Comments by "Tim Trewyn" (@timtrewyn453) on "FRONTLINE PBS | Official" channel.

There's the fast part of our brain, and the slow part. The slow part usually comes out a bit more reasoned than the fast. Unfortunately, the safer way to defeat Putin is slowly over time, allowing him to engage daily experiences that may be difficult, but, in his view of himself, surmountable, giving him time to adjust his narrative of victory. I know that is a horrible outlook for the people of Ukraine to consider. I fear the current negotiations are similar to the negotiations with the North Vietnamese. When they are losing, the Russians will try to moderate the arming of Ukraine and the reduction of Ukrainian military operations so they can buy time to turn the tide back in their favor. This is not a scenario where we need or could even achieve Russia's unconditional surrender. What can be done is the reduction of Russian forces in Ukraine to the point where occupation goes from impractical to impossible, and our arming and training of Ukraine should be steady as we go. Russia could still bombard Ukraine from its territory and Belarus. Ukraine would then need something like Iron Dome to mitigate that. Any "de-militarization" of Ukraine is utter farce. Ukraine needs to figure out its new borders and fiercely defend them. I am all for America helping them do that.
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Yes I remain astounded how the CIA could outwit the FSB in the FSB's own backyard in 2014.
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@Catch_The_Irishman No way the FSB did not know what the CIA was up to in its own back yard, Ukraine, limited presence or not. If Ukraine was of high interest to Russia, it would be a high priority of the FSB to understand the CIA threat in that nation. This is evidence that the FSB denies the agency of the Ukrainian people themselves. The CIA does not have enough contract soldiers to hold back the Russian army in the Donbas. This is evidence of the self-defeating tendency of Russian leadership to assume its own infallibility. I am appealing to Russian leadership to become more humane and stop the senseless killing it is committing in Ukraine.
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The Republican Party has deteriorated into vague arguments that the courts generally cannot respect. Too many American minds lack skill in basic logic and discernment. Social media has enabled the gathering of remorseless minds into groups of deluded people ripe for opportunists to enrich themselves with. I am resigned to the idea that some percentage of Americans will always be this way. I offer the American Solidarity Party as an alternative to the Republican Party for pro-life voters.
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@SvetlanaVoikova Go ahead and make a sound, logical argument for Russia's war against Ukraine as an average Russian citizen. Demonstrate your right to free speech. Demonstrate independent thought.
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AI's impact could be mitigated by an Economic Democracy Act, aka Capital Homestead Act. See the Center for Economic and Social Justice.
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I remember in engineering college the emphasis on modeling systems on paper and, if possible, in computer simulation before you build them, because it is cheaper to find a problem and fix it then. More powerful computers and software can and have improved modeling. If you rush the modeling process, then you are just asking for trouble later on. Of course, prototypes are also very valuable for rooting out things the modeling process may have missed but rushing that as well compounds the potential problems down the road. It happens again and again with automobile recalls. And although I am not an aeronautical engineer, I do somewhat wonder about the fix of adding another AOA sensor as enough to rule out the problem. If an AOA has a obscure vulnerability, both AOAs might fail when presented with that vulnerability. If you have a computer controlling the envelope, then why wouldn't airspeed and altimeter indications, even pilot vitals of some kind like asking the crew to reply with a word, show the program that continuing to pitch the nose is going to take the plane into the ground? It seems to me that the software still is not thorough in modeling and coping with near envelope scenarios. I mean, once MCAS starts a stall correction, should it not have a time parameter that is the outer boundary of how long a stall takes to be corrected and give control back to the pilot if MCAS cannot correct the stall? There just seems to be all kinds of parameters available to be checked and indicate to the program and pilots that some parameter has become untrustworthy and nullify its input. It sounds like this AOA addition is still a safety feature quick fix instead of a thorough modeling of the aircraft envelope and writing the software accordingly. I can imagine this is a huge task requiring many more lines of code and the computer processing power to cope with that (a testament to the value of a pilot), but public confidence in air travel should be the foundation of the business. As we can see, it not always is for those in leadership.
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What do you do? Among other things, help your international friends to become stronger.
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Note the duping delight in Putin's "spokesman".
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Putin the communicator.
