Russia Invades Ukraine. Again
POSTED BY: captaincrunch
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 21:09
VIEWED: 562266
PAGE 1050 of 1104
I wonder if Google's AI is sometimes more helpful to people than Google would like it to be.
I'm not bad at Google-Fu, but I was really having a hard time finding the story I was thinking about. I didn't have much solid to go off of, since I didn't remember anybody's names who were involved, which outfit put the lie out there first or even what the lie itself was about.
But 2 prompts from the AI got me exactly what I was looking for...
Quote:
The incident you are remembering where a prominent American media personality or broadcast associate mistook video game footage for a live military conflict involves MSNBC contributor and retired four-star U.S. Army General Barry McCaffrey.
The confusion over the exact year makes complete sense, as this happened right on the edge of your timeline in May 2022, during the heavily televised initial months of the Russia-Ukraine war.
The 2022 MSNBC Contributor Incident
What Happened: General Barry McCaffrey, appearing frequently on MSNBC as a military analyst, went viral after tweeting a video he believed showed authentic wartime action.
He added the caption: "Russian aircraft getting nailed by UKR missile defense. Russians are losing large numbers of attack aircraft.
"The Reality: The clip was actually beautifully rendered, simulated gameplay from the photorealistic military sandbox video game Arma 3.
The Fallout: Because of his high profile on cable news, mainstream media, internet watchdogs, and gamers immediately noticed the mistake. McCaffrey quickly deleted the tweet without an official on-air correction, but the story was widely reported across American media circles as an example of how easily simulated footage can fool experts.
That was BEFORE A.I. was a thing that people who weren't die-hard, OG Terminiator fans ever talked about.
You had a retired 4-Star US Military General who was a frequent commentator on MSNBC either wittingly or unwittingly, of his own accord or under duress from somebody else, try to pass of current popular video game footage as a real military conflict.
The fact that people caught this isn't the story here. The story is that we were already at the point where they felt like they could use fake footage to manipulate us even before everybody with $60 extra per month to burn could create footage just as convincing while in their jammies at home.
And they weren't wrong. And every time they do something like this and there's no outrage and nobody ever has to suffer any consequences that's just more data. Push the envelope further next week. And a little further the next. And again and again and again until everything becomes so normalized that not only can't anybody tell what is real and what isn't anymore, but they completely stop bothering to care because it's all just too damn much.
General Barry McCaffrey should have been tarred and feathered with the whole thing broadcast on national TV. And I'll bet he wasn't even given a slap on the wrist. Worst case scenario is that they stopped having him on for 2 or 3 weeks until everyone stopped talking about it and then they just brought him right back into whatever normal rotation they used to have him on.
And at the end of the day... if we, as in you and I specifically, have this power and technology available to us now, how long has the government actually had it? How long have foreign governments actually had it? How long have large tech companies actually had it before they started renting out a heavily gimped version to us?
How much video footage have we watched over the last decade that wasn't real?
They put movies like Wag the Dog out there so whenever anybody suggested that our governments and corporations were doing shit like this all the time with the tech that Hollywood more or less invented, we would be called conspiracy theorists and they could laugh it all off and tell you to go and watch Wag the Dog again.
Man...
Once I saw Tom Hanks sha
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If one side puts out a phony video, the other side can dispute it. And if one side puts out a video that's detrimental to it's own side, chances are it's genuine.
Since my sources follow events like hawks, as do their audiences, it's unlikely anything slips by. I think you're more likely to find AI manipulation on sites with a lot of followers, not on specialized sites run by obsessive- compulsives.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
If one side puts out a phony video, the other side can dispute it.
What? Am I talking to AI right now?
That seems a little too simplistic and naively optimistic a statement for it to have been written by the Sigs I know.
For quite a few more reasons than just one. The more I think about it, there's levels to why I don't believe that you actually believe that statement actually means anything. It's really an iceberg, actually.
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And if one side puts out a video that's detrimental to it's own side, chances are it's genuine.
