Latest / International Flavor: Where the Truth Tastes Better / Fuel Wars: Russia’s Gas Lines, Trump’s Pump Prices, and the Kiev Mega Strike

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Fuel Wars: Russia’s Gas Lines, Trump’s Pump Prices, and the Kiev Mega Strike · International Flavor: Where the Truth Tastes Better

• 0:00
  Hello, good morning. Welcome. I am Samuel Trapp. This is International Flavor coming to you live
• 0:06
  from the Lake Ozark real estate of the art studio. You can listen every day damradio.com forward
• 0:12
  slash live. You can call in 5737468020 should you feel the urge. Sometimes I even answer.
• 0:22
  Let's see. What else can you do? You can go to internationalflavor.com
• 0:28
  and listen to all the old episodes should you feel the desire. Or you can even go to
• 0:34
  damradio.com forward slash podcast and also listen to the older versions of my show and any other
• 0:40
  great show on damn radio. Today is Thursday. Today is July the 2nd. Happy birthday to my
• 0:50
  esteemed colleague and sister and partner in murderous behavior, Virginia, Ed Lefsen. Sorry
• 0:59
  to rat you out on the radio out there in Idaho. I ain't to hoe you to hoe. And that's, you know,
• 1:09
  shouldn't say stuff like that about Idaho. It's a wonderful country, wonderful place to hang out.
• 1:15
  And I shall be back there later this month. It'll be entertaining. See what we're going to do. I
• 1:22
  don't think I'm going to drive though, just so you know. So anyway, I was following the old news.
• 1:27
  And I last night got went down a rabbit hole. Okay. And everybody knows I traveled to Russia
• 1:36
  to the motherland. And then I go out there and I like to communicate with people and find out
• 1:43
  interesting points of view and stuff like that. And what I've been missing is that point of view,
• 1:50
  because I like to go out and talk to people and I want to know what they feel. And I remember
• 1:55
  the 1970s. And it was, you know, one of my first memories is first real memories. You know, I
• 2:03
  remember things, you know, from when I was like two, three, just in kind of figurative sort of
• 2:09
  things, like moving, like something enormous, moving from one house to a house next door. And I
• 2:15
  just quizzed my mother about that. And she said that really did happen. But memories. Anyway,
• 2:20
  what I remember from the 70s are my father worked in transportation. And I remember gas shortages.
• 2:30
  I remember that being an issue. I remember movies, you know, about it. I remember songs about it.
• 2:37
  And, you know, I've talked on this show about, you know, this about my beef with the old Trumpster
• 2:49
  and my beef with the old Trumpster being fuel prices. You know, you can hide a lot.
• 2:56
  Government can hide a lot of grief, a lot of bad activity. If the people down below us,
• 3:02
  deplorables down on the bottom, if you can keep them not necessarily satisfied,
• 3:13
  but even if they're struggling, if you can keep things propagandized properly,
• 3:22
  then you can control them a lot better. You don't need a riot in your own country. And I think
• 3:27
  that's somewhere, some things that they can bury under propaganda. But one of the things they
• 3:34
  absolutely cannot bury, or they have an extremely hard time hiding, is the price at the pump. I mean,
• 3:43
  gasoline is like a truth serum for a politician. You know, here's your truth serum. If things are
• 3:52
  going as well as you claim, asshole, pardon my French, but if things are going as well as you
• 3:58
  claim, why in the crap am I paying $4 a gallon instead of the $2.50 I was paying in February?
• 4:05
  That's actually $2.39 in a place I went by every single day and filled up. And not two weeks later,
• 4:15
  you know, there I was in February paying $2.39 a gallon. A few weeks later, driving to or from
• 4:21
  Florida, can't remember which, I was looking at prices of $4.09. In Miami, like $4.79. It was
• 4:29
  crazy. And that's not an abstraction. That's not a think tank paper. It's not some foreign policy
• 4:36
  debate on cable news. It's a direct hit to an ordinary dude. I like to claim that I'm ordinary.
• 4:43
  And I think I am an average white dude, right? And this is one of my major complaints with Trump,
• 4:49
  right? I mean, he wants to be seen as the president of peace, the businessman president,
• 4:55
  the guy who knows how to keep things moving. But if you're the guy who provoked Iran,
• 4:59
  if you destabilize the Gulf, if you got involved in another shadow war or a direct confrontation,
• 5:06
  fuel markets react and people notice. Oil is global. Gasoline is global. Suppliers are not
• 5:15
  price gouging in some moral cartoon where they're doing what companies do. They charge
• 5:21
  what the market allows. And the market reflects the risk that a political leader creates.
• 5:29
  So when Trump turns around and blames suppliers, refiners, manufacturers, or price gougers,
• 5:34
  I don't just buy that right off the bat. You know what I mean? There's cause and effect going on
• 5:40
  here. The price at the pump reflects the world that you helped to create. If you create a risk
• 5:46
  of war, you create a price risk for gasoline. That's all there is to it. If you create instability
• 5:53
  around Iran, shipping, energy corridors, or global supply, you can't then act shocked that gas is
• 5:59
  suddenly expensive. And here's the political point. Americans will forgive a lot of stupidity
• 6:05
  if gas prices are low and keep the lower and middle class reasonably comfortable,
• 6:11
  fuel reasonably affordable, groceries barely under control, and a lot of people are going to grumble.
• 6:19
  You know, I'll grumble, but I'll still support you. But they'll move along. This is why fuel
• 6:24
  is political. Trump knows it. Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin absolutely knows it. I watched
• 6:31
  a couple. So what I did last night in my rabbit hole is I was interested in this theory,
• 6:37
  because I remember the 70s. I mean, there was another one in like 79 or something. And there
• 6:41
  were some political songs that came out there. I found one I'm going to play for you. And I'm
• 6:45
  going to play a couple of songs today with this theme, because Russia is going through it right
• 6:50
  now. And so I wanted to go down that rabbit hole, and I kind of did. And what I did is I got my VPN
• 6:58
  on, and I noticed something that I haven't checked in a while, because it's been, Jesus, it's been
• 7:03
  a year since I... Well, almost. September will be a year since I went to Belarus, Moscow, and all
• 7:10
  that. And now I've got my visa coming in. I think I got noticed that I'll be getting it here in the
• 7:17
  mail today. It's registered mail sent back to me. And so I'll be getting my Russian visa three years
• 7:25
  today. And that's awesome, because now I can schedule a trip over there. I'm definitely going
• 7:30
  for New Year's. And I might go before that. We shall see, because there's a couple of things
• 7:35
  I want to do. And anyway, we're going to check on that. And that's not the story today. But fuel
• 7:41
  is the story in Russia. So Ukraine, like I've been telling you for a little bit, has been bombing the
• 7:46
  crap out of Russia with the US help, with the West's help. And there's lots of politics around
• 7:51
  that. And there's lots of politics in Russia. But I wanted to find normal voices. And what I did is
• 7:55
  I got my VPN on, and I went back out as if I was sitting in Russia, because YouTube is a hundred
• 8:01
  times different if you're in Russia than if you're out. And so I had to get my VPN on, go into Russia
• 8:06
  and get some. And I found a bunch of new content providers, not necessarily... You know I prefer to
• 8:17
  listen to the propaganda that is slung by the state sources and by the higher political sources,
• 8:24
  like their answer to our channels like CNN, Fox News, all that crap, that they get a...
• 8:35
  Ours are allegedly private, and theirs are... Or to our... What do they call that? I forget.
• 8:49
  Whatever those... The PBS channels, America, whatever. The Voice of America, there you go,
• 8:57
  that they send out. So these are kind of like that. So Russia is having its own fuel conversation.
• 9:03
  And I watched a guy named Venediktov, which is really awesome. It was like 20 minutes long. It's
• 9:10
  a good interview with him. And I'll get to him in a minute. There's a guy named Platoshkin that
• 9:14
  I listened to. And these are political people that have their own channels and lots of subscribers
• 9:20
  and the people are listening to. And so freedom of speech does exist because these guys weren't
• 9:25
  necessarily pro-government. And it was really funny. I'll get to it when I get to Mr. Venediktov,
• 9:31
  because Mr. Venediktov, in fact, before they posted him on the Internet, he was interviewed
• 9:37
  by two people. And there's a warning placed on the screen beforehand. He's a journalist,
• 9:42
  but he also had to register as a foreign agent. He's a Moskvich. He lives in Moscow, but he
• 9:50
  is labeled a... He's an agitator. Today's agitators. He's labeled an agitator by the
• 9:58
  government, which they want to warn you, like us. This is your, I don't know what, your social media
• 10:10
  police, basically. But they didn't stop him. They just put a warning up front that goes,
• 10:16
  watch what you're getting from this guy, because he's an agitator. These agitators.
