So your assertion, that decrease in mass means increase in extent, means that eventually, when most of the mass of the ice is melted, the entire world will be covered in ice?
Huh? No one asserted anything remotely similar to that. If you're going to go all reductio ad absurdum on him at least reduce to something relevant.
Furthermore, wouldn't the melting of ice mass (without affecting albedo), prove to be a negative feedback, since the ice melt is an endothermic reaction that mitigates heat from any source, natural or otherwise?
Who was talking about the endothermic nature of the reaction? Maybe that's relevant, maybe not, I don't know the energy levels involved (it's actually better for your argument if it's not).
Your original comment was a claim that directly contradicted the central claim of the article, he showed your claim was false, and now you're talking about something unrelated?
Funny how your dodge doesn't really address the issue:)
Except for the part where he directly addressed the issue and you responded with a complete dodge.
You clearly don't understand that a global warming skeptic can spot problems in five minutes that an actual scientist wouldn't see in years.
Rumour has it that the theory of gravity wasn't discovered by Issac Newton, but an enlightened fisherman. This fisherman, driven by the profit motive to fully understand the forces that caused the tides, was walking by Newton one day and yelled out:
"I beseech thee Dumbass philosopher! Can thou not see that any two bodies in the universe attract each other with a force that is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them?! Tis clearly a conspiracy by the clergy and lords to keep the populace in line. Now I give you an apple as a gift, perhaps one day myself or one of my entrepreneurial ancestors will bother explain to one of your intellectual ancestors the limitations of the speed of light when we see you're finally worthy of the knowledge!"
Politicians can't sell the solution because people keep obfuscating the fact there's a real problem.
Tell someone they have cancer and need to undergo months of nasty chemo or they're likely going to die and they're gonna do it.
Tell someone it might not be cancer, and even if it is it won't cause much harm, and even if it does cause harm they can delay treatment until it does start causing problems without any real consequence. Well it's going to be real tough to sell that person on chemo right off the bat.
The fixes aren't actually that drastic, they will slow economic growth, but the technology is there, and compared to the consequences of not acting it's not a tough decision.
Exactly that. For example since they introduced rental bikes more and more people are riding on the footpath, and since they never get fined they now assume they have right of way too. My son (5 years old) was knocked over by one such idiot who was texting - right in front of a policeman who said it was my fault for not pulling him out of the way quick enough. This is not what the actual law says, BTW.
Again irresponsible cyclists doesn't actually indicate whether this altered rule would create more, or less of them.
Note the scenario you're talking about is one of the reason why it's important to create bike friendly road rules (to keep bikes away from sidewalks).
To avoid other vehicles, yes. To avoid people crossing, no. This should be obvious from the geometry of a typical junction.
To avoid anything a cyclist would have much better vision. Getting hit by a bike at an intersection is also a lot less serious than getting hit by a car, it's a bit more likely but mostly due to risk compensation.
" perhaps my opinion is clouded as to their reasoning"
Their reasoning is that cyclists don't obey the rules anyway, so why not legalize the behavior so they have one more way to bitch about cars not yielding to them.
Seriously, I live near a university town, and cyclists are terrible about obeying traffic laws, they'll glide through stop signs, ride the sidewalks when convenient, etc. Then they'll turn around and complain that cars don't treat them as equals on the roadway. Well, you can't have it both ways, if you want to use the right-of-way, you need to follow the same rules as everyone else. I have no sympathy for the self-righteous assholes. (not all, but a very large and visible number behave that way)
If it's safe for a bike to glide through stopsigns or treat all stoplights as signs, then it's safe for motor vehicles to do the same. In fact, it's recognized that this is sometimes the case - that's why there are blinking red lights. There's no reason to give bikes any special treatment.
Of course bikes have trouble following the rules of the road, the rules of the road were written for cars.
If you want bikes to follow the rules then make rules that take bikes into account.
As a pedestrian, I fail to see why having two-wheeled idiots blasting through red lights is safer for me. Especially since their view (if they were looking) and mine are likely to be obstructed by the cars & vans they're overtaking (usually on the wrong side).
