My credentials, since you bring them up might bang your gong and dissolve the evidence-free…

3 min readMar 20, 2022

My credentials, since you bring them up might bang your gong and dissolve the evidence-free flippancy of your comment: I'm a permanent resident of Latvia whose 7th language is Russian. Latvian is my 8th. I had lots of Russian, Ukrainian, Tadzhik, Kazakh and Belarussian students when I taught investments, history and entrepreneurship in Riga Business School. One of my colleagues, Glen Grant, is a retired British Lt Col. who worked for the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense for nearly a decade. The Borderlands podcast is not a random Facebook post, but run by Sam Cook is the founder of a Kyiv-based tech startup (now in Warsaw) who did two tours in Iraq after graduating from West Point and then taught military history at West Point. We both did our theses on the Spanish Civil War.

Borderlands' GoFundMe aiding refugees: https://www.gofundme.com/f/ensure-the-safety-of-35-tech-workers-in-Ukraine?qid=3fc01d119b695a2ebaf6ad1f1154d38f .

Another credential of mine, since you mentioned credentials: I have a Brazilian friend in Warsaw doing IT work for a Polish construction company that has five empty apts. I connected Borderlands with my Brazilian friend and five refugee families will be housed in their empty apts. I've donated about 800 euros of my own money to Fight for Right, Latvia, which organizes help for several marginalized and vulnerable populations fleeing Ukraine (list at bottom) and to territorial defense in my friend's network of 11 villages west of Kyiv. My maternal grandfather raised money for the Spanish Republic in 1937; so this is our family heritage.

Vindman: he was a policy advisor, totally uninvolved in procurement. He pulls no strings there and has no impact on Lockheed's or Raytheon's share price. Your accusation is a fantasy and evidence-free character assassination. You also clearly have no idea how the Pentagon works. My friend Glen Grant has had Pentagon consulting contracts and from him I've heard lots of stories about how military intelligence is an oxymoron.

Since I protested against the Vietnam War and held #96 in the 1973 draft lottery, you can't brand me as a militarist or as an advocate of the Domino Theory or string puller for the military industrial complex.

A No-Fly zone is pointless if we supply Ukraine with the S300 and S400 air defense systems.

History's menu doesn't offer good vs bad. It's bad vs worse. Once a generation a malignantly expansionist authoritarian regime offers the planetary American empire a cartoon cut-out of an enemy that makes the US look very good by comparison. Putin is this generation's cartoon cut-out bad guy and Ukraine's war is this generation's Spanish Civil War. Advocating non-intervention in Ukraine's fight for survival is as morally acceptable as the British-sponsored non-intervention agreement in that conflict.

If your bong remains insufficiently banged, feel free to write back requesting more evidence.

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