• 10:20
  And anyway, we'll get to him in a little bit. But Russia is one of the great oil producing
• 10:25
  countries of the world. Some say, you know, one of the, you know, the biggest. And Russia
• 10:29
  has always had its own fuel and gas market. Even during Soviet Union times, their gas was
• 10:37
  so much cheaper than ours. It wasn't even funny. But they also, and they spend,
• 10:44
  like over there, the minimum octane is much higher than our octane. And they don't pay a
• 10:54
  lot of attention to that. But anyway, we get to one of these guys and we go through it, because
• 10:56
  it's actually quite interesting to me when you go over there. And I hope it's interesting for
• 11:01
  you as well, because Russia is suffering right now. When you go through this, there's no doubt
• 11:07
  about it. Putin admitted it. Putin acknowledged it and said some things. Zakharova in one of her
• 11:13
  broadcasts, which I also listened to last night, or two and a half hour weekly
• 11:17
  a fact focus on the war and stuff like that. But Russia is a great oil producing country. But
• 11:27
  Russian commentators are talking about, get this, us in the 70s, gas lines, fuel shortages,
• 11:34
  closed filling stations, price spikes, regional rationing and public frustration. The cause isn't
• 11:41
  just market economics, it's war. Ukrainian drone strikes are hitting Russian refineries, fuel
• 11:47
  trucks, logistics hubs, energy infrastructure. And Russia is answering by striking Ukrainian
• 11:52
  fuel stations, depots, substations, military transport infrastructure. So today we're really
• 11:58
  talking about a fuel war. America, Russia, Iran, Ukraine, Trump, Putin, and the ordinary person,
• 12:06
  Samuel Trapp, that's me, standing at the gas pump, you know, with the schlong in my hand,
• 12:14
  a schlong is a hose, with the old schlong in my hand, wondering what in the hell's up. Oh,
• 12:22
  geez, look at this, I'm paying $4 a gallon. And I grumble, grumble, grumble, grumble.
• 12:28
  Uh, Russia is answering by striking Ukraine. And I've got some reports on that, that came out
• 12:35
  about an hour ago. Last night was one of the biggest strikes that Russia has done on Kiev,
• 12:42
  570, 580 drones, and then 180, I'll get the exact numbers later when we get down to that segment
• 12:53
  in response. And they're destroying all kinds of gas stations, 70 more yesterday, 70 more gas
• 13:01
  stations along the outside, east of the Dnieper River that are the supply lines for anywhere in
• 13:08
  the eastern half of Ukraine, eastern third of Ukraine, Kharkiv, Zaporizhia, Sumy regions are
• 13:15
  slowly being blocked off. You know, because Russia's doing the same thing, they're retaliating
• 13:22
  in kind and destroying everything energy related. And so today we're going to talk about that,
• 13:29
  the American gas angle. Let's talk about this. And I want to play for you to keep you in the mood.
• 13:35
  I'm going to play a song, but we're going to have two song choices today and one of them.
• 13:41
  So in trucking, these guys were all talking about this, and this was a dual purpose one.
• 13:48
  It had to do with fuel. It had to do with taxes, had to do with the interstate commerce commission
• 13:54
  and with truckers frustrated because they were paying tolls all over the place. And you had to
• 14:01
  be licensed in each state individually. I don't know if you remember this, but you'd see on the
• 14:07
  back of these trucks, you'd see 50 different license plates to cover 50 different states.
• 14:12
  You didn't have a department of transportation license. You had to be licensed in every single
• 14:17
  state you wanted to run to. Remember Smokey and the bandit member, uh, uh, uh, that show,
• 14:23
  you know, there's beer and Texarkana and they're thirsty in Atlanta. You know, that, that was one of
• 14:29
  them shows. And that was, uh, that was the bandit he's helping. He's a runner for an illegal truck.
• 14:35
  And that doesn't, I mean, it still exists, but it's more of a national sort of licensing deal.
• 14:41
  Anyway, it's, uh, it's interesting stuff. So we're going to play for you,
• 14:44
  uh, theme song of truckers and here it comes.
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  Breaker one, nine, this is a rubber duck. You've got a copy on me, big fan. Come on.
• 14:58
  Oh yeah. 10 for big Ben for sure. For sure. By golly, it's clean. Clear to flag town. Come on.
• 15:05
  Yeah. That's a big 10 for their big Ben. Yeah. We definitely got the front door. Good buddy.
• 15:09
  Mercy sakes alive. Looks like we've got us a convoy.
• 15:18
  It was the dark of the moon on the 6th of June in a Kenworth pulling logs cab over Pete with a
• 15:24
  reefer on and a Jimmy calling hogs. We is heading for bear on I one Oh, about a mile out of shaky
• 15:30
  town. I says, big Ben, this here's a rubber duck. And I'm about to put the hammer down.
• 16:05
  Yeah, we got a little
• 16:09
  and all, but there's a roadblock up on the cloverleaf and them bears was wall to wall.
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  He had them smokies as thick as bugs on a bumper. They even had a bear in the air.
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  I says, calling all trucks. This here's the duck. We about to go on her bear.
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  I say,
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  well, we rolled up interstate 44 like a rocket sled on rails. We tore up all of our swindle
• 16:59
  sheets and left was sitting on the scales. By the time we hit that shy town, them bears was getting
• 17:05
  smart. They brought up some reinforcements from the Illinois National Guard. There's armored cars,
• 17:12
  tanks, jeeps, rigs of every size. He had them chicken coops with full of bears and choppers
• 17:18
  fill the skies. Well, we shot the line. We went for broke with 1000 screaming trucks
• 17:23
  and 11 long haired friends of Jesus and a chartreuse microbus.
• 17:29
  Yeah, a rubber duck, just soft busted. Come on there. You have 10, four soft busters.
• 17:33
  Listen, you want to put that microbus in behind that suicide jockey? Yeah, he's all dynamite.
• 17:37
  He needs all the help he can get. Well, we laid a strip for the Jersey Shore preparing to cross
• 17:44
  the line. I could see the bridge was lined with bears, but it didn't have a doggone dime.
• 17:49
  I says, pink panther, this here's a rubber duck. We just ain't going to pay no toll.
• 17:53
  So we crashed the gate doing 98. I says, let them truckers roll 10, four.
• 17:58
  We got a mighty convoy, rocking through the night. Yeah, we got a mighty convoy.
• 18:04
  Ain't she a beautiful sight? Come on and join our convoy. Ain't nothing going to get in our way.
• 18:10
  We're going to roll this fucking convoy.
• 18:25
  And there it went. That was C.W. McCall and the song is Convoy, representative of a time in
• 18:44
  America when there were our own fuel issues and fuel problems, trucking problems too.
• 18:50
  And we got another protest song coming up for you later on the same theme, but that was put out in
• 18:57
  the 79 timeframe when round two came up. And so all this fuel shortages, there they are. And that
• 19:07
  is what is happening in Russia right now. It's not a good thing for them and they're having troubles.
• 19:19
  Trouble, trouble, trouble. Let's see, let's get to that trouble. Okay. So,
• 19:28
  you know, I told you about what I, you know, what my theory is and what my problem is with
• 19:37
  the gas issues. Well, imagine Russia. So I'm watching these two shows. I watched two folks
• 19:44
  last night in this. And one of them is a guy that was put out to make sure that they realize who he
• 19:53
  is. And you have to make sure his name is Venediktov Andrei. And the other guy was a guy
• 20:00
  named Platoshkin. And they're both political commentators. And Platoshkin was more realistic,
• 20:08
  kind of funny in fact. I liked listening to him. It's the first time I listened to both of them.
• 20:13
  One was an interview with two people interviewing the first guy, Venediktov. And the other one,
• 20:21
  Platoshkin, was a show on himself. And he was reading some of the commentary online because
• 20:26
  he was having people give the price of fuel, how long they had to wait in various places. And I
• 20:31
  want to get to that. So, you know, everybody knows what they were paying before the war for gas. And
• 20:40
  for Russians to not acknowledge it online and everywhere else. You know, things aren't all,
• 20:46
  you know, everybody's not in chocolate, as they say in Russian, шоколадье. They're not all in
• 20:53
  chocolate. And everything is not just good. You're not just swimming in the chocolate.
• 20:58
  So the businessman president mythology in America, at least for me, has kind of fallen apart. I
• 21:05
  used to say, I used to say this, you know, man, what we, you know, I'd support Trump. He's a
• 21:10
  businessman. He's run the place like a business, you know, run the country like a business and
• 21:16
  government would certainly benefit from that. You know, I like to depart with Doge in the beginning,
• 21:22
  and I like to part with all of that, but government really isn't a business and foreign
• 21:26
  policy cannot really be run like a real estate negotiation. And that I never really saw as,
• 21:34
  it's not all about the money. Okay. It's, it's not all about the deal. So Trump's political
• 21:40
  need is obvious right now. He needs to keep the gas prices low enough that ordinary people
• 21:46
  do not connect. Don't put the dots together. They don't bring out their crayons and start
• 21:52
  connecting the dots between his Iran policy, his Middle East policy, his alleged peace policy,
• 22:00
  which I don't think exists anymore. Now he has just a war posture and the prices that you are
• 22:06
  paying every week. He needs to keep that low. That's why the allegation that he made sure not
• 22:12
  to have the Department of War, which I also disagree with, advertised that, oh, by the way,
• 22:20
  we don't really have a deal and we're bombing the hell out of Iran over the weekend. They didn't
• 22:26
  announce it until after the market was closed. You know, I don't, maybe that's not intentional.
