In two-player sequential games, a ply is one turn taken by one of the players. The word "ply", used as a synonym for "layer", goes back to the 15th century. Arthur Samuel first used it in its game-theoretic sense in his seminal paper on machine learning in checkers in 1959.
Russians learn chess the way Westerners learn checkers. They also prefer the more cautious queen's pawn opening where many westerners like to open with the more brazen king's pawn.
Thinking ahead is the key to winning. Find, for every plausible move, the optimal countermove by the opponent (at the next "ply") and so forth.
Looking at the disarray in the West right now, what with televised news panel discussions morphing into episodes of The Muppet Show with all their regulars drunk on spiked water from the backstage cooler, one must really wonder. They're falling over each other to come forward to denounce Russia and Putin for... For what?
It's likely none of them are familiar with what Putin actually said on the morning of 24 February, and even less familiar with his milestone speech at the Munich Security Conference 15 years earlier.
But you can be. Yet, to get there, you have to first acquaint yourself with one Vladimir Pozner who explained it all at Yale four years ago.
Vladimir Pozner is an international celebrity, born in Paris, a citizen of the US who for several years worked with Ted Koppel and also hosted a show with Phil Donahue, a citizen and currently a resident of Russia where he has his own prime-time television show and enjoys a status roughly equivalent to Walter Cronkite - despite calling out Russian media for being no freer than media in the West.
Pozner gave a talk at Yale a few years back. The curious title of this talk notwithstanding, Pozner's trying to ask a simple question.
The question, repeated throughout, is:
"Name one thing, from 1991 to 2007, that Russia or the Soviet Union did to incur the wrath of the US."
As he advises repeatedly, he really wants to know - it's not just a rhetorical challenge. If anyone can come up with anything, he wants to know. For he knows of nothing such himself. He wants the truth, not an agenda.
But no one can come up with anything.
The full clip goes on for two hours, the Q&A part being by far the longest. Although that part is also interesting, all you really need at this point are the first forty-five minutes, so you understand the context of the 2007 Munich Security Conference.
1991. Ronnie famously asks Gorby to "tear down that wall". Yeltsin takes over shortly thereafter. Russia comes to the forefront where previously it had been the USSR. Shock therapy is used to convert Russia's previously functional state monopolies into "free" enterprises.
But graft runs rampant. A new oligarchy is born. The Russian economy tanks and the Communist Party starts climbing up in the polls.
The CIA brings in George Gorton to fix things. Elections are coming up in 1996 and the US doesn't want no fricking commies to win. Gorton helps Yeltsin eke out a thin victory with methods that scandalise the naive Russians. But Yeltsin is tired. And so, on the eve of the new millennium, Yeltsin announces his resignation and appoints his prime minister as interim president.
That interim president is Vladimir Putin.
The first thing Putin does when taking office is apply for membership in NATO. The second thing he does is apply for membership in the EU.
Putin then sets about draining his own swamp. Things were so bad in the 1990s that the average longevity of life was in the 50s. People were making bread out of tulips. Putin himself considered taking a second job as a taxi driver just to make ends meet. He also considered sleeping with a shotgun under his bed...
The oligarchs had not only seized the wealth of the country, they also openly flaunted law and order.
Putin summons them all to a meeting.
Putin's message at that meeting is clear. He isn't going after the oligarchs - that would lead to civil war - but he needs their cooperation in setting a good example for the people - to show respect for the law.
All but one oligarch agreed. (The dissenter was of course picked up by the US and profiled as a champion of free speech. Of course he was.)
From that point going forward, things begin improving in Russia. Putin becomes immensely popular. People of course applaud a leader who makes their life better.
Putin believes in accountability - he puts himself through a five-hour ordeal at least one time per year where he sits alone on an empty stage like an X Factor contestant and answers questions sent in by the general populace and given by a panel of reporters sitting below like Simon Cowell and his friends.
Five hours. No one in the West would even consider it.
February 2007. Munich. Angela's in the front row. So is an uncomfortable John McCain. YouTube has other copies of this speech. One's in hi-res, but it doesn't have subs.
It's important to understand what Putin's doing here. Two things basically. He's calling out the dishonesty amongst politicians, and he's calling for them to be more honest and mature in the future.
This speech is considered a turning point in modern history.
And now we come to Putin's speech on 24 February this year. Where he calls the West an "empire of lies". Where he calls them out for lying to him, for betraying him.
You could do worse with your time than reading and absorbing what he's getting at here. Far far worse.
https://sputniknews.com/20220224/putin-authorizes-special-operation-in-donbass-1093318890.html
Grand Schemes
The 1940s. The second world war is winding down, the "Allies" - the US, the UK, and Russia - are close to victory. Nuremberg awaits.