Chances are BETTER that it's genuine, certainly. I get it. To each of their own ability and accord, we've all consciously or subconsciously started building defenses to this. Even those among us who want to believe everything they're told still have to fight their genetic code that knows something is very wrong right now, but is confused and doesn't know how to properly handle what is going on.
You know I walk around thinking I'm the smartest person in almost every room, but I'll be the first to admit that I'm having a really hard time deciding whether or not new channels that I come across are AI generated or not these days. There's still plenty of obvious slop out there to be immediately discarded, but that's just distracting us from how many channels have been set up that are much more sophisticated than they were only 3 months ago.
This is no joke. This has always been one of my greatest fears coming to life. Not the AI part, but the part where we have technology of any kind available to us that can make videos so convincing that most people don't even question if they were real or not. It's something I've feared since I saw The Running Man with my old man and younger brother when we were something like 5 and 7 years old.
Quote:
Since my sources follow events like hawks, as do their audiences, it's unlikely anything slips by. I think you're more likely to find AI manipulation on sites with a lot of followers, not on specialized sites run by obsessive- compulsives.
I get that. And I understand that you have faith in them that everything is genuine.
I just can't bring myself to do that for anyone. To put it another way, I don't even know what you could ever say about your sources that would ever convince me to believe in them the way that you do. And that's not even a knock on any of them. How could it be when we're not even talking about any specific sources here?
I'm not there. Only once in my life now can I say I spent 3 days outside of the little 250 mile radius I've called home for the rest of the 47 years. I've lived a very fucking simple life, and I have no shame in admitting that.
That being said, I appreciate our talks even when they get heated and we say some things that we know we shouldn't say to each other probably more than I would otherwise because we come from very different walks of life and that's the kind of thing I find interesting. I understand that, especially in your field, you've had tons of experience being around a lot of these Studies and Theses and and all sorts of things that were basically all but invisible to the general public until some laws and the internet made a lot of it finally available to everyone (and almost nobody gave a shit and most people don't even know about it).
It was part of your job to play Sherlock Holmes and weed out the bad info from the good info and refine all the results. Theories aren't law. Isolating and cutting out the bullshit is arguably more important than verifying one single (alleged, supposed, subject to change in the future) truth.
Me? That ain't my job. I just don't believe none of it. No reason to even lie about that.
99% of the time or more, that has never positively or negatively impacted my life in any way that I'm even aware of. The f
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Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I've asked the question here before, and didn't get an answer from anyone.
What does anybody get from talking about Russia at all, let alone every day for years? How has focusing any time on this issue at all positively impacted any American Citizen's life, regardless of which lens you're viewing it through?
I seriously want to know.
Wow...
Here's a Theory for you, Sigs.
What if this... this little dance that all of us do here every day or pretty much as often as possible at least...
What if this... everything we do here... is just OUR Fantasy Football?
Even our other friend in the Garden who I won't even mention by name as not to drag her in here for any reason.
What's your favorite sport?
Mine was wrestling, because it was the only sport I'd ever played and it was one of the only things I was really good at growing up. Technically a team sport with the way it's scored, sure, but I genuinely never cared at all about the team score. I rarely hung out with any of the team outside of training and matches, and I was only there to win my match and finally get to eat something after 2 days of starving myself.
I think that actually is a pretty good marker of my psychology regarding all of this if we're playing some sort of RISK type game here.
I don't know why I come here, but I know I'll never leave...
It's the only place I wanna be, yeah, yeah, yeah...
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Hmmm.....
Someday everything we see on the inet .... all the videos, all the analyses, all the debate... could be AI generated. It could ALL be fake. We could all be surrounded by artificially generated media, and the only thing we would know for real would be the people that we know IRL and the things we experience IRL.
But today isn't that day.
If the internet were under such tight control, governments wouldn't be working so hard to control the content. (Britain is turning into a real dystopian tyranny.)
So, I "get" your concern, but I don't think it's warranted at the moment.
Why do I care?
Well, I think if we want any agency whatsoever over our future, we really have to make a point of trying to understand the world. And we'll never be able to influence the future individually, only together. And of course if we need to work together we have to have a common understandings ... among other things, that there's a real world and facts don't cater to our wants or fears.