• 22:30
  Maybe it's just a coinkydink, but maybe not. But it's the same political principle that
• 22:38
  Venedictive is describing in Russia. A government can say there isn't any crisis, which Putin kind
• 22:44
  of said, but if the citizen is standing in line for fuel, the citizen knows there's a crisis,
• 22:50
  right? So the Russian discussions were very interesting to me. A missile strike somewhere
• 22:55
  far away is one thing. A battlefield map is another. A speech from a foreign ministry is
• 23:00
  another thing. But fuel shortages are different. They are personal. And fuel turns a foreign
• 23:05
  policy into a domestic pressure. So if you claim the Russians are, the Russian government is not
• 23:13
  feeling a certain amount of pressure, you'd be quite wrong. If gasoline is unavailable,
• 23:19
  people notice. If the price jumps, people notice. If stations limit them, which they're doing,
• 23:23
  to 20 to 30 liters, people notice, you know, when you go up there to get it. If half the stations
• 23:30
  are closed, people notice. If farmers, truckers, taxi drivers, delivery services, and ordinary
• 23:36
  families cannot plan for vacation, summer, they're doing the same thing we are. They want to go
• 23:41
  somewhere in the summer. Now they can't afford it, can't do it. And their gas was cheap, cheap,
• 23:46
  cheap, right? Then the war stops being something on television, becomes something in daily life.
• 23:51
  So this is what Ukraine and the Western backers are trying to create inside of Russia.
• 23:56
  Not a collapse, but pressure, irritation, uncertainty among the electorate, among the
• 24:02
  people. The feeling that the war is coming home to them. But the dangerous assumption
• 24:08
  that the West is making, because I don't believe this remotely. I have a young lady that I
• 24:14
  correspond with through telegram, and I'll send her a voice recording, and she'll send me one back.
• 24:25
  And we talk about bricks, and we talk about impressions. And she said a couple of things
• 24:31
  to me a few days ago about things going on in Russia, one of them, you know, being the drones
• 24:40
  coming across all the time. And she doesn't live in Moscow. And she says that drones are constant,
• 24:48
  you know, that these Ukrainian drones are constant. I'm exploring that. I sent her another
• 24:52
  one back saying, you know, tell me about this, what's happening, how's it going, you know,
• 24:56
  what are ordinary people going through? And she's sending me these, I won't say it in Russian,
• 25:05
  every time, she's sending me these recording, you know, her voice recording, telling me a little
• 25:11
  bit about some of the things going on. Ordinary people are feeling this pressure. Now, Venediktov,
• 25:17
  this guy, first, we have to say what he has on there. Where is that? Because there was a word,
• 25:27
  let's see if I can find it, because I got a picture of it on my phone. Because I took a picture of it,
• 25:32
  of what he says, this guy Venediktov. I thought part of it is pretty, I mean, it's definitely
• 25:39
  interesting to me because, but I gotta have my glasses on or I'll never be able to read it.
• 25:43
  And I thought I had a translation of it right here, but I'll just translate it on the fly
• 25:49
  because I don't have it. It's basically a statement that shows up, and I took a picture of it
• 25:56
  on the video part because they have to give a warning. They're given a warning on what he has.
• 26:05
  Now, damn it, where's, ah, son of a nutcracker. I don't, it's on my tablet, not my phone. Sorry,
• 26:13
  I don't have it. But the warning basically said, listen, this guy's an agitator. He's an agitator.
• 26:21
  You can't really believe this guy, you know, or it doesn't say that. It says just take into account
• 26:28
  that he's been labeled a, you know, kind of a dissident by the, you know, he had to register
• 26:33
  as a foreign agent, is basically what they've said. And sometimes with a foreign journalist or
• 26:39
  a journalist who reports not only to, or he writes for an outside source, they might say that he
• 26:47
  shares political beliefs outside of the country. And so they had to put that warning out there,
• 26:55
  and it was an interesting warning that they put. But his first point is that there's definitely a
• 27:00
  fuel crisis. He says he sees one thing people say and another, and official networks say a third.
• 27:06
  But in reality, he says the crisis has to be acknowledged. He attributes a significant part
• 27:11
  of it to the Ukrainian drone strikes on refineries and fuel trucks. He says Russian gas production has
• 27:17
  fallen about 25% over the year, and that Russian summer gasoline consumption is roughly 110,000 to
• 27:24
  150,000 tons per day. That is why he made fun of the idea that getting 60,000 tons of gasoline from
• 27:33
  India is going to solve the problem, because it's not. That's about a half a day of consumption for
• 27:39
  Russia. That is the point. Russia is huge, and symbolic imports from India don't solve a
• 27:48
  structural disruption. And then he also said that Moscow controls prices where fuel exists,
• 27:57
  and market prices exist where Moscow doesn't control. And this is true too, and you notice it
• 28:03
  when you travel in Moscow and outside of Moscow, or with a state-run gas place like Gazprom, or
• 28:11
  Neft something, I forget what the other one is. Gazprom, Rosneft, and similar companies,
• 28:19
  three out of ten filling stations have no gasoline right now. They're not closed forever,
• 28:25
  but they're just empty. So the big vertically integrated companies like Rosneft, Gazprom,
• 28:30
  and similar companies, like Lukoil, the ones that America, what do you call it,
• 28:37
  sanctioned, are mostly holding the prices in the 70 ruble range per liter, which is about,
• 28:46
  the last I heard, should be about 80 cents maybe, and call four liters. That's about,
• 28:54
  right now, that's how many liters in a gallon? Still like four, but it's really,
• 29:03
  I don't remember how many liters, but you figure it out. And that's a significant uptick from where
• 29:08
  it used to be. But the independent stations are charging 80 to 90 rubles in Moscow, and in places
• 29:15
  like Crimea, there are far more extreme prices because major companies are constrained or absent,
• 29:22
  right? So that's the same basic reality that Trump has been trying to hide here since February.
• 29:29
  You can yell about price gouging, but if the global risk of premium, the premium for gas rises,
• 29:35
  or your production is falling off, companies are going to protect themselves and they're charging
• 29:39
  a higher market price. That's not a morality assessment at all. It's just capitalism,
• 29:45
  that's what it is. And so one of the questions they asked us, Venediktov, when he was there,
• 29:51
  these two people that were interviewing him, they said, why do officials say that there is no
• 29:55
  crisis? Which, by the way, isn't what Putin said. He said he recognized, he said there's enough
• 30:01
  fuel out there, and there might be, but his answer is one of the best parts of the interview,
• 30:07
  it's dependent on where you come. He says, a supplier may say there's enough gasoline in the
• 30:12
  system, but a consumer waiting 30 minutes or an hour in line experiences that as a crisis.
• 30:18
  He says panic demand makes the problem worse. Now think about this. People who have half a tank
• 30:27
  stop to fill up all the way just in case. I only fill up my truck when it's empty. I go fill it up
• 30:34
  and I fill it all the way up, drives me crazy, I don't want to pay for it, but because it's bigger.
• 30:40
  Some people don't do that. Some people are doing, I don't know, I can do that and fill it up again,
• 30:46
  maybe two, three times a month is all I fill it up. But every time I fill it up, if it's 60 bucks
• 30:52
  or 70 bucks, that's a hell of a lot different than 130, right? And so you're basically time
• 31:00
  and a half and at least you're outlay for fuel. So for the fuel isn't just a product,
• 31:06
  it's the bloodstream of every other price, right? Raise your fuel and you're raising your transport.
• 31:11
  I mean, how does the Uber guy? Well, in Russia it's Yandex, but how does the Yandex guy? I'm
• 31:17
  sitting there curious about how I get around and what's that mean for the metro? That's all run
• 31:23
  and they have cable systems that are run on electricity, but raise transport, you raise food,
• 31:28
  raise food and suddenly inflation isn't an economics statistic. It's like your food for
• 31:34
  the week. I can't afford to eat because I got to fill the car. What? So this
• 31:41
  danger that the West keeps trying to push though, and here's where I want to differ from a lot of
• 31:47
  people because here people, all the propagandists over here are saying one thing and I don't believe
• 31:55
  this. Okay. Here's what they're saying is that the irritation is rising and this is going to cause
• 32:04
  the people to overthrow Putin, the people to demand that Russia capitulate. Not so,
• 32:13
  and if you think that you don't know Russians, okay? Russians are, I've said it before on here,
• 32:21
  they're, my wife calls it tochni. They are exact. If you say something and you say I'm going to do
• 32:32
  something, they believe that's what you're going to do. You know, I mean, you could call it Ozarkian
• 32:37
  if you want to, because a lot of people here are the same, but Russians are obsessive about it.
• 32:41
  If they say they're going to be a, uh, I don't know if I'm a, an advertising guy, that's what
• 32:47
  they are. Okay. And, and you, and if you're going to go to them to be an advertising guy and they
• 32:56
  shine you on or scam you, or don't do what they said they were going to do,
• 33:00
  you ain't going to pay for it. They go, Oh no, you didn't do what you said. I sure as hell,
• 33:06
  I'm not paying for that. And they will bitch about the tiniest of things because they expect
• 33:12
  a professional do something. And they expect now there's a lot of times there are criminal
• 33:17
  consequences for not running your company correctly and disadvantaging all those below
• 33:23
  or causing damage in this or any, there are criminal consequences. Okay. And so it's a
• 33:30
  different type of philosophy, a different thought process. It's one of the things you
• 33:35
  got to love about, about Russia, but you got to hate about it and you better be aware of it too.
