A picture is beginning to emerge of the general direction that the elites want to push Europe into for the coming decade. One must think of geopolitical phases in the same fashion as tactical defense structures. There’s a first echelon defense line, then a second behind it, which is already undergoing preparation even as indications of the first line’s collapse begin appearing.
Look at the bright side of it , you don't have to stay in line , just wait until everyone is in . As for me, I am going in a different direction , heaven is boring for me . All the nice people , polite , orderly , helpful , courteous . They drive me crazy , i like a little demon every now and then .
How about the net from ca. 1998- Dial up at 10K is ssssssmokin! (and the modem goes off line if you get a phone call). A 3 minute video takes about 12 hours to download...
I don't remember when did I exactly first go to the net, maybe 1997. I do remember it involved a lot of waiting, and I do remember I didn't spend a lot of time interacting with people online. I mostly visited websites. I know there was one or two Start Trek fansites I basically read through end-to-end. I was a big fan of Voyager back in the day. I watched most of the episodes. I distinctly remember downloading all the 3D projections of Federation starships and I remember this took probably 7 or 8 hours. It used up almost my entire Internet allowance back in the day. Back then Internet was pay-by-minute and the minutes were expensive. So when your parents would buy you Internet minutes, you really needed to stretch them to make them last. Goofing around and trolling people on forums or IRC just wasn't a good way to spend time. You had to have a Higher Purpose when you went online.
Ca. 1978, my dad had a connection to DARPA net and a "micro" about the size of a dorm refrigerator through the University he worked for, which he used from home as needed. No display, just a dot matrix printer. I don't remember the modem speed but it was pathetic. I had graduated highschool and got to use a computer science lab on campus- WITH A CRT DISPLAY! WHOOT!!! My younger brother got to use the "micro" computer a bit for school work.
And dad? He knew we were spoiled, he'd started out using punch cards for programming.
Punch cards! Luxury! You could replace a single card as necessary to edit a program!
My first computer experience was doing an evening course in programming in the late 60s at the local technical college. Output was a printer, of course, but the only input was a paper-tape reader. You had to type into an off-line paper-tape punch machine to enter your program (having originally written it on paper with a pen, of course!) You would submit your tape to be run, and would eventually get it back along with the printed output, almost always including error messages. You could start the whole process again from scratch, or you could feed the paper-tape into an input section of the punch machine and have it copy it up until the part you wanted to edit, take over manually for a bit, and then let it copy the rest.
The whole process was made even more frustrating by the fact that the punch machines were not 100% reliable at copying, and would sometimes introduce new mistakes in parts of the program that had been fine. This meant that there was a maximum length of program that you could ever hope to get running!
I thought I'd really arrived when I got to university and was able to use an online teletype machine. Managed to miss out on punch cards completely.
My dad was born in Nov. 1927, graduated HS @ 17 YO to join the USN June 1945, done with basic and had started radio & RADAR school when the war ended (He was a ham radio pre nerd as a teen, wanted to be a pilot, USN did not allow, plenty of kids with good eyesight & reflexes, not enough who already knew electronic technology). Took the bit of cash for staying in the reserves- The USN grabbed his ass back at the beginning of Korean war, of course. The first "un war".
This is nonsense because the Western elites today have never had a grip on reality.
As I wrote in a different comment: if the "gas station masquerading as a nation" is kicking the literal entire West's ass in military industrial production despite having 1/5th the population and a far smaller relative PPP GDP, obviously the Western elites have their heads so far up their asses that they are getting confused by their tonsils banging on their heads.
"Waking the people" is both irrelevant and real. Western populations are increasingly voting against the elite's interests hence the increasingly blatant methods used to keep out dissent: Russiagate, Catalan amnesty, impending anti-Wilders coalition, AfD outlawing etc. And even when these methods succeed as was done in the UK - look how well the UK is doing now /sarc
I agree, in the US we do not even have the opportunity to vote for a different outcome. You get 2 choices of the same party. Elect a total outsider and he gets crushed by the rest of the uniparty , they flat out refuse to implement policies which help the people
I think they created a closed feedback loop and can't get out of it. They pay the MSM directly and indirectly via less taxes, buy newspapers via their state owned or partially state owned companies, with ads, etc. The Pentagon spent 50 billion each year for PR. And this was 10 years ago, I think it will be much more now.
If some media outlets show dissent, they get no money or get sued/closed or censored, hence closed feedback loop.
And the icing on top of this delusion cake, they think those bought and sold MSM are Journalists and are portraying the truth. So this bubble got away from reality for at least 10 years. Normally reality hits you on the head if you are that long gone from it, but in this case they try to even put down dissent even more.
So imho, our Western states will crush, we already went bankrupt morally, diplomatically, economically, but the real bankruptcy is not here yet, but it could come any minute, week, month, year. Russia and China blocked them everywhere, like the good chess and go players they are. Every day the US military bases in Syria and Iraq were attacked. That's unheard of, this shows the world, the Kaiser is naked.
My view is that what is occurring in the West is the sublimation of normal societal ebbs and flows, checks and balances into a society dominated utterly by an ever shrinking elite class. Shrinking because the imbalances are funneling all power into fewer and fewer hands, which in turn reinforces the dynamic where even marginal elites are precarious in their position, thus reluctant to endanger said position by providing real feedback much less actual dissent. This is Turchin's "popular immiseration" and "elite overproduction" twin theses as documented in his "End Times ..." book.
The Rome analogy that no one tends to make is that the Western empire disappeared because _no one cared_ enough to fight for it. It ceased to stand for anything at all.
Perhaps I should have stated this in my first post. The Russian military is state controlled and is very efficient. The US system runs war as a business and is elitist and immoral in its practices. It supports congress and presidents that supports its business model. So if the US military wants to go to a war footing it needs a war and apparently it took the Ukrainian debacle to reveal its productivity problems. But the "planners"
foresee a major war with Russia some years down the road, and a Europe that is dysfunctional. So the MIC has first to build the factories in order to prepare and that will cost and then it will have to stockpile the products (think 155 mm) artillery shells which will at some point not need to be replaced. This is not a really profitable enterprise until there is a good war. In the meantime we have seen those shells cost ten years ago about $800 each while now they cost $3,500 ea. And there is higher inflation ahead. Politically, the MIC is dealing with telling the government that the number one military in the world has to rebuild itself which runs counter to the hubris. But we have to ask ourselves just how irrelevant the citizen is in this occasion. If government, as I believe, is a complete criminal enterprise, it simply adds to risk of foreign and domestic disaster. Isn't capitalism great!
I believe you confuse the respective militaries - which are part of the government - with military industrial companies - which are private companies in the US case and state owned companies in the Russian case. A state owned company is not quite the same thing as part of the government - among many things, ownership may not be completely government; the state owned company could very well be profit oriented (see Gazprom); the state owned company could operate with various degrees of freedom, etc etc.
As for "planners" - the presumption is that there is actual planning from multiple aspects ranging from MIC logistics to overall economic to capital projects etc etc.
My view is that the West has very little planning of any kind. Everything is either left to the private sector or is simply left to rot. The elite classes in charge are uncompetent - they don't know what they are doing in any sense of the word - they just push fictional counters around a fictional board because of their utter divorce from reality or accountability.
Government in the West may well be a criminal enterprise - although I don't believe so. It is acting in a way contrary to its fiduciary responsibility, but that is a function of a dysfunctional and uncompetent bureaucracy, political class and executive class all subsumed within an ever wealthier but shrinking elite class.
The rest of the world - even the most corrupt governments - are more accountable than the majority of the West simply because real world limits force them to be even as there are many examples of governments which clearly are excelling.
So returning to your statement that "the MIC has first to build the factories" - yes that's obvious but I actually don't see it happening. There is very little evidence that the West has the will and willingness to seek optimal results as opposed to optimal profit. My view is that the most likely outcome is going to be ever more white elephant junk whether drone or AI or whatever nonsense a la F35 is pushed by the MIC. I just saw an article where "ramjet artillery rounds" were being touted as the next big thing - an artillery round with range comparable to a 1970s era missile. This is probably a leading candidate for the next white elephant - new tech, expensive, complicated, useful only against 2nd tier or worse opponents because accuracy must be governed by GPS systems, no short or medium term accountability, complexity to substitute for functionality that addresses a known need, etc etc.
This isn't government as a criminal enterprise problem - this is government failing to rein in abuses of the private sector (the MIC in this case).
