Week 38 2023
Week 38 2023
18/9-24/9. Ukraine advances. putin's troops kill Ukrainian children. Zelensky in the UN, sloppy journalists help putin to fight disinformation war, and more.
In Finland
Yle just published a home-made film in which the little person in the kremlin appears. The film is made in the beginning of the 1990’s when putin was working for St Petersburg’s mayor, Sobtjak. putin looks just like the little rat he is. Or maybe a very odd kind of fish.
Fish or rat?
Source: Yle
In Sweden
The Riksbank increased its policy rate by 0.25 percent to 4.0 percent on Thursday morning. Inflation is still too high. Part of that depends on the ridiculously weak exchange rate which makes imports more and more expensive as it depreciates. This is what happens when your monetary policy is too expansive. This means of course that the monetary policy will need to be restrictive for quite some time to bring inflation down. This will most likely entail further future increases of the policy rate. That is going to hurt households who haven’t loans with fixed interest rates for long periods of time. Almost two thirds of Swedish households have loans whose interest rates change every three months. Only 11% of the households have loans with interest rates fixed for two years or longer.
Taking also into account that there is a recession around the corner, house prices and invesments are declining.
Housing prices and housing investments in Sweden 2010-2023.
Source: Riksbanken
Also in Sweden. A newly educated teacher decided for a career change. Teaching was too burdensome for him so he made a cunning plan to make schools pay him not to work. He faked sex scandals involving himself. The sex scandals became known to the school administrators by e-mails from concerned parents and other citizens. These concerned citizens and parents did not exist however, they were made up by the teacher. After a while, the teacher offered to leave his position, in exhange for salaries for a given period of time.
He got caught when an administrator in Varberg became suspicious of the e-mails from different sources arriving so close in time. Before he got caught there, he had made similar fraud attempts in several municipalities and also managed to get 90,000 SEK from the municipality of Kungälv.
Around Taiwan
Is imperialist China having its fighter jets and bombers flying day and night. Xi Jinping is a piece of shit.
Source: https://x.com/detresfa_/status/1703714515819647167?s=20
In the UN
President Zelensky spoke before the General Assembly at the UN. He talked about muscovy’s kidnapping of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainan children. Regarding these and other war crimes, hearings began at the UN International Court on Justice converning muscovy’s war crimes in Ukraine.
In the EU
Poland violates EU law. France and Germany are plotting to federalise the EU.
Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and maybe also Romania have blocked imports of Ukrainain grain. That is not their decisions to make which Spain’s agricultural minister perhaps was the first EU minister to call. Trade policy is an exclusive EU competence, which makes the countries’ decisions illegal according to EU law. Decisions are to be made by the Council or sometimes the Commisson if the Council has made a delegation. The EU-Ukraine trade relations can be found here
Ukraine will now bring those countries blocking imports from Ukraine before the WTO. The Commission should bring them before the EU court since the countries also prevent Ukrainian grain to be shipped further across the EU countries. The Commission probably won’t do that. There will be meetings and discussion in the corridors of Berlaymont, Charlemagane, Justus Lipsius, and embassies. As usual.
But Ukraine is not only taking legal actions against Poland and the other countries. It has already proposed some way of mitigating the effects for markets in Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary. This story develops by my rambling about it so, it may be that at least Slovakia and Ukraine have come to some sorts of agreement.
In anticipation of Ukraine and more members in the EU, France and Germany have been plotting again. Their plotting was leaked to Politico who published the report of the Franco-German plotting group. One of the purposes of their proposed reforms is to make the EU’s decision making more efficient as it becomes larger in the future. One would think that this would entail a discussion of what is better decided at the EU level than on the national levels. A discussion of EU’s core competencies would have been interesting to see. But no. This is a proposal by France and Germany, both having ambitions to make the EU a federation of states. France may be more “federalistic” in its ambitions than Germany. Their ambitions show up very clearly in the quotation below.
The first goal is to strengthen the EU’s capacity to take and implement decisions across all policy areas based on EU primary law, including those areas of cooperation which – because of the various crises – have de facto become EU powers. Given external and internal challenges, speedy decisions are of the essence.