I have no illusions that SECOND will ever change. IDK what's up with him. At one point, long before you became aware of him, he said he was fighting a war here online. And, of course, if you look at his view of war, it's all about eliminating "the enemy".
So I guess I'm the nub that won't be hammered down bc I'm still here.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Hmmm.....
Someday everything we see on the inet .... all the videos, all the analyses, all the debate... could be AI generated. It could ALL be fake. We could all be surrounded by artificially generated media, and the only thing we would know for real would be the people that we know IRL and the things we experience IRL.
But today isn't that day.
If the internet were under such tight control, governments wouldn't be working so hard to control the content. (Britain is turning into a real dystopian tyranny.)
So, I "get" your concern, but I don't think it's warranted at the moment.
I appreciate you attempting to understand where I'm coming from here, but unless I'm misreading you I think haven't quite gotten there yet.
I'm not making any real mention about the inevitability of where this all ends up. But we're a lot further along in that process than you believe we are. It started a long time before A.I. the movie came out. Before we developed the tech and the energy capabilities to run A.I. we were using CGI in movies along with practical effects for years. Yeah... a lot of it was shit, but you and I both know you can't deny some of it was really, really good. And you were seeing it through the crystal clear lens of the highest quality cameras available at the time filmed for a gigantic theater screen.
Look at the bigfootesque alien footage they put out whenever somebody puts out more top secret stuff. 90% of people walking around with 4k video recorders and not a damn one of them has ever taken footage of an alien that doesn't look like it was recorded from a CCTV camera from the mid 1980's. Right.
Like I said. I have no reason to believe any of the experts on anything. I don't know them. Their degrees and accolades don't impress me in the slightest, and usually has the exact opposite effect over what was intended when any mention was made of their credentials. They've never done a single thing that has earned even a sliver of my trust, so why should I trust anything they say. Especially if it's going to in any way encroach upon my life? I've lived most of my life that way and it's rarely come back to bite me in the ass. Not that the lessons learnt sometimes weren't harsh, but for the most part you can go through life not believing what anybody says outside of your own personal sphere of people and it won't change your life one way or another at all.
Quote:
Why do I care?
Well, I think if we want any agency whatsoever over our future, we really have to make a point of trying to understand the world. And we'll never be able to influence the future individually, only together. And of course if we need to work together we have to have a common understandings ... among other things, that there's a real world and facts don't cater to our wants or fears.
Yeah. It's a rough world. I have no idea what the hell we're doing with Russia and Ukraine, but to be honest, I've kind of given up questioning things like that. Maybe they are protecting the world from ultimate annihilation by doing what they're doing and that's one of the reasons that it ain't going to stop until "somebody" is good and goddamned ready to stop it no matter who is President.
But maybe it's just pure bi-partisan corruption through and through and just another leak on our boat that should be plugged up? Great. Oh... you've got proof too? Even better. Now who do you tell the truth to that gives a shit and/or will actually put it in front of a very large audience who actually might give a shit and/or know that you're not giving this information to somebody who is on the other side and now knows which side you go to bat for?
I think my theory about Fantasy Football is onto something...
But I think I might have asked the wrong question when I asked you what your favorite sport is, because there'
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Yeah, I guess political economics is a puzzle to solve. That's my "sport“ (altho, I was pretty good at racquetball once upon a time).
I did originally come here for discussion. I was hoping to discuss some Big Ideas ... why society is like a living organism, or the misdirection that “efficiency“ builds into societies.
And I found a bunch of people who were way smarter than me but had their own Big Ideas. Well, I learned a few things.
You have to be a little bit crazy to see what most people are trained NOT to see. I'm not even a little itty bitty bit crazy, so I have to depend on the craziness of others. (I find your new tagline interesting.)
You can't believe you're so right that you dismiss other people's ideas without good reason. People dismissed Alex Jones and PN even tho there was real truth in a lot of what they said.
