It is estimated that over 100,000 Russians have died so far in the War in Ukraine and that the total number wounded and killed could be as high as 500,000. Russia is struggling to recruit new soldiers and Russia is now offering IMMEDIATE RUSSIAN CITIZENSHIP to any Foreign National that signs up to fight in Ukraine for a minimum of 1 Year. However it has recently been reported that immigrants that are moving to Russia to work are being forced to go to Ukraine to either join the war or the reconstruction projects. In this video I provide more details on this issue, look at the problems that Russia is facing in terms of the birth & death rates, what is happening with migration and discuss how these issues are now impacting on both the war and the Russian Economy.
Chapters:
0:00 Intro
3:48 IMMIGRANTS
9:34 BIRTHS & DEATHS
12:08 POPULATION
14:12 RUSSIAN EMIGRATION
15:41 RUSSIAN IMMIGRATION
16:20 NET MIGRATION
17:54 MILITARY RECRUITMENT
19:23 SUMMARY & CONCLUSION
Palestinian officials have condemned a dramatic new settlement drive by Israel in the occupied West Bank which includes retroactively authorising three outposts.
The move is set to further stoke tensions in the territory which has seen a surge in violence since the war in Gaza began on 7 October.
Palestinians claim the West Bank as part of their hoped-for future state. Settlements are widely seen as illegal under international law although Israel disagrees.
The three unauthorised outposts that have now been legalised under Israeli law were described as new neighbourhoods of existing settlements. They are in sensitive areas in the Jordan Valley and near the southern city of Hebron.
In addition, the Israeli anti-settlement watchdog Peace Now said on Thursday that Israeli authorities had approved or advanced plans for 5,295 homes in dozens of settlements.
It also emerged this week that the Israeli government’s Higher Planning Council had approved the largest seizure of West Bank land in over three decades.
Some 12,700 dunams (5 sq miles) has been seized in the Jordan Valley and declared as Israeli state land. This year has marked a peak in the extent of declarations of state land with a total of 23,700 dunams affected.
StevoRsays
Biden – keep or replace pros & cons WSJ historian’s analysis here via :
“Liv Struss Loses Seat in General Election: Inner Monologue (A Liz Truss Parody)”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=UeFx4yMZZ0o
Liz Truss- the prime minister that lasted less time than a head of lettuce.
birgerjohanssonsays
Russis is banning males of draft age from getting airline tickets.
Russia has impossibly long borders with Kazakhstan et al – if people who avoid the draft are willing to walk and endure some hatdship it must be possible to get out to nations that are unwilling to round them up and send them back.
KG @ 12
Certain politicians create scandals that just make satire fail – reality has overtaken imagination.
This is increasingly the new normal in places where dimwitted (usually ideology-driven) populists get power.
I watched George Stephanopoulos of ABC News interview President Biden.
Biden was Biden. He was not perfect, but he was good. He answered questions coherently. He highlighted some of his accomplishments, including expanding NATO, pulling together 50 countries to support Ukraine, competently handling the COVID vaccination campaign, reducing student loan debt, reducing prescription drug costs (especially for seniors, and especially for Insulin), passing a bipartisan infrastructure bill, working with South Korea to bring chip manufacturing to the USA, and more. His stutter only showed up a couple of times.
Stephanopoulos asked way too many hypothetical questions. He framed every one of his hypotheticals as if the worst had happened and everyone was asking Biden to step aside. [A small minority of Congress Critters have asked Biden to step aside.) It was a disgusting tactic meant to create a sound bite in which President Biden said he would not run. Stephanopoulos kept trying to get Biden to say that he was incompetent and that all of his family and friends had asked him to step down. President Biden objected to all of the hypothetical questions, and he even just refused to answer one of them.
Nevertheless, here is just some of the negative spin about that interview:
Finally, the president ended the interview with a Trumpian bout of self-flattery, one that also served as an implicit rebuke of his vice president’s readiness to manage foreign affairs. “Who’s gonna be able to hold NATO together like me?” he asked rhetorically. “Who’s gonna be able to be in a position where I’m able to keep the Pacific Basin in a position where we’re — we’re at least checkmating China now? Who’s gonna — who’s gonna do that? Who has that reach?”
