What Does Zelensky Want?

Russia has made its war objectives in Ukraine clear:

1. Ukraine to acknowledge Crimea as Russian territory.

2. Ukraine to end the sniping and shelling of the breakaway Donbas republics of  Donetsk and Luhansk that is reported to have claimed 14,000 lives over the last seven years.

3. Ukraine to commit to remaining outside the anti-Russian NATO military alliance.

That Ukraine will not accept these terms, reveals what Zelensky wants. Specifically, Zelensky wants:

A. To continue painting the 2014 Russian occupation of Crimea as illegitimate, notwithstanding that:

i. Ukraine, including Crimea, has been Russian territory for much of the last one thousand years.

 ii. The Russian state was founded in Kyiv where, following the baptism, in Crimea, of Vladimir I prince of Kiev, in 988, Orthodox Christianity became the Russian state church headed by the metropolitan of Kiev.

ii. Russia has ruled Crimea continuously from the time of Catherine the Great until the 1950's, when a Ukrainian General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, Nikita Khruschev, gifted Russian Crimea to the Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraine. At the time of the transfer, it made no great difference to anyone since both Russia and Ukraine were subordinate to the Soviet Communist Party. On the breakup of the Soviet Union, however, Kruschev's action resulted in the Russian-populated, former-Russian territory coming under the rule of an, at times, genocidally anti-Russian Ukrainian government.

iii. In the 1850's, Russia defended the Crimean peninsula against an assault by British, French and Turkish forces in a war estimated to have cost 650,000 lives. Leo Tolstoy served in the defense of Sevastapol, winning a medal for bravery and, for his dispatches from the front, his first recognition as a writer.

iv. In early 2014, following a referendum in which over 90% of the mainly Russian-speaking population of Crimea voted for union with Russia, the Crimean Parliament requested to join the Russian Federation, which request was accepted, resulting in an essentially peaceful transfer of sovereignty. Among Ukrainian troops stationed in Crimea, many switched loyalties, becoming members of the Russian armed forces.

v. The validity of the Crimean referendum was confirmed by the US-based Pew Trust, which conducted its own opinion survey in Crimea.

B. To destroy the breakaway Donbas republics and eliminate official use of the Russian language, including in education, throughout Ukraine, notwithstanding that the majority of citizens in Eastern Ukraine are Russian speakers.

C. To join the anti-Russian NATO alliance and thus obtain the military backing of the Western nations, while wiping out Russian culture and Russian language-use across Ukraine. 

As Canada's Prime Minister, dictator-wannabe Justin Trudeau, shuttles around Europe lobbying for NATO membership of Ukraine, Canadians might reflect on the consequences of Zelenskyism were it to be applied in Canada. Specifically, they should think of the consequences of a Ukrainian-style, one-language, one-culture policy as it would affect Canadian unity: except there would be no Canadian unity. Quebec would be gone, and if restrained, Quebec would fight.

Related:

Ukraine news – live: Kyiv rejects proposed neutrality

Zelensky pleads for NATO intervention He might as well be candid and admit he's asking for a nuclear Third World War. But our boy, Justin, is still backing Zel.

Zelensky BEGS Biden to step up and 'be the leader of peace'  By going to war

The Killing in Ukraine Won't End As Long As It Hurts Russia Max Blumenthal with Colonel Doug McGregor:

Sending NATO troops to Ukraine is ‘red line’ – German official If the Germans, who have some experience with World Wars, are against another one, maybe it would be wise to consider their advice.

10 Signs the War in Ukraine is part of the Great Reset

30% Of "Ukrainian Refugees" Are Actually From Other Countries That's OK. Canada will have them. We need them. As the fertility of the Canadian nation collapses, thanks to Trudeau I's policies on divorce and abortion, we will replace the historic Canadian nation with people from elsewhere. 

More Than One-Third Of Americans Would Risk Nuclear War Over Ukraine Do these damn-fool dupes of the globalist media propaganda not realize that in a nuclear war not only will they most likely be incinerated, but that civilization as they understand it could be entirely destroyed. 