• 33:41
  You know, the basketball chick that went over there with some weed in her, in her bag, you know,
• 33:47
  in her smoke pan or whatever the hell she had was, uh, uh, she, she learned a horrifying lesson.
• 33:54
  When you go to another country, you got to obey their rules and you better know what they are
• 33:59
  before you go and do what you can to avoid them. You know, because not everything is a target.
• 34:05
  She, I don't, it wasn't targeted. She was taken for a, I don't like what happened to her. And,
• 34:12
  you know, maybe there was something political that could have been done to save her sooner,
• 34:16
  you know, and it's unfortunate what happened to her, but not, I'm not ready to say it's
• 34:21
  absolutely wrong. You know what I mean? And, uh, so, uh, the public irritation, you know, the anger
• 34:28
  aimed at authorities because authorities can't solve the problem, but then it becomes the fork,
• 34:34
  you know, what should the authorities do? Should they capitulate or in his words,
• 34:40
  break Ukraine's arms. You know, they're exact. They require, they want, don't believe that
• 34:46
  they're going to be over in Russia because we are helping Ukraine bomb the shit out of
• 34:52
  their infrastructure. Uh, and all of Europe is laughing and, Oh yeah, look what we're doing.
• 34:58
  We're making them pay. And they're going to hate that Putin. Now don't buy it. Do not buy it.
• 35:04
  Cause that is not what's going on. Instead, the reverse is happening. They're going, look,
• 35:10
  escalate, quit being nice to these guys, bomb the crap out of them, destroy their fuel,
• 35:16
  destroy their infrastructure and win this war. Why aren't you throwing more at this?
• 35:23
  Get this over with. It's gone on too long. That frustration also exists. So don't think that this
• 35:28
  is going to say, Hey, it's time to capitulate. You believe that you don't know Russia. Okay.
• 35:33
  And, uh, you know, I'd be happy to debate you on it, but let's, let's go. Uh, so,
• 35:38
  you know, this is where the comparison, Russia is more like Tehran than Paris. You know,
• 35:44
  they're going to wimp out. If bombs fall, people don't overthrow their government.
• 35:49
  They rally around it, you know, just like what happened in Iran. Okay. And that's the mistake
• 35:54
  that these, uh, I don't know that you could put quotes around them, put quotes around the word
• 36:01
  advisor to, uh, the old, uh, uh, Trumpster, you know, but, uh, they aren't going to say down with
• 36:13
  our government. They're going to say the enemy's attacking us, hit them harder. That's what's
• 36:18
  going to happen. And that's the point that Western strategists miss. So if you say the Putin's under
• 36:24
  pressure escalation is answering escalation. Even Venedictive said it, uh, Putin sees pressure,
• 36:31
  uh, says that Putin sees pressure as a demand for surrender. Now pressure Putin, send weapons,
• 36:40
  fund Ukraine more help with long-term or long range strikes inside of Russia. Putin doesn't
• 36:46
  read that as an invitation to compromise. He reads it as coercion and under coercion,
• 36:51
  he ain't going to capitulate. Forget it. Stop being under that pressure is capitulation. If you think
• 36:57
  that guy is going to capitulate, you better forget it. His country doesn't want him to capitulate.
• 37:02
  So even if you think this is gonna, you know, Russians, they don't like it and they're speaking
• 37:07
  out about it, but you know, this is a strategic warning. That's it. Um, and before I get to
• 37:15
  Platoshkin, we'll, we'll go ahead and take a caller here and see what he has to add to this
• 37:21
  conversation. Hello, sir. Are you going to add to this conversation or are you trying to change
• 37:27
  my topic? Cause I'm not going to let you if you are. Yeah. I can talk about Ukraine. Well,
• 37:35
  let's do it. What do you got? Uh, I saw that they're closing down the borders so people can't
• 37:46
  leave. And they're going to try to get between the half a million or half a million and 1.2
• 37:51
  million new conscripts. And, uh, I saw that, um, uh, food companies are, are trying to get out of
• 38:00
  their contracts. Uh, don't want to breach a contract because they can't deliver food to
• 38:04
  St. Petersburg. You mean on the Russian side or the Ukrainian side? Cause Ukraine, Ukraine
• 38:12
  closed their board. Well, no, but I mean, but Ukraine closed their border and Russia closed,
• 38:18
  um, Russia closed rail lines between, um, uh, Latvia, uh, Latvia, Lithuania and Finland that
• 38:29
  they've closed those, those, uh, rail lines. And they're stopping because the, um, now part of it
• 38:36
  has to do with NATO buildup on the Finnish side because they're, they're doing exercises over
• 38:42
  there. And they're also doing the same thing down in the black sea that they're now NATO exercises.
• 38:48
  And Russia says what they really are, are hidden, um, uh, intelligence branches for the Ukrainian
• 38:55
  army. Cause the Ukrainian army doesn't have its own military intelligence. And so it's all being
• 39:00
  supplied by the U S mainly, but NATO secondarily. And so that's what Russia says. Now they, uh,
• 39:06
  have not done another conscript conscription yet. It's been, uh, uh, announced that they might have
• 39:12
  to, but they've always had a required military service for a certain percentage of people,
• 39:18
  uh, when they come in and that has not changed. And so they, they have always done that. And I
• 39:25
  haven't seen anything that said they're taking an escalation to go up to another million deaths.
• 39:30
  They still have some reserves. And plus they last time I was there, and this is one of the
• 39:34
  updates I'm trying to get personally is last time I was there, they were still paying a very
• 39:39
  large bonuses, uh, to people and they had more than enough, uh, volunteers. And, uh, allegedly
• 39:48
  the, from what I've seen is that they are paying even higher bonuses to keep it on a voluntary
• 39:55
  level. And so I haven't heard anything about conscription. If you have something about that,
• 40:00
  that's different than what I, what I've heard. Yeah. Uh, it's readily available on YouTube.
• 40:10
  1.2 million is way different than it's supposed to be for October. And, uh,
• 40:19
  they're saying they're speculating the reason they're closing the borders is because
• 40:22
  the Russian citizens are going to flee. They don't want to be, uh, have you, have you heard
• 40:27
  the thing that said, I find this hard to believe, but I get the point talking about, uh, the, the,
• 40:35
  the average Russian soldier lives 20 minutes once he gets into battle.
• 40:42
  I don't know where you're getting that number. Uh, the average Ukrainian then only lives four
• 40:48
  because the, the number that are dying on the Ukrainian side versus the Russian side is, uh,
• 40:56
  astronomically higher. Uh, it's, it's estimated between five and eight times as many dying.
• 41:02
  I watched an interview of a Russian Colonel and, uh, uh, now remember this is on my VPN side.
• 41:09
  Cause I, you have to YouTube's completely different with a VPN in Russia than without.
• 41:14
  And, uh, so I watched an interview of a, of a Russian, uh, Colonel yesterday who said that,
• 41:21
  uh, when they went into, uh, Constantinovka that the Ukrainians were still there,
• 41:28
  but they were, they did not confront them at all. And they just started leaving and they would not
• 41:35
  confront and that they are not fighting. And that there were already Russians in many of these
• 41:40
  places. And he said that they are just leaving in droves. And by the way, the actual numbers,
• 41:48
  even from Kiev, they have charged over 400,000 of their, uh, military with desertion.
• 41:58
  They go to the front lines and they leave and they are, they do not want to fight.
• 42:02
  They're training them for two weeks and shipping them out to the front lines. I don't know where
• 42:06
  you're getting the numbers that the average Russians are dying there. Now there's large
• 42:09
  amounts of people dying on both sides, but Russia's kicking the crap out of the Ukrainians
• 42:14
  on the front lines. Well, I get it from YouTube. You can hear, you can hear two opposite stories
• 42:21
  for every conflict. You can hear two polar opposite stories. Well, that's true too.
• 42:29
  Yesterday you were talking about how, how Russia was winning. And then last night I'm,
• 42:33
  I'm looking at mile long, miles long fuel lines and bridges blown up. That's because they block
• 42:40
  the Russian side. YouTube blocks it. If you, if they block me, by the way, if you, if you go to
• 42:47
  YouTube now, I have a Russian channel on YouTube and they block me and they, they, it's called
• 42:53
  throttling and anything that goes against the Google YouTube narrative, they block it. They
• 43:00
  throttle it. They get rid of the, they got rid of the girl Panchenka who had 2 million subscribers.
• 43:05
  You know, they just shut her off one day and she was a truth teller. And, uh, you know, I'm
• 43:11
  surprised they haven't to arrest Dovich yet because he's still, uh, uh, he's still pro-Ukraine,
• 43:18
  but he's not anti-Russia. He's also anti the, the green goblin. He's anti Zelensky.