And that’s some of the milder stuff.
I think that at this point, no version of Biden will be able to refute the “enfeebled” story that most of press is running with. There is not a Biden that is that perfect.
“Hamas popularity among the populace who are actually living now in shelters, in tents and makeshift, you know, communities is declining,” one pollster told NBC News.
It’s become a tragically familiar scene in the Gaza Strip: After seeing her slain son’s corpse, a Palestinian woman screams in agony.
Yet she points her anger not at the Israelis whose weapons killed him, but at Hamas.
“I hope that God will destroy you, Hamas, like you destroyed our children,” she yells in a video captured by NBC News crews in Gaza, her anger palpable, tears streaming down her face. Her startled companion reaches to cover her mouth, insisting the woman’s teenage son died a martyr as she quickly ushers her away.
Her comments are a sign of the shifting times: Nearly nine months after Hamas’ Oct. 7 terror attacks, people in Gaza are increasingly voicing frustration with the Islamist group that has governed the Palestinian enclave since 2007, when it wrested power from Fatah, its internationally recognized rivals who still run the occupied West Bank, the larger of two Palestinian territories in the region.
Dissent against Hamas’ rule was once rare in the Gaza Strip, and speaking out remains risky. But the despair and chaos of war has cleaved open a small space for defiance.
Hamas’ popularity in the enclave has sunk considerably in the months since the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel that saw 1,200 people killed and resulted in around 250 taken hostage.
Only about a fifth of people in the enclave support those attacks, down from nearly half in November, according to polling conducted in May by the West Bank-based Arab World for Research and Development (AWRAD), an independent organization that conducted 1,500 personal surveys across the Palestinian territories.
The poll also showed that Hamas only has the support of about a quarter of residents in the enclave, where the death toll since Oct. 7 passed 38,000 this week, according to Palestinian health officials.
[…] Hamas, which was established in the late 1980s, has exercised a strict style of rule over Gaza for nearly two decades. During that time advocacy groups including UN Watch, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch routinely accused the group of torture, beatings, solitary confinement and other similar tactics against its own people.
The group’s regular bombing barrages on Israel have also invited fearsome retaliation that has left tens of thousands of Palestinians dead.
The militant group has never enjoyed overwhelming popularity in the Gaza Strip. Their maximalist positions set them apart from the Palestinian Authority, who rule over the occupied West Bank, recognize Israel and are seen by many Hamas supporters as cowardly collaborators.
AWRAD’s May polling data from the West Bank confirms that impression. Where Hamas’ popularity has plummeted in Gaza, it has surged in the West Bank, where many see the group as delivering a more powerful response to Israel. […]
Inside the Gaza Strip, Hamas has brooked little dissent from the more than 2 million Palestinian residents over whom it rules.
“The control in the Gaza strip was very bad in the past 17 years by Hamas,” said Itaf Al-Hamran, a feminist and opposition activist who said she was displaced from her home in Gaza’s southernmost city of Rafah by the heavy fighting there and now lives farther north in Khan Younis.
“There was no plan, it was unjust: work opportunities, economical aspects — it was all controlled by Hamas,” she said.
[…] “We refuse to continue the war over our kids’ and women’s bodies and blood,” Al-Hamran said. “Today Hamas has taken us 70 years back.”
Still looks like a mixed bag to me, with some Palestinians still supporting Hamas, and with Israel’s expansion of settlements in the West Bank (even while the war is ongoing) proving Hamas’ point. Others point out that Hamas never really focused on internal governance, and that Hamas was stubborn … like Netanyahu. Two stubborn leadership groups that are not serving their people well.
Let us not forget there’s a full-scale war going on in Europe.
Right now.
Anyway, some economic-slanted analysis here:
In the tactical war Israel prosecutes as I write this: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/czq61w10qwpo
Biden – keep or replace pros & cons WSJ historian’s analysis here via :
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2024/07/01/im-trying/comment-page-1/#comment-2226948
So, today, I felt somewhat maudlin.
Maybe you know the feeling.
Music, even for such as I, stokes the emotions.
(I’d write ‘stroke’, but connontsexuality is inappropriate, here)
So I played Imagine by John Lennon.