On the Edge of a Nuclear Abyss: Edward Curtin

Poland Tells Zelensky It's Seeking Armed NATO 'Peace Mission' For Ukraine Poles have form when it comes to stupidity in the run up to a World War. 

US Mulls Sending New "Switchblade" Kamikaze Robot Drone To Ukraine Wonder what the process of "mulling" amounts to when you have a demented president and crackpot VP.

NATO Moves Ahead With Military Drills In Europe, Deploys 30,000 Troops Oh not to worry. It's just a drill, they said.

Homo sapiens: the Ape With Nukes. Or Are We Really the Smartest Animals Alive?

In his excellent book Are we smart enough to know how smart animals are? Frans de Waal tells of the chimp Ayumu who could memorize a random layout of the digits one through nine when shown them for a mere one fifth of a second, a task impossible for most if not all humans. So we aren't very smart at some of the tasks that might feature in an inter-specific IQ test.

It might be argued that visual memory is hardly a measure of smart. But animals do all sorts of other things that humans can do barely or not at all. Hunt moths by echolocation like a bat, for example. What's more, animals do pretty well at solving problems: the New Caledonian crow, for example, being better at solving a variety of puzzles than the average seven-year-old human.

But whatever one may say about the intelligence of animals, none have been smart enough to build the bomb, or describe the motion of the planets. So what makes us effectively smarter than the animals, even if our IQ is not nearly so much higher than that of other animals as most people think?

Evolution? Image source

The answer is language. That humans have somewhat larger brains, though not by that much, than other apes is an evolutionary development almost certainly related to, and driven by the benefits of, language acquisition.

As I have previously discussed, the gift of language grants humanity a power almost equal to that of telepathy. For direct mind-to-mind communication, there is no need for everyone to have a chip in their head as some have supposed. All that's required is the ability to think in symbols, and to express those symbols by verbal utterance or other means. Then, to create the same thought in your head as in mine, I have simply to think out loud. Thus, if I say, "elephants never forget," what you'll hear is "elephants never forget," which is my thought exactly.

Language thus creates a group mind. Experience of one becomes the knowledge of all. Knowledge passes between the generations, and beyond the bounds of the tribe. Your solution to the problem of extracting honey from the bees' nest without being stung can become my solution too, without my ever seeing you perform the trick. With that one step, a dim-witted ape became master of a wealth of knowledge far beyond the experience of a single individual or a single generation.

The verbal sharing of knowledge meant improved human survival, larger populations, the development of urban civilization, the complexity of which gave rise to a need for record keeping, which led naturally to the invention of writing.

Writing provided the means to the next big step in the evolution of human "smartness." It led to the transmission of experience and ideas over both time and space. Knowledge now passed easily down the generations and between tribes, cities and nations. With the accumulation and dispersal of literary, historical and technical writings, the intelligence of a person of any accomplishment ceased to be a product chiefly of that individual's own experience and cerebration, but of the civilization in which that individual was raised.

And now there is the Internet, which makes civilizational distinctions obsolete. All human knowledge is available to everyone, everywhere at virtually no cost. Even a poorly financed terrorist organization has the potential to deploy weapons of mass destruction. The world is at the threshold of an era during which all kinds of freaks and crazies will be able to wreak havoc upon the world. In Washington, Moscow or Beijing, one of them may already have their finger on the button marked Armageddon. All that power in the hands of an animal with a mind comparable to that of a crow and in some ways inferior to the brain of a chimp.

Related: 

Frans de Waal: Moral Behavior in Animals

Humanity Is Not Wise, But Dangerously Inventive

Man is the Reasoning Animal. Such is the claim. I think it is open to dispute. Indeed, my experiments have proven to me that he is the Unreasoning Animal... In truth, man is incurably foolish. Simple things which other animals easily learn, he is incapable of learning. Among my experiments was this. In an hour I taught a cat and a dog to be friends. I put them in a cage. In another hour I taught them to be friends with a rabbit. In the course of two days I was able to add a fox, a goose, a squirrel and some doves. Finally a monkey. They lived together in peace; even affectionately.

