Philip Bossy

Honnêtement... Ceux qui ont peur d'être le 51e état se rendent-ils compte que l'on fait une plus grande couverture de la politique américaine que notre propre politique? Autrement dit, nous sommes déjà américains dans notre tête? On peut chialer sur les médias, mais ils répondent à des incitatifs de marché eux aussi et vous cliquez et vous écoutez quand ils parlent de Trump. Carney fait un paquet de conneries, mais vous l'aimez et vous n'en parlez pas...

Yeah…nah. Here’s what I think is happening instead. I haven’t wanted to say this, but there is a problem with organized Skepticism even more than conspiracy theories. My claim is that from hard evidence NOT ONE of the following is an extraordinary claim: The CIA not only gathers intelligence but kills people, violates rights, gaslights and evades scrutiny and oversight. The U.S. hides bioweapons programs. The U.S. engages in regime change through charity and aid programs. We in the U.S. medically experiment on our own citizens without consent. We run drugs. The DOJ and FBI are actively and flagrantly obstructing justice. Putin easily kills people outside Russia. We conspire and use academics for sheepskin washing our dirty work. U.S. newspapers actively avoid reporting stories about which the U.S. population is desperate for information. They also carry extremely non neutral biases. We actively conspired to hide open and obvious presidential dementia. And by extension, there are massive conspiracies at every level below that one. At a mind boggling level. There are Special Access programs that are about real and/or fake NHI/UFOs Etc. ———— The last thing we need is skeptics telling us the bar for such conspiracies and/or governmental accountability requires extraordinary evidence. Somehow the skeptics have it totally wrong. After Watergate, Iran-Contra, COVID, Church/Pike committees, etc. these are no longer extraordinary claims to raise. They are ordinary claims. I have no idea whether Lindsay Graham died of natural causes. But I can tell you the difference between a skeptic and a scientist looking at the claim. A skeptic’s first move is to lurch for the budding conspiracy and try to pull the idea of foul play off the table first and then to require a mountain of evidence to consider such a thing. A scientist firmly grabs the skeptic’s hand and forces him to put the hypothesis back on the table and says “Uh, you’re not in charge here. There’s a history…and I’m going to need to see something other than reference to null hypotheses, William of Occam and Carl Sagan…because that’s not how science and investigation works.” Time for extra scientific skepticism to die I think. Covert operations and conspiracies are difficult enough to document as it is. We don’t need skeptics as self appointed referees.

