Dear Readers:
The Russian mainstream press is chock full of stories about the situation over the Black Sea. Something has to be done about those pesky American spy drones, which collect data about Russian strategic objects and relay it back to their Ukrainian goons. The Crimea beach attack was the last straw! Russian Minister of Defense Belousov has tasked the General Staff to take appropriate measures to deal with American provocations over the Black Sea.
The Russian name “Belousov“, by the way, means “white whiskers”. The actual Minister does have white hair, to be sure, but is clean shaven and rather distinguished looking. One could even see him in a Hollywood action movie, playing the good guy (the grandfatherly General or Admiral) who sends the team on its dangerous mission, even though he is Russian.
This piece by reporter Alyona Zhilina lays out succinctly what the issues are, and even adds some expert opinion, offering various choices of solutions. The obvious solution is to just shoot down the drones, which is what the Russian public are demanding. But the General Staff are cautious people, not given to impulsive emotions. Reporters from the internet portal Tsargrad relay that these men most likely will not employ the more “radical” methods demanded by the public. However, there are several other, equally interesting, variants that can be considered.
One of the proposals offered by technical specialists is a super-secret Russian laser complex called Peresvet. This new weapon (or anti-weapon) system was announced by President Putin in March of 2018. At the time the complex was announced, there was a public contest to name it. The official winner was Peresvet (Пересвет), which was the name of a medieval Russian warrior who became a monk and was placed in the list of official Russian saints. The second part of his name –Svet is the Russian word for “light”, so it fits. This is also the root of the popular Russian girl’s name Svetlana. The prefix pere– means “over” like walking over or across something; but has many of the same semantic shadings as its English counterpart. For example, not just physically moving “over” something, but also, more abstractly, “over-arching” in the meaning of “too much”. For example, this steak is over-cooked! Or, in this case, Too much light!
According to the wiki, the system was developed to deal with drones by blinding them. There are limitations: The system works beautifully in beautiful weather, not so much in foggy or cloudy weather, which is why it was not necessarily designed to be used in naval conditions. The system also requires a lot of electricity, which limits its portability.
Nonetheless, some Russian technical experts believe that this laser system, maybe with some adjustments and some issues worked out, will be able to burn the optical devices out of the American spy drones. This is just one possibility; the General Staff are considering all options. One way or another, the airspace over the Black Sea must be secured for Russia.
Awful Avalanche 
I think we’re getting well past “tiptoe through the tulips” time on these huge US spy-drones flying near Crimea in the Black Sea. They come from a US base in Sicily. Where the ones come from to spy on Yemen, who knows, but the Houthis have shot down at least five and maybe six. They don’t give a ratsass about the ramifications.
I confess to no longer caring about the difference between a “Reaper” and a “Global Hawk” drone. They’re equally vulgar in the sense of helping to murder civilians with a dash of military effect on the side. Official US has shown time and again that killing non-Westerners is a sport to them. The natives can’t be allowed to get too uppity, quite literally. Psychopathic behaviour to remain “on top” is US policy.
Belousov is tasking his people to come up with a clean way to disrupt the US drone eavesdroppers. Well, it’s not that they haven’t been thinking about that for years already. There isn’t an easy way. So I’m afraid Russia will have to take the bull by the horns and act Houthi. The US may deflate like a pricked balloon, never having been challenged for decades. According to Ritter, Johnson, Macgregor, etc, the US Army is shite, and the Navy can’t beat the Houthis. So the US attitude is bluff.
I think the time has come to call that bluff or face years if not decades of constant US harrassment. Belousov knows this. The US is run by its bureaucracy and rich people who know someone in Washington — look at the utter jokes offered as candidates for president. So the RF should shoot a few US drones down and watch the fist-waving and MSM idiocy unfold. Few people watch or pay attention to the MSM any more. Sometimes you just have to kick your opponent in the gonads to get them to come to heel.
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To me, Belousov looks a lot like the late American actor Jonathan Harris, who played Dr. Zachary Smith in 60’s sci-fi series Lost in Space.
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OMG, it’s a perfect resemblance! Just age Dr. Smith a tad to whiten his hair, and bingo!
