[Conservative Wire] Hillary Clinton’s team should be sweating bullets after the latest update from Special Counsel John Durham.
Durham is presenting evidence to a grand jury regarding his investigation into the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation.
According to The Washington Post, Durham is focusing on whether someone lied to the FBI and gave them false evidence.
If someone working for Clinton’s team was involved with the unverified dossier or gave the FBI fabricated evidence to jumpstart the Trump-Russia investigation, that could be a crime.
This could also pertain to ex-British spy Christopher Steele, who was hired by Democrats and allies connected to Clinton’s team to compile the salacious, unverified anti-Trump dossier.
The dossier played a huge role in jumpstarting the Trump-Russia investigation.
"It has struck me from the start as a fool’s errand at best, and a political task at worst, but to shut it down would give the appearance of political interference that would be unwise," said former U.S. attorney Barbara McQuade.
From The Washington Post:
Steele had been hired to look into Trump by an opposition research group working for the law firm representing Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and the Democratic National Committee.
Durham’s most recent inquiries, people familiar with the matter say, have focused in part on the authenticity of data given to the FBI about alleged cyber links between the former president’s company and Alfa-Bank of Russia — a theory pushed to journalists by some computer scientists in the fall of 2016 on the basis of purported server connections they had discovered.
The theory — which generated public pushback after it was published by Slate — essentially posited that Domain Name System lookups from Alfa Bank servers to a server with a Trump Organization-linked domain could signal a secret communications channel.
One of the researchers told the New Yorker in a story published in 2018 that his lawyer passed along the data to the FBI. Michael Sussmann, a Perkins Coie lawyer whose firm represented the DNC and the Clinton campaign, testified to the House Intelligence Committee in December 2017 that he talked with the FBI’s then-general counsel, Jim Baker, in September 2016 about the information. Baker testified that he referred the matter to investigators.
Posted by: Frank G ||
08/20/2021 7:31 Comments ||
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#8
And then Cyndy will sue Durham for slandering her dead husband.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
08/20/2021 9:45 Comments ||
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#9
#5^^^July 2016 the farce began as I recall, August 2021...Durham report close to release... almost as if the authors are relaying on the media and public's poor grasp of math and the law.
#4
Like slavery in the US, most everyone involved is dead now. F*ck white guilt.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
08/20/2021 10:42 Comments ||
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#5
M. Murcek: you miss the absolute gall of this.
slavery in the US wasn't run by a German occupation force.
"What about Poland's sins?" is a complete non sequitur from a treasonous psychopathic idiot trying not to talk about all the people who have fallen from airplanes on his watch.
#6
/\.....is a complete non sequitur from a treasonous psychopathic idiot trying not to talk about all the people who have fallen from airplanes on his watch.
#7
Hair splitting for a totalitarian turd. I totally agree with your take, Thing, but it's all of a piece too.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
08/20/2021 11:38 Comments ||
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#8
I understand the desperation of the people who fell from airplanes. Maybe they should have made more of an effort sooner?
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
08/20/2021 11:39 Comments ||
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#9
What happened in Poland had a certain amount of tacit approval and connivance. Don't try to say otherwise.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
08/20/2021 11:42 Comments ||
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#10
Tacit approval and connivance happened everywhere the Nazis were in control. So, prosecute those who did. Oh, they're dead? So, prosecute their heirs ad infinitum.
I am so sick to death of this genetic guilt schidt.
#13
As Slavs, the Poles were slated for their own genocide after the Nazis had cleared the slate of Jews, Gypsies, and the handicapped... and won their war against the Soviet Union. They were in an impossible situation themselves, and then the Nazis pitted them against the Jews in their midst.
But this is really about the current squabble between Israel and Poland about no longer returning Jewish property or something. With all else that’s been going on in the world, I haven’t been paying much attention to that — and neither should Secretary of State Blinken.
[Atlantic] When people ask me what I did in Afghanistan, I tell them that I hung out in planes and listened to the Taliban. My job was to provide "threat warning" to allied forces, and so I spent most of my time trying to discern the Taliban’s plans. Before I started, I was cautioned that I would hear terrible things, and I most certainly did. But when you listen to people for hundreds of hours—even people who are trying to kill your friends—you hear ordinary things as well.
On rare occasions, they could even make me laugh. One winter in northern Afghanistan, where the average elevation is somewhere above 7,000 feet and the average temperature is somewhere below freezing, the following discussion took place:
"Go place the IED down there, at the bend; they won’t see it."