I'm not sure how relevant that is since those cyclists are breaking both the standard law and the proposed law. Maybe it causes standards to relax so more cyclists ignore traffic signals, or maybe realistic signals cause more cyclists to obey the law.
I think this isn't a bad idea, anyone who rides a bike realizes full stops at stop signs are pointless in a way they aren't in a car. Cyclists have much better vision at an intersection so don't really need a pedantic stop and look around period the way cars do. Bikes also have a much slower acceleration from a standstill, this makes stop signs really annoying in a way that doesn't apply to cars.
I'm not sure if the argument holds as well for stop lights though. The article talks about lights that require triggers and I'm not sure how common those really are.
Why is China using MSCEs to scare away birds? I can't imagine they'd be very good at tree climbing, surely they're better off running the network or something.
The regular Joes in the US love wearing military fatigues. As to the exclusive gear you mentioned, supposedly the GM-94 has also shown up in Libya. Saying they're not widely inventoried outside of Spetnaz isn't the same as saying they're exclusive to Spetnaz. If these guns are pro-Russia they're gonna want guns that the Russian special forces use.
I'm just not convinced the evidence of Spetnaz being there is conclusive.
Anything that advances the anthropogenic global warming agenda is climate. Anything that doesn't is weather. Keep up!
According to the government's own figures, 78% of the United States has been experiencing the coldest year (i.e., 2014 so far) since 1937. About the only exception has been the SW like the LA region right now. Great Lakes have record ice for this time of year. Arctic is at normal sea ice levels and Antarctic levels are above normal. Which wouldn't be worth mentioning if it hadn't been a strong trend for well over a year. But what's really educational is to look at the actual record of past years, rather than just taking other peoples' word for it.
This guy is a very good source of historical comparisons to todays weather AND climate.
When you know a little actual history of our climate, you look at these "warming" scares and go "Pffffft. Baloney."
He posts some really great, actual historical stuff like THIS and THIS and THIS.
Alarmists can say what they want about skeptics, but the historical record is the historical record.
Good luck trying to rebut the actual thermometers in, say, 1940 for example. They said what they said.
So the first link is the infamous trick of showing no warming by starting with 1998, the hottest year ever. Doing so obscures the fact that we've spent the last 15 years almost matching the hottest year ever!
The second link is an unsourced graph of percentage of weather stations experiencing 100F days. The implied interpretation is that 100F days are less frequent. The unaddressed question is how has the composition of weather stations changed in the last 100 years, are there more outside of urban centres, more in Alaska?
The third is a plot of global sea ice area, this sounds like a rebuttal of the scientists talking about the loss of sea ice, an attentive person might remember scientists are usually talking about multiyear sea ice at the north pole...
The final one reprises the short lived scientific discussion, and massive media hyping, of global cooling from the 1970s. Of note is the fact that global cooling was never the scientific consensus but was merely the hypothesis of a handful of scientists before the field worked out how anthropogenic factors would balance out. It only became a big thing because the media was playing its same game of finding a paper or two and declaring it to be the latest truth from science.
I do agree with Mr. Goddard we can learn something from the global cooling debacle. The obvious lesson is ignore the media, listen to the scientific consensus and take global warming seriously!
The best course would have been to force him to bring back the old constitution or resign
It is difficult to force someone to do something when they are hiding in a neighboring country under that government's protection. He was declared "incapable of performing his dutie" after he fled by a vote of the Parliament.
Hence "would have been":)
The constitution states the acting president would be the Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada and that is what happened. That Turchynov was voted in at the same time looks a little fishy until one sees that the previous Chairman resigned due to ill health.
He fell ill the day they impeached Yanokovych. He really shouldn't have celebrated becoming President by going out for discount sushi!!
Even if he wasn't forced out they should have voted in someone else from the Party of Regions. I still wouldn't call it a coup, it was unfair but the country probably would have recovered after a round of counterprotests and the next election. Unfortunately Putin wasn't willing to let it.
I've noticed the same though there's another phenomena as well, Americans who support Russia because they see Russian power as to counter American Imperialism.
It's actually sadly ironic. They try to show how they're anti-US, against US imperialism, and they really care about the rest of the world. They do this by taking crisis in another country and advocating for a position that involves large scale death and suffering of foreigners because they don't care about any criteria except how it affects the US. Neither do they understand how it's racist to insist that hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians protesting over months are all simply American stooges.