Then, for reasons reasonable people may or may not infer,Dreamer by Ozzy Osbourne.
Whence to Dreamer by Ozzy Osbourne.
(Unless I mistake the lyrical referent)
And so to Calling by Angry Anderson.
Then, I thought aboutSalt Water by Julian Lennon.
Etc.
(you’d get the gist, I reckon, if you’ve ever been pensively maudlin. RL stuff aside)
[ah, right. StevoR knows how it goes. In my cups, RL events. Don’t ask, please]
Ah, right.
Lynna does not want to show you videos, so I have to take care.
I can do that!
So. I could have shown you a thumbnail and other info, but it’s deprecated here.
Fair enough.
Oxford University Mathematician REACTS to “Animation vs. Geometry”
[It does make things mysterious, so there’s that]
Schadenfreude is great
“Liv Struss Loses Seat in General Election: Inner Monologue (A Liz Truss Parody)”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=UeFx4yMZZ0o
Liz Truss- the prime minister that lasted less time than a head of lettuce.
Russis is banning males of draft age from getting airline tickets.
Russia has impossibly long borders with Kazakhstan et al – if people who avoid the draft are willing to walk and endure some hatdship it must be possible to get out to nations that are unwilling to round them up and send them back.
One very happy mathematician, reacting:
Oxford University Mathematician REACTS to “Animation vs. Math”
Cautious optimism.
“Starmer Shock Appointments Prove This Will be Different”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=IhxlJgWxU9U
I might have to watch that just to see if it is really possible to parody Liz Truss!
Diabetes drugs like Ozempic lower cancer risks: Study
.https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-07-diabetes-drugs-ozempic-cancer.html
KG @ 12
Certain politicians create scandals that just make satire fail – reality has overtaken imagination.
This is increasingly the new normal in places where dimwitted (usually ideology-driven) populists get power.
Hello, Readers of The Infinite Thread.
For your convenience, here are a few links back to the previous chapter of 500 comments.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2024/04/07/infinite-thread-xxxi/comment-page-6/#comment-2226906
Trump Tries To Claim He Has No Idea What The Deal Is With Project 2025
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2024/04/07/infinite-thread-xxxi/comment-page-6/#comment-2226885
Guardian – “France can argue later – now everyone who cares about our democracy must unite to keep the far right out”
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2024/04/07/infinite-thread-xxxi/comment-page-6/#comment-2226875
Do more, worry less
Cartoon: Tom the Dancing Bug presents a Calvinesque and Hobbesian look at presidential immunity
I watched George Stephanopoulos of ABC News interview President Biden.
Biden was Biden. He was not perfect, but he was good. He answered questions coherently. He highlighted some of his accomplishments, including expanding NATO, pulling together 50 countries to support Ukraine, competently handling the COVID vaccination campaign, reducing student loan debt, reducing prescription drug costs (especially for seniors, and especially for Insulin), passing a bipartisan infrastructure bill, working with South Korea to bring chip manufacturing to the USA, and more. His stutter only showed up a couple of times.
Stephanopoulos asked way too many hypothetical questions. He framed every one of his hypotheticals as if the worst had happened and everyone was asking Biden to step aside. [A small minority of Congress Critters have asked Biden to step aside.) It was a disgusting tactic meant to create a sound bite in which President Biden said he would not run. Stephanopoulos kept trying to get Biden to say that he was incompetent and that all of his family and friends had asked him to step down. President Biden objected to all of the hypothetical questions, and he even just refused to answer one of them.
Nevertheless, here is just some of the negative spin about that interview:
And that’s some of the milder stuff.
I think that at this point, no version of Biden will be able to refute the “enfeebled” story that most of press is running with. There is not a Biden that is that perfect.
Hamas is losing the backing of ordinary people in Gaza who are paying the human price of its war
“Hamas popularity among the populace who are actually living now in shelters, in tents and makeshift, you know, communities is declining,” one pollster told NBC News.
Still looks like a mixed bag to me, with some Palestinians still supporting Hamas, and with Israel’s expansion of settlements in the West Bank (even while the war is ongoing) proving Hamas’ point. Others point out that Hamas never really focused on internal governance, and that Hamas was stubborn … like Netanyahu. Two stubborn leadership groups that are not serving their people well.