• 43:24
  But, uh, but trust me that, well, you don't have to trust me. I don't give a crap if you do or
• 43:28
  don't. But the fact is that they are throttling anything that is pro, uh, well, anything that is
• 43:38
  anti-Ukraine, they throttle it and they've been doing it since, since 2014, they do it. And I
• 43:45
  don't know if you've listened to me for that long, but when I was in Russia last, uh, no,
• 43:50
  it wasn't last year. It was 2024. When I was in there in 2024 is when they started it. And my
• 43:55
  channel, which had been growing literally by five to 700 people, I went from zero to 15,000,
• 44:03
  like extremely fast. And when I went to Russia and I started broadcasting from Russia is when they
• 44:10
  noticed me and they throttled me and they cut me off. And I'm, I'm telling you my views per
• 44:16
  per session went down to nothing. So they, they absolutely are well, and they're doing it to people.
• 44:23
  They started throttling, um, what's his name? Uh, Alex Mercoulis. And, and, uh, they started
• 44:32
  guys like that, that tell the truth about what is going on in Ukraine. So you're, you're free to
• 44:38
  believe what you want, who you want, get your sources, where you feel like getting them, but
• 44:45
  don't trust YouTube. And if that's the only place you're getting your news, well, that's a mistake.
• 44:51
  And, uh, uh, in my view, I, you know, you get your news where you feel like, so
• 44:58
  are you, are you suggesting that, uh, those, uh, few lines and, uh, and blown up bridges are fake?
• 45:06
  No, I'm telling them. In fact, I'm telling you about them now. I'm not saying anything anti,
• 45:12
  anti Russia or anti Ukraine right now. I'm pushing, I'm pushing the fact that this is
• 45:18
  costing Russia right now. There are, in fact, I've taken what I told you at the beginning of
• 45:23
  the show, I got on YouTube yesterday and acted and put a VPN on, registered my VP myself as if I was
• 45:31
  in Russia and got the news from there. And it's a, it's totally different. What, what I've gotten
• 45:37
  from listening to the, the, uh, political stuff released for the West. So I've, this, this is
• 45:45
  different stuff. And the real people are talking about this, just like, you know, I mean, if I
• 45:52
  haven't put it out well enough, you know, uh, I I'm, I'm talking about the suffering going on
• 45:57
  in Russia right now. And another comment is, uh, you were talking about how the people want,
• 46:07
  want Russia to go ahead and put the hammer down. Well, that's the same here. I can turn on Fox news
• 46:12
  and every one of them say, well, it's road, it's bridge and power day. It's bridge. Take them out.
• 46:19
  This has gone long enough. And the rest of the people are smart enough to know that if there
• 46:25
  was anything he could do, he would have done it by now. So, uh, you mean Putin or you mean
• 46:30
  the green goblin? No, I'm talking about the United States. Ah, oh, you mean in, in Iran?
• 46:38
  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I gotcha. I'm comparing it to Russia. You're going to find people that
• 46:43
  say finish the job, but they're not the ones that are going to be, uh, drafted and sent.
• 46:50
  Well, that that's true. And, uh, and, and in Russia, they haven't had to do that yet,
• 46:55
  but, uh, I haven't looked in about, uh, about six weeks and whether that's changed or anything,
• 47:00
  but so far they haven't done any, any, any out of the ordinary, anything other than the,
• 47:07
  than the, uh, registration that they already had, you know, that, that everybody has to register
• 47:14
  like us going to the, you know, when you're 17 or whatever, you got to go register with selective
• 47:19
  service, that kind of thing. That sounds like blind faith to me because, um, um, I've heard
• 47:25
  that they're using people from the, I guess the Eastern side of Russia, where they don't consider
• 47:31
  them to be as civilized or, uh, the same class. I've never seen that on a personal level. And
• 47:41
  I've been to the Eastern half of Russia and I don't see it that way. I went to a, uh, I went
• 47:47
  to a place near Ufa, which is, uh, uh, and I went to a place in, I think it was called the, the city
• 47:53
  was called Bashkir and, uh, the, the, the, I want to say it in Russian, the, um, it's like a resort.
• 48:03
  The resort was called Yangon Tao and it's, uh, a couple hours further East of there and still all,
• 48:10
  you know, white Russians, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, uh, all those places down below. I've been there
• 48:16
  too. And they still are, you know, they don't, they don't treat people out of the ordinary.
• 48:21
  You know, I, I don't, you know, I don't see it. I did years ago, you know, years ago when I was in
• 48:27
  Moscow and I had a, I had a black boss that went with me and, uh, they did not treat him very well.
• 48:33
  There weren't very many, I mean, and there's more, more black people in Russia than there were
• 48:37
  before, but that place was as white as Finland and Sweden, you know, it, uh, it was very, very
• 48:44
  white in, uh, not so much anymore. It seemed to indicate that, uh, they were, they were choosing
• 48:50
  the, the, the native people over the Eastern European Russians in, in, uh, uh, I don't
• 48:58
  believe that. Uh, and I don't, I haven't seen any of those reports. If you send me those reports,
• 49:04
  I'll be happy to read them and consider them. Send them to me. I know, you know, my email,
• 49:08
  you've sent me stuff before, but I'm going to get through this. I want to get through this and get
• 49:11
  on to the next topic because I got some more to do. Okay. I appreciate your call and thank you.
• 49:17
  Hey, man. Okay. Well, you have a very nice day. Call me again. And there he goes. Well, um, I
• 49:27
  wanted to get to this Platoshkin guy because, uh, he gave a little bit more brutal version than did
• 49:32
  the guy who was, uh, this Venedict of who they said was more of an agitator, right? And Platoshkin,
• 49:40
  he had a pretty funny and brutal version, you know, uh, the, the question was, and he's a
• 49:45
  political commentator. He said, why does an oil country run out of gas is basically, and he was
• 49:52
  mocking people who were claiming to be, I'm not a politician. I just, I don't want anything to do
• 49:58
  with politics. He said, all of you people who said you were outside politics. Great. Now you're
• 50:03
  outside of politics, but standing in a gas line, you're standing in a line for gas. Maybe you
• 50:10
  should have been there. And he mocks these, uh, fake scapegoats is what he called them. You know,
• 50:14
  Rockefeller, Rothschild, Bill Gates, my, maybe the migrants are drinking all the gasoline. He said
• 50:20
  secret shipments to Tajikistan, you know, uh, whatever his point is that people should stop
• 50:26
  inventing these, uh, fake explanations. The explanation is the war infrastructure in
• 50:33
  vulnerability, weak preparation and policy failure. And so he said that, uh, you know,
• 50:41
  the air defense he's, he was particularly harsh on Novak Putin and the air defense systems. He
• 50:48
  made fun of Novak's response, uh, you know, keep import duties from being imposed on gasoline,
• 50:55
  you know, make it cheaper for us to get it. He says that's a weak bureaucrat answer to a serious
• 51:01
  strategic problem. And that's true. He says that Putin admitted that there's at least a fuel
• 51:07
  deficit and said refineries need better air defense. And Putin at least identified the
• 51:13
  problem correctly. And so he's asking the obvious question, Platoshkin says, and this is directed at
• 51:19
  and the people who are supposed to be running the fuel, uh, on the national level, if Ukrainian
• 51:25
  strikes on refineries have been going on for a year, why weren't the major refineries already
• 51:33
  protected with better air defense? If the state knows that 10 or 12 major refineries are critical
• 51:39
  to the national gas supply, why weren't they already covered? You can't protect everything,
• 51:44
  but you should protect the arteries. And that's a fair criticism. It's not anti-Russia,
• 51:50
  it's not pro-Russia. It's a serious internal question. Remember, I told you that Russians are
• 51:54
  very, uh, very exact and specific. They're going, wait a minute, dude, you knew about this. Why
• 52:01
  didn't you protect it? You know, and people can be held accountable for that stuff, you know,
• 52:07
  and they are there, you know, they'll be removed. You know, how come you didn't have air defense in
• 52:11
  place? What were you thinking? You knew this was a likelihood. Why didn't you do something?
• 52:16
  But they also knew that, and I'm not trying to justify it, but, uh, because it shouldn't be
• 52:22
  justified. They should have done it. And, uh, instead of building more drones, maybe they
• 52:27
  should have built more, uh, air defense, uh, more S-400s, more something like that.
• 52:31
  It's a serious internal question. Did the state adapt quickly enough to the drone warfare?
• 52:37
  And then he gave this scarcity joke, and I want to share it with you because it's pretty,
• 52:41
  I like it. It's pretty funny. And he, he gave a joke and he said, uh, he goes, for those of you
• 52:47
  that want to joke on, uh, scarcity and the psychology of scarcity, he says, it's, uh,
• 52:53
  early in the morning, you know, well, middle of the night basically is what he's saying.
• 52:57
  And he says, a guy calls a night pharmacy and these pharmacies are open 24 hour all over Russia.
• 53:04
  They're everywhere. You can always get drugs anywhere. And not drugs here, but the prescription
• 53:08
  drugs in the middle of the night, anywhere. And, uh, he, um, calls a midnight pharmacy and says,
• 53:14
  do you have any bananas? Pharmacist says, this is a pharmacy. He says, a couple minutes later,
• 53:20
  phone rings again, same guy. Do you have any bananas? And the pharmacist says, I told you,
• 53:25
  this is a pharmacy. Waits 10 minutes and gets another call. Says, do you have any bananas?