Thank you for your generous and informative correction. My thoughts came from the way the old soviet system was structured for technological advances in the military that was sadly lacking in many other sectors. It is nice to see that some of the positives of the soviet system are still maintained. It was also a basis of comparison to the US system of the MIC which certainly corrupted itself fully after 9/11. But still the Vietnam War was a business venture and the system expanded on the "war as business" premise. Again the evolution toward oligarchy continued with speed after the Trade Centre attacks and an argument could be made that this expanded to the point where the government was mostly taken over with the result that democracy has mostly died as a government process by now. The other factor building during the 2000s was the growing influence of globalism, another influential faction of the deep state buried in the elites control of government, a subject area that has strongly captured my attention. So I perfectly agree with you comments about elite incompetence. Somehow the Agenda 21 of creating dysfunction of deindustrialisation and cultural identity etc. is not recognized by members of the WEF as being an element of dysfunction to the elites as well as the citizen. With this one cannot help at viewing the problem as one of stupidity and ironically a position like this is not very acceptable to the average citizen as quite ludicrous. The captured governments work against the citizen or at cross purposes and basically means the citizen harm. The Covid and inoculation psyops are a good example. If you are familiar with the WEF and its belief system you will also recognize a wish list to depopulate a substantial percentage of populations. It is definitely inappropriate for Washington to follow the WEF program in the US and concurrently plan for the next war.
I don't disagree with your analysis in most instances, but Vietnam wasn't driven primarily by the defense contractors. They certainly took advantage of a propitious environment to market their wares. Johnson's policy goals were destroyed by the Vietnam involvement, and I don't think he could have been easily stopped if he had chosen to end the Vietnam involvement while he retained popularity. He had a failure of imagination. Nixon's success at winding down the war should be indicative of this, even though he searched for a 'victorious conclusion' of some sort that delayed his disengagement for years.
My view is that the MIC in the US has always been more profit driven than anything else - if for no other reason because the US has not been seriously directly threatened, .militarily, for 200 years. Being profit driven does not HAVE to mean abuse but clearly this has occurred
What we see in the US MIC today, according to Scott Ritter and Colonel MacGregor and others, is a result of several factors:
1) 9/11, as you noted, refocused the US military on counter-insurgency as opposed to peer or near-peer warfare. 20+ years of this means those who did have such experience or focus are long gone and that the generals in place today are all promoted based on this wrong focus.
Note this is HWBush and Bill Clinton, and was years before 9/11.
Personally, I think this MIC consolidation was far more damaging even than the post 9/11 refocus because it converted an ecosystem of MIC suppliers into a handful of big ones. Big MIC suppliers unsurprisingly focus on giant new platform pushes but also have very little competition. It really shouldn't surprise anyone that there have been almost no successful new weapon system deployments after this consolidation - the F35 might be the only one.
3) The overall deindustrialization in the US and West is a force multiplier, but probably much less of one than in the past. Ford and GM might have been able to switch over quickly from making trucks and cars to tanks in WW2 - I have grave doubts over whether they could convert modern car manufacturing facilities to tank production so easily today.
4) Incompetent civilian leadership and oversight. Eisenhower was a wartime general who brought enormous understanding of the requirements of MIC into the US Presidency - the modern equivalents clearly don't have anything like the focus and understanding of an Eisenhower even if an actual general were to become President.
Couple this with revolving door to MIC jobs and the bad result should not surprise anyone.
And then again the F35 was not brag worthy either. I agree with your statement. I recall the Col McGregor has stated repeatedly that the Washington mindset is buried in the past, of the early 1990s. This is a long gap for perceptions of glory.
I think they overestimate their own financial power also. Problem is, with more and more spending on useless military expenditures, less and less money is there for the "people", hence social welfare programs they had for the last 30 years. And they have to get more taxes. Add more censorship, less freedom, more regulation for smaller businesses. Not a good outlook for the "free" West.
Additionally Russia has increased their commodity output with a world market share of 20% up to even 70% of 40-50 commodities which are important for the world market in cases of production, logistics, energy, agriculture.
So basically Russia and China got them at least 4-5 steps ahead in this geopolitical chess game. They are playing checkers, they have no clue about standing armies, imho you need at least an standing army of 30-40 million soldiers to "rule" the world, they are delusional at best. They could always just bully inferior armies like the Iraqui army in the 90s and 00s, and even then they had to watch out. Because in the end, real war means putting all your soldiers and resources into it. Big standing armies are no joke you can just sweep away. Just look at Afghanistan. Surely they could have done it differently, put more resources and more soldiers in this "project", but still, they got basically thrown out by roughly 70k soldiers with AKs and sandals.
I agree with you. It is probably true that the MIC of the US is one of the few survivors of outsourcing their industrial base. Clinton even provided taxpayer money in grants to corporations to subsidize the offshore moves. Again there was no strategic thinking going on that this was economic suicide. I also do not recall much public outrage over this depletion. Or even if the public noticed.
There is also little thinking going on as Washington turns its back on public education, energy policies that make sense, health care flops over plandemics and inoculations, transportation snafus, open borders and infrastructure maintenance. And I am leaving out what is still a long list.
We should also be reminded that the citizen allowed all this to happen by looking the other way.
The thread from Perot to Trump was that very issue - the outsourcing and hollowing out of the US industrial base. The fact the elite-dominated media doesn't want to talk about it is not the same as no one noticing.
Anyone who's had problems with videos loading in the article, refresh the page as some of the videos seemed to have gotten corrupted so I fixed them. Substack tells me they didn't really make their architecture with a lot of video embeds in mind, so I'm sort of stressing their system but it usually works.
He's probably a realist that understands paper money isn't really proper money so that you could "print" money all you wanted but in reality if you print too much people would stop using it. So "fiat money spigot" can only provide so much liquidity. That's my guess on what he was trying to say.
Although if you put the word in quotes, then you're aware of all this so.... ? I dunno, I'm guessing what other people are trying to say.
Yes, there is no inexhaustible spigot. People keep calling it inexhaustible, but I don’t think they understand what the word means. Fiat money is a bubble currency. It only has value if you think there is someone else who is willing to accept it in payment. The intrinsic value aka value of the paper it is printed on and the ink it contains is infinitesimal. The more you print, the more people come to think of it as worthless. “Not worth a Confederate” is the old fashioned American phrase, referring back to our civil war where the confederacy tried desperately to fund the war with fiat currency.
The ECB's ability to print euros is inexhaustible.
What is not inexhaustible is the purchasing power stability of the euro.
As Greenspan said in Congressional testimony: "We can guarantee cash benefits as far out and at whatever size you like, but we cannot guarantee their purchasing power."
The ECB has printed money like crazy, left and right, whenever it really wants to.
The so-called rules that forced austerity on the PIIGS in the post GFC era (after 2009) are routinely ignored now just as they were ignored during COVID.
Luongo can believe what he wants - the fact of ECB printing is indisputable whatever the ECB charter and laws say, much as the IMF's supposed rules are completely ignored when it comes to giving money to Ukraine.
Scott: the EU does not have an "inexhaustible" fiat spigot. The US with its (now declining) world reserve currency status may still have but this is currently being undermined by BRICS+. And its support of Israel is going to hasten the end to that foundation of the hegemony. The Modern Monetary Theory is nonsense and is the road to hyperinflation and collapse and Europe cannot just print its way out of the problem.
I apparently failed to properly indicate the sarcasm in my comment. My intent was to compare the use of the word “inexhaustible” with the use of the word “inconceivable” in the classic movie “The Princess Bride”. The villain repeatedly attempts to indirectly dispatch the hero, and is then told that he is still following them, and replies with “inconceivable!!!”. After about the fifth use of the word he is warned that the word does not seem to mean what he thinks it does.
This sequence also includes him warning that the hero has made one of two inconceivable mistakes. The first, is to not start a land war in Asia, but the second, almost as well known, is to never go in against a Sicilian.
Awesome, classic movie.
“I’ve hired you to help me start a war. It’s a prestigious line of work with a long and glorious tradition”
“Are you sure nobody is following us?”
“As I told you, it would be absolutely, totally, and in all ways inconceivable. Why do you ask”
“No reason, I just happened to look behind us and something is there”
And I’m in 100% agreement with you on the childish ridiculousness of MMT. Too much money chasing too few goods equals inflation. You may get away with it on occasion if there is slack demand, but that only makes the inflation worse when demand picks up again.
The inherent goodness of the Russians will be their downfall. Look at how many women and children the Israelis have murdered? Now counter that to the total civilian casualties in Ukraine? Is it any wonder the Polacks are ready to put themselves in front of the civilized Russian Army? At some point Russia has to send the signal. Of course, this is the ancient problem is it not? To defeat evil, do you have to become evil? And if you do not, does evil win? At the age of 63, I no longer know the answers. But being humane or not, Russia is going to be forced to remove the Ukrainians as a society. Because the West will keep sending them into the cauldron. And since 99% of the human race are sheep, they will march to their slaughter. My revulsion of the human race is reaching new heights.