The OSS - forerunner to the CIA - intentionally spared the gruesome Ukrainian Nazis, who would otherwise be purged. They'd fought with Himmler's SS. But the OSS reckoned they might be useful later.
This wasn't the only time the US utilised Nazis. Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon with their help. The murderous ideology of the Nazis, which was otherwise purged from Europe, was instead cultivated in the Ukraine. Things came home to roost in 2014 when the US staged a coup in Kiev.
Donetsk and Lugansk felt threatened by Kiev who called them "subhuman". Bombing and shelling intensified in May 2014 when Poroshenko won the presidential election. An estimated 14,000 residents of this area - known as Donbass - lost their lives.
Both Donetsk and Lugansk declared independence. Putin was most likely of a mind that Obama and Hillary wanted him to come to their aid, so they'd have a pretext for going on the offensive, but the ever-cautious Putin declined to play their game, despite the carnage he witnessed.
Obama appointed Joe Biden as his "point man" for Ukraine. Victoria Nuland, working under Hillary Clinton, organised the Kiev coup together with Geoff Pyatt. Things went from bad to worse for the country, who finally elected the professional comedian Zelensky to replace their president.
The two most feared Nazi groups in the country, the Azov Battalion and Right Sector, which the earlier president Poroshenko had used to manage state security, applied the thumb screws.
Zelensky was hard put. The new German Nord Stream 2 pipeline from Russia would not be going through his country. He stood to lose $3 billion annually in transport commissions. His economy was no better than it had been under Poroshenko. And the Azov Battalion and Right Sector were still conducting their ongoing genocide in Donbass.
Back home in the wonderful US of A, Obama's old Ukrainian point man had moved into Pennsylvania Avenue and was making a right mess of things. He stopped work on Trump's border which had been near completion. People were smuggled over the Rio Grande and shuttled to undisclosed locations in the dark of night. He still had Anthony Fauci in charge of beating the pandemic, which meant that all early treatment, which could have saved millions of lives, was thwarted, under pain of having Fauci withdraw some of that $6.8 billion he disposes of annually, all for vaccines, made by his friends, that don't work as advertised and are considered so dangerous that his friend at the CDC has to keep the data hidden - all the while early (and cheap) treatment medicines could have stopped the pandemic in its tracks virtually from "Day One". And given the vaccines by Trump, Biden still shows a far higher fatality count than his predecessor.
Afghanistan. One is reminded of Obama's warning about Biden. Polls now show that the Democrats are going to crash and burn like never before in November 2022.
What did Teddy Roosevelt say? And it's not just the nation - Hunter needs a new job too.
People rally around a leader in a time of war.
And so, at six o'clock in the morning of 24 February local time, Vladimir Putin addresses his nation. He comes from an all-night session with his security council.
Given the context of his Munich speech fifteen years earlier, his words on 24 February make perfect sense. But there's more.
Pepe Escobar is a renowned Brazilian journalist. Already on the same day as this speech by Putin, he is able to provide additional details about Putin's ply theory.
"From a dramatic meeting of the Russian Security Council to a history lesson delivered by President Putin and the subsequent birth of the Baby Twins - the People's Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk - all the way to their appeal to President Putin to intervene militarily to expel the NATO-backed Ukrainian bombing-and-shelling forces from Donbass, it was a seamless process."
http://thesaker.is/from-the-black-sea-to-the-east-med-do-not-poke-the-russian-bear/
"First came the recognition of the Baby Twins..." (Donetsk and Lugansk.)
Then:
"The sequence, then, became inevitable. In a flash, all Ukrainian forces between the so-called line of contact and the original borders of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts were boxed in as the occupying force of territories of two Russian allies that Moscow had just sworn to protect."
Crucially important:
"Timed to the end of Putin's speech announcing the operation, the Russians decapitated with precision missiles everything that mattered in terms of the Ukrainian military in just one hour: Air Force, Navy, airfields, bridges, command and control centers, the whole Turkish Bayraktar drone fleet."
Shock and Awe 2
"This was Shock and Awe against Iraq, 19 years ago, in reverse", Pepe writes. "Not for conquest, not as a prelude for an invasion and occupation. The political-military leadership in Kiev did not even have time to declare war. They froze. Demoralized troops started deserting. Total defeat - in one hour."
"The water supply to Crimea was instantly re-established." (Kiev had cut off Crimea's water supply - Crimeans are "subhuman".)
The articles goes on at some length to speculate on the future, but the point is made.
Ply theory generally works.