it all adds up to a big wait-and-see here

[click image]

You're probably never going to believe I harked this dude's name up, almost flawlessly, after deciding to forget all about him a few weeks ago. Badri Patarkatsishvili. Big stink about Putin murdering him, turned out, not so much, but at the time I was reading all this positively dizzying stuff about the shit he pulled to become an oligarch and the shit he was pulling to wield influence in Georgia. I admit I have the big old ugly-American weakness of finding it impossible to follow researches involving too many outrageously foreign-to-me names. If I stick with it, it becomes totally doable, but sticking with it is tough, and I always have to try to measure the cost/benefit ratio in putting myself through it. The Georgian lost. I'd read enough to establish he was a total pig from start to finish and he spent most of his time fucking with fuckers, and when I hit upon the tidbit that his father had died at 48 of the same thing that downed him at 52, I washed my hands of him, thinking I could safely just leave my knowledge of Georgian politics a blur. Heavy sigh.

Anyway, I've been doing a lot of hopping around the net about this ordeal, and everyone seems to be saying that Georgia is waving the white flag and Russia is not going for it. [1] Georgia attacked South Ossetia just hours after their last ceasefire. [2] Russia is unconvinced they're really all the way out. [3] The whole thing is being run by the jerks who looted Russia after the fall of the USSR, and their buddies, the Israelis and the Americans, so it might be completely stupid for Russia to back off now.

Setting aside the fact that I think the Georgians are better off under Russia's umbrella, I've been looking at the most outlandish opining about this conflict for most of the day. It seems the Russians have captured an American, but that is not yet clear to me and not adequately confirmed. Some bozo thinks its the Americans trying to tie up Russia so they can attack Iran without feeling the heat from Russia, and using the Olympic Games to do similarly with China. Idiotic. Maybe there's an argument for doing it to gauge Russian military response capabilities....

In that case, congratulations. You've just made Russia that much closer to ready to help Iran, which might have been an argument for it being a false flag, but everyone agrees Russia was caught completely off guard by this. The fascist media is even having to cede this point, and they surely aren't happy about it. Unfortunately, well, or fortunately, that so totally does sound like our Commander in Chief and his gang of vicious plutocrats.

I snatched this image from Chris Floyd's bit on it today, but that's all I took away from there. He's quoting heavily from old colleagues on the matter and interspersing them with reminders that everyone involved is a war criminal. It occurred to me as I was skimming it that I've become bloody sick of that term. Congratulations, again, guys, for taking all meaning out of a very useful term. Swell.

I had to get over some antiwar conditioning to do it, but I'm inclined to see this as the disgraced Russian oligarchs, dba the Georgian government, tangling with the guys who are trying to save the people from them. I'm remaining so staunchly unmoved by the protestations of Putin's criminality because: [1] whatever I thought I knew about that came to me before I was paying strict attention to the insidious propagandizing being done in our media, and so I threw it out; [2] everyone I've seen engaged in the accusations has not overcome that kind of conditioning, and is still clearly under the -- false -- impression that Americanization is a good thing; and [3] I have been digging hard and consistently come up with information about Putin and Medvedev that puts them squarely on the side of a flourishing population and against plutocrats. I don't think they're angels. I won't let this hopefulness for a transcendent decency blind me to the facts, and yeah, yeah, it's all relative, but I keep seeing who's the good guy and who's the bad guy in so many of these global affairs....

And we are just absolutely never the good guys anymore.