Well personally, I and many others sort of agree to an extent, or at least can see both viewpoints. I'm not necessarily a fan of the velvet glove approach to war but it's what we've got and unfortunately I can't do anything to change that.
I think though history will magnify those good deeds, and it may be worth it down the line. But of course, the victors write history
This is what genuinely worries me. It seems Ukrainians and Europe are not sufficiently afraid, to put it bluntly. Perhaps a weekly Tsar Bomba test would shake them from their neoliberal post-industrial stupor. But as it stands the war is still on the internet for Europe. Direct flesh-and-bone consequences are only in the form of inflation. The Washington architects must be pleased with Russia's gradualism strategy knowing they can adjust their Euro-puppet strategy thanks to the generous timeframe and predictability Russia grants them. They likely calculate that they can stay evil longer than Russia can stay moral and that ultimately their own saddism is a form of escalation superiority.
Actually, the Washington architects are hating the Russia slow and steady..
They have to constantly play up observably insignificant "gains" by Ukraine as some looming victory against an ever weaker foe. At the same time they have to keep making this weak loser look like the Big Bad Russian Bear to maintain political support for Ukraine. This is a policy tightrope, being walked whilst both ends unravel..
On the flip side, a massive Russian sweeping offensive would be easy to spin into a NATO article 5 event.
I am constantly amazed at the astuteness with which Russia is conducting the whole affair, both locally and globally.
I was just discussing with my husband (he and I were both US diplomats) my suspicion that Ms.Nuland was "kicked upstairs" with her promotion, because it took her out of daily oversight of Ukrainian affairs and weakened her control. Today she must be seen as some sort of lunatic for dragging the USG into that damned war in Ukraine that nobody wants to finance anymore, and whose refugees (NATO-created as usual) are unwelcome in Europe.
Victoria Nuland did not make the overall State Dept/CIA Ukraine strategy, that is at least two levels above her pay grade as I conceptualize this.
She WAS a face on site for implementing them. And being shown on video + various other leaked media as doing so, preparing a fall guy (girl) in case of "less than optimal results".
We get shown her face, read about her activities + occasionally hear her voice and amoral bullshit, it's easy to hate on Vicky. Frankly, it is not an accident on her superiors part that you know her face. She'll be burned when a scapegoat is needed.
Look farther up the chain of command, always ask "who benefits?" Follow the MONEY.
Really? She has been personally involved in Ukraine since before 2014. I do not see her being made the "face" of Ukraine. Who benefits? Again really? The Biden family, The Clintons, Many of Obama admin are crossovers from Clinton which includes even Bush era NeoCons like McCain , the list of politicians and family members benefitting from the money laundering is very long
I politely disagree. You have to know her background. As an American of Ukrainian Jewish origin, and someone who served in high position at the US Embassy in Kiev, she knew UKRAINE and stupidly thought she thus knew Russia, but she never knew Russia. You cannot penetrate the soul of a nation if you hate it. And she said she hated Russia. So there you are. She was ignorant, but highly influential. Inside the Department she was a shining star to be promoted and promoted, and she learned at the heart of the MIC, the US Council on Foreign Relations in NY where she did her senior training. The Council's powers set their sights on her. The right sort of bellicose "intellectual" that they needed. She would be the female warrior against Russia. And she did her job, with hubby's knee-jerk anti-communist (seriously out of whack with the times) support. They feathered their nests on the anti-Russian schtick. You give Washington too much credit by assuming the top figures have ideas of their own. They steal their ideas from their colleagues.
you just don't do that except under the most DIRE pressure, as it is an admission of poor judgment on your part. so you sidestep the problem, you remove her without demoting her. What can one do but speculate until some disloyal schmuck in DC writes a memoir?
There is zero chance NATO can beat Russia. Nukes all bets are off but you're just not gonna beat Russia conventionally in a land war on it's territory. The biggest issue with slow roll is that Russians get tired of SMO and demand peace instead of draining the swap until Ukraine collapse that Russia is doing now. Then that "peace deal" allows Ukraine to rearm or NATOize and Russia has to keep refighting this war every 5 years. Will Russian public stay behind this 1, 2 or even 3 more years until all Ukraines combatants are "demilitarized and denazified" aka dead?
They were asked "if Russia should continue the so-called special military operation (SVO) or move to peace talks."
Peace talks will take place while the war continues unhindered. Russia will never agree to a ceasefire, not after they were publicly screwed over with the bogus Minsk II accords. The war will continue uninterrupted until Ukraine agrees to be neutral. How neutrality will be guaranteed I don't know but that's Lavrov's problem not mine.
LOL you are using a DC think tank to gain "insight" into the Russian public?? You have to know this is not based on any real evidence of public opinion. Next you will be linking "The Moscow Times" as a source
the people AND their governments so-called are afraid of Russia. what we witness is the panicked reaction of a whole smug bloc of war-makers who suddenly realize all those it has warred against could come for them en masse. Come one, come all is not the motto of a strong and unified organization. Both NATO and the EU are fracturing, not cohering. More members will mean more trouble for NATO. What a joke those European organizations are.
I think the Russians are proceeding with lightening speed , relatively on the cheap .
Just think of it, they gone thru in less than two years of the majority of ammunition stock of the western world . Plus unknown number of specialist personals in many many places , like Mariupol . Odessa , etc. Not to mention the immense amount of learning curve the Russians piled up . The west is hoping for some sort of a miracle of AI , pushing forward more " Apache warriors " ? If other country's want to try they luck , under whatever pretext the Russians will have no choice , but take the gloves off. Who will hold out longer is clear by now . The Russians have to worry about , some sort of sneaky attack . Chemical , nuclear of some kind , or large scale concentrated attack on the Presidential leadership . The Russians are way behind the West in meanness , and back stabbing tactics . But the God of war will decide .
I think you underestimate the Russian leadership intelligence, they probably have wargamed most scenarios, the concerning point is demography imo, time will tell if they can make sufficient technological progress to counterbalance this issue.
It is not the style that needs to be changed. It is the goal. Military strategy, as in war is mere continuation of policy by other means, absolutely reflects political goals.
If Russian goal was to somehow persuade Ukraine to choose neutrality, now confonted with Ukraine ruled by extreme nationalists, who are willing and with West support able to fight until the last Ukrainian, and with zero trust left for politicians both Western and Ukrainian, a new goal is forming an Ukriaine that is friend and connected, linked to Russia, like Russian speaking Ukraine, NovoRossiya as a part of RF. A goal of neutrality that was acceptable to at least half of original Ukrainian population and that would be a better solution to majority is now impossible. Dividing the country makes it possible to support Ukrainians who refuse to fight a proxy war against Russia into shaping their part of Ukraine into a viable allied state. Redefining the war as a civil ear between CIA supported extremists, former Nazzies, and normal Ukrainians.
Goodness will pay off in number of soldiers ready to surrender, and ability to progress and be supported by local population.
Military strategy will reflect changing political goals.
The US is obsessed with decapitation strikes, but currently lacks the means which Russia actually has. The Russians are smarter than to waste resources as there's a clearer understanding leaders are also expendable. As for the civilians - why increase the motivation to resist by unifying the population (as the Germans did bombing cities as their military objectives failed in the air war) President Putin is both humane and level headed. It's the collective west that keeps making critical errors, AI or no AI (GIGO)
Sorry, whether it was on purpose or not, this has saved Russia from turning to a public enemy like Israel. Israel has lost all credibility and has horrible pr. Imagined if Russia had acted as callously. This was their saving grace
After seeing what is happening to Israel reputation, for y'all to even call for a heavy hand. This slow hand saved Russia reputation and is destroying the West reputation . Most people don't want bloodbaths. Look what is happening to America after bombing the middle east all the time
You are correct. If Russia had copied NATO's policies of destruction Putin and Lavrov wouldn't be the political rockstars they are everywhere except in the EU and NATO.
You mis-perceive the situation, in some ways like those behind this war, but differently (as a result of reading this substack).
Only those with a very narrow point of view will choose to fight Russia, one might even call them brain-washed in some cases. And that is a very finite resource, quickly squandered.
Look at the front line participants, they are mostly Gen-X, with some Boomers and Millenials/Gen Z. The Western mercs are generally ex-military who spent their whole careers being told Russia/China/Iran is behind everything. Ukrainian conscripts (and large parts of DPR LPR forces) are "blue-collar" workers.
Poland/NATO/Western Europe has a much smaller pool of such from which to draw, and most of them will NEVER volunteer to be in the Army. After that you get the draft, which would require an never before seen unity of purpose in the EU.