“Danger, Doctor Smith! Must destroy drones…”
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I was hooked on ‘Lost in Space’ as a little boy. The series ran 1965-68, which would’ve been kindergarten through second grade for me. Looking back with a grown-up perspective, Dr Smith clearly stole the show: He – and weirdly, the Robot he loved to berate – seem by far the most memorable and nuanced characters. Everybody else was just generic bad and good guys (and the latters’ generic good kids). The most memorable scenes were Smith’s monologues, scheming aloud about his plans to destroy the mission; and of course the Robot famously going haywire, bellowing ‘crush, kill, destroy!’
In any case Harris’ resemblance to Belousov piqued my paranoia. It seemed to require some conspiratorial, perhaps slightly overwrought follow-up. (Also it’s Saturday, a day off … though some who know me insist that I’m always a little off … )
First, a Google search for ‘jonathan harris’ and ‘belousov’ and ‘images’ comes up with exactly zero pertinent hits, establishing that the two have never been photographed together. Moreover, according to Wikipedia, Jonathan Harris was born in the Bronx in 1914 to Russian Jewish immigrant parents. Encouraged by his dad, he became interested in acting – that is, impersonation – at an early age, via Yiddish theater and then Broadway plays. (What kind of ‘Murican dad, even a newly minted one, encourages his son to become an actor?) We’re told Jonathan ‘detested his Bronx accent and by high school cultivated an English one in its place …’ Then ‘[i]n 1942, Harris won the leading role of a Polish officer in a Broadway play, [adopting] a Polish accent.’
The simplest explanation that fits all these facts? Jonathan’s parents, ‘Sam’ and ‘Jennie’ Charasuchin (Харасучин? Чарасучин?) were members of an early Bolshevik sleeper cell established in the US even before the Revolution, as part of a long-term plan to subvert the budding ‘Arsenal of Democracy,’ by organizing NYC workers. And young Jonathan was trained from the start to be a superspy, an international man of mystery.
Dad supposedly objected to his son changing his name to Harris – the sort of pro forma objection that any sleeper-cell dad would have made.
So when WW2 didn’t end quite as expected, Джонатан [Иёнатан?] Харасучин aka Jonathan Harris seamlessly transitioned to Plan B: subverting America via Hollywood, as a ‘cowardly eccentric’ villain right under Joe McCarthy’s nose. Hell, he managed to normalize, even romanticize cowardly, eccentric villainy to mainstream Cold War US audiences who were just suckers for a little nuance and vulnerability.
Oh, he can’t possibly be the new Russian defense minister – he died in 2002 at age 87, you argue. Well, first, records weren’t digital and indelible a century ago, so who knows how old ‘Jonathan Harris’ really was? Second, WTF, you haven’t heard that all all the elites are harvesting adenochrome from children’s blood, to keep themselves alive, healthy and in charge, pretty much world-without-end-amen?
Sorry Yalensis. Just having fun. Alex Jones and I are both from Texas, there must be something in the water.
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That’s a very fine conspiracy theory, and thanks for your amazing research! I never would have guessed that the villainous “English actor” with such a posh accent, was actually a Yiddish kid from the Bronx!
Okay, so maybe the Charasuchin parents did raise little Jonathan to become a Bolshevik spy in the U.S. Is it possible that his theater work was just a front? During the McCarthy era he would have had to lay really low to protect his Commie cell. It was precisely during this period, in 1959 to be precise, that Andrei Removich Belousov was born. Coincidence? I don’t think so. I submit to you that Belousov is Jonathan’s son. Removich means “son of Rem”, so it flows logically from this, that Jonathan Charasuchin aka Harris had adopted the call-sign “Rem” for his spymaster work.
In Russian, the name Rem (Рэм) sounds vaguely Jewish, so it all fits.
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Now THAT’s elegant. Makes perfect sense and explains the time gap. Better watch it, if we’re not careful we’ll soon have our own wiki page denouncing our ‘far-right Remanon conspiracy theory.’
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Haha!
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I think the main reason the Russian military doesn’t plan to simply shoot down the US intel drones is because they think one of the idiots running for US president might escalate the situation to prove he’s not chicken-hearted, and that would be a danger for all humanity. I’ve read that Russia has other methods in addition to the laser-eye you mention. For example, they could mess with US satellites without destroying them, or they could have a jet go by at high speed not far from the drone, thereby disfunctionalizing the drone without destroying it. There must be still other ways, too. Can the Houthis send missiles as far as the Black Sea?