"It can wait ’til morning."
"No, it can’t. They [the Americans] could come early, and we need it down there to kill as many as we can."
"I think I’ll wait."
"No, you won’t! Go place it."
"Do I have to?"
"Yes! Go do it!"
"I don’t want to."
"Brother, why not? We must jihad!"
"Brother ... It’s too cold to jihad."
Yes, this joke came in the middle of plans to kill the men I was supposed to protect, but it wasn’t any less absurd for it. And he wasn’t wrong. Even in our planes with our fleeces and hand warmers, it really was too damn cold for war.
Read: This is not the Taliban 2.0
In 2011, about 20 people in the world were trained to do the job I did. Technically, only two people had the exact training I had. We had been formally trained in Dari and Pashto, the two main languages spoken in Afghanistan, and then assigned to receive specialized training to become linguists aboard Air Force Special Operations Command aircraft. AFSOC had about a dozen types of aircraft, but I flew solely on gunships. These aircraft differ in their specifics, but they are all cargo planes that have been outfitted with various levels of weaponry that range in destructive capability. Some could damage a car at most; others could destroy a building. In Afghanistan, we used these weapons against people, and my job was to help decide which people. This is the non-euphemistic definition of providing threat warning.
I flew 99 combat missions for a total of 600 hours. Maybe 20 of those missions and 50 of those hours involved actual firefights. Probably another 100 hours featured bad guys discussing their nefarious plans, or what we called "usable intelligence." But the rest of the time, they were just talking, and I was just eavesdropping.
Besides making jokes about jihad, they talked about many of the same things you and your neighbors talk about: lunch plans, neighborhood gossip, shitty road conditions, how the weather isn’t conforming to your exact desires. There was infighting, name-calling, generalized whining. They daydreamed about the future, made plans for when the Americans would leave, and reveled in the idea of retaking their country.
But mostly, there was a lot of bullshitting.
Pashto and Dari naturally lend themselves to puns and insults—there is a lot of rhyming inherent to the languages, and many words share double meanings. Part of this bullshitting stemmed from a penchant for repetition. The Afghans I met would repeat a name or statement, or anything really, dozens of times to make a point. But this repetition intensified when talking over radios. A man named Kalima taught me this. None of us know who Kalima was, though it’s generally accepted that he wasn’t anyone important. But someone—we don’t know who—really wanted to talk to him. So he called his name.
He called his name again and again, at least 50 times, in every possible combination of syllabic emphasis. I listened the whole time, but Kalima never responded. Maybe his radio was off. Maybe he just didn’t want to talk to this guy. Maybe he was dead. It’s possible that I had killed him. I never heard a Kalima answer the radio after that.
All this bullshitting flowed naturally into the Taliban’s other great verbal talent, the pep talk. No sales meeting, movie set, or locker room has ever seen the level of hyper-enthusiastic preparation that the Taliban demonstrated before, during, and after every battle. Maybe it was because they were well practiced, having been at war for the majority of their lives. Maybe it was because they genuinely believed in the sanctity of their mission. But the more I listened to them, the more I understood that this perpetual peacocking was something they had to do in order to keep fighting.
Read: Why the Afghan army folded
How else would they continue to battle an enemy that doesn’t think twice about using bombs designed for buildings against individual men? This isn’t an exaggeration. Days before my 22nd birthday, I watched fighter jets drop 500-pound bombs into the middle of a battle, turning 20 men into dust. As I took in the new landscape, full of craters instead of people, there was a lull in the noise, and I thought, Surely now we’ve killed enough of them. We hadn’t.
When two more attack helicopters arrived, I heard them yelling, "Keep shooting. They will retreat!"
As we continued our attack, they repeated, "Brothers, we are winning. This is a glorious day."
And as I watched six Americans die, what felt like 20 Taliban rejoiced in my ears, "Waaaaallahu akbar, they’re dying!"
It didn’t matter that they were unarmored men, with 30-year-old guns, fighting against gunships, fighter jets, helicopters, and a far-better-equipped ground team. It also didn’t matter that 100 of them died that day. Through all that noise, the sounds of bombs and bullets exploding behind them, their fellow fighters being killed, the Taliban kept their spirits high, kept encouraging one another, kept insisting that not only were they winning, but that they’d get us again—even better—next time.
