Ukraine’s Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said that Russia’s shelling of
various regions in Ukraine on Monday morning has damaged civilian energy
infrastructure.

“Missiles and drones hit 10 regions, where 18 objects [facilities] were
damaged, most of which are energy-related,” he said on Telegram.

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/31/ukraines-forces-repel-brutal-russian-offensive-in-donetsk-wheat-prices-rise-after-grain-export-deal-stumbles.html

“Hundreds of settlements in seven regions of Ukraine were cut off. The
consequences could have been much worse. But thanks to the heroic and
professional work of the Air Defense Forces, 44 of the more than 50
missiles fired at our territory were shot down,” he added.

A series of missile strikes hit major Ukrainian cities on Monday morning,
with the capital Kyiv and cities to the northeast and south being
targeted. Much of Kyiv is without power and water following the attacks.

Kyivvodokanal, a utilities company supplying water for Kyiv, said Monday
that 80% of the city’s residents are currently without a water supply.

### - with the russians digging-in behind their new borders while at the
same time systematically cutting-off ukraine's power & water systems
(they're not telling us the full extent of this but it's been going-on
every day since they blew up that bridge, so the damage to their
infrastructure must be extensive by now) there appears to be very little
ukraine can actually do about it other than to hype their own attacks
while at the same time playing-down any russian successes...

the point being that these are very dangerous moments for us all wherein
the west is no doubt tempted to intervene in some perhaps more overt way
in order to break this now threatening stalemate which could now,
theoretically speaking, continue-on like this for months on end if not
years?

a situation that no nation can possibly afford to sustain in the long term!

iow: unless something happens to fundamentally 'change' this stalemate
it's gonna basically be all over bar the shouting!? and just can't imagine
that the west is gonna stand for that being the case while their costs
(which are unbelievably huge) continue to mount by the day, to the point
that the whole of europe is slowly sinking into recession!

that unless something to address this dire situation happens very soon
then THAT will indeed be the case... and ALL for NADA??? (thus dangerous
moments while the west makes up its mind what exactly it's gonna do...)

i.e., they either attack russia 'now' (or very soon) or abandon the idea
altogether of ever beating them & just accept their total loss in all this!

it being very difficult to accept that the west will now, after ALL their
effort & costs, just roll over and back down?? (riiiight...)

(which would perhaps indeed be the sane thing to do, only they's not sane!
:)))

>
> ### - with the russians digging-in behind their new borders while at the
> same time systematically cutting-off ukraine's power & water systems
> (they're not telling us the full extent of this but it's been going-on
> every day since they blew up that bridge, so the damage to their
> infrastructure must be extensive by now) there appears to be very little
> ukraine can actually do about it other than to hype their own attacks
> while at the same time playing-down any russian successes...

Polls here show a sizable magority (60%) want a diplomatic solution.

Many analysis articles I've read, point to "Germany" as the real target
of influence operations and sabotage. US & UK fear a Russia-China-Germany axis
as an unbeatable combine of weapons and resources.

>
> the point being that these are very dangerous moments for us all wherein
> the west is no doubt tempted to intervene in some perhaps more overt way
> in order to break this now threatening stalemate which could now,
> theoretically speaking, continue-on like this for months on end if not
> years?

These are the moments when the "Super" or "Ultra" natural events are
easier to spot as past-present-future time flows shift.
The liberals won a sizeable victory in Brazil.

>
> a situation that no nation can possibly afford to sustain in the long term!

USA is cutting into diminished stockpiles.
Russia and China spent 2014-2020 developing hypersonic missiles.

>
> iow: unless something happens to fundamentally 'change' this stalemate
> it's gonna basically be all over bar the shouting!? and just can't imagine
> that the west is gonna stand for that being the case while their costs
> (which are unbelievably huge) continue to mount by the day, to the point
> that the whole of europe is slowly sinking into recession!

By the West blackmailing Europe, over energy they are weakening their own allies

>
> that unless something to address this dire situation happens very soon
> then THAT will indeed be the case... and ALL for NADA??? (thus dangerous
> moments while the west makes up its mind what exactly it's gonna do...)
>
> i.e., they either attack russia 'now' (or very soon) or abandon the idea
> altogether of ever beating them & just accept their total loss in all this!

I've rethought everything since Covid was unleashed.
I saved an article about Hitchens and his progression from position to position.

>
> it being very difficult to accept that the west will now, after ALL their
> effort & costs, just roll over and back down?? (riiiight...)

It's about the whole "US Dollar" based system of international settlements
and movement of large chunks of capital and resources, CCCP & Russia are building a parallel
system to settle large accounts as fuel and food are moved here and there.
>

> (which would perhaps indeed be the sane thing to do, only they's not sane!
> :)))

Ever since US was stupid enough to get involved in WW One, the sequencing
has led to a rapid rise and now rapid decline of US influence.

I saved this article, Hitchen''s backed The Iraq war but died before seeing all this WW3 stuff.