Despite its significance, the election was marred by voter fraud, ballot stuffing, boycotts, intimidation, vote-buying, and protests by opposition groups, leading for a low-turnout of under 30%.
I was talking about Morsi, not Mubarak.
I don't think for a moment that Crimeans or East Ukrainians actually want to join Russia,
Crmea might want to join Russia but I doubt most of Eastern Ukrainians want to.
You have a good plan there. It isd sad the Putin will not let it happen.
But Crimea didn't want to join either, that's the whole point of this story, everyone knew the results were a fraud but no one knew what the real unification support was, now we do know, and even with all the propaganda and intimidation is was still only about 1/4.
For that reason if this news does reach East Ukraine it could make a difference. The reason for the fake results being as crazy as they were was to create a false consensus, people are afraid to speak up because they think they'll be the only ones. What this tells East Ukrainians is they aren't the only ones, and they have to speak up or they'll get caught by a similar referendum.
That's a great point though I still think replacing him with your own candidate is problematic. The best course would have been to force him to bring back the old constitution or resign, replace him with a Russian speaker, and call new elections.
It sounds like this isn't so much an accidental leak as a deliberate shot from a Russian government agency that isn't fully Putinized. Either way to all the people who were doubtful about the missing article's existence... well there you go.
Ukrainian new unelected leadership is more like Hitler.
First all the current leaders were elected to Parliament. The only "unelected" part is the post of acting President. That was done when the previous president abandoned his post and fled. Second the main political party is Batkivshchyna which looks like a pretty progressive party. Show me how they compare to Hitler in what they have actually done. If you mean the few radical outliers the same thing could be said for the Republican Party.
I like the new President, I don't like how he came to power. Yanokovych was a terrible leader, but the last election he won seemed to be fair. Chasing him out of the country was a bad idea.
Look what has happened in Egypt when they overthrew their terrible, but democratically elected leader. One of the prices of democracy is the only real way to deal with horrible leaders is protect the free press and elections apparatus and hope you can vote them out.
I don't think for a moment that Crimeans or East Ukrainians actually want to join Russia, or even create a federation, but I think the pro-Russians are able to run things and not get chased out of town because East Ukrainians are legitimately pissed off at the Euromaidan and don't want to stand up for a government they see as illegitimate. They bought into fair elections and when their guy won the opposition took over the capital and forced him to leave, they're gonna want justice.
I wonder if there's a way out of the crisis for Ukraine. The current President apologizes for the way the Euromaidan went down, maybe pushes back the new elections a month because Donetsk is way too chaotic, and the Parliament appoints a new President from Yanokovych's party. The narrative goes from a coup to a forced resignation and the bottom falls out of Russia's propaganda campaign. At that point east Ukrainians hopefully feel comfortable kicking out the militants and things go back to normal.
You should tell the 30 strong team from Poland, Austria, France, Germany, Belgium, Bulgaria, Hungary, Greece, Italy and Latvia that they weren't there...
The whole series is actually pretty good but I find the observers' claim to not have seen any armed people to be absolutely uncredible and I think that's an important fact to take notice of. If they either lied, or worked so hard not to notice, something so obvious and incontrovertible as the armed people wandering around the city then why would you believe a thing they say about the things you can't verify?
You see a lot of yahoos in the US with crazy guns, I don't see why you wouldn't expect to see the same in the former USSR. Even the rockets they used to take down the helicopters are feasible, some of the fighters are veterans of previous wars, surely a few have the contacts to get their hands on heavy armaments.
Let me point out that the article was based in the op-ed column by Paul Roderick Gregory, who referred to a web piece that we can no longer find ourselves. This guy has been posting anti-Russian articles, often quite ridiculous ones, about once a week of Forbes's web site. In my view, this guy is simply a neo-con mouthpiece and has zero credibility.
True.
I still find these numbers and their source far more credible than the official result:)
Unless a more credible number comes out this is the figure I'll believe.
There is exactly zero evidence that the US or EU played any part in the Maiden movement. If there is I challenge you to provide it.