There is no discussion at all, in that document, if those areas in which EU has increased its “powers” are better handled by the EU or by the Member States. This is not going to go be easily digested in some, not to say many, countries. Among other suggestions are changes to the treaties allowing for differentiation of integration, more of qualified majority voting in the Council, making it more difficult for countries like Hungary to violate the treaties’ articles about Rule of Law, and make it easier to punish and eventually kick Hungary out of the EU.
IN BRICS
India and China are at each other again. About borders of course. Three Indian athletes from a part of India that China claims were unable to travel to the Asian Games in China. The Indian government is of course furious, and India's Sports Minister Anurag Thakur on Friday canceled a planned visit to China. Another example of the fact that BRICS is just an acronym.
The kremlin’s war crimes
No war has been so thoroughly documented and reported as this war. We are all aware of the russian troops’ atrocities. Mass murder, gang rapes, torture, mass deportations of Ukrainian children.
That means that those that demand negotiations where Ukraine should cede territory for peace, are saidists. They are perverts.
Every orch soldier on Ukrainian soil is a war crime.
Some people demand Ukraine to betray some of its people in exchange for peace. Those people don’t care about what the muscovites do to Ukrainian children.
Vladyslav is one of over 500 Ukrainian children who have been killed by the Russian army since the beginning of the full-scale invasion on Feb. 24, 2022.
Most of the children have died in Russian missile or artillery attacks, but dozens have been gunned down with small arms at close range. The murders were perpetrated by different Russian units in different regions of Ukraine, but they all seem to share the same purpose – to induce terror.
The kremlin terror bombs Ukrainian cities on a daily basis. The muscovites prioritise targets which contain humanitarian aid items. The warehouse of the Roman catholic charity organisation Caritas-Spes in Lviv, was destroyed by muscovite shellings. 300 tons of relief supplies, was burned to the ground. The terrorist act was condemned by the UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Ukraine.
The Centre for Information Resilience has released a report identifying specific units from the Luhansk and Donetsk People’s Republic militias who tortured Ukrainian civilians in Izium.
On Twitter
Elon Musk keeps incentivising me to leave Twitter. I’m not going to pay for antisemite muscovites spamming my feed. Here’s my, so far, rarely used Mastodon account. Musk’s stupidity will hopefully speed up the use of Bluesky. I need an invitation to join.
In muscovy, aka russia
This is truly a shithole country. Buildings and houses outside of the city centreas barely stand on their own. Since the WWII, Vyborg is not Finnish anymore. Here is how it still looks like 80 years after the war ended.
Source: https://x.com/anno1540/status/1705855993245032507?s=20
Lack of fuel has caused the fuel producing “country” to stop exporting its fuel. Useless bastards. And another fighter jet crashed. Not because of lack of fuel but because of negligance, lack of spare parts, no maintenance and corruption in general giving rise to deteriorating equipment.
Source: https://x.com/NOELreports/status/1704417773588304303?s=20
The planes on the ground are not safe either. It appears that careless smoking caused two planes and a helicopter to blow up at the Chalovsky Airfield near Moscow. This is supposed to be the most secure airfield in Moscow. Shit happens and there’s always a fire somewhere in muscovy.
The fascist putin regime again demonstrated how unreliable and useless it is. The war that began on Monday this week between Azerbaijan and the Armenian region Nagorno-Karabach has ended with Armenia’s capitulation. muscovy was not able or willing to defend Nagorno-Karabach despite its promises to do just that. Nagorno-Karabach will now be re-integrated into Azerbaijan. It is said that a the agreement was
reached through negotiations with the Russian peacekeeping contingent in the region and envisions the withdrawal of Armenian military units and equipment from Nagorno-Karabakh, as well as disarming the local defense forces, according to the region's officials.
The Armenians will now leave Nagorno-Karabach. Either willingly of forced. Azerbaijan has previously made it clear that they don’t want any Armenians there. There will be an ethnic cleansing.
It is not clear for me if the kremlin realised it couldn’t do anything to prevent Azerbaijan or it let Azerbaijan have its way as a punishment for Armenia. Some claim that muscovy has abondoned Armenia because of its prime minister’s flirting with the west. I don’t know which of these version that is true. In any case, the kremlin has lost influence in the region.
In the war
The French photographer Emeric Lhuisset has made a wonderful new interpretation of the famous painting Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks by Ilya Repin. You can find it here.
Ukraine advances beyond muscovy’s trenches. muscovy wastes its own soldiers.