Western Millenials/Gen Z are *totally* unwilling to be servants of war (look at the pro-palestinian protests)
and they were raised on the myth of US and NATO invincibility as their mother's milk. they have no grounding in reality, but they are about to get some.
As an American who is familiar with our style of leveling everything I agree but when is the last war we won? Russia is a winner. Russia is also only place on Earth Europeans never conquered despite hundreds of years of trying so they must do doing something right. Russia also has 80%+ world on it's side while America is feared and despised. Russia probably has 50% of Western citizens on it's side.. Russia has former Ukraine POWs willingly fighting for Russia. I guess I'm trying to say there is a lot one could say good about nice war even though I'd prefer they drop a nuke on Lviv and ask "who's next?..sign here"
Russia is far too small to defeat Europe. It is even too small to occupy the hostile portions of violent Ukraine. Russia is well aware of this fact. (The population of Russia is less than Nigeria. It is about the same as Japan or Bangla Desh.) The US is trying to provoke Russia into occupying Ukraine but it is not working and will not happen. Even if somehow Russia convinced themselves they were strong enough to occupy Ukraine, their dominant Christians and Slavs are strongly opposed to becoming an exploitative empire, oppressing others with the iron fist of torture, secret police, etc. This is not going to happen. They aren't going to try it, and if somehow they did they would fail.
By conducting the war following international law Russia is winning the larger game of garnering international support. This is far more important then what happens in Ukraine. Having Saudi Arabia join BRICS was a major defeat for the West. The USA's Risk move to take over the world is failing. Bombing Nordstreem should end up costing them the EU, after which there could be no rational hope of success.
Politically the US offers the "rules based order," which is just might-makes-right lawlessness. This is not attracting popular support outside of the USA. The USA's rulers are resorting to propaganda and censorship to maintain control of their subjects, to win support as a lesser evil. This will not bring anyone outside of the bubble to their side and is repellant to neutralish nations. The US is failing to make suicidal stooges of the Taiwanese. The Taiwanese are far too smart to fall for that.
Losing the wider war will not stop the USA. The true goal is large transfers of wealth from ordinary people to the politically well connected. This can continue all the way to the end. If the US populace can figure this out then they can put a stop to it, but there is no sign at all that this is happening.
A Ukrainian mutiny is possible but this is a minor theater of the larger war and doesn't make all that much difference. I expect the USA's Risk move will be over when the USA loses control of the regrettably democratic EU. This will not prevent the US from exploiting its own populace but it least it won't lead to nuclear war.
Why do so many assume Russia wants or wanted to occupy or conquer Ukraine? It was simple in the beginning they wanted a neutral country without NATO missiles and without losing their Black Sea port. Maybe Putin should have known better, but even so things still had to play out with a conflict. The US is ruled by ego maniacs without much intelligence. Now Russia must make Ukraine as useless as possible to the corporate fascist's which control US policy, and I think little by little they are doing that.
but Israel killed itself with this latest slaughter, at least for me and I was far from being anti-Israel. But now all I see when I see an Israeli is the victims of the Zionist belief that the Jews are better than everybody else and innumerable humans can be slaughtered if an Israeli is hurt. It is the philosophy of brutes and tyrants.
The only reason admitting Ukraine to NATO is not dismissed as crazy talk is because the West continues to ignore red line after Russian red line with impunity.
The result of there benevolence is the entire global community outside of the lilly white west firmly being on their side. And even in the West more and more people ste waking up.
Once fortress Donbass is fully secured the Russians will roll all the way to Kiev and oust their Nazi government and destroy the West’s bridgehead in Ukraine. If the Europe starts preparing for war they’ll bopefully move all the way to Brussels to cut the head off of the snake for good.
You have my agreement and sympathies. But do not discount the Russians as a thwart to the hegemony. To my mind (and I am Canadian) the US and its empire are mostly the walking dead. Both Russia and China are in the ascendant and building civilization and the West is in free fall decline. You need a healthy economy and monetary system to build a civilization and this is what the BRICS+ is building. The US announced its RIP statement in 1971 unknowingly when it went off the dregs of the gold backed system (defaulted). The East is building to stabilize under gold now.
I disagree. The question that needs to be asked is "how successful have been offensive scorched earth tactics in the past." Of course, Sherman was on the victorious side in the U.S. Civil War, but did his burning of Georgia really contribute to the victory of the Union or simply make reconstruction that much more difficult? Wasn't the conquest of Vicksburg, the loss of the Mississippi, and the final collapse of Lee's army in Virginia owing to attrition the real cause of victory, with Sherman's ransacking merely a sideshow?
Did allied strategic bombing in World War II really affect the surrender of Germany and Japan? The Japanese were deliberating terms of surrender months before Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the firebombing of Tokyo. Alan Dulles, working outside the chain-of-command and producing his own foreign policy in Switzerland, ensured that most of Krupp's manufacturing base remained intact, even as allied heavy bombers flamed the residential sections of German cities. German arms manufacturing was not severely impacted by the bombing. What was far more limiting to German war capacity was the lack of oil and the loss of the synthetic refineries in Romania. So, did Germany surrender because of the heavy bombers lighting civilians on fire or because of a general collapse at the front in both the east and west?
I think the answers to these questions are clear. Scorched earth attacks on civilian populations have done little to affect the outcomes of modern wars. In general, wars are won by the side that can produce the most artillery tubes, ammunition, oil, and trained combatants. There is no substitute or shortcut to achieving military superiority at the tip of the spear.
Ukrainians and Russians being fellow Slavic peoples have a lot in common including family ties, the way the people of Israel and Gaza don't. Also Russia wants to capture the cities, not pound them into dust for future juicy rebuilding contracts the way the GAE did in Iraq.
Wow. You guys are no different than these NAFO folks. Listen, the Poles have not even joined Ukrainians in masses. But you think that they will fight when Ukraine collapse? Sure.... 🙄
The music is very soothing. Soulful, heart, breaking, yet…This addition reminds me of…VOS. The long game, civilizations and perhaps, the human species… change is afoot. Shelf life over this side of the pond. Grateful I have lived well and loved often, giving so much more than…taken…inhale exhale ❤️🐈⬛
Russia will never agree to a cease fire. The war will continue until they get a neutral Ukraine.
The war is a cash cow for the elite. I expect it will continue until either the Ukraine army mutinies or the European NATO countries vote out their governments.
Why should China support? Russia has not asked for it, is not in a losing position and is getting/has received 10 million 155 mm shells from North Korea. All is hunky dory on Russia's side.
If there is direct Chinese support, it's going to be ww3. China is still hoping to remain 'neutral' for diplomatic purposes, but if a train load of unassembled drone parts gets sent to North Korea and then shipped off to 'parts unknown'...
If NATO objective is the strategic defeat of Russia, this is diametrically opposed to china's interest. My read is that they are best served in a "stalemate" scenario, where nobody wins. But that's very destructive
Totally agree that if NATO strategically defeats Russia, China will be in a lot of trouble.
However, since Russia does not look like it is losing, China can afford to "fold its sleeves and observe", in order to keep its diplomatic options open and ensure BRICS systems are not disrupted. Almost certainly this has been coordinated between Russia and China. China is focused on the economic and diplomatic defeat of the US "rules based order", above and beyond a military defeat of NATO in Ukraine. Even if Ukraine collapsed today, the US would simply pivot to new conflicts over Taiwan, the middle east, central asia, or even south east asia, with its ability to fund an unlimited string of vassals and color revolutions.
However, I absolutely believe that if Russia was about to collapse, or if NATO directly intervened in Ukraine, that China would enter on the side of Russia, and that would be ww3.
I think the general plan is to take enough territory of Ukraine that it functionally becomes an economic drain on the EU and US to support it, but not so much that it outright collapses into Poland.
Probably taking Odessa and Kharkiv, and enough territory to THREATEN (but not occupy) Kiev is the goal.
When the West says "frozen conflict", do you think they mean "just stop attacking [Ukraine]" and they will assume Russia won't attempt any large scale offensives? And then the war more or less freezes automatically? I have wondered about this, like, why would they just assume that it would freeze without even thinking about what the Russians would do - can it be they genuinely don't think the Russians would do anything?
China is doing what is the most beneficial for Russia and itself: maintain a united front, support economically and diplomatically, work with Russia to unite more and more of the World Majority against the aggressor West, keep working on tying more and more of the Eurasian continent together with OBOR transport and trade infrastructure, and work with the BRICS to build out a parallel financial system starting with correspondent banks.
This is plenty, and more importantly, what will make the biggest difference going forward for both countries.