There are two sides to this story: 1. The Russian side (what you're repeating, partially) 2. The truth
There are 3 sides to every story - his side, her side, and the truth, which lies somewhere in between.
If 1 is the Russian narrative and 2 is the Western narrative the truth is probably about 1.9.
The US and EU were certainly providing some support and advice to the Euromaidan protests. And I think the Euromaidan shouldn't have ignored the agreement and forced Yanokovych to leave, he was very bad of course, but it's just a bad idea to force a change like that that in democracies.
But I find the claim that the US or EU were a driving force in the protests to be incredible, the Euromaidan protests were massive, and occurred over months. I find the concept that they were all US or EU stooges to be insulting to the point of mildly racist. Good or bad the credit for Yanokovych's overthrow belongs to Ukrainians.
I'm actually not convinced that there's any Spetnaz in East Ukraine (though there were definitely some in Crimea).
There's a lot of former military folks reminiscent of the USSR wandering around Russian speaking countries and a few Ukrainians who want to be part of Russia. Putin doesn't have so send forces East Ukraine, all he has to do is talk about defending Russian speaking peoples, use his army to keep the Ukrainian army out of the picture, and they get the message.
They may still be there, and they might be effectively leading, but I don't think they're necessary to drive the conflict. I think most of the fighters are something more reminiscent of the Bundy ranch, a bunch of people who see the opportunity to play soldier. They also see the opportunity to become oligarchs in a breakaway republic.
I'm not saying Putin isn't to blame, he's the one instigating it and providing the potential backing of the Russian army. I'm just not sure he needs Spetnaz to do it.
Slashdot Mirror
So your assertion, that decrease in mass means increase in extent, means that eventually, when most of the mass of the ice is melted, the entire world will be covered in ice?
Huh? No one asserted anything remotely similar to that. If you're going to go all reductio ad absurdum on him at least reduce to something relevant.
Furthermore, wouldn't the melting of ice mass (without affecting albedo), prove to be a negative feedback, since the ice melt is an endothermic reaction that mitigates heat from any source, natural or otherwise?
Who was talking about the endothermic nature of the reaction? Maybe that's relevant, maybe not, I don't know the energy levels involved (it's actually better for your argument if it's not).
Your original comment was a claim that directly contradicted the central claim of the article, he showed your claim was false, and now you're talking about something unrelated?
Funny how your dodge doesn't really address the issue :)
Except for the part where he directly addressed the issue and you responded with a complete dodge.
You clearly don't understand that a global warming skeptic can spot problems in five minutes that an actual scientist wouldn't see in years.
Rumour has it that the theory of gravity wasn't discovered by Issac Newton, but an enlightened fisherman. This fisherman, driven by the profit motive to fully understand the forces that caused the tides, was walking by Newton one day and yelled out:
"I beseech thee Dumbass philosopher! Can thou not see that any two bodies in the universe attract each other with a force that is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them?! Tis clearly a conspiracy by the clergy and lords to keep the populace in line. Now I give you an apple as a gift, perhaps one day myself or one of my entrepreneurial ancestors will bother explain to one of your intellectual ancestors the limitations of the speed of light when we see you're finally worthy of the knowledge!"
Politicians can't sell the solution because people keep obfuscating the fact there's a real problem.
Tell someone they have cancer and need to undergo months of nasty chemo or they're likely going to die and they're gonna do it.
Tell someone it might not be cancer, and even if it is it won't cause much harm, and even if it does cause harm they can delay treatment until it does start causing problems without any real consequence. Well it's going to be real tough to sell that person on chemo right off the bat.
The fixes aren't actually that drastic, they will slow economic growth, but the technology is there, and compared to the consequences of not acting it's not a tough decision.
As a non-physicist I have to agree that the article was badly written and was setting off alarm bells the whole time I read it.
If you have a good point you can generally make it fairly clear and precise.
If you don't you end up stumbling all over the place in an attempt to justify it and avoid the weak points.
Exactly that. For example since they introduced rental bikes more and more people are riding on the footpath, and since they never get fined they now assume they have right of way too. My son (5 years old) was knocked over by one such idiot who was texting - right in front of a policeman who said it was my fault for not pulling him out of the way quick enough. This is not what the actual law says, BTW.
