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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   35216 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 26, 2023

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The people saying that are idiots. Not only do they have zero evidence, it doesn't make any sense. The "accounting error" was not a pile of cash or a number in a bank account. It's games with the valuation of equipment transfers.

It's somewhat besides the point. It was probably not a $6.2 billion ACH transfer. The point is that "aid" being given to Ukraine is not being tracked particularly carefully and bribery of Russian officials is hardly out of the question.

I don’t believe it was even an accounting error. It honestly sounded to me like they wanted to spend more money without announcing they were spending more money. I believe they changed some accounting from “replacement costs” to “historical costs” - which I think is just lifo accounting to fifo accounting.

Just so. There's a lot of creative accounting that can be done to make numbers look the way you want them to look. If you want to provide more aid but don't want to get a new authorization, just fiddle the books a bit.

"Prigozhin accepted CIA bribe, coordinated with Putin to put on a good show until the bribe was paid, then turned back" is apparently popular on the Chinese internet, and fits what we do know pretty well. Russia letting its men be sacrificed in the ruse seems brutal, but it's not unheard of. Also possible that the helos could have have been destroyed without killing anyone, and the deaths manufactured as part of the ruse.

and fits what we do know pretty well.

Prigozhin was possessed. Then he was exorcized, and then he recalled his troops. Fits pretty well, doesn't it? It's like epicycles

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deferent_and_epicycle

when ancients astronomers wanted to explain the movement of planets using geocentric system.

No, it doesn't. Putin's legitimacy and power rest on the appearance of strength and stability. This proposes he decided to jeopardize that so an unruly subordinate could scam the CIA. That's far more of a stretch than "Prigozhin acted out of desperation and then lost his nerve or was persuaded/threatened into backing off."

It is never 5D chess.

It is never 5D chess.

Whenever someone claims that n-dimensional chess is being played in the FSU, my go-to response is "Gary Kasparov has repeatedly said nobody in the FSU is playing n-dimensional chess and the cock-up theory of history applies the same there as everywhere else - are you claiming to know more about chess than him?"

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