• 53:30
  And the pharmacist says, no, we don't have any bananas. And the man says, ah, so you did have
• 53:36
  bananas. It says scarcity psychology. When people are told there is none, they don't believe that
• 53:44
  category. They think there was some, but it's gone hidden reserved or sold to somebody else.
• 53:50
  And that's what the gas line is doing. It's changing the public's mind on what's going on.
• 53:55
  That is why the song convoy fit is what I think. And Americans remember that as well. If you
• 54:03
  remember the fuel lines, fuel lines create jokes, songs, anger, hoarding, blame, and increased
• 54:10
  politics. There's an entire line of songs that went out in the, in the 73 and in 79,
• 54:17
  that people would put those out. It's the regional fuel map he talked about too,
• 54:26
  because here's what it is. Think about this. Moscow 4.20 AM, no line to get fuel, but a 20
• 54:33
  liter limit. Serpukhov, normal price gasoline is available where gasoline is always available.
• 54:43
  The prices are around a hundred rubles per liter in Tomsk. 95 octane is around 65 rubles
• 54:51
  at Rosneft, but only from 8 AM with a 30 liter limit and a weight in line.
• 54:59
  Varanezh an hour wait to be at her half the filling stations aren't working. And a 92 octane
• 55:06
  is around 64. A 95 octane is around 69. Saratov, 30 liter limit for private citizens, 50 for people
• 55:16
  in industry like Yandex drivers, like a trucker or stuff like that. Krasnodar,
• 55:22
  no filling canisters. You can't bring a container and fill it up. You have to put it only in the
• 55:28
  tank of your car. Only tanks in about an hour wait. In Perm, 30 liters per receipt.
• 55:34
  So it's not a collapse. It's a patchy stress. Some places have fuel, but limits. Some have
• 55:41
  normal prices, but long lines. Some have high prices and no line. Some have empty stations.
• 55:46
  And so the unevenness itself is politically dangerous because no one knows what tomorrow
• 55:50
  will look like. This guy said, and one of the things he said is the mistake that everybody makes
• 55:56
  is that they equate Moscow to Russia. Russia is a huge place. And people say that, oh,
• 56:04
  so as long as there's no problem in Moscow, there's no problem in Russia. And that's not true.
• 56:11
  Not remotely. And he wandered a little bit into Soviet history on refineries. He talked about
• 56:19
  diesel and biofuels. And there's a serious theme. Industrial sovereignty isn't a slogan.
• 56:25
  It's a supply chain. He said that Russia inherited much of its refinery from Soviet period. And he
• 56:31
  questions what has been built since. He talks about fuel refining. And he discussed biofuels.
• 56:39
  Said Brazil is using sugarcane waste. Germany is using something called rapeseed, which I don't
• 56:45
  know what that is. America is using corn. And Russia is potentially using sunflower for biomass.
• 56:50
  And his complaint is that oil companies don't want the competition inside of Russia.
• 56:56
  And the state hasn't developed enough alternatives. And so his redundancy,
• 57:04
  he's questioning why there isn't any redundancy. Why aren't we protecting refineries?
• 57:10
  Why is there no huge regional reserve, price discipline, alternative fuels,
• 57:15
  more domestic equipment, and real industrial depth?
• 57:20
  Even an oil country can find itself in a gasoline line. So that's part one. Because Russia,
• 57:32
  just over last night, Russia has done a response. But before we get to that,
• 57:39
  I'm going to play one more tune for you. And this one came from the 1979
• 57:45
  era. And this one is By The Kinks. Here we go.
• 58:04
  I've been waiting for years to buy a brand new tablet. I want to send it right back.
• 58:15
  I can't afford the gas for my luxury limousine.
• 58:26
  But even if I hit the store, no one's got no gasoline. I went to my local dealer to see if he
• 58:41
  could set me straight. He said, there's a little gas going, but you have to wait.
• 58:48
  For the office is red hot, sweet, and some really high-grade hash.
• 58:59
  Hash can be purchased anywhere for any amount of cash.
• 59:10
  I can score you some coke and some grape one glass, but I can't get a gallon of gas.
• 59:21
  I've got some dollars that speed all the drugs that you eat, but I can't get a gallon of gas.
• 59:33
  There's no more left to gas. For any man who needs a car and a 747 when you can't buy a gallon of gas.
• 1:00:01
  Who needs a highway, an airport, or a jet when you can't get a gallon of gas.
• 1:00:11
  There's no more left to buy and sell. There's no more oil left in the well.
• 1:00:18
  A gallon of gas can't be purchased anywhere for any amount of cash.
• 1:00:28
  You can't buy a gallon of gas.
• 1:00:38
  Well, there you go. That was entertaining, I believe, anyway. But there you have it.
• 1:00:45
  Let's see. Hold on. I gotta make sure to turn that off. There you go. Gotta figure
• 1:00:50
  out what the hell I'm doing. And I have now, so life is pretty good.
• 1:00:55
  I wanted to switch gears just the tiniest of bits, because Kyiv is ablaze. Last night,
• 1:01:05
  Russia attacked Kyiv huge. And they had a mega strike. Okay, this is the Russian response.
• 1:01:17
  And Russia has been, you know, I told you the last few days they did, or last week or so,
• 1:01:23
  they've taken out some 200 gas stations east of the Dnieper River. Last night,
• 1:01:30
  they took out 70 more, according to the reports that I'm privy to. And the Russian
• 1:01:43
  military says that while Ukraine and Russia opposition channels are laughing about the
• 1:01:49
  Russian fuel lines, you know, that the West is putting that, you know, the Russians are losing
• 1:01:55
  the war because of a fuel, you know, because of fuel. That's really not true. If you look into
• 1:02:06
  places like Sumy, Kharkov, Dnieper, Petrovsk, and the guided Garand drones, and from Ukrainian
• 1:02:14
  channels, by the way, they got these guys walking around advertising what they're doing. And the
• 1:02:20
  losses are huge. Even Siersky admitted it last night. So Siersky is the commanding general for
• 1:02:26
  Ukraine, all their military. And this has turned into a fuel war. Ukraine has been striking Russian
• 1:02:36
  refineries and fuel logistics. I say they're only doing that because they have nothing left.
• 1:02:41
  You know, they have no people left. Siersky says he can't fill in any people. He has no people to
• 1:02:47
  do it. Everywhere they have these boosification squads, they can't do it. So both understands,
• 1:02:53
  both sides are, you know, figuring out the same thing. Military fuel infrastructure, substations,
• 1:03:01
  logistics hubs, fuel is movement, and movement is war. So this is a Russian, you know,
• 1:03:10
  response to what they've been doing inside of Russia. So Siersky says, and there was an interview
• 1:03:16
  of him on one of the, what do you call it, Ukrainian channels. And Siersky claims that
• 1:03:25
  Russia is conducting offensive operations in the northern part of the Russian territory,
• 1:03:30
  just like I've been reporting on, specifically from Bryansk and Belgrade areas into Sumy and
• 1:03:39
  into Kharkov. And what he's doing is it's forcing Ukraine to pull people from places like
• 1:03:48
  I don't know, Konstantinovka and over on the Eastern Front. And the guy asked him,
• 1:03:53
  the Russian, the commentator asked him whether that means that Russia is planning an assault
• 1:03:58
  on Kiev. And he said, no, more likely it's going to be in Chernigov. And even if that is,
• 1:04:05
  even then, that would be questionable because the terrain is forest and swamp.
• 1:04:10
  So Siersky doesn't need to say that Russia is going to Kiev for this to matter. The point is
• 1:04:17
  that Ukraine has to defend too many places. Right now, the Russians are on the move and moving
• 1:04:23
  forward in quickly in Sumy, Kharkov, Chernigov, Donbass, Zaporizhia, Dnipro line. The more Russia
• 1:04:33
  threatens in this summer offensive, which they're gaining dramatically, the more Ukraine has to
• 1:04:39
  spread around reserves it does not have. And so that's what Siersky is talking about.
• 1:04:47
  And if you want to connect this to Russian thought process, especially from Putin,
• 1:04:52
  Russia has been very clear that if Ukraine uses its border regions like it has been Bryansk
• 1:04:58
  and Kursk to strike Belgrade, you know, those places and killing Russian civilians there,
• 1:05:07
  then Russia's creating a buffer zone. And we're watching that happen in Sumy and in Kharkov.
• 1:05:12
  And so it's not a dramatic thunder run, you know, to Kiev. That's not what we're trying to do.
• 1:05:17
  It is according to Putin. It's a grinding removal of Ukraine's ability to attack
• 1:05:23
  inside of Russia with anything other than drones, you know. And so Ukraine's Kursk adventure,
• 1:05:30
  you know, when it took Russia to crawl through gas pipes to get that over with,
• 1:05:37
  you know, when they shut off the gas pipes, that adventure may turn out to have been one
• 1:05:42
  of the worst strategic mistakes of the war for Ukraine. It gave Russia the political and
• 1:05:47
  military justification to expand the buffer zone. So, you know, the overnight strikes on
• 1:05:54
  Kiev are part of the same escalation ladder. Ukraine hits Russian refineries and cities.