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@nyalarhotep These points have been made over and over again. I propose they are pretext. Why? Think about what was going to happen in Ukraine. Exxon, Chevron and Shell had conducted extensive surveys of Ukraine for oil and gas that could be extracted by the most modern methods those companies now have. Ukraine was on its way to entering the European oil and gas market with the assistance of those companies. That would have increased Ukrainian government revenue and decreased Russian government revenue. Increased government revenue would have further secured Ukraine's independence. If Putin was ever going to take Ukraine, then he had to do it now. A future Ukraine full of American and European capital investment would have been vigorously defended by NATO countries, even if Ukraine was not in NATO. Putin invaded before that investment occurred. This is a world of empires. This is an imperial war over resources, and not just oil and gas, but every resource in Ukraine and warm water ports on the Black Sea. Just go back to Potemkin to understand Russia's interests in the region. And a few more things, how could the CIA outwit the FSB in the FSB's own backyard? Grant the Ukrainian people some agency in all of this. A lot of them are into boxing. They can fight. They read Svetlana Alexievich's "Second-Hand Time" and decide they want to have a different kind of life. They remember the famine under Stalin. Millions died because of his policy. All the money and weapons in the West would not make a difference if the Ukrainians were not willing to fight. Every day they are showing the world that they are people, too, and that they matter.
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@nyalarhotep You miss my point. Ukrainian oil and gas sales would have strengthened the Ukrainian economy and thus its government and military, making acquisition of Ukrainian territory more difficult in the future. Ukraine never needed to replace Russia as an oil and gas source. And I don't think Russia thought it would lose all its market share of oil and gas sales to Europe. It thought sometime after a quick acquisition of Ukrainian territory, Europe would totally return to oil and gas purchases from Russia. The annexation of Crimea did not sacrifice Russia's market share. Russia had precedent to believe taking another piece of Ukraine would not permanently result in loss of oil and gas market share. Russia's designs on Ukraine would be revealed in a war settlement negotiation. If Russia opposed NATO membership for the balance of Ukraine, that effectively is retaining the option to annex more of Ukraine in the future. Just because somebody speaks Russian does not mean they prefer Russian jurisdiction. I personally know seven such people from Ukraine. Russia has "pacified" the world's largest jurisdiction by land area. It knows how to establish control over human beings. It does it a small amount at a time, always saying it doesn't want the whole thing and more.
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@nyalarhotep But the Russian regime has obviously pacified its own population that it cannot assume is 100% non-hostile. The regime is paranoid about civil unrest, ergo the world's finest riot police. The same is true of the North Korean regime and its population. The Russian regime knew it would not have 100% support in Luhansk and Donetsk, much less Zaporizhya and Kherson, or it is indeed delusional. Yet it marched forward and annexed these areas because it was confident in its ability to relocate or stamp out a sufficient amount of dissent. I have heard this "Russian heritage" narrative before and it does not explain the Russian invasion. It does not take into account local loyalties but assumes certain distant peoples who speak Russian have a natural overriding loyalty to the Moscow regime. I take it as pretext. The geopolitical interest today is not much different than that seen by Empress Catherine and Gregory Potemkin, except they were not aware of as much of the mineral wealth to be had. And there is nothing fictitious about a national nuclear arsenal. It was the very basis of the Russian regime's confidence in its conventional aggression and contributes to its optimism that it will eventually prevail.
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@nyalarhotep I never lived in the Donbas or Crimea. I cannot verify or deny your claims of their political inclinations. It does seem that the warring parties are sacrificing absurd amounts of life to control these regions, so there must be something of great value there. Or perhaps it has become all about leadership's reputation, or even leadership's survival. Whatever the differences of political opinion in these regions, I wonder if the people living there still think it is worth this fight. Meanwhile, like it or not, Russia has deepened Western perceptions of its propensity to war. Russia may get part of what it wants out of this fight, but the aftermath looks like NATO on its whole western border. Anybody next to Russia who is not in NATO will not have free agency in its foreign policy. It's notable that Russian leadership just brushes over the setbacks it is facing. It really was about 14,000 alleged wrongful deaths?
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@nyalarhotep Cheer up, Nyalarhotep. Such a grim narrative. I hope you have opportunities to step outside and be thankful for the site of the clouds and stars in the sky. As an engineer, my perspective is more oriented towards climate change and the adjustments EVERYBODY on the planet needs to make. This war is taking our attention from the climate change challenge. We must be wary of seeing a finite planet as infinite. If we adjust our ways, we can preserve the ecosphere for future generations. Our young need that hope. Stop the war. Bring the young home.
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The Afghans will remember the last 20 years as not their vision of Afghanistan. Hopefully they will consider that memory when offered the next opportunity to aid and abet terrorism against nonbelievers. The result of the American presence will propagate into Afghanistan's future. We will see. Religion being what it is, they are likely to continue their holy war against everyone that doesn't measure up to their idea of what a human being should be. For the last 20 years, that mentality was shown that their adversaries can put a high cost on their vision. The conflict is perpetual for them. There was nothing vain about pushing back for 20 years. We would like to leave them alone. Their religion does not let them leave us alone.
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Putin agreed to be a loyal protector of Yeltsin. It is time for him to find his own loyal protector and retire.
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