That was my first mission in Afghanistan.
Time went by, and as I learned what different code words meant and how to pick voices out of the sounds of gunfire, I got better at listening. And the Taliban started telling me more. In the spring of 2011, I was on a mission supporting a Special Forces team that had recently been ambushed in a village in northern Afghanistan. We were sent in to do reconnaissance, which sounds impressive, but logistically means flying in a circle for hours on end, watching and listening to locals. We came across some men farming, working a plot of recently tilled land. Or so we thought. The ground team was sure that these were the guys who had attacked them, and that instead of farming, they were in fact hiding weapons in the field.
So we shot them. Of the three men in that field, one had his legs blown off. Another died where he stood. The last was blasted 10 feet away, presumed to be dead from the shock wave obliterating his internal organs. Until he got up and ran away. He and his friends came back, loaded the newly amputated man into a wheelbarrow, and carted him off to a car waiting nearby. It seemed that they were trying to escape, but revenge was just as likely a scenario, and the ground team was worried that they would get more men, or more weapons, and retaliate. But I could hear them, and they didn’t sound interested in retribution.
"Go, drive! We are coming. Abdul was hit. We have him in the car."
"Keep going! Don’t let them shoot us!"
"Yes, we are coming. We will save him."
They were trying to get their friend to a doctor, or at least someone who could save his life. And then their car slowed down.
"No, brother. He’s dead."
The rest of them were no longer a threat, so we let them go.
Throughout my deployment, time and again, our kills outnumbered theirs, they lost ground, and we won. This happened so regularly that I began developing a sense of déjà vu. This feeling isn’t uncommon when you’re deployed; you see the same people, follow the same schedule, and do the same activities day in and day out. But I wasn’t imagining it. We really were flying the same missions, in the same places, re-liberating the same villages we had fought in three years ago. I was listening to the same bullshitting, the same pep talks, and the same planning, often by the same men, that I’d heard before.
On yet another interminable mission, we were supporting a ground team that had gone to a small village to talk with the elder. Together, they were establishing plans to build a well nearby. We circled overhead for a few hours, and nothing interesting happened. No one was doing anything suspicious on the ground; no one was talking about anything remotely militant on the radios. The meeting was successful, so the team headed back to its helicopters. And then the Taliban attacked.
"Move up, they’ve gone to the eastern ditch. They’re running, move up!"
"Bring the big gun; get it ready. They’ll be moving again soon."
The ground team had to sit and wait for its helicopters to be safe to take off.
"Hey, gunship, where are they, what are they doi—fuck, I’m hit."
The Taliban knew that they’d hit the team leader. I know because while I listened to his scream, I heard them celebrating.
"Brother, you got one. Keep going; keep shooting. We can get more!"
"Yes, we will, the gun is work—"
They stopped celebrating, because my plane shot them. This was the worst day of my life. It wasn’t the shooting or the screams or the death that made the day so terrible; I’d seen plenty of that by then. But that day, I finally understood what the Taliban had been trying to tell me.
On every mission, they knew I was overhead, monitoring their every word. They knew I could hear them bragging about how many Americans they’d managed to kill, or how many RPGs they’d procured, or when and where they were going to place an IED. But amid all that hearing, I hadn’t been listening. It finally dawned on me that the bullshitting wasn’t just for fun; it was how they distracted themselves from the same boredom I was feeling as they went through another battle, in the same place, against yet another invading force. But unlike me, when they went home, it would be to the next village over, not 6,000 miles away. Those men in the field may have just been farmers, or maybe they really were hiding the evidence of their assault. Either way, our bombs and bullets meant the young boys in their village were now that much more likely to join the Taliban. And those pep talks? They weren’t just empty rhetoric. They were self-fulfilling prophecies.
Because when it was too cold to jihad, that IED still got planted. When they had 30-year-old AK-47s and we had $100 million war planes, they kept fighting. When we left a village, they took it back. No matter what we did, where we went, or how many of them we killed, they came back.
Read: What we got wrong in Afghanistan
Ten years after my last deployment, and after 20 years of combat with the world’s richest, most advanced military, the Taliban has reclaimed Afghanistan. Whatever delusions existed about whether this would happen or how long it might take have been dispatched as efficiently as the Afghan security forces were by the Taliban over a single week. What little gains have been achieved in women’s rights, education, and poverty will be systematically eradicated. Any semblance of democracy will be lost. And while there might be "peace," it will come only after any remaining forces of opposition are overwhelmed or dead. The Taliban told us this. Or at least they told me.