Again irresponsible cyclists doesn't actually indicate whether this altered rule would create more, or less of them.
Note the scenario you're talking about is one of the reason why it's important to create bike friendly road rules (to keep bikes away from sidewalks).
To avoid other vehicles, yes. To avoid people crossing, no. This should be obvious from the geometry of a typical junction.
To avoid anything a cyclist would have much better vision. Getting hit by a bike at an intersection is also a lot less serious than getting hit by a car, it's a bit more likely but mostly due to risk compensation.
" perhaps my opinion is clouded as to their reasoning"
Their reasoning is that cyclists don't obey the rules anyway, so why not legalize the behavior so they have one more way to bitch about cars not yielding to them.
Seriously, I live near a university town, and cyclists are terrible about obeying traffic laws, they'll glide through stop signs, ride the sidewalks when convenient, etc. Then they'll turn around and complain that cars don't treat them as equals on the roadway. Well, you can't have it both ways, if you want to use the right-of-way, you need to follow the same rules as everyone else. I have no sympathy for the self-righteous assholes. (not all, but a very large and visible number behave that way)
If it's safe for a bike to glide through stopsigns or treat all stoplights as signs, then it's safe for motor vehicles to do the same. In fact, it's recognized that this is sometimes the case - that's why there are blinking red lights. There's no reason to give bikes any special treatment.
Of course bikes have trouble following the rules of the road, the rules of the road were written for cars.
If you want bikes to follow the rules then make rules that take bikes into account.
As a pedestrian, I fail to see why having two-wheeled idiots blasting through red lights is safer for me. Especially since their view (if they were looking) and mine are likely to be obstructed by the cars & vans they're overtaking (usually on the wrong side).
I'm not sure how relevant that is since those cyclists are breaking both the standard law and the proposed law. Maybe it causes standards to relax so more cyclists ignore traffic signals, or maybe realistic signals cause more cyclists to obey the law.
I think this isn't a bad idea, anyone who rides a bike realizes full stops at stop signs are pointless in a way they aren't in a car. Cyclists have much better vision at an intersection so don't really need a pedantic stop and look around period the way cars do. Bikes also have a much slower acceleration from a standstill, this makes stop signs really annoying in a way that doesn't apply to cars.
I'm not sure if the argument holds as well for stop lights though. The article talks about lights that require triggers and I'm not sure how common those really are.
So what you're saying is Bush was right all along, Iraq really did have WMDs!
Why is China using MSCEs to scare away birds? I can't imagine they'd be very good at tree climbing, surely they're better off running the network or something.
The regular Joes in the US love wearing military fatigues. As to the exclusive gear you mentioned, supposedly the GM-94 has also shown up in Libya. Saying they're not widely inventoried outside of Spetnaz isn't the same as saying they're exclusive to Spetnaz. If these guns are pro-Russia they're gonna want guns that the Russian special forces use.
I'm just not convinced the evidence of Spetnaz being there is conclusive.
Anything that advances the anthropogenic global warming agenda is climate. Anything that doesn't is weather. Keep up!
According to the government's own figures, 78% of the United States has been experiencing the coldest year (i.e., 2014 so far) since 1937. About the only exception has been the SW like the LA region right now. Great Lakes have record ice for this time of year. Arctic is at normal sea ice levels and Antarctic levels are above normal. Which wouldn't be worth mentioning if it hadn't been a strong trend for well over a year. But what's really educational is to look at the actual record of past years, rather than just taking other peoples' word for it.
This guy is a very good source of historical comparisons to todays weather AND climate.
When you know a little actual history of our climate, you look at these "warming" scares and go "Pffffft. Baloney."
He posts some really great, actual historical stuff like THIS and THIS and THIS.
Alarmists can say what they want about skeptics, but the historical record is the historical record.
Good luck trying to rebut the actual thermometers in, say, 1940 for example. They said what they said.
So the first link is the infamous trick of showing no warming by starting with 1998, the hottest year ever. Doing so obscures the fact that we've spent the last 15 years almost matching the hottest year ever!
The second link is an unsourced graph of percentage of weather stations experiencing 100F days. The implied interpretation is that 100F days are less frequent. The unaddressed question is how has the composition of weather stations changed in the last 100 years, are there more outside of urban centres, more in Alaska?