• 1:05:59
  Russia hits Kiev, fuel infrastructure, power infrastructure, logistic, command modes,
• 1:06:04
  military industrial targets. Each side is calling the other side strikes terrorism.
• 1:06:10
  But each side calls its own military, you know, its own strikes militarily necessary.
• 1:06:16
  So from the Russian point of view, the Kiev strikes are not random. They are pressure,
• 1:06:21
  retaliation, that's a big one, and operational shaping. Russia is trying to break Ukraine's
• 1:06:26
  ability to sustain the war with energy, fuel, logistics, command, manpower, and morale.
• 1:06:33
  And the Western press, of course, is going to say, Russia's escalating. Well, what choice do
• 1:06:38
  they have? Moscow is going to say, Russia is responding. You're destroying our stuff. Well,
• 1:06:43
  we're going to destroy yours. And they've done that. They've taken out a couple of
• 1:06:48
  reservoirs with fresh water because Ukraine has shut them off and won't supply any of the
• 1:06:55
  Donbass areas. And so Russia's gone in and destroyed them a couple of times. They're
• 1:06:59
  approaching another one up in Sumy right now. Or was it Kharkov? Either way, they have another
• 1:07:04
  huge reservoir up there. And strategically, the war has moved deeper into infrastructure on both
• 1:07:12
  sides. And if you want to talk about a political person, this is Maria Zakharova from the
• 1:07:21
  from the Ministry of Defense. And her briefing, which she gives once a week,
• 1:07:26
  is two and a half hours. Good, good listen. And I only, she talks a lot about, you know,
• 1:07:33
  specific attacks too in the first half hour. So I usually skip past that and go to the next part.
• 1:07:40
  But she does talk about attacks against Russian civilians and casualties and specifics on,
• 1:07:46
  you know, she likes to, I don't want to say she likes, nobody likes, but she reports on the fact
• 1:07:51
  that civilians are targeted in various regions. And she lists the casualties among children
• 1:07:58
  in Belgorod, Biansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhia, Krasnodar, Kursk, Lugansk, Moscow, Crimea,
• 1:08:04
  Rostov, Tula, and Kherson. She also went back to the Starobelsk college attack that they attacked
• 1:08:11
  the dormitories of a college, you know, with young, mostly women going to school to be teachers.
• 1:08:20
  And so both sides call the other side what they're doing in attacking their infrastructure
• 1:08:25
  is terrorism. And she says, this is terrorism backed by the West, because Ukraine doesn't have
• 1:08:32
  the ability to do this if it wasn't for the West. Ukraine doesn't have any satellite. They don't
• 1:08:37
  have any military intelligence. They got nothing. All they got is Elon Musk on their side,
• 1:08:43
  giving them Starlink for free. And that's all they got. Well, and U.S. intelligence that is being
• 1:08:52
  passed out to them. So her argument is that Ukraine has crossed from battlefield warfare
• 1:08:57
  into terrorism against civilian infrastructure and civilian life. And the West isn't merely
• 1:09:03
  watching this happen. It is participating and enabling the growth in it. So her words,
• 1:09:11
  what she said was what they have done is they've turned Ukraine and get this. This is an important
• 1:09:17
  wording, what she says. She says they've turned Ukraine into a military laboratory,
• 1:09:24
  a debt colony, and a platform for NATO's war against Russia. Now, previously, she was talking
• 1:09:31
  about the biological sites that we built over there, 40 of them, that they have been railing
• 1:09:38
  about for several years now. Moscow's view is that the West first fuels the war, then holds
• 1:09:45
  conferences about rebuilding what it helped destroy, while Ukraine is going to be loaded
• 1:09:51
  with debt, stripped of any sovereignty it had before. And this is a hybrid, kind of a hybrid
• 1:09:58
  war. This is really the U.S. war against Russia. You know, it's all funded by the U.S. and by NATO.
• 1:10:06
  And, you know, what this means about the fuel segment is that long-range Ukrainian strikes
• 1:10:14
  aren't really Ukrainian. The West and their Western weapons, Western targeting,
• 1:10:21
  Western satellite navigation, Western intelligence, and Western specialists that make these attacks
• 1:10:29
  possible. Ukraine doesn't have them. She says Russia sees this as a proxy hybrid war
• 1:10:35
  by the collective West against Russia. It absolutely is. And that you can't deny.
• 1:10:42
  The fact is, if the U.S. and NATO were not funding this, Ukraine would have been wiped out long ago.
• 1:10:50
  And that is true. And they're already being wiped out, you know.
• 1:10:59
  It's, this, there's not much you can do about it. Now, Jeffrey Sachs was, he gave kind of analysis
• 1:11:08
  of this, and he's done it repeatedly over the last 10 years, you know, quit provoking Russia.
• 1:11:14
  Stop it, because Russians don't think like you do. And I've said this, they're not going to do it.
• 1:11:20
  You know, the key lines from his thing, Sachs isn't speaking as a Russian official, he's an American.
• 1:11:27
  And he says that Europe has become a strategic child. All they are is a child throwing a tantrum.
• 1:11:34
  His warning is simple, quit provoking your neighbor. You're going to live next to him
• 1:11:38
  for the next thousand years, you know. Stop it. All you're doing is revisiting what happened in
• 1:11:46
  the 1500s, 1600s, 1700s, 1800s, and 1900s. Happens every hundred years or so. This is the one right now.
• 1:11:53
  You get in and you, you know, you beat each other up. He said Europe should be in the room with your,
• 1:11:59
  you know, with Europe and Russia, not America, not Ukraine. And quit provoking your neighbor.
• 1:12:07
  Here's another quote, to be, is his quote, to be an enemy of the United States is dangerous,
• 1:12:13
  but to be a friend is fatal. Now that's not me saying that, that was Jeffrey Sachs.
• 1:12:19
  And I happen to agree with him. I mean, Ukraine, they're not going to recover from this anytime
• 1:12:25
  soon. You know, you're going to be living with Russia for thousands of years, was another one
• 1:12:31
  of his quotes. And this kind of brings me full circle with what I've been discussing. Trump
• 1:12:36
  wants to be seen as the peace president. And I've played that for you a couple of times.
• 1:12:42
  But the U S keeps behaving as the manager, the provocateur in other people's war. Europe pays,
• 1:12:53
  Ukraine bleeds, Russia bleeds and escalates. Ukraine escalates, Russia then escalates again.
• 1:13:00
  Americans pay at the pump and then politicians blame, you know, the supply lines, you know,
• 1:13:07
  that we helped create. So I don't know this, the summer offensive, you know, Russia's not racing
• 1:13:15
  to the finish. Russia is grinding and they've done it all through the winter, two years in a row.
• 1:13:22
  And in the summer, they have pretty good offenses that come up. You can't, you can't use a tank.
• 1:13:27
  You can't do all that stuff in the spring because it's all nothing but mud, you know? And, and so
• 1:13:33
  in the summer, they have an offensive. It goes on into the fall. And then over the winter,
• 1:13:37
  they grind and they take them out. And this is the part the Western audiences miss.
• 1:13:43
  Russia's building pressure on multiple axes in Sumy, Kharkov, Donbass, Aparajia, logistics nodes,
• 1:13:50
  fuel depots, substations, command centers, and the psychological pressure of major strikes on Kyiv.
• 1:13:57
  If Ukraine keeps striking into Russia, Russia will keep widening the buffer zone.
• 1:14:03
  If Ukraine threatens Kursk, Belgrade, Biansk, or Moscow, Russia will say, fine, then the line's
• 1:14:08
  going to keep moving west. I still think that they're going to take the, the victories of the
• 1:14:14
  four places and they're, they're grinding through and they've done some major advances, this,
• 1:14:21
  of some larger areas. You know, if they get to, well, I don't want to say the same,
• 1:14:28
  um, man, I can't remember the name of the city I'm thinking, well, I'd have to have the map in
• 1:14:35
  front of me in order to pick it right. But if, but if they, uh, if Ukraine doesn't find a serious way
• 1:14:41
  to exit this, a negotiated exit, Russia may eventually decide that the only stable military
• 1:14:48
  answer is to go all the way to the Dnipro, like I've been saying since 2022. That's not going to
• 1:14:55
  be tomorrow. It might not even be the stated goal today. It's not, but the logic of buffer
• 1:15:00
  zones is going to expand. Every Ukrainian escalation creates an argument for deeper
• 1:15:05
  Russian security belt. And Russia doesn't need any sort of Hollywood offensive. You know, it's,
• 1:15:12
  it can plot, it can grind in a war of attrition. Ukraine loses every single time. Anybody that
• 1:15:19
  knows anything about wars of attrition, especially when one side is out of people,
• 1:15:27
  it can take villages, roads, tree lines, substations, depots, and rail nodes. That interview
• 1:15:34
  with the Ukrainian Colonel was quite interesting. And then the one with the Russian Colonel right
• 1:15:42
  after it, where he was saying, these guys aren't even fighting anymore. He said, they're,
• 1:15:47
  they're retreating. And they're, they're, I told you yesterday, there was one place where they
• 1:15:53
  busted through the line and the Russians advanced too fast. You know, they went through like eight,
• 1:15:59
  nine kilometers ahead and they had to slow down because they would lose their own ability to,
• 1:16:06
  to react, you know, to protect what they've taken so far. So they're, they're, they're slowly
• 1:16:14
  building it all the way down the front lines. It's a 1200 kilometer front line. It's huge.