They told me about their plans, their hopes and dreams. They told me exactly how they would accomplish these goals, and how nothing could stop them. They told me that even if they died, they were confident that these goals would be achieved by their brothers in arms. And I’m sure they would have kept doing this forever.
They told me how they planned to keep killing Americans. They told me the details of these plans: what weapons they would use, where they would do it, how many they hoped to murder. Often, they told me these things while doing the killing. They told me that, God willing, the world would be made in their image. And they told me what so many others refused to hear, but what I finally understood: Afghanistan is ours.
#1
Just cast's a bright light on how badly we did against a not particularly motivated enemy. COVID zealots are more fanatical than the average jihadi.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
08/20/2021 11:27 Comments ||
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#2
You may win battles with sufficient resources and proper organization. But you will never dominate without sufficient hatred. Unless the west can learn this lesson, it is doomed to fall to jihad, commies, globalists what have you.
#5
Interesting that this guy posted his description of his job. I had an identical job when I was in Vietnam and haven't talked about it since, except the time my plane got shot up -- and that wasn't job content. I wonder if they've changed the rules or if they don't apply to him.
Posted by: Fred ||
08/20/2021 12:39 Comments ||
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#7
Maybe good fodder for stories at the VFW, but it strikes me as way too much detail in terms of our listening capabilities to be published in a magazine.
#11
They told me how they planned to keep killing Americans... what weapons they would use, where they would do it, how many they hoped to murder. Often, they told me these things while doing the killing. They told me that, God willing, the world would be made in their image.
While I didn't interact with the taliban, I did with baloch and other organized groups. This is not what men discuss. Most of the time it's just desperate bursts of tactical info and sometimes short messages between those manning the comms.
You can recognize where the writer goes into gimme-a-pulitzer territory at times.
#16
Technically, only two people had the exact training I had.
Others came in with slightly different knowledge bases, so their training to do this or similar jobs had to be specialized to target their particular lacks so that in the end they arrived at the same place, ability-wise. Or a slightly different place, depending on the specific needs for their particular assignments— the US military is keen to add specialized knowledge for a specific task for those capable of absorbing the information. I once met a civilian translator once who had been put through a language course for Bosnian or some such minor European language — only the latest language he’d taken on for the job.
Perhaps our Atlantic journalist was kept unaware of the others before and after him, flying in circles over different areas of operation. It’s a big country, after all, and it’s been ten years by his own report.
Ten years after my last deployment, and after 20 years of combat with the world’s richest, most advanced military, the Taliban has reclaimed Afghanistan. Whatever delusions existed about whether this would happen or how long it might take have been dispatched as efficiently as the Afghan security forces were by the Taliban over a single week. What little gains have been achieved in women’s rights, education, and poverty will be systematically eradicated. Any semblance of democracy will be lost. And while there might be "peace," it will come only after any remaining forces of opposition are overwhelmed or dead. The Taliban told us this. Or at least they told me.
As I recall, the Taliban only ruled from Kabul last time from 1996 to 2001. And it doesn’t look like they’ve learnt all that much since then. Something to ponder.
#1
The picture this article paints of officers paying attention to "metrics" reminds me of McNamara and his "free fire zones" and body counts. I thought the military had sworn "never again."
The fact that the old (bad) habits are back is very depressing.
[PJ] America’s humiliation in Afghanistan goes on. It’s going to get worse, quite possibly much, much worse, before it’s over, assuming it ever is. But the many reasons it didn’t have to be this way are already coming into clearer focus.
Start with the decision made sometime before Independence Day 2021 for the July 6 U.S. pullout from Bagram Airfield, the massive operations and supply center for air power, the decisive element of the U.S. military effort in Afghanistan.
That the Bagram withdrawal was pulled off at night without prior notice to our Afghan allies was a huge warning sign of the epic disaster President Joe Biden was setting about. Watching closely were the Taliban, Beijing, Moscow, and numerous other centers of evil in the modern world.
But not only was Bagram the heart of U.S. air cover for its own withdrawing forces and for those it built up in the Afghan military, Bagram was an essential asset in the inevitable evacuation of tens of thousands of American civilians and Afghans who helped the U.S.