That video of the solo tank working is wild. No drones against him no arty against no ATGMs even and he's literally just sitting firing at was is basically point blank. Ukraine is fing acrewed.
I’m fascinated by the thought process behind this “beachhead” Ukraine is hurling so many souls into.
Is there nobody with any sense left? They are in a known location, on the bank of a river, with limited ammunition and only light infantry weapons.
One assumes that they are aware that there is this weapons system - actually a whole combat arm - called “artillery”. Its main purpose is to blow up anything stupid enough to stay in place for too long. And then there are these things called drones....
Our author is right that they have trapped themselves. Western press loves the bridgehead story. I read an article where they hypothesized that the 300 marines could mount an offensive towards a road crossing a few klicks from the bridgehead and cut off most of the Russian army.
300 solders marching from an observed location with no motor mech air or armor support assaulting across several kilometers with hand held infantry weapons. Anyone ordering such an attack should be court martialed.
This isn't rocket science. I have been saying since almost Day 1 of the SMO that Ukraine is fighting a Twitter war whereas Russia is fighting a real one.
Twitter war is precisely Snake Island, Khrynki, Russia border/Belgorod selfies vs. Russian attritional warfare and taking of Artemovsk (and soon, Avdiivka).
military Schengen is ultimately about EU/NATO suppressing European citizens who object to their dictators' behaviour.
People in Hungary objecting. No problems, rush in military units from Germany, Poland, France, etc. Look like the AFD likely to get control of German government, no problems, rush in military units from France, Spain, Poland, rump-Ukraine, etc.
Don't kid yourself. Hungarians and Slovaks like EU structural adjustment monies more than they like freedom. They'll do anything not to be kicked out of the EU.
I wouldn't underestimate these people. They had two world wars happening right on their land, they've been stuck between two big blocks for the entire Cold War and they're frontline states right now.
And, as a result of geography, their dependence on Russia (both in terms of imports and exports) is greater than that of Western Europe. The sanction war is causing them more harm in the short term than to countries further West and they would've never profited if the sanctions worked.
For 100 years, they've been caught in between foreign interests.
Something is going to snap and it's the land between Germany and Russia where this is going to happen or these people will have another world war happening right in their home.
Whichever comes first.
And with the sinking West, it will be more and more beneficial to flip sides or at least assert neutrality (something in terms of Cold War Yugoslavia).
Orbán and Fico are manifestations of that and there will be more in other countries.
The "Powers that Be" pinning hopes on some sort of economic miracle arising from A.I. are doomed to have their dreams shattered on the reality of GIGO. All these AI models only "know" the information that is available on the internet, with its well known signal to noise ratio....
The inability for "AI" (that should actually be called "auto-computers") to invent anything is a hard limit on the technology. There is no way to code or data their way out of this problem. New technologies reliant on new physics will have to be invented for this problem to be over come. All this "AI" bullshit is just smoke and mirrors to make the gullible too afraid to call their bluff. I know all this because I've worked extensively with "AI" and have actually coded things. You would not believe how stupid computers and "AI" actually are.
I would agree based on history. However, something new has come up with Qstar - apparently this AI module has not only the ability to learn math but to figure out math solutions on its own without being taught. That is groundbreaking. And yes, as it can only figure out solutions to primary grade-level math problems today, this shows huge potential for tomorrow.
Ok cool. That's just moving the goalposts a bit, as the inherent issue still remains: the AI cannot understand what math, addition, or subtraction are. All it knows is how to get the input to become the desired output. It's figured out how to invent a process that works for itself and nothing else, but there's no telling what that process actually is or how it actually works. That doesn't mean that logic gates and pulses of electricity can suddenly grasp number theory. It's still just smoke and mirrors for the inept.
That's the point I am trying to get across. If by teaching AI 2+2=4 and 2+3=5 (which is what programmes like ChatGPT offer today), that AI can then figure out that 2+4=6, then AI has taken a huge leap forward - think of it this way - teach basic math to AI and then watch AI derive algebra from it and then calculus. If AI can be taught and then project those teachings into new solutions for similar problems then you have witnessed the beginnings of a vast advancement in technology, possibly one that could eventually, as we become more dependent on it, not only change the course of the future but lay the foundation for the destruction of humankind if it ultimately turns against us.
If AI can reproduce Nikolai Teslas understanding of the world, or better yet, reconciles General and Special Relativity, all well and good. If it just rehashes our current understanding (or worse, makes an intelligible mathematical construct that is wholly self consistent, yet meaningless) then AI is a dead end.
Cool. We made a mimic. Now make that addition AI do 3-D vector calculus and see what happens. This is just a machine governed by the logic and data we give it. That's all there is to it. There's no need to elevate "AI" to some metaphysical, supernatural force. The actual problem with the "black box" of "AI" is that this is how catastrophic errors can worm their way in which is how these things will get people killed for seemingly no reason at all when they're trusted with operating heavy machinery such as cars and aircraft, especially when in unpredictable, chaotic environments that all forms of "AI" (even the new "Ay-Gee-Eyes") are known to struggle with.
The real fear is that it has cracked 128-bit encryption. That would enable a gang of cyber-thieves or a foreign adversary to empty all US bank accounts in two days.
that's mathematically not feasible. PK algorithms used in bank encryption nowadays rely on problems which are inherently unsolvable in polynomial time by deterministic algorithms (thus the keys are not breakable in realistic time).
For what it's worth, all the hot bro-money that was in blockchain has moved over to AI. Keep that in mind. Most of people talking about AI these days are AIbros, and about as sensible as cryptobros - BECAUSE they are the exact same people!
In case anybody thinks "AI" will be like in the movies - it won't. "AI" is unable to set it's own goals because it can't inject new axioms into the Universe. Therefore it's only ever going to be an epifenomenon. OTOH, if humans have free will than that necessarily includes the ability to inject axioms into the Universe (everything else is non-free deterministic following of axioms), thus co-creating the Universe with God who gave them their free will to begin with.
>> And it can be proven A free will necessarily exists. << To start the proof, ask: can the world be different than it is and if so, what - if any - reason there is the world is the way it is. The question therefore isn't if free will exists as a thing - it does and there's at least one concrete one - God's, the question is if humans have free will or not. Many people say they do, based on the fact they clearly freely decide on things like what to think. But since free will is nothing other than the ability to inject axioms into the Universe, then clearly it can't be completely based on following axioms because following axioms presupposes (super)determinism. So you can't *inject* an axiom because the axiom you'd inject has to follow from axioms that already exist which in turn means the axiom you'd inject is actualy a theorem. But a new axiom has to be not-derived from exiting axioms which means any algorithm or body that creates it can't be based entirely on axioms.
The bullshitters will poison their precious "AI"s learning algorithm data with their own bullshit which means that their "AI" can never actually be smarter than they are, just quicker to come to conclusions.
Oh, it will be a lot smarter. But will it be misused by stupid politicians? The nation is full of brilliant people who are ruled by the corrupt and feeblewitted.
Will the new so-called "Ay-Gee-Eyes" be smarter? Well, that depends on what you mean by "smarter". They'll have a lot of versatility which will make them more economically sensible in the long run, but they're going to still have all the same hard limitations as standard "AI". The only advantage I can see "Ay-Gee-Eyes" having is interdisciplinary knowledge which would only be intimidating to a society so thoroughly drowned in mediocrity as to have lost all of its polymaths as the modern west has.
Even if AI is the next "big thing" I don't see how USA can lead jack shit anymore teaching kids 2+2=5 DEI and other nonsense.
My money is first on China who a) graduates 20x more engineers than we do and b) smoke our kids in standardized testing even taking tests in English. c) 10 mean IQ pts higher d) work ethic through the roof e) 3x more people
Then Russia for similar reasons - even they graduate 2x as many engineers with half population.
Today's machine learning based AI is truly revolutionary but no chance does the USA ride it to world dominance. If anybody DOES ride it to world dominance it is going to be China. (China is a nation of engineers while the USA is a nation of salesmen.) But my money is against that. I say all the biggies will have a share of the pie. Just like nuclear weapons.
OpenAI is garbage for anything other than making search easier for lazy people.
What people don't understand, who don't look either at the details of how LLMs work and/or who don't understand just how Silicon Valley works, is that the LLMs represent only 1 actual "breakthrough" - properly structured language emission. The LLM tech has achieved sufficient detail to be able to tag parts of sentences such that it can pull out the subjects/verbs/adverbs etc and reorganize/rearrange in a proper sentence. Or in other words, monkey see/monkey do with words.
This proper emission is fine if the source material is correctly identified (i.e. no false info, no incorrect or conflicting info, etc etc), but the danger of the "proper emission of sentences" capability is that the LLMs can lie with complete equanimity.