The third is a plot of global sea ice area, this sounds like a rebuttal of the scientists talking about the loss of sea ice, an attentive person might remember scientists are usually talking about multiyear sea ice at the north pole...
The final one reprises the short lived scientific discussion, and massive media hyping, of global cooling from the 1970s. Of note is the fact that global cooling was never the scientific consensus but was merely the hypothesis of a handful of scientists before the field worked out how anthropogenic factors would balance out. It only became a big thing because the media was playing its same game of finding a paper or two and declaring it to be the latest truth from science.
I do agree with Mr. Goddard we can learn something from the global cooling debacle. The obvious lesson is ignore the media, listen to the scientific consensus and take global warming seriously!
Perhaps the karaoke did it?
Nah, I can't see a positive outcome from that kind of brain trauma.
The best course would have been to force him to bring back the old constitution or resign
It is difficult to force someone to do something when they are hiding in a neighboring country under that government's protection. He was declared "incapable of performing his dutie" after he fled by a vote of the Parliament.
Hence "would have been" :)
The constitution states the acting president would be the Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada and that is what happened. That Turchynov was voted in at the same time looks a little fishy until one sees that the previous Chairman resigned due to ill health.
He fell ill the day they impeached Yanokovych. He really shouldn't have celebrated becoming President by going out for discount sushi!!
Even if he wasn't forced out they should have voted in someone else from the Party of Regions. I still wouldn't call it a coup, it was unfair but the country probably would have recovered after a round of counterprotests and the next election. Unfortunately Putin wasn't willing to let it.
I've noticed the same though there's another phenomena as well, Americans who support Russia because they see Russian power as to counter American Imperialism.
It's actually sadly ironic. They try to show how they're anti-US, against US imperialism, and they really care about the rest of the world. They do this by taking crisis in another country and advocating for a position that involves large scale death and suffering of foreigners because they don't care about any criteria except how it affects the US. Neither do they understand how it's racist to insist that hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians protesting over months are all simply American stooges.
Look what has happened in Egypt when they overthrew their terrible, but democratically elected leader.
The elections of Mubarak were about as democratic as the elections in China
Despite its significance, the election was marred by voter fraud, ballot stuffing, boycotts, intimidation, vote-buying, and protests by opposition groups, leading for a low-turnout of under 30%.
I was talking about Morsi, not Mubarak.
I don't think for a moment that Crimeans or East Ukrainians actually want to join Russia,
Crmea might want to join Russia but I doubt most of Eastern Ukrainians want to.
You have a good plan there. It isd sad the Putin will not let it happen.
But Crimea didn't want to join either, that's the whole point of this story, everyone knew the results were a fraud but no one knew what the real unification support was, now we do know, and even with all the propaganda and intimidation is was still only about 1/4.
For that reason if this news does reach East Ukraine it could make a difference. The reason for the fake results being as crazy as they were was to create a false consensus, people are afraid to speak up because they think they'll be the only ones. What this tells East Ukrainians is they aren't the only ones, and they have to speak up or they'll get caught by a similar referendum.
That's a great point though I still think replacing him with your own candidate is problematic. The best course would have been to force him to bring back the old constitution or resign, replace him with a Russian speaker, and call new elections.
Moreover, the claim that's based on a website that was taken down is pure garbage. At least give us an archive version, please?
Not quite, but I can give you a Russian version and some discussion of that version in English.
The Volokh conspiracy has a link to a Russian version of the article which is somehow still up (and it sounds like it's an official government agency).
It sounds like this isn't so much an accidental leak as a deliberate shot from a Russian government agency that isn't fully Putinized. Either way to all the people who were doubtful about the missing article's existence... well there you go.
Ukrainian new unelected leadership is more like Hitler.
First all the current leaders were elected to Parliament. The only "unelected" part is the post of acting President. That was done when the previous president abandoned his post and fled. Second the main political party is Batkivshchyna which looks like a pretty progressive party. Show me how they compare to Hitler in what they have actually done. If you mean the few radical outliers the same thing could be said for the Republican Party.