Thanks for the etymologies. Wouldn’t peregrinate be an English cognate? And how about peregrine, “coming from another country,” also a falcon. And also perambulate and perorate (to”speak through”). How about perennial, “to last over time”? And maybe perform? It’s from a Norman form par- meaning “through, to completion”?
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The prefix/adverb per– is common to many Indo-European languages, and all with this same meaning of “over”, “through”, etc. In this etymology, look for *per (2) root: Proto-Indo-European root meaning “to lead, pass over.” A verbal root associated with *per- (1), which forms prepositions and preverbs with the basic meaning “forward, through; in front of, before,” etc.
I misspoke earlier when I put the I-E root as pere-, it’s actually just *per, the Russian descendant has the extra /e/ on the end, due to rules of Slavic pleophony.
The English word peregrinate is not a cognate, but rather a borrowing, from the Latin peregrinari (“to travel abroad”, “to make a pilgrimage”). All those other words you mention, are also borrowed from Latin. Peregrinate is formed from per-agri (“over the fields”, agri as in agriculture).
Cognates are words or roots that literally descended from a common ancestor, a common language that everybody spoke at the time, before it split into other languages. Sometimes it’s hard to figure out, because outright borrowings can cloud the situation and confuse people who are trying to figure out the lines of descent.
The Germanic and English descendant words would have transmuted the initial p- to an f- based on Grimm’s Law. (Grimm being the Brothers Grimm who also wrote Little Red Riding Hood).
Therefore, if I am not mistaken, the English cognate word would be for (as in “forward”), but this is the other semantic shading, not the “over” or “through” shading. The semantic shift is something like: You are moving forward, and then moving through or over something. And then things just get over-complicated!
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On a much more serious note: I’m with Beluga. And unlike him, I’m no pacifist. It speaks volumes that he thinks it’s time to stop ‘tiptoeing through the tulips.’
I think Kremlin / Stavka ‘restraint’ (assuming that’s all it is) is making things worse. Veteran US observers of the intelligence community, like Larry Johnson, argue that the US establishment are really convinced that ‘Putin is bluffing.’ If they really believe that, then they think they possess ‘escalation dominance,’ which – for now – seems to amount to escalating terror attacks on Russian civilians in an effort to turn Russians against the state. (They aren’t having much luck on the battlefield.)
That hasn’t worked – so far. Someone – I don’t recall who – recently wrote that in the Ukraine, the US made the fundamental error of trying to ‘wage 5th-generation warfare on a 3rd-generation battlefield.’ The point was that all the Fox News / CNN / CIA psy-ops and disinformation notwithstanding, the Ukronazis have been losing – in one way or another – since Day One. The Russian public understands that, because they are vastly more sophisticated news consumers than western citizens. They were never fooled.
But I would argue that Russians’ patience isn’t unlimited. Nor should it be. It’s not impossible that Russians will get fed up with a state that fails to protect its citizens, vigorously and proactively. Meanwhile Russian ‘caution’ is feeding the Americans’ delusions.
Never mind shooting down unmanned drones over international waters. I don’t understand why anyone is ‘cautious’ about that rather obvious first step. Let’s talk about shooting down NATO AWACS aircraft over Poland, Romania and the baltics. The crewmen are, by definition and by the very nature of their task, war criminals. You’re gonna start WW3 because we shot down your surveillance craft and killed your war criminals, without a Nuremburg tribunal? No you’re not. Absolute BS.
Oh, the AWACS crashed into a civilian neighborhood? That’s really dreadful, a tragedy, we (Russian MFA) aren’t denying it. But they were killing people in our civilian neighborhoods, so we had to shoot them down, and we didn’t have much control over where they crashed. Maybe you survivors should demand answers from your own regime. We’ve already given ours: We shot them down because they were killing Russians. If they’re killing your people too, then we have something in common. Consider joining us to overthrow your [Latvian, Lithuanian, Estonian, Polack] regime.
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This is what many Russians are thinking, and saying, as well. The Houthis have the right idea, they do what they think is right, and they don’t fuss and worry about the consequences.
Fundamentally, I think the Russian leadership do not understand the core of the American mentality. Which is the mentality of a bully. A bully will just keep on doing what he does until he gets a bloody nose. And then he stops. Just like the Gipper got a bloody nose in Lebanon, and then pulled out. Because every bully is also a coward. And that is what the Russian leadership needs to factor in. But they just don’t get it, because they never lived in America, and so they don’t understand how Americans actually think.
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