Next, in another cage I confined an Irish Catholic from Tipperary, and as soon as he seemed tame I added a Scotch Presbyterian from Aberdeen. Next a Turk from Constantinople; a Greek Christian from Crete; an Armenian; a Methodist from the wilds of Arkansas; a Buddhist from China; a Brahman from Benares. Finally, a Salvation Army Colonel from Wapping. Then I stayed away for two whole days. When I came back to note results, the cage of Higher Animals was all right, but in the other there was but a chaos of gory odds and ends of turbans and fezzes and plaids and bones and flesh — not a specimen left alive. These Reasoning Animals had disagreed on a theological detail and carried the matter to a Higher Court.

Mark Twain

Our species, Homo sapiens, which is to say the wise ape, is as Twain observed, not only not wise but is in fact incurably foolish. But it is also terrifyingly inventive. That is the secret of humanity's domination of the planet. We engage in continuous innovation.

At the outset, the process was more intermittent than continuous. Someone found that a pointed stick could be hardened in a fire, making a better weapon to spear a boar or pierce a threatening stranger.

Later, perhaps ten thousand years later, someone invented the bow and arrow. The first step, perhaps, was to tie a piece of buffalo gut to both ends of a slightly bowed stick and twang it to produced a novel sound with which to entertain the girls. Then, someone fooling around with a twang stick, found that the gut string, when stretched really tight could propel a stick or a stone. Then we were really on the ladder of progress. Next step: point the arrow and you've got a cool way of nailing a pigeon.

Somewhere along the line came various kinds of chipped stone tools, axes, knives and arrow heads. Then someone came up with the idea of catching fish with a worm tied to a length of twisted gut. Often, the fish would slip the line before it was hauled in. But after a few thousand years some genius came up with a small hook carved from a stag's antler or a piece of whale bone, which, when attached to a fishing line and swallowed with the bait, kept the fish on line as it was drawn out of the water. Yeah!

None of these innovations, individually, may have been beyond the intellectual capacity of a chimp, or an orangutan. But what made humans unique and gave them the capacity for continuous innovation was the gift of speech. The power of speech meant that what was conceived once could become common knowledge of the tribe and then the species.

In the early stages of human evolution, innovation affected life only marginally. People with fire hardened spears killed more game than people armed only with rocks, and so their numbers increased, but not by a lot. Likewise, those who developed fish hooks increased the quantity and quality of their food supply, and thus prospered. But it took nine-tenths of human history before people got the idea of settling down to cultivate the land and grow crops instead of relying solely on what they could hunt or gather, and by that time the world's entire human population probably still numbered less than a million.

But by increasing the carrying capacity of the land, farming increased the density of population. Urbanization became possible, and with urbanization the process of continuous innovation was greatly accelerated. Higher population density meant more ideas and faster transmission of ideas. Moreover, urbanization created greater opportunities for trade and for the division and specialization of labor, which led to competition, which concentrated minds on innovation for competitive advantage. Thus began the human population's exponential rise, doubling over shorter and shorter intervals, first ten thousand years, then a thousand, then a hundred, and today, just thirty to forty years.

With each leap in population, the intellectual effort devoted to the process of innovation leapt also, thus causing the human carrying capacity of the planet to rise exponentially. Among the more important innovations were writing (which facilitated the spread of ideas both contemporaneously and across the generations), calculating, and organized learning. What started out as a bit of fun with a stick and a piece of gut turned increasingly to nightmare. Incurably foolish men acquired toxic gases, lethal microorganisms and nuclear weapons capable of destroying virtually all life on the planet. What's more they went about replicating these weapons on a massive scale and devising means of delivering them to any point on earth at hypersonic speed.

That is where the mind of man has brought us: to the brink of extinction. Or rather one should say, that is where the mind, not of man, but of mankind has brought us, for the minds of individual human creatures are as feeble as they ever were, but linked in a vast network with other feeble minds, they achieve prodigious results leading us ever more rapidly to the point of extinction.

Related:

CanSpeccy: Why Are We So Smart? Or Perhaps We're Not