A town in Siberia unveiled a war memorial late last year. Beyond commemorating the fallen, It gives us a rare insight into the Ukrainian War.⬇️ This memorial is located in Birsk, a small city in Bashkortostan located on the Belaya River more or less between the cities of Ufa and Izhevsk, and was opened on September 10th, 2025. It commemorates post-WWII Soviet and Russian war dead from the city and surrounding district of Birsk, which has a collective population of approximately 63,000. As of opening day the memorial featured three names from the Soviet-Afghan War, four names from Chechnya, and 188 names from the Ukrainian War, all listed with dates of birth and death. Bashkortostan has contributed a huge number of volunteers to the war effort and has, at least per publicly available data, suffered more casualties than any other Russian oblast - in fact more than the entire Moscow region despite having a fifth the population. Birsk has certainly contributed its share and suffered proportional losses. Critically, this is hard data on Russian casualties in Ukraine - curated by local citizens and geographically and temporally bounded. It's as good as it is possible to get. First of all, a sanity check. The Soviet Army was staffed by conscription whose burden was spread fairly evenly among the Soviet population, and it suffered approximately 15,000 fatal casualties in Afghanistan. Per the 1989 Soviet census, Birsk and the surrounding district had a population of approximately 54,000 in a country of some 286 million, which should have produced 2.83 fatalities from the district in Afghanistan. The wall features 3 names from that conflict. All good. The Russian Army of the 1990s was similarly staffed by conscription whose burden was spread somewhat less evenly among the Russian population, and it suffered approximately 10,000 fatal casualties in Chechnya. Per the 2002 Russian census the Russian Federation had a population of 145 million and Birsk and the surrounding district had a population of some 61,500 people. This should have produced 4.24 fatalities from the district in Chechnya. The wall features 4 names from that conflict. Checks out. The Russian Army of the 2020s is staffed on a volunteer basis with a highly uneven recruitment base. This is not unique to Russian society, it's simply a factor of who joins a volunteer army and why - San Francisco suffered forty times fewer casualties per capita in the GWOT than some rural districts of California, for instance. Similar dynamics are in play in Russia - rural districts like Birsk see significantly higher recruitment than urban centers like Ufa, let alone metropolitan centers like Moscow and Saint Petersburg. As such to draw conclusions about overall Russian losses we need to properly account for this. Mediazona runs a rather infamous casualty-tracking website that attempts to document Russian losses in Ukraine by name. I don't trust their data - otherwise I wouldn't be writing this lol - but I do think there's enough signal in their noise that their proportions can be relied upon for the purposes of this analysis. And of the approximately 9050 names Mediazona collected for Bashkortostan as of 10 September 2025, only 1900 are present from the major cities of the oblast - Ufa, Sterlitamak, Salavat, Beloretsk, and Neftekamsk, which collectively account for half the total population of the region, some two million people in total. The rest of the two million residents of Bashkortostan hail from rural or semi-rural districts like Birsk. Ergo, Mediazona is claiming that there are some 7150 personnel KIA from rural districts in that period. (Mediazona had approximately 9700 names for Bashkortostan as of present and about 9050 as of 10 September 2025; I checked their regional database yesterday which showed about 2050 casualties from those cities and scaled it to their overall count as of 10 September 2025 at 94%) Scaling off the 188 names in Birsk (pop. 63,000) to the entire rural oblast population of 2 million gives us an estimated rural KIA total of approximately 5,970 - 83% of Mediazona's claim of 7150 for that period. And bear in mind that this figure is both supportable by hard data collected by organizers and completely independent of the veracity or lack thereof of Mediazona's name list. Crudely scaled this would suggest the Russian Army has suffered approximately 190,000 KIA in Ukraine to date from Mediazona's claim of 225,000 KIA, although I suspect the actual number is quite a bit less than that because of "memorialization bias" - districts with heavy recruitment and thus heavy losses are logically going to be similarly quick to put up war memorials, in this case well before the end of combat.

Once again, we have another instance of people inventing ludicrous timelines and deadlines for Russian offensives, and then claiming Russia "failed" when they eventually don't reach these fake deadlines. ISW is one of the biggest users of this propaganda tactic, aimed at manipulating battlefield success. The only person who has claimed Russia has set a deadline to capture the rest of Donbas by the end of 2026 is Zelensky, not Putin, or any Russian official. There is exactly zero evidence beyond Zelensky's word that Russia has set a goal of capturing Donbas by the end of the year. The earliest example of this propaganda tactic being used was at the very beginning of the war, where former U.S. General Miley claimed in an interview with Fox News that Russia would likely be able to take Kyiv in 3 days. This resulted in people hallucinating that Russian officials, or even Putin himself, stated that it would be a "3 day special military operation", ultimately creating that whole "Kyiv in 3 days" meme. Now I'm not doubting that Russia probably thought the war would be over in less than 4 years, but this doesn't change the fact that these false timelines being created are only used for propaganda purposes. Any real analyst, Pro-Russian or Pro-Ukrainian, generally agrees that Russia will likely not be able to capture the rest of Donbas by December 31 2026. This new timeline is invented purely for the purpose of saying in 6 months time that Russia failed in their offensive goals, and then spinning this into a narrative that is heavily skewed in favour of Ukraine.

Letter of transmittal

If we saw “Lost Ancient Technology” would we recognize it? This object was pulled from the seabed at the sunken port of Thonis-Heracleion in Egypt. Noted as a scepter the relic displays multiple features of some kind of drive shaft. I could think of multiple mechanical functions for this object.