Bagram could also have provided decisive leverage for the U.S. in the post-withdrawal period, especially in the event of the Taliban victory over the central Afghan government in Kabul. It’s not entirely analogous, but the U.S. ability to maintain its naval base at Guantanamo in Cuba is instructive in this regard.
Another key decision that was made prior to Independence Day didn’t prompt an embarrassingly well-publicized midnight departure because it was carried out behind closed bureaucratic doors in Foggy Bottom.
That was the "pausing" of a special program then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo established to coordinate and expedite the emergency evacuation of U.S. forces and civilians in crisis situations.
Pompeo saw the need for special capabilities that weren’t coalesced in the State Department, so, being a military veteran, he set in motion the creation and establishment of the Crisis and Contingency Response (CCR) bureau.
Presented in its entirely, unedited. by Seyed Mohammad Marandi
[AlMayadeen] Roughly 20 years ago, after the Taliban’s crushing defeat in Afghanistan and the complete withdrawal of support from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia under US pressure, the Quds Force began a dialogue with this seemingly diminished organization. At that time, many thought this to be a meaningless endeavor as the political landscape across the region was changing dramatically. The fact that the Taliban murdered 11 Iranian diplomats and a journalist inside the Iranian consulate in Mazar-i-Sharif, would have made this new direction seem grossly inappropriate in the eyes of many in Tehran, if publicized.
Continued on Page 49
"Intelligence and rationalism are not in themselves revolutionary. But technical thinking is foreign to all social traditions: the machine has no tradition. One of Karl Marx’s seminal sociological discoveries is that technology is the true revolutionary principle, beside which all revolutions based on natural law are antiquated forms of recreation. A society built exclusively on progressive technology would thus be nothing but revolutionary; but it would soon destroy itself and its technology."
— Carl Schmitt
Understanding the true significance of events is, at least in some sense, a task best left to historians. Even the fall of the Roman empire can appear as something akin to the normal state of things for the people living through it; the true historical significance of something is generally only clear well after the fact, and every new generation has its own notion of the true meaning of history. To the people living in Germany in 1450, the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest surely meant something very different than it did to the german nationalists of the 19th century. For the former, if people thought about the battle at all, it merely represented a particularly nasty defeat suffered by a long dead empire. To the people struggling to unite the german nation under the banner of a single strong state, the roman defeat by the teutons appeared as a prefiguration of their own political and national destiny.
Continued on Page 49
#3
I think the true irony of the ascendance of a technologically driven world is that as we move into more unforgiving terrain, replicants and alien predators on Earth, trips to hostile planets as envisioned in Alien and Starship Troopers, human survival will dictate a certain harsh practicality that will leave no room for parlor guessing games about what might work. People like Brennand and Panetta will not be remotely up to the task. A very different type will emerge. With any luck those people will look more like Paul Artreides than Reinhard Heydrich.
But it could go either way...
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
08/20/2021 8:18 Comments ||
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#7
He's not for everyone. I've never read any of the Thomas Covenant books. Not my type of story. In interviews, Donaldson is quite bitter about writing and feels he's gotten a bad shake doing it. The Man Who books I still think are quite good...
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
08/20/2021 9:33 Comments ||
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#8
And I did organize an email campaign some years back to try to get J. Michael Straczynski to do the Gap Into books as a series of movies ala Babylon 5. Needless to sat I was not successful.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
08/20/2021 9:36 Comments ||
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#9
In many respects, Donaldson's take on the industry mirrors Harlan Ellison's distaste for how Roddenberry mutilated his screen play for a Star Trek episode that aired as City on the Edge of Forever.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
08/20/2021 9:41 Comments ||
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#11
I just can't get "swords and sorcery." I like hard sci-fi. The market for the former is enormous, almost nil for the latter.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
08/20/2021 9:52 Comments ||
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#12
City on the Edge of Forever was in many respects a seminal Star Trek episode. Really. Jim Kirk and Joan Collins. Spock does miracles in a distant past. Actual history comes into play. Seldom did so much come together so well in a prime time TV show. Rod Serling was probably even impressed.
I don't even have a TV bundle these days. It's all crap...