Anyway, despite his best efforts to convince ... who? ... I take a pretty "meta" view of SECOND. Which is to say, I'm not so interested in what he transmits (from others) as to why those others say what they say. Whose interests do they represent? So in some bassakwards way he's providing puzzle pieces, same way that other sources do.
THGR is just a lost cause. He's so completely brainwashed he has no agency. Not even interesting.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
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Kremlin could force Belarusians to fight for Russia, ISW says
Russia has found a legal way to conscript Belarusians into its armed forces
By Liliana Oleniak | Wed, June 24, 2026 - 12:22
https://newsukraine.rbc.ua/news/kremlin-could-force-belarusians-to-fig
ht-1782292932.html
Meanwhile, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov claimed that it was Ukraine that was allegedly dragging Belarus into the war. As reported by RBC-Ukraine, Moscow is threatening Kyiv with a full range of measures if Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy does not back down from his demands regarding Belarus.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Occupied Crimea’s “energy independence” runs on natural gas that Ukraine can cut
A decade of spending bought dependency dressed as autonomy.
By Peeter Helme | June 24, 2026
https://euromaidanpress.com/2026/06/24/crimea-energy-independence-runs
-on-gas/
Russia built two power plants in occupied Crimea to free it from blackouts. They run on natural gas piped from Russia, so the Ukrainian drone strike that cut electricity across all of Sevastopol on 24 June hit a dependency Russia engineered into the peninsula.
The independence that runs on gas
The two plants at the center of the project—Balaklava in Sevastopol and Tavrida in Simferopol—were built to end Crimea’s reliance on electricity imported from Ukraine. The plants were opened by Vladimir Putin in 2019. Together, they were meant to cover about 90% of consumption, a figure Russian authorities promised at the time, and both were gas-fired, built around Siemens turbines that were transferred to Crimea and installed in breach of EU sanctions.
Sevastopol is the home port of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, and the blackout was the latest in a week of strikes that have left much of Crimea rationing power. The reason the damage sticks is Western sanctions: the plants run on turbines Russia can no longer repair.
The gas the plants burn arrives from Russia, and that is the second dependency. Crimean Tatar Resource Center head Eskender Bariiev told RBC-Ukraine that the peninsula’s main plants run exclusively on gas, so strikes on gas distribution and compressor stations paralyze electricity generation.
Energy analyst Hennadii Riabtsev told Suspilne that occupied Crimea is an energy dead-end with no grid ring of its own, dependent on a single artery from Russia and backed only by small local power stations sized for morning and evening peaks. He put the money Russia has poured into the peninsula since 2014 at levels comparable to Chechnya, with little to show for it in everyday life.
Crimea’s occupation economy rests on two supports: Russian government subsidies and the summer tourist season. That season is being shut down by decree.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Jun 23, 2026
. . . Russian forces responded with a devastating barrage of KAB precision glide bombs.
One mapper logged 70 bomb impacts along a roughly mile-long ridge stretching east from the town. More widely across the 700-mile front line of Russia’s wider war on Ukraine, the Russians are lobbing around 7,000 KABs a month. Each weighs more than 500 pounds.
The sheer scale and destruction of the KAB campaign have the Ukrainians reeling and struggling to respond. “The main Ukrainian challenge for the next few months is to counter the massive air-guided bombs (KAB) campaign,” mapper Clément Molin wrote in May.
Only a much stiffer air-defense posture can blunt the KAB sorties, but the Ukrainian air force is desperately short of long-range ground-based air defenses and equally short of long-range air-to-air missiles for its small fleet of modern fighters. Sixteen ex-Swedish Saab JAS-39 Gripen fighters should arrive in Ukraine next year. Until then, the Ukrainians can’t do much to stop the deluge of glide bombs.
But the Ukrainian government announced that, after 17 months of development, it was ready to deploy locally made glide bombs for the first time. And on Tuesday, a Ukrainian air force Mikoyan MiG-29 may have used the so-called “UkroKAB” for the first time in combat.
https://www.trenchart.us/p/ukraine-has-copied-russias-best-bomb
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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