This is where the hallucinations come in. The LLMs have a control knob where the accuracy of acceptable source material can be tuned down; the possible useful outputs resulting are accompanied by ever increasing likelihood that the LLM literally just makes shit up but types it out in a proper grammatical structure.
There is NO place in combat, industry, whatever you can name for such bullshit.
People are confusing properly configured and controlled machine learning - which is certainly what Lancet drone targeting is being improved by - with the OpenAI LLM bullshit.
What I say about LLMs is not speculative - we have many many examples already of how this GO (garbage out) situation can occur any time for any reason. (Note that in the past, computers only spewed garbage out GO if there was garbage in GI. LLMs can spew out GO at any time for any reason).
The point is that these hallucinations are not a bug - they are a feature. And as such, they won't be fixed until literally computer awareness is achieved.
Thinking the West has some kind of lead in AI is utterly false.
OpenAI will throw a lot of white collar people out of work - processing language and forming proper language out is what a lot of white collar work is. Paralegals, junior lawyers, accountants, bookkeepers, customer service, graphic artists, technical writers, all these poor saps are facing the fate of HTML programmers of the Y2K era. But note that precision doesn't actually matter for any of the above - the net effect is to allow ever greater micromanagement by managers and/or replacement of the extra bandwidth for principals that the above professions represent.
I will correct the one part of your statement that is false: "All these AI models only "know" the information that is available on the internet, with its well known signal to noise ratio"
This is one form of training data for LLMs, but it is not the only one. In particular, the LLM usage as sold to customers is to train LLM models on each customer's data. The source for LLM S/N ratio being bad is not the internet source information problem, it is the structural LLM problem as noted above.
For example; an LLM understands what the subject, verb, object, adverb etc part of any sentence or a million sentences are. The way LLMs output a response to a question is to use secondary tags. Let's say you want to learn about underwater basket weaving. An LLM will first look for "underwater basket weaving" subjects. This group of subjects will have a cloud of associated verbs, adverbs, objects etc from all of its training data sentences that include "underwater basket weaving" as a subject. The LLM looks through this cloud and assembles what is the most likely verbs, objects, adverbs etc (frequency is probably the default, but there certainly can be others) into the final response to the query.
The hallucinations arise because if the "accuracy" parameter is tuned down, the LLM can search through other clouds associated poorly or even not at all with "underwater basket weaving" as a subject, pull in those other associated verbs/object/adverb etc clouds and then output a sentence.
This is how LLMs will prove 2+2=5. They don't actually know the laws of mathematical proofs or understand anything about addition. What they will do is find a similar proof - maybe it is 1+1=2, and then replace the relevant bits: 1 --> 2, the 2nd 1 -->, the 2 -->5 but otherwise the same bunch of sentences in that 1+1=2 proof.
This is literal cargo cult "intelligence". Cargo cults were Pacific islanders who built wooden planes and runways because they thought these symbols were what brought goods to their remote island; LLMs/OpenAI is the same thing only with software.
There will be no ceasefire or even pause in this war..The Russians are far too smart, and why would they stop when they are winning hands down? It's becoming clear, as Simplicius points out, that NATO will never give up throwing European bodies into the meat grinder, unless European leaders simply refuse...And I'm pretty sure that the Russian public will not settle for half a loaf at this point...
Doubtful. The voters' hardship levels are not high enough yet. I see these European doobs (they haven't cornered the market on doobishness btw) complaining about the increasingly visible problems with their society, but still thinking that voting for the same liberal parties (who brought on the shit) will change something. More pain is needed to get them to vote for "hard/far-right" candidates. Not saying such candidates have better solutions necessarily, but without them given a chance, there is no improvement process.
First
https://babylonbee.com/news/confirmed-people-who-comment-first-shall-be-last-in-kingdom-of-heaven?utm_source=pocket_saves
Lol sounds about I'm definitely last to get into heaven
Look at the bright side of it , you don't have to stay in line , just wait until everyone is in . As for me, I am going in a different direction , heaven is boring for me . All the nice people , polite , orderly , helpful , courteous . They drive me crazy , i like a little demon every now and then .
Yes, Hell is my final destination as that's where all the dirty girls are.
Clean girls are dirty girls that never got caught... just saying ...
This is like somebody rolled the clock back 15 years. Man, I miss the Internet from 2008. :'(
How about the net from ca. 1998- Dial up at 10K is ssssssmokin! (and the modem goes off line if you get a phone call). A 3 minute video takes about 12 hours to download...
I don't remember when did I exactly first go to the net, maybe 1997. I do remember it involved a lot of waiting, and I do remember I didn't spend a lot of time interacting with people online. I mostly visited websites. I know there was one or two Start Trek fansites I basically read through end-to-end. I was a big fan of Voyager back in the day. I watched most of the episodes. I distinctly remember downloading all the 3D projections of Federation starships and I remember this took probably 7 or 8 hours. It used up almost my entire Internet allowance back in the day. Back then Internet was pay-by-minute and the minutes were expensive. So when your parents would buy you Internet minutes, you really needed to stretch them to make them last. Goofing around and trolling people on forums or IRC just wasn't a good way to spend time. You had to have a Higher Purpose when you went online.
@groddlo
Ca. 1978, my dad had a connection to DARPA net and a "micro" about the size of a dorm refrigerator through the University he worked for, which he used from home as needed. No display, just a dot matrix printer. I don't remember the modem speed but it was pathetic. I had graduated highschool and got to use a computer science lab on campus- WITH A CRT DISPLAY! WHOOT!!! My younger brother got to use the "micro" computer a bit for school work.
And dad? He knew we were spoiled, he'd started out using punch cards for programming.
Punch cards! Luxury! You could replace a single card as necessary to edit a program!
My first computer experience was doing an evening course in programming in the late 60s at the local technical college. Output was a printer, of course, but the only input was a paper-tape reader. You had to type into an off-line paper-tape punch machine to enter your program (having originally written it on paper with a pen, of course!) You would submit your tape to be run, and would eventually get it back along with the printed output, almost always including error messages. You could start the whole process again from scratch, or you could feed the paper-tape into an input section of the punch machine and have it copy it up until the part you wanted to edit, take over manually for a bit, and then let it copy the rest.
The whole process was made even more frustrating by the fact that the punch machines were not 100% reliable at copying, and would sometimes introduce new mistakes in parts of the program that had been fine. This meant that there was a maximum length of program that you could ever hope to get running!
I thought I'd really arrived when I got to university and was able to use an online teletype machine. Managed to miss out on punch cards completely.
@KGBGB
My dad was born in Nov. 1927, graduated HS @ 17 YO to join the USN June 1945, done with basic and had started radio & RADAR school when the war ended (He was a ham radio pre nerd as a teen, wanted to be a pilot, USN did not allow, plenty of kids with good eyesight & reflexes, not enough who already knew electronic technology). Took the bit of cash for staying in the reserves- The USN grabbed his ass back at the beginning of Korean war, of course. The first "un war".
You, too, must be older than dirt.
I used to run a BBS with a 1200 baud modem so this is kind of funny to me. ;-)
Nice you sound like my dad. He's awesome.
hehe
Grader
Cut me straight to the core of my being with that one champ. Some I will go on.
The Elites™ are starting to lose their grip on reality. This will wake many people.
Ok probably not but it's becoming increasingly less subtle.
The goal is not winning the war. The goal is to maintain the cash cow.
the power is iwhat they are losing, the corruption shall be ever with us. Without the power, there is no cash cow.
They are way past any grip on reality.
This is nonsense because the Western elites today have never had a grip on reality.
As I wrote in a different comment: if the "gas station masquerading as a nation" is kicking the literal entire West's ass in military industrial production despite having 1/5th the population and a far smaller relative PPP GDP, obviously the Western elites have their heads so far up their asses that they are getting confused by their tonsils banging on their heads.
"Waking the people" is both irrelevant and real. Western populations are increasingly voting against the elite's interests hence the increasingly blatant methods used to keep out dissent: Russiagate, Catalan amnesty, impending anti-Wilders coalition, AfD outlawing etc. And even when these methods succeed as was done in the UK - look how well the UK is doing now /sarc
I agree, in the US we do not even have the opportunity to vote for a different outcome. You get 2 choices of the same party. Elect a total outsider and he gets crushed by the rest of the uniparty , they flat out refuse to implement policies which help the people
I think they created a closed feedback loop and can't get out of it. They pay the MSM directly and indirectly via less taxes, buy newspapers via their state owned or partially state owned companies, with ads, etc. The Pentagon spent 50 billion each year for PR. And this was 10 years ago, I think it will be much more now.