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
08/20/2021 9:57 Comments ||
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Now that the Afghan government has fallen, I believe I am free to talk about what I do know. I met with the government on neutral ground in Thailand. I was invited to give lectures there but just never found the time to make that trip. As I have said before, most governments have heard of Socrates. After all, it has been putting out economic and geopolitical forecasts since 1977. From my discussions with them in Thailand, what I can say is that the Taliban are largely self-funded, yet have been warmly protected by Pakistan which is the ONLY nuclear nation in that region. Pakistan has supported the Taliban, not for religious agreement, but because of their enemy, the Afghans, we friends with Pakistan’s enemy India. In that sense, there is a deep-seated religious conflict that goes back to the creation of Pakistan in 1947.
The peak in our model on the region took place in 2019 when any hope of some sort of peace treaty with the Taliban collapsed. Military operations between Afghan and US government forces and the Taliban then intensified in 2019 resulting in more than 8,000 civilian casualties. That was precisely on target being 72 years from 1947 which was the real period of the rise in militant Islam. A standard 2-year reaction was in play which has brought us to this point in 2021. But this is the start of a 13-year cycle of rising tensions which will also peak in 2032.
Pakistan is aligned with China and the idea has been that China will invest in Afghanistan and that may help to satisfy the Taliban. But that is perhaps wishful thinking. Religiously, they are more akin to Iran. Nevertheless, the Taliban has been a movement of religious students (talib) from the Pashtun areas of eastern and southern Afghanistan. They were actually educated in traditional Islamic schools in Pakistan. Keep in mind that Pakistan can be very authoritarian. Pakistan is blocking cell phones to compel people to be vaccinated.
Continued on Page 49
#1
..yet have been warmly protected by Pakistan which is the ONLY nuclear nation in that region.
Sort of forgets India. Take with a grain of salt.
India has developed and possesses weapons of mass destruction in the form of nuclear weapons. Although India has not released any official statements about the size of its nuclear arsenal, recent estimates suggest that India has 160 nuclear weapons and has produced enough weapons-grade plutonium for up to 161–200 nuclear weapons. - wiki
#3
They're not really dependable in case of war with China. When China attacked Tibet, India instantly recognized it as Chinese territory. India also never formally supported Taiwan to try and not piss off China. We supplied AFG with ammo for arty and meds and evacced some Afghan businessmen but that's it. India keeps its overt engagements at the economic, cultural and soft-diplomacy level.
Due to the mostly leftist civil leaderships in India, it remains a singularly defense oriented power; non-aligned, non-committal. It's leaders live in a bubble where they believe the military will keep protecting the palaces at New Delhi, and as long as that is fine the world can go fcuk itself.
To see photos of the Volkonsky Estate, click on the link in the title. by Yaroslav Chingaev
[Regnum] Sukhanovo is a former noble estate, hereditary estate of the Volkonsky family. The estate is located in the Moscow region, not far from the town of Vidnoe, stands on the steep bank of the Gvozdyanka river, in the middle of a landscape park with artificial ponds.
The village that was on this place passed from hand to hand until it was bought in 1769 by Melgunov Alexey Petrovich, a statesman under Catherine II. This place was inherited by his daughter Ekaterina Melgunova, who married Prince Dmitry Petrovich Volkonsky.
Ekaterina Alekseevna Volkonskaya turned this place into a monument of Russian classicism. Under her, the main house with galleries-colonnades was built and the existing palace and park ensemble was created. Being childless, Ekaterina Alekseevna presented Sukhanovo to her nephew Pyotr Volkonsky.
Pyotr Mikhailovich Volkonsky was Minister of the Imperial Court and Appanages under Alexander II. Volkonsky attracted major Petersburg architects associated with the imperial court to the development of the estate. Such masters as Rossi, Gilardi, Stasov, Grigoriev, Menelas worked on the projects of various buildings here. Pyotr Volkonsky declared Sukhanovo a reserved estate of the Volkonsky family.
After the Revolution of 1917, a revolutionary committee was located on the estate. From 1920 to 1929 there was a boarding school organized with the assistance of Nadezhda Krupskaya. Since 1930, a sanatorium was located in the estate, and after that it was transferred to the Union of Architects. In 1960, the estate was recognized as a monument of all-Union significance. The film "Dubrovsky" of 1988 was filmed on its territory.
One of the most unusual buildings of the estate is the clergy house (the house of the clergy). The exterior of the castle-like building is immediately striking. This pseudo-Gothic building was built in the 1820s. and one of the few that have come down to us in its almost original form, only a few side turrets have not survived. The building was erected as a "Gothic house" according to the drawing of one of the Volkonsky children.