Source: British Ministry of Defence
What air defence doing?
muscovites have been smoking carelessly all over Crimea again. They never learn , do they? The muscovites’ Black Sea Fleet’s HQ successfully intercepted some British made missiles on Friday. A lot of high ranking officers appear to be among the casualties. Very high ranking officers if I understand it correctly. It is interesting to note that Ukraine knew in advance who and when high ranking officers were to hold a meeting
in the HQ. Details will follow in the media.
Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister, Minister for Reintegration of the Temporarily Occupied Territories, Iryna Vereshchuk has encouraged Ukrainians in Crimea to try to leave it as soon as possible.
"Once again, I am asking Ukrainians to leave Crimea if possible. Wait for the deoccupation of the peninsula in the Ukraine-controlled territory or in third countries," Vereshchuk said.
On the disinformation war front.
Media went ballistic and published headlines saying that the Polish prime minister wanted to cease sending weapons to Ukraine. He never said that. His statement concerned the new weapons that Poland is acquiring. The Polish president had to make a statement clarifying this since the idiots in the media speculated that Poland would stop its support of Ukraine. This is absurd, but not surprising given the low standards of Swedish journalists, quite possibly journalists in other countries too.
The journalists should have asked themselves the obvious question: Is it resaonable that Poland will stop supporting Ukraine? And, since they have reported how Poland and the Polish people have stood up for Ukraine and its refugees, they should have answered that question with a No. In percent of GDP, Poland is the seventh largest donor, and in absolute terms the eighth largest donor. And the Poles have opened their homes to many Ukrainian refugees.
Source: Kiel Institute for the World Economy. Ukraine Support Tracker
The journalists, being journalists, who reported the bullshit don’t apologise or correct themselves. Instead, they try to save faces by making a story that connects what the Polish PM didn’t say with Polish farmers complaing about increased competiton from Ukrainian farmers.
Women for Peace (KFF) keep delivering the kremlin’s messages. The old rag below is a member of the organisation’s board. She writes
In Sports.
The Bandy season begins in the end of October. It has already made headlines since the final this year will not be played at the traditional arena, Studenternas, in Uppsala. Instead, it will be, for the first time, be played indoors in Västerås. Blasphemy if you ask me, which you shouldn’t if you were looking for a reasonable response. About Bandy. Even though England doesn’t appear as one of the more successful nations playing the game, it can trace its origins to England.
Bandy as an ice skating sport first developed in Britain. English bandy developed as a winter sport in the Fens of East Anglia. Large expanses of ice would form on the flooded meadows or shallow washes in cold winters where fen skating, which has been a tradition dating back to at least medieval times, took place. Bandy's early recorded modernization period can be traced back to 1813.
In Hockey, AIK lost, as expected, the first game of the season against Brynäs who played in the first division last year. It will be tough season for all of us who support AIK.
In Pole Vault, Mondo Duplantis broke the world record at the Diamond League Final in Eugene. The new world record is 6,23. It is the seventh time he breaks the record, the last six his own.
The Swedish men’s team won the Gold Medal in European Table Tennis Championship.
What I listened to, read and watched.
I find it very difficult to find information about new interesting rock bands these days. The radio almost exclusively plays rap music and what they claim to be R&B. I’m very confused, and have been for many years. I thought that meant Rhytm and Blues and was written “R’n’B”. Anyway, because I don’t find any new bands, I listen to what I found many years ago.
This week I’ve been listening to Stonecake. Unforturnately, the band is not active anymore.
I also find it difficult to find new books to read. The descriptions on the backsides usually bore me. Sometimes, I buy a book anyway, usually get bored after 20 pages and throw them away. So I re-read old favourites.
Now, I’m re-reading Right Ho, Jeeves. P.G. Wooster is visiting his aunt Dahlia and while he’s there, tries to get Dahlia’s dotter Angela to marry his friend Tuppy and Angela’s friend Madeleine to marry another of his friends, Gussie Fink-Nottle, an expert of newts. Since Wooster refuses to take the advice of Jeeves, let alone leave the matters entirely in the hands Jeeves, nothing goes as Wooster planned it. One of many highlights in the book, is Gussie’s speech to the pupils at local grammar school.
I’m fed up with Netflix and the other streaming services. They produce a lot of garbage. Luckily, I have a collection of old films. Yesterday, I watched Arsenic and Old Lace for the umptenth time.