If some media outlets show dissent, they get no money or get sued/closed or censored, hence closed feedback loop.
And the icing on top of this delusion cake, they think those bought and sold MSM are Journalists and are portraying the truth. So this bubble got away from reality for at least 10 years. Normally reality hits you on the head if you are that long gone from it, but in this case they try to even put down dissent even more.
So imho, our Western states will crush, we already went bankrupt morally, diplomatically, economically, but the real bankruptcy is not here yet, but it could come any minute, week, month, year. Russia and China blocked them everywhere, like the good chess and go players they are. Every day the US military bases in Syria and Iraq were attacked. That's unheard of, this shows the world, the Kaiser is naked.
The examples you cite are valid.
My view is that what is occurring in the West is the sublimation of normal societal ebbs and flows, checks and balances into a society dominated utterly by an ever shrinking elite class. Shrinking because the imbalances are funneling all power into fewer and fewer hands, which in turn reinforces the dynamic where even marginal elites are precarious in their position, thus reluctant to endanger said position by providing real feedback much less actual dissent. This is Turchin's "popular immiseration" and "elite overproduction" twin theses as documented in his "End Times ..." book.
The Rome analogy that no one tends to make is that the Western empire disappeared because _no one cared_ enough to fight for it. It ceased to stand for anything at all.
Perhaps I should have stated this in my first post. The Russian military is state controlled and is very efficient. The US system runs war as a business and is elitist and immoral in its practices. It supports congress and presidents that supports its business model. So if the US military wants to go to a war footing it needs a war and apparently it took the Ukrainian debacle to reveal its productivity problems. But the "planners"
foresee a major war with Russia some years down the road, and a Europe that is dysfunctional. So the MIC has first to build the factories in order to prepare and that will cost and then it will have to stockpile the products (think 155 mm) artillery shells which will at some point not need to be replaced. This is not a really profitable enterprise until there is a good war. In the meantime we have seen those shells cost ten years ago about $800 each while now they cost $3,500 ea. And there is higher inflation ahead. Politically, the MIC is dealing with telling the government that the number one military in the world has to rebuild itself which runs counter to the hubris. But we have to ask ourselves just how irrelevant the citizen is in this occasion. If government, as I believe, is a complete criminal enterprise, it simply adds to risk of foreign and domestic disaster. Isn't capitalism great!
I believe you confuse the respective militaries - which are part of the government - with military industrial companies - which are private companies in the US case and state owned companies in the Russian case. A state owned company is not quite the same thing as part of the government - among many things, ownership may not be completely government; the state owned company could very well be profit oriented (see Gazprom); the state owned company could operate with various degrees of freedom, etc etc.
As for "planners" - the presumption is that there is actual planning from multiple aspects ranging from MIC logistics to overall economic to capital projects etc etc.
My view is that the West has very little planning of any kind. Everything is either left to the private sector or is simply left to rot. The elite classes in charge are uncompetent - they don't know what they are doing in any sense of the word - they just push fictional counters around a fictional board because of their utter divorce from reality or accountability.
Government in the West may well be a criminal enterprise - although I don't believe so. It is acting in a way contrary to its fiduciary responsibility, but that is a function of a dysfunctional and uncompetent bureaucracy, political class and executive class all subsumed within an ever wealthier but shrinking elite class.
The rest of the world - even the most corrupt governments - are more accountable than the majority of the West simply because real world limits force them to be even as there are many examples of governments which clearly are excelling.
So returning to your statement that "the MIC has first to build the factories" - yes that's obvious but I actually don't see it happening. There is very little evidence that the West has the will and willingness to seek optimal results as opposed to optimal profit. My view is that the most likely outcome is going to be ever more white elephant junk whether drone or AI or whatever nonsense a la F35 is pushed by the MIC. I just saw an article where "ramjet artillery rounds" were being touted as the next big thing - an artillery round with range comparable to a 1970s era missile. This is probably a leading candidate for the next white elephant - new tech, expensive, complicated, useful only against 2nd tier or worse opponents because accuracy must be governed by GPS systems, no short or medium term accountability, complexity to substitute for functionality that addresses a known need, etc etc.
This isn't government as a criminal enterprise problem - this is government failing to rein in abuses of the private sector (the MIC in this case).
Thank you for your generous and informative correction. My thoughts came from the way the old soviet system was structured for technological advances in the military that was sadly lacking in many other sectors. It is nice to see that some of the positives of the soviet system are still maintained. It was also a basis of comparison to the US system of the MIC which certainly corrupted itself fully after 9/11. But still the Vietnam War was a business venture and the system expanded on the "war as business" premise. Again the evolution toward oligarchy continued with speed after the Trade Centre attacks and an argument could be made that this expanded to the point where the government was mostly taken over with the result that democracy has mostly died as a government process by now. The other factor building during the 2000s was the growing influence of globalism, another influential faction of the deep state buried in the elites control of government, a subject area that has strongly captured my attention. So I perfectly agree with you comments about elite incompetence. Somehow the Agenda 21 of creating dysfunction of deindustrialisation and cultural identity etc. is not recognized by members of the WEF as being an element of dysfunction to the elites as well as the citizen. With this one cannot help at viewing the problem as one of stupidity and ironically a position like this is not very acceptable to the average citizen as quite ludicrous. The captured governments work against the citizen or at cross purposes and basically means the citizen harm. The Covid and inoculation psyops are a good example. If you are familiar with the WEF and its belief system you will also recognize a wish list to depopulate a substantial percentage of populations. It is definitely inappropriate for Washington to follow the WEF program in the US and concurrently plan for the next war.
Thanks again.
L.
I don't disagree with your analysis in most instances, but Vietnam wasn't driven primarily by the defense contractors. They certainly took advantage of a propitious environment to market their wares. Johnson's policy goals were destroyed by the Vietnam involvement, and I don't think he could have been easily stopped if he had chosen to end the Vietnam involvement while he retained popularity. He had a failure of imagination. Nixon's success at winding down the war should be indicative of this, even though he searched for a 'victorious conclusion' of some sort that delayed his disengagement for years.
My view is that the MIC in the US has always been more profit driven than anything else - if for no other reason because the US has not been seriously directly threatened, .militarily, for 200 years. Being profit driven does not HAVE to mean abuse but clearly this has occurred
What we see in the US MIC today, according to Scott Ritter and Colonel MacGregor and others, is a result of several factors:
1) 9/11, as you noted, refocused the US military on counter-insurgency as opposed to peer or near-peer warfare. 20+ years of this means those who did have such experience or focus are long gone and that the generals in place today are all promoted based on this wrong focus.
2) In order to be more efficient, the US government pushed the MIC to consolidate starting in 1993: https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2023/03/01/the-last-supper-how-a-1993-pentagon-dinner-reshaped-the-defense-industry
Note this is HWBush and Bill Clinton, and was years before 9/11.
Personally, I think this MIC consolidation was far more damaging even than the post 9/11 refocus because it converted an ecosystem of MIC suppliers into a handful of big ones. Big MIC suppliers unsurprisingly focus on giant new platform pushes but also have very little competition. It really shouldn't surprise anyone that there have been almost no successful new weapon system deployments after this consolidation - the F35 might be the only one.
3) The overall deindustrialization in the US and West is a force multiplier, but probably much less of one than in the past. Ford and GM might have been able to switch over quickly from making trucks and cars to tanks in WW2 - I have grave doubts over whether they could convert modern car manufacturing facilities to tank production so easily today.
4) Incompetent civilian leadership and oversight. Eisenhower was a wartime general who brought enormous understanding of the requirements of MIC into the US Presidency - the modern equivalents clearly don't have anything like the focus and understanding of an Eisenhower even if an actual general were to become President.
Couple this with revolving door to MIC jobs and the bad result should not surprise anyone.
And then again the F35 was not brag worthy either. I agree with your statement. I recall the Col McGregor has stated repeatedly that the Washington mindset is buried in the past, of the early 1990s. This is a long gap for perceptions of glory.
I think they overestimate their own financial power also. Problem is, with more and more spending on useless military expenditures, less and less money is there for the "people", hence social welfare programs they had for the last 30 years. And they have to get more taxes. Add more censorship, less freedom, more regulation for smaller businesses. Not a good outlook for the "free" West.
Additionally Russia has increased their commodity output with a world market share of 20% up to even 70% of 40-50 commodities which are important for the world market in cases of production, logistics, energy, agriculture.