The unusual tomb-temple in the far part of the park was built by the famous architect Domenico Gilardi. The temple was consecrated in the name of St. Dmitry of Rostov. Now the Volkonskys' remains are not in the tomb; they were reburied (according to other versions, they were simply thrown out) back in the 30s of the XX century. In the building of the temple itself, a temporary altar has now been restored and services are being held. Orthodox priests perform a prayer service for the repose of the souls of the departed princes, as well as for the health of living people. Federal cultural heritage site.
Next to the temple is the Volkonskys necropolis - these are the very slabs taken from the tomb in the 30s. There are also two small pedestals with the inscriptions: "Pestel Varvara Alexandrovna 09/13/1837 - 06/28/1838" and "Maria Alexandrovna Pestel 10.11.1840 - 11.11.1840". These are the daughters of the younger brother and, in fact, the niece of the very same DecembristPyotr Ivanovich Pestel. Alexander Petrovich Pestel, found a shelter in Sukhanovo, where the children died here.
There is also a sculpture "The Virgin with a Broken Jug". This is a copy of the famous work of P.P.Sokolov, made in 1816, located in Tsarskoye Selo Park and praised by A.S. Pushkin. Volkonsky, it is true, was flattered by the opportunity to see small fragments of the imperial residences. Now the maiden is in place, but the jug is not visible.
Today the entire architectural ensemble is in a deplorable state. The main building, the Volkonsky mausoleum, the manor buildings decay with time, no restoration is carried out. The park, a cascade of ponds are abandoned and not well maintained. At the same time, there are tents on the territory of the park where banquets and weddings take place. The main house is occupied by a private lyceum. Other office or residential buildings.
The easiest way to get to the estate is by your own vehicle. You can go on your own by bus # 379 from the Butovo MCD station or the Rastorguevo station in the Paveletsky direction.
#2
They already have them, some assembly required. I bet China will be real surprised when they are used. That big fat dam needs to be hit.
Posted by: Theresing Scourge of the Sith6998 ||
08/20/2021 8:05 Comments ||
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#3
During the 1970s, Taiwan produced plutonium for its indigenous weapons program. The US placed nuclear weapons on Taiwan during the cold war and Taiwan's weapons planning went underground. Now the US nuclear umbrealla doesn't mean spit, and the Taiwanese probably have the makings of nuclear weapons by this time.
#9
^ I never cease to be amazed at what you can learn just from reading the 'Burg. By the way, the Global Strike Command is just across the state line in friendly territory.
Posted by: Matt ||
08/20/2021 21:35 Comments ||
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#3
We live with death, be it on the highways or the streets of Chicago. There are even deaths in prisons, the ultimate lockdown for the living without any liberties. Life is about trade offs.
#1
Ann sort of misses that Trump's pullout was to be May. It only points out the need to purge the senior ranks of the military (aka part of the Swamp) that obstructed this by not following the previous Commander in Chief's direct order.
Three weeks from now, America will be marking the twentieth anniversary of 9/11. The observances will be muted in New York, but not in Kabul - because that's the privilege of victory. So, ahead of that grim date, I thought we'd revisit August 2001 with a few columns of mine from that last summer.
We began a fortnight ago with the summer of sharks, and continued with racial demagoguery then and now. For this week's entry, I see Joe Biden is under fire for taking off for Camp David as America suffered a pitiful global humiliation. He'd barely been back in Washington for a day before it was decided that he'd heading off for a long weekend back home in Wilmington, Delaware. Apparently, Sleepy Joe finds it hard to sleep at the White House: possibly Trump made sinister modifications to the MyPillows before he left the residence.
Well, it's hard to see that it makes any difference where Biden sleeps as it's only the useless US media still maintaining the pretense that he's exercising executive authority. Sot here, from The Spectator of August 25th 2001, is a column of mine about a far more leisurely presidential break. I wouldn't cite this as my best work, but, quite unintentionally, it captures well the lazy languorous quality of what came to be called America's long "holiday from history":
ACCORDING to his tanned spokesman, George W Bush will cut short his vacation in Crawford, Texas, and return to Washington next Friday, 31st August. The President arrived in Crawford on 4th August and it was thought he intended to stay at least until Labor Day, 3rd September, thus beating Richard Nixon's 1969 summer sojourn and earning his place in history as the taker of the longest-ever presidential vacation. On the other hand, even at a paltry twenty-eight days, it's almost certainly the longest vacation anyone's ever taken in the Greater Waco area. Don't try to book online: the computer will redirect you to more glamorous resorts such as Crawford, Florida, Crawfordsville, Indiana, Crawford Notch, New Hampshire, or the Crawford oil field in the middle of the North Sea between Scotland and Norway. And, if you insist that no, really, you really want to spend a month in Crawford, Texas, the entire site crashes.