I like the new President, I don't like how he came to power. Yanokovych was a terrible leader, but the last election he won seemed to be fair. Chasing him out of the country was a bad idea.
Look what has happened in Egypt when they overthrew their terrible, but democratically elected leader. One of the prices of democracy is the only real way to deal with horrible leaders is protect the free press and elections apparatus and hope you can vote them out.
I don't think for a moment that Crimeans or East Ukrainians actually want to join Russia, or even create a federation, but I think the pro-Russians are able to run things and not get chased out of town because East Ukrainians are legitimately pissed off at the Euromaidan and don't want to stand up for a government they see as illegitimate. They bought into fair elections and when their guy won the opposition took over the capital and forced him to leave, they're gonna want justice.
I wonder if there's a way out of the crisis for Ukraine. The current President apologizes for the way the Euromaidan went down, maybe pushes back the new elections a month because Donetsk is way too chaotic, and the Parliament appoints a new President from Yanokovych's party. The narrative goes from a coup to a forced resignation and the bottom falls out of Russia's propaganda campaign. At that point east Ukrainians hopefully feel comfortable kicking out the militants and things go back to normal.
You should tell the 30 strong team from Poland, Austria, France, Germany, Belgium, Bulgaria, Hungary, Greece, Italy and Latvia that they weren't there...
You might want to watch the end of this report
The whole series is actually pretty good but I find the observers' claim to not have seen any armed people to be absolutely uncredible and I think that's an important fact to take notice of. If they either lied, or worked so hard not to notice, something so obvious and incontrovertible as the armed people wandering around the city then why would you believe a thing they say about the things you can't verify?
You see a lot of yahoos in the US with crazy guns, I don't see why you wouldn't expect to see the same in the former USSR. Even the rockets they used to take down the helicopters are feasible, some of the fighters are veterans of previous wars, surely a few have the contacts to get their hands on heavy armaments.
Let me point out that the article was based in the op-ed column by Paul Roderick Gregory, who referred to a web piece that we can no longer find ourselves. This guy has been posting anti-Russian articles, often quite ridiculous ones, about once a week of Forbes's web site. In my view, this guy is simply a neo-con mouthpiece and has zero credibility.
True.
I still find these numbers and their source far more credible than the official result :)
Unless a more credible number comes out this is the figure I'll believe.
There is exactly zero evidence that the US or EU played any part in the Maiden movement. If there is I challenge you to provide it.
There are two sides to this story:
1. The Russian side (what you're repeating, partially)
2. The truth
There are 3 sides to every story - his side, her side, and the truth, which lies somewhere in between.
If 1 is the Russian narrative and 2 is the Western narrative the truth is probably about 1.9.
The US and EU were certainly providing some support and advice to the Euromaidan protests. And I think the Euromaidan shouldn't have ignored the agreement and forced Yanokovych to leave, he was very bad of course, but it's just a bad idea to force a change like that that in democracies.
But I find the claim that the US or EU were a driving force in the protests to be incredible, the Euromaidan protests were massive, and occurred over months. I find the concept that they were all US or EU stooges to be insulting to the point of mildly racist. Good or bad the credit for Yanokovych's overthrow belongs to Ukrainians.
I'm actually not convinced that there's any Spetnaz in East Ukraine (though there were definitely some in Crimea).
There's a lot of former military folks reminiscent of the USSR wandering around Russian speaking countries and a few Ukrainians who want to be part of Russia. Putin doesn't have so send forces East Ukraine, all he has to do is talk about defending Russian speaking peoples, use his army to keep the Ukrainian army out of the picture, and they get the message.
They may still be there, and they might be effectively leading, but I don't think they're necessary to drive the conflict. I think most of the fighters are something more reminiscent of the Bundy ranch, a bunch of people who see the opportunity to play soldier. They also see the opportunity to become oligarchs in a breakaway republic.
I'm not saying Putin isn't to blame, he's the one instigating it and providing the potential backing of the Russian army. I'm just not sure he needs Spetnaz to do it.
Russia is seeing a country that is essentially on the brink of civil war right next to its borders.
Who else got a mental image of a big brother Russia holding Ukraine's arms and swinging them at Ukraine's face while yelling "stop hitting yourself!"