I don’t usually do this, but today I’m going to be talking about the #haters. We’ll also dive a little deeper into the Kakhovka Dam that was destroyed by the Russians.
I’ll let the video speak for itself today, but I’ll leave you with two thoughts.
Number 1: If you need to get across a dam, why would you blow it up before you cross it?
Number 2: If you’re not a bot or troll, maybe come up with a username other than @Tony89380945
Prefer to read the transcript of the video? Click here
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TRANSCIPT
Hey everyone. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from my favorite front range Foothills Trail. It’s called The Golden Banner. I can see in the South all the way to Castle Rock in the North, all the way to the Red Rocks Amphitheater, which is a great place to see a show. By the way, I’m going to do something today that I don’t normally do. I’m going to talk about the haters.
Yesterday I released a video where guys that would be this morning released a video on why the Russians blew up the Kakhovka Dam and people came out of the woodwork to say, I doesn’t I didn’t know what I was talking about. And obviously it was the Ukrainians. Just to give you a quick refresher, two things.
Number one, the Ukrainians are starting their counteroffensive and by blowing up the dam, what the Russians have done is they’ve made a direct crossing of the dam impossible, obviously, but they’ve also made an amphibious landing on either side of the dam, on the river, impossible, because the reservoir above the river is now draining very, very quickly. And independent of that being a dangerous environment, it’s going to leave behind a muddy bed, which is going be very difficult to get any vehicles across. And then south of the river, everything is flooded. And when the waters do recede a couple of weeks from now, again, very, very muddy and difficult to move. So any sort of amphibious landing is going to be impossible. In addition, most of the thrust probably is going to be south from Japanese to towards the Sea of Azov. And in that sort of scenario, Russian forces are going to have a choice of going one or two directions, then go east to the Donbas and get back to Mother Russia, or then go southwest and cross over into the Crimean peninsula. If the Ukrainians had been able to capture the Kakhovka dam rather than have it destroyed, they had the chance of actually cutting those forces off. And then you might have tens of thousands of encircled Russian troops that would have to surrender. And the global hit to Russian power from that would have been immense. That is now completely off the table.
So from a purely military perspective, the Russians made a wise move. There’s also a long term economic issue. A million acres of southern Ukraine is no longer going to irrigation water because it came from that reservoir. Water levels now drop below the levels of the canal. So they’re dry aside from a few pockets of dry wheat. That’s it. So you’ve just taken the single largest chunk of agricultural land in history offline all at once. Yikes. Anyway, back to the dam.
This might seem kind of simple, but dams are giant pieces of reinforced concrete that are hundreds of feet thick at the base. This thing’s 1500 feet from one side to the other, is at least 200 feet thick, probably thicker. So we just don’t keep good data on that for the rest of us. And you don’t just throw a few bombs at this. If you want to take out the dam from the air, you attack the weak points. Those are specifically the control gates and the navigation locks that you have on both sides up and below. That’s not what was hit. If the navigation logs were hit, that would be where the water is flowing through there high and dry now. And if the control gates were hit, that wouldn’t have necessarily led to a structural failure across the entire length of the dam, which is exactly what we’re seeing now. This thing was blown up from the inside, specifically with tons of explosives, specifically located in the turbine room. And for the Ukrainians to have done that, they would have had to have launched an attack on the dam. Somehow the Russians, who have been preparing for this for a year, didn’t notice and then managed to smuggle like two cargo trucks worth of explosives and place them and hit the trigger. No, no, no, no, no, no. You’re also not going to do this with 500 pound bombs, or at least not one or two. So, you know, the other aircraft idea is like a direct attack on the dam. Well, I mean, number one, that requires aircraft and there is no indication of aircraft or anti aircraft fire in this area that night. And you’re not going to do it with one plane you’re into with several because it takes a lot to crack one of these suckers open.
And then third, Ukraine, you don’t have fighter bombers. I mean, they inherited a few from the Soviet Union. They had the beginning of the war. They haven’t been flying them because they’re not any good in the dogfight role and they don’t have the bombs that would be necessary anyway. So you’re talking about what, multiple dumb drops with weapons that they don’t have from platforms that they really don’t fly? I’m sorry. The people who say that this was Ukraine are just headless at this point anyway. Well, I guess that’s the whole point. They’re bots or trolls. So this was definitely the Russians.
One more thing. And yes, sometimes dams fail, but there’s always warning. You’ll have cracks, you’ll have leaks. They don’t fail catastrophically overnight. And yeah, yeah, this has been in a war zone, but it’s not like it’s been under attack and for it to all fail catastrophically from within on the day that the Ukrainians are starting their counteroffensive. Yeah, no.
Let’s talk about bots and trolls. So I have always had to deal with a lot of bots and a lot of trolls from a lot of places with the Russians probably being at the top of that list, they at one point were probably about ten, maybe even 15% of my total followers just before the war started. But then the war started. And when the war started, Western governments and the social media companies decided that enough was enough. And they had a broad scale purge of the Russian presence, both from the social media platforms themselves and the crackdown on the financial transfers that allowed them to hire trolls in other countries to make it look like they weren’t, you know, Russian sourced. That all went away in the first two weeks of the war. And I probably saw the number of trolls and bots on my platform dropped by 99%. But then Elon Musk took over and said that this violates his idea of free speech. And so they’re all back. In fact, I’d argue that there’s twice as many now. It’s the were before the war and they all came out of the woodwork in the last 24 hours to scream at me over a thing. What do you do about bots? What do you do about trolls? So first you have to identify them as a rule. If they have a lot of numbers after the line, you know, it’s a troll or you know it’s a bot because there’s not a lot of creativity that’s put into the profiles. If you really want to, you can scan through their feed and you’ll see that a lot of these guys quote one another. I mean, I think a lot of these guys quote one another. So it really is kind of just a circular economy of crap. It don’t trade with them. If you do, they will make it into your feed on a regular basis, as will their friends. The way Musk has rejiggered the algorithm is any engagement from you. It shows interest. So if there’s a topic you don’t care about, if you just think they’re completely wrong and misinformation, don’t engage because you’ll get more and more and more and more of that. Third, don’t block them, mute them. If you block them, they’re going to know and they’re going to move on and try a different strategy. But if you mute them, they don’t know and they’re screaming into the void and they want to ever show up on your feed or your platform again. And then they’re wasting their time and their money and not yours. So hopefully this clears up a few things. For those of you who are real people in real followers, I hope this filled in some gaps for you.
For those of you who are trolls, you can always reach me at my direct personal email – I’[email protected]
Toodles.
I’ll try to have better news tomorrow. Bye..