#1
We voted for this. When 9/11 hit, people who have since soured on the whole mess were all in. Boosh belongs at GITMO along with pretty much everyone who came after him. That, of course, ain't happening. Still, we can dream...
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
08/20/2021 10:31 Comments ||
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#2
GITMO? No, no, no! They need to be put someplace really miserable. Someplace cold, barren, rocky and windswept. Hmmm. I know, Adak Alaska. I even think there's a decommissioned Naval Air Station there. Put them in drafty barracks with insufficient warm clothing and a reduce calorie diet.
Posted by: Theresing Scourge of the Sith6998 ||
08/20/2021 13:40 Comments ||
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#3
^
Before you directed us to Alaska, you were describing a Maine Summer perfectly! - G.W. Bush has a family compound in Kennebunkport, which is isolated on a point, with the super cold Gulf of Maine - Atlantic Ocean surrounding the compound at a 360 degree circumference - If you fell-in the ocean water, I would give you about 25-40 minutes to live before you died of hyperthermia and that's in the summer. In the winter, Maine has been known to reach -40 degrees at high noon, with the ocean literally freezing so solid and thick that 3 ton trucks were known to drive over 1/2 mile deep ocean (Google WWII Winters in Maine) from islands in Casco Bay.
Send him home, the government will only have to spend money on the 24 hour guard in his Isthmus of Bush Compound
IMO the key paragraph:
[AmericanConservative] The reality is that America lost its war in Afghanistan more than a decade ago, roughly around the time when CIA officers began bribing aging warlords with Viagra. The Americans knew all about the young boys the tribal leaders kept in their camps; because the sex drug helped Afghan elders rape more boys more often, they were beholden to America’s clandestine service. Losing Afghanistan then is the least of it. When you choose to adopt a foreign cohort’s cultural habits, customs for which the elders of your own tribe would ostracize and perhaps kill you, you have lost your civilization.
#1
I take his point but inasmuch as this was done by a handful of individuals without civilization's consent with only after the fact discovery I think I'll hold on a little longer.
I think it was far worse in terms of informing the enemy a weakness unnecessarily. Much in the way of killing thousands hard and fast then sending civil engagement as if to apologize. In this case, ' We want to be friends so badly we champion and salute your repulsive lifestyle.'
Most of our global tribal adversaries aren't all that bright. But they are uniformly cunning and know how to observe and take the simplest route to a conclusion, as they remain unburdened with Hamlet-esque psycho drama.
I could go on about the Bush administration's lukewarm non-criticism of liberated Afghanistan's murderous intolerance in the Rahman case, Western governments & miltary siding with Afghan and OIC demands for an end to free speech civil rights in the West, while humiliating themselves before the murderous tantrum throwing 'Noble People of Afghanistan', etc.
The point is that the West of the 21st Century has ZERO civilizational confidence.
This is why, since 2001 our NATO governments have hallucinated the presence of Afghan 'allies' even though liberated Afghanistan's political posture (no peaceful coexistence but submission to Rushdie rules) was officially more hostile than the post Stalin Soviet Union's.
This is why we are failing, miserably and dangerously.
Scrapping "Infinite Justice" and pursuing "Enduring Freedom" made sure that freedom was doomed.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[Conservative Wire] Hillary Clinton’s team should be sweating bullets after the latest update from Special Counsel John Durham.
We're finally getting rid of these people. 
[Atlantic] When people ask me what I did in Afghanistan, I tell them that I hung out in planes and listened to the Taliban. My job was to provide "threat warning" to allied forces, and so I spent most of my time trying to discern the Taliban’s plans. Before I started, I was cautioned that I would hear terrible things, and I most certainly did. But when you listen to people for hundreds of hours—even people who are trying to kill your friends—you hear ordinary things as well.
[PJ] America’s humiliation in Afghanistan goes on. It’s going to get worse, quite possibly much, much worse, before it’s over, assuming it ever is. But the many reasons it didn’t have to be this way are already coming into clearer focus.