Christopher Hitchens' last years: Islam, the Iraq war and how a man of the left found his moment by breaking with the left
Hitch despised Clintons, religion and authoritarianism. After 9/11, he moved toward war. His flaw? George W. Bush

By Daniel Oppenheimer
Published February 14, 2016 11:00AM (EST)
Excerpted from "Exit Right"

During the later part of the 1990s it was Bill Clinton, curiously, who was the only subject who seemed to get under Christopher Hitchens’s skin as irri­tatingly as the neoconservatives. His grudge was principled. He dis­liked what he perceived as Clinton’s pandering to the Right on capital punishment, welfare reform, military intervention. It was also temper­amental: Clinton was too much the sweet-talker, the glad-hander, and the people-pleaser for a purist and provocateur like Hitchens. And it was a manifestly primal, almost fraternal thing for Hitchens, an anger that welled up in the space between the very different choices made by two sybaritic, brilliant, round-faced scholarship boys from bruised or broken homes who’d worked and charmed themselves into the upper classes.

https://www.salon.com/2016/02/14/christopher_hitchens_last_years_islam_the_iraq_war_and_how_a_man_of_the_left_found_his_moment_by_breaking_with_the_left/

Writing of Dick Morris, Clinton’s Machiavellian advisor, Hitchens wrote, “Mr. Morris served for a long spell as Bill Clinton’s pimp. He and Mr. Clinton shared some pretty foul evenings together, bloating and sating at public expense while consigning the poor and defenseless to yet more misery. The kinds of grossness and greed in which they in­dulged are perfectly cognate with one another—selfish and fleshy and hypocritical and exploitive.”

Even as Hitchens became, throughout the 1990s, more interested in how American military force might be wielded as a force for achieving humanitarian good, and as Clinton slowly became a cautious advocate for just such a humanitarian internationalist vision, the president was given no benefit of the doubt. Clinton was too slow and too calculating for Hitchens. Where was America, wondered Hitchens, when Hutus were slaughtering Tutsis in Rwanda? Why did America hold back as Sarajevo, once one of the most beautiful, ethnically heterogeneous, and cosmopolitan cities in the world, was torn apart by ethnic chauvinism and quasi-fascist power politics? Even when Clinton acted earlier and more decisively in Kosovo than he had in Bosnia, Hitchens never got on board with the project, choosing to snipe from the sidelines at what he saw as a cowardly refusal to commit ground troops to the fight.

In February of 1999, incensed by Clinton’s continued political sur­vival, Hitchens swore out an affidavit declaring that Sidney Blumen­thal, a senior Clinton aide and an old friend of Hitchens’s, had perjured himself when he’d testified to the U.S. Senate that he wasn’t involved in spreading rumors to discredit Monica Lewinsky. Hitchens’s impulsive act cost him Blumenthal’s friendship, as well as the sympathy of many of his remaining admirers on the Left. And it was to no avail: Clinton was acquitted by the Senate the following week.

Later that year, Hitchens published "No One Left to Lie To: The Val­ues of the Worst Family," a defiant coda to the Blumenthal affair and a final summary of his belief that Clinton was a politician of rare toxicity.

The book’s rap against Bill Clinton—that he was a phony, sur­rounded by phonies, who thrived through phoniness—was typical Hitchens. The tone, however, was aggrieved in a way that was striking. “There is, clearly, something very distraught in his family background,” Hitchens wrote, venturing the kind of pop analysis he’d often dismissed when practiced by others. “Our physicians tell us that that thirst for approval is often the outcome of a lonely or insecure childhood.”

As the twenty-first century turned, Hitchens was still a man of the Left. He still wrote his column for the Nation, and although his crusade against Clinton had struck most of its readers as overwrought, his con­tempt appeared to arise from a wellspring of leftist principle. Hitchens may have been tone-deaf to the politics of impeachment—to the desire to push back against the Right, even if it meant overlooking Clinton’s flaws—but he had always been impatient with such calculations. It was what had made him such an incisive critic of the Right’s power lust and realpolitik. He remained an idealist, and his enemies, for the most part, remained the right ones.

Something had shifted, though. Hitchens seemed tired of being on the Left, which hadn’t seen much action during the go-go 1990s, when Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, and the invisible hand of the marketplace appeared poised to solve all of our problems and to render quaint the need for a “Left” to fight against things like poverty, racism, inequal­ity, imperialism, injustice, authoritarianism, and religious intolerance. He seemed weary of his role as the disreputable, lecherous uncle of the Movement, and he seemed bored with the Movement itself and its predictable antipathy to America, and in particular its knee-jerk oppo­sition to the exercise of American military force.

What’s the Left’s answer, he began asking more and more insis­tently, when confronted with evil that can’t be remedied by a critique of capitalist-imperialism or a withdrawal of Western military power? What should one do or say when faced with evil that might be rem­edied, in fact, only by an application of Western military-capitalist ­imperialist power? His answer, which awaited only the right moment to deliver it, was that there were occasions when there was no choice but to get on board with power. Having preserved his moral cleanliness for decades precisely by puncturing grand narratives rather than embracing them, Hitchens was finally ready for his great cause.

September 11, 2001, and the war in Iraq, gave it to him. It was a perfect storm. He’d been writing about Iraq since the 1970s. He’d been concerned about the threat from the religious and secular fascisms of the Middle East ever since the fatwah against his friend Rushdie in 1989. He’d lost much of his respect for and loyalty to the Left after its tryst with Bill Clinton and what he saw as its failure to rise to the occasion in Bosnia, Rwanda, and Kosovo. In the course of his years re­porting on Iraq he’d formed friendships with men like Ahmed Chalabi, the urbane Iraqi exile leader with a Ph.D. in mathematics from MIT; Paul Wolfowitz, the most genuinely idealistic of the neoconservatives who would come to populate the Bush administration; and Jalal Talabani, the charismatic Kurdish revolutionary who would later become the president of postinvasion Iraq.