• 1:16:20
  And the Ukrainians can't defend it all. Tsirsky admits that and they can't do it. So I don't know.
• 1:16:30
  Even Russian commentators outside of clean official state lines acknowledge fuel problems
• 1:16:36
  right now, but they tie it to Ukrainian drone strikes. They admit the crisis. They criticize
• 1:16:42
  Russian preparations and air defense, and nobody's reading a Kremlin script and those commentators
• 1:16:51
  that I was watching. So fuel pressure doesn't necessarily produce peace. It's in my view,
• 1:16:58
  probably more likely to produce escalation and the, the desire to get this over sooner rather
• 1:17:08
  than later. And so I don't know. I wanted to cover, if I could, a little bit about,
• 1:17:18
  I read something interesting. I didn't listen to it all, but I did review a couple of the notes.
• 1:17:29
  Tucker Carlson is talking about, and he said he didn't want to do it, says he's breaking,
• 1:17:39
  his breaking point with the Republican party came with the June 2025 12 day war that he said
• 1:17:49
  wasn't a new Iranian nuclear issue, but the first stage of an Israel led regime change effort.
• 1:17:57
  He says that it was antithetical to what Trump ran on. I agree with that analysis, by the way,
• 1:18:04
  Tucker was talking about helping to build a third party, but he doesn't want anything to do
• 1:18:11
  with being a candidate for it or anything like that. I think it's long past the time for a third
• 1:18:18
  party. So I don't know. If we look at the American fuel crisis that hasn't fully arrived, you know,
• 1:18:26
  it isn't gone. It's going to get worse because the farce of the alleged peace talks between Iran
• 1:18:33
  and America, it's not going to get any better. It's not over. It's going to create a political
• 1:18:40
  crisis of our own here. My desire to pay $4 a gallon for gas doesn't exist. I want to go back
• 1:18:51
  to the way it was in February, but you can't roll back the clock and change the idiocy of that
• 1:18:56
  attack on Iran and the idiocy of just blindly following Israel. I saw some reports last night
• 1:19:03
  that a bunch of socialists have won democratic primaries, knocked off some long-term people.
• 1:19:11
  One girl, 29 years old, beat out a guy who's been in office for like however many terms it was,
• 1:19:19
  but he's been there 16, 17 years, something like that. And that people are taking younger,
• 1:19:25
  they're taking socialism, they're taking, the people are thinking differently. Our kids sure
• 1:19:31
  as hell don't think like we do. You know, I mean, being an older guy, you know, I'm allowed to say
• 1:19:35
  that. And then I hope it doesn't offend my kids. I don't think it does because they don't think
• 1:19:40
  like I do. And, you know, they have a completely different view. And the Republican Party is,
• 1:19:47
  you know, all it is is Democratic Party 2.0. They're the exact same. And I don't
• 1:19:54
  think that socialism is the right move. You know, we've got, you know, step from communism.
• 1:20:03
  But then again, that's what many in Europe are there and they want, why can't we have what
• 1:20:09
  Europe has? Where's my six weeks of vacation every year? Where's the free health care? Why
• 1:20:16
  is our health care five times what it costs anywhere else in the world? You know, I get
• 1:20:22
  the issue, but the government can't answer those questions. And they have in other countries,
• 1:20:31
  but there's a give and a take. And the take is sometimes too big. You know,
• 1:20:36
  Canada is not all that great, you know, with what, because you don't get to necessarily pick your own
• 1:20:41
  medicine just because the state gives it to you. You know what I mean? And so I don't know what the
• 1:20:50
  right answer is, truthfully, nor do I want, I just want to be one of the masses that is allowed to
• 1:20:55
  go through and not have my life dictated to or destroyed by a socialist agenda or an agenda by
• 1:21:04
  a Democratic candidate or a Republican candidate. They're all, it's a unit party all the way down
• 1:21:10
  the line once they get up to the federal level anyway. And a lot of respects in the,
• 1:21:16
  in the state courts as well. So I don't know this fuel crisis and the political crisis behind it
• 1:21:25
  with Tucker Carlson talking about leaving the Republican party and creating a third. I was
• 1:21:30
  very much for Ross Perot way back in the day. I thought he was goofy, but then again, I was for
• 1:21:39
  the effort. You know, the two party system, it's BS because they both suck and they have for at
• 1:21:45
  least the time of Ross Perot, if not longer. And the people that fight it the most are those that
• 1:21:52
  benefit the most from one of those two parties. No, no, we can't have a third. How are we going
• 1:21:58
  to control those middle people? Because every election who can, what do they do? They're,
• 1:22:05
  they're targeting those in the middle because the middle people switch.
• 1:22:10
  You know, I, I did not vote for Obama. I thought about not voting for,
• 1:22:19
  not voting at all that year, you know, and, and I did not pick a presidential candidate that year.
• 1:22:27
  And, and I, and, you know, I almost did the same when it was Trumpster,
• 1:22:32
  you know, and, and, you know, I, I was like, you know, I, I was more along the lines of,
• 1:22:37
  of a business one. I try hard not to pick somebody if I don't have any real preference for them,
• 1:22:44
  especially in local elections. You know, if it's like, well, it doesn't really matter whether you
• 1:22:49
  pick a Republican or a Democrat for a judge. And if that's the only definition, unless I know them
• 1:22:55
  personally, I'm not interested, you know, I won't even, I won't even pick one. I have no problem
• 1:23:02
  with leaving a vote off, you know, when I don't know the people, especially in a local deal.
• 1:23:07
  And sometimes I would go only to vote in the senatorial and for, for the national sorts of
• 1:23:13
  elections because I didn't know anybody personally on the, on the side. You might disagree with that,
• 1:23:18
  you know, but that's the way I've done it for years. So all I know is that in February,
• 1:23:25
  I was paying $2.39 a gallon, and a few weeks later, I'm paying more than four dollars.
• 1:23:33
  Who do you blame for that? It's got to be the incumbent, right? You know, who do you penalize
• 1:23:40
  for that, if anybody? You know, do I support what Trump is doing in the world, in America?
• 1:23:47
  Generally, I've always said, you know, I don't, you know, what's your alternative? Kamala Harris?
• 1:23:54
  Oh, Jesus. No, I'll stick with Trump, you know. But internationally, they all suck. You know,
• 1:23:59
  I liked what they were doing initially, but it's always the same. You know, they, this is where
• 1:24:05
  they hide the money, whether they're Republican or Democrat, they all do the same thing. And it's
• 1:24:12
  huge amounts of propaganda. Huge. Well, we only have a few minutes left in the show. I might put
• 1:24:19
  on a little bit of music to end it up. And, but I did want to tell you a little bit about tomorrow.
• 1:24:25
  Tomorrow's Friday. Tomorrow's Civic Outlaws. I listened with interest to a lot of Gabby Hayes'
• 1:24:34
  show yesterday. And you can go out to damradio.com forward slash podcast and listen to it yourself.
• 1:24:40
  And he covered quite a bit about this, this sheriff's deputy that is a menace to the badge,
• 1:24:49
  is what I would say. And I was horrified listening to some of that stuff. And by the way,
• 1:24:57
  I've run into those assholes before. Not this asshole, but a bunch of other ones that act
• 1:25:03
  like this. I have a badge. That means I'm God. I do not like those types of people.
• 1:25:14
  You are there to represent authority in a state. And what does Civic Outlaws do?
• 1:25:25
  What are we against at Civic Outlaws and our Civic Outlaws page? Go there and check it out
• 1:25:34
  if you're interested. We're about educating people. What did I do when I was practicing
• 1:25:39
  law in this area? I sued so many people in federal court that were government overreach,
• 1:25:49
  the assholes of government. And by the way, they do exist. And they're prevalent. There are
• 1:25:57
  multiple examples of it in policing constantly. And the trouble is they're protected.
• 1:26:05
  They're protected by the sheriff. They're protected by the prosecutor.
• 1:26:10
  They're protected in their position. And what's the horrifying part for me
• 1:26:16
  is they're protected under the law through qualified immunity, official immunity,
• 1:26:25
  and things of that nature. And this guy needs to go. And the proof is in the pudding.
• 1:26:34
  I'm disappointed with how these things go. And I think that people ought to go after that guy.
• 1:26:39
  You want to talk about it, I tell you what, get on Civic Outlaws tomorrow from 7 a.m. to 8.30
• 1:26:48
  and pay attention because we're going to talk about government overreach in depth tomorrow.
• 1:26:55
  I appreciate you being here. I appreciate you being here every day at damradio.com forward slash live.
• 1:27:02
  Or whether you happen to listen in arrears as it is, you can go out online and listen
• 1:27:08
  to internationalflavor.com to all the past events and damradio.com forward slash podcasts.
• 1:27:15
  We appreciate all that, your listenership and your support. And thank you for listening.
• 1:27:21
  And I hope you all have a beautiful mid-Missouri day.