crowd in a panic, Breitbart Editor-in-Chief and New York Times bestselling author Alex Marlow told Fox Business host Larry Kudlow in a Tuesday interview.
Kudlow kicked off the discussion by pointing to the Breitbart headlines of the world’s panicked reaction to Trump’s historic victory at Monday’s Iowa caucuses.
"The globalists are scared to death. The Davos crowd is scared to death. China is scared to death, and Europe is positively beside itself that Donald Trump just might be back," Kudlow said.
"We start every day at Breitbart by reading The Global Times in China, and they are saying prepare for Trump. Biden might not be a strong opponent," Marlow said. "The main obstacle for Trump to overcome between now and Election Day is the courts — it’s not even Joe Biden."
"Then you head over and you read what’s going on in Europe," the Breitbart EIC continued. "The Belgian Prime Minister who is now in the presidency of the Council of Europe, he’s saying that Europe is going to be on its own when Trump comes back, which is a huge misinterpretation of America First, but it just shows they’re panicking. The U.S. underwrites European security; so, they’re deeply concerned right now, the globalists over there. They’re just in a total panic repeating MSNBC and CNN talking points. We [at Breitbart News] can’t get enough of it."
Kudlow reminded viewers that global establishment leaders feared President Ronald Reagan too.
#4
I don't understand the term over-represented. By her standards Blacks in Birmingham, Alabama are over-represented as they are the majority. How can a majority be over-represented?
Posted by: Deacon Blues ||
01/17/2024 10:13 Comments ||
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#7
Party aside, the majority of Americans are disgusted with the different aspects of out of control government: open borders, green agenda, FBI tracking Catholics, release of dangerous criminals, spiraling consumer costs.
Consolidating with the GOP politicians that are helping the Dems screw the American people is not a winning strategy. Would a policy of prosecuting the Epstein perps, for instance, be popular with most Americans? I think it would.
Would Ronna McDaniel’s support that as a party plank? I think we know the answer. A policy that would immediately excite Americans across party lines is impossible if you consolidate with evil people.
Posted by: Super Hose ||
01/17/2024 11:24 Comments ||
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"As a practicing Emergency Medicine physician I can tell you from a front line perspective what he says is true. We were all told we could NOT use Ivermectin or other meds for covid even though we used them for weeks in the beginning and they worked. "
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