So basically Russia and China got them at least 4-5 steps ahead in this geopolitical chess game. They are playing checkers, they have no clue about standing armies, imho you need at least an standing army of 30-40 million soldiers to "rule" the world, they are delusional at best. They could always just bully inferior armies like the Iraqui army in the 90s and 00s, and even then they had to watch out. Because in the end, real war means putting all your soldiers and resources into it. Big standing armies are no joke you can just sweep away. Just look at Afghanistan. Surely they could have done it differently, put more resources and more soldiers in this "project", but still, they got basically thrown out by roughly 70k soldiers with AKs and sandals.
I agree with you. It is probably true that the MIC of the US is one of the few survivors of outsourcing their industrial base. Clinton even provided taxpayer money in grants to corporations to subsidize the offshore moves. Again there was no strategic thinking going on that this was economic suicide. I also do not recall much public outrage over this depletion. Or even if the public noticed.
There is also little thinking going on as Washington turns its back on public education, energy policies that make sense, health care flops over plandemics and inoculations, transportation snafus, open borders and infrastructure maintenance. And I am leaving out what is still a long list.
We should also be reminded that the citizen allowed all this to happen by looking the other way.
The thread from Perot to Trump was that very issue - the outsourcing and hollowing out of the US industrial base. The fact the elite-dominated media doesn't want to talk about it is not the same as no one noticing.
Yes, I agree but the damage was accelerated with the MSM's strangle hold on information and discussion. This realities keeps the people ignorant.
The elites are losing their grip on the peoples reality.
Let me grab a nice cup of mint tea.
Anyone who's had problems with videos loading in the article, refresh the page as some of the videos seemed to have gotten corrupted so I fixed them. Substack tells me they didn't really make their architecture with a lot of video embeds in mind, so I'm sort of stressing their system but it usually works.
Refreshed, working great on the low income internet program of 3mb🤪
Yes, it only takes me the initial opening from the Email to the substack for the videos to all work perfectly
Qualities gone down
Focus on quality over quantity
"Quantity has a quality of its own." - Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili
quality and quantity are outstanding!
"Each problem has a name and a surname" from the same author
I agree with OP. Actually theorizing a forever war ? Come on...that makes no sense
Everything in life is patchy.
“Europe’s ‘inexhaustible’ central bank and fiat money spigot. “
That word. I don’t think it means what they seem to think it means....
Enlighten me
He's probably a realist that understands paper money isn't really proper money so that you could "print" money all you wanted but in reality if you print too much people would stop using it. So "fiat money spigot" can only provide so much liquidity. That's my guess on what he was trying to say.
Although if you put the word in quotes, then you're aware of all this so.... ? I dunno, I'm guessing what other people are trying to say.
Yes, there is no inexhaustible spigot. People keep calling it inexhaustible, but I don’t think they understand what the word means. Fiat money is a bubble currency. It only has value if you think there is someone else who is willing to accept it in payment. The intrinsic value aka value of the paper it is printed on and the ink it contains is infinitesimal. The more you print, the more people come to think of it as worthless. “Not worth a Confederate” is the old fashioned American phrase, referring back to our civil war where the confederacy tried desperately to fund the war with fiat currency.
The EU now paying over $8,000 for an HE round.
As Thatcher so famously said, they will keep spending until they run out of other people's money.
As Keynes noted, a nation with fiat currency can "afford" to do anything ot has the physical capacity to do.
The constraints are mainly productive capacity.
The sin is wasting the productive output of the nation on this stuff.
The ECB's ability to print euros is inexhaustible.
What is not inexhaustible is the purchasing power stability of the euro.
As Greenspan said in Congressional testimony: "We can guarantee cash benefits as far out and at whatever size you like, but we cannot guarantee their purchasing power."
I'm not sure, but I think the ECB does NOT have the power to simply print money. Some other central banks can print money like the FED. Tom Luongo has written about the fight between the ECB and their retinue of the Davos crowd, versus the Federal Reserve. He says the Feds have the upper hand because the ECB can't just print money. Links: https://tomluongo.me/2023/10/30/powell-exposes-europe-hidden-war-bonds/ https://tomluongo.me/2023/08/01/the-ecb-is-trapped-between-japan-and-the-us/
The ECB has printed money like crazy, left and right, whenever it really wants to.
The so-called rules that forced austerity on the PIIGS in the post GFC era (after 2009) are routinely ignored now just as they were ignored during COVID.
Luongo can believe what he wants - the fact of ECB printing is indisputable whatever the ECB charter and laws say, much as the IMF's supposed rules are completely ignored when it comes to giving money to Ukraine.
Just see this chart to understand what the supposed ECB rules really mean: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/files/2012/05/Doukas-fig-1.jpg
Note the 2 different instances of 40% plus ECB balance sheet increases in 3 and 6 month periods.
Rules, my ass.
Scott: the EU does not have an "inexhaustible" fiat spigot. The US with its (now declining) world reserve currency status may still have but this is currently being undermined by BRICS+. And its support of Israel is going to hasten the end to that foundation of the hegemony. The Modern Monetary Theory is nonsense and is the road to hyperinflation and collapse and Europe cannot just print its way out of the problem.
I apparently failed to properly indicate the sarcasm in my comment. My intent was to compare the use of the word “inexhaustible” with the use of the word “inconceivable” in the classic movie “The Princess Bride”. The villain repeatedly attempts to indirectly dispatch the hero, and is then told that he is still following them, and replies with “inconceivable!!!”. After about the fifth use of the word he is warned that the word does not seem to mean what he thinks it does.
This sequence also includes him warning that the hero has made one of two inconceivable mistakes. The first, is to not start a land war in Asia, but the second, almost as well known, is to never go in against a Sicilian.
Awesome, classic movie.
“I’ve hired you to help me start a war. It’s a prestigious line of work with a long and glorious tradition”
“Are you sure nobody is following us?”
“As I told you, it would be absolutely, totally, and in all ways inconceivable. Why do you ask”
“No reason, I just happened to look behind us and something is there”
“INCONCEIVABLE!!”
And I’m in 100% agreement with you on the childish ridiculousness of MMT. Too much money chasing too few goods equals inflation. You may get away with it on occasion if there is slack demand, but that only makes the inflation worse when demand picks up again.
The inherent goodness of the Russians will be their downfall. Look at how many women and children the Israelis have murdered? Now counter that to the total civilian casualties in Ukraine? Is it any wonder the Polacks are ready to put themselves in front of the civilized Russian Army? At some point Russia has to send the signal. Of course, this is the ancient problem is it not? To defeat evil, do you have to become evil? And if you do not, does evil win? At the age of 63, I no longer know the answers. But being humane or not, Russia is going to be forced to remove the Ukrainians as a society. Because the West will keep sending them into the cauldron. And since 99% of the human race are sheep, they will march to their slaughter. My revulsion of the human race is reaching new heights.
Well personally, I and many others sort of agree to an extent, or at least can see both viewpoints. I'm not necessarily a fan of the velvet glove approach to war but it's what we've got and unfortunately I can't do anything to change that.
I think though history will magnify those good deeds, and it may be worth it down the line. But of course, the victors write history
This is what genuinely worries me. It seems Ukrainians and Europe are not sufficiently afraid, to put it bluntly. Perhaps a weekly Tsar Bomba test would shake them from their neoliberal post-industrial stupor. But as it stands the war is still on the internet for Europe. Direct flesh-and-bone consequences are only in the form of inflation. The Washington architects must be pleased with Russia's gradualism strategy knowing they can adjust their Euro-puppet strategy thanks to the generous timeframe and predictability Russia grants them. They likely calculate that they can stay evil longer than Russia can stay moral and that ultimately their own saddism is a form of escalation superiority.
Actually, the Washington architects are hating the Russia slow and steady..
They have to constantly play up observably insignificant "gains" by Ukraine as some looming victory against an ever weaker foe. At the same time they have to keep making this weak loser look like the Big Bad Russian Bear to maintain political support for Ukraine. This is a policy tightrope, being walked whilst both ends unravel..
On the flip side, a massive Russian sweeping offensive would be easy to spin into a NATO article 5 event.
I am constantly amazed at the astuteness with which Russia is conducting the whole affair, both locally and globally.
I was just discussing with my husband (he and I were both US diplomats) my suspicion that Ms.Nuland was "kicked upstairs" with her promotion, because it took her out of daily oversight of Ukrainian affairs and weakened her control. Today she must be seen as some sort of lunatic for dragging the USG into that damned war in Ukraine that nobody wants to finance anymore, and whose refugees (NATO-created as usual) are unwelcome in Europe.
@Norma Bown
Victoria Nuland did not make the overall State Dept/CIA Ukraine strategy, that is at least two levels above her pay grade as I conceptualize this.
She WAS a face on site for implementing them. And being shown on video + various other leaked media as doing so, preparing a fall guy (girl) in case of "less than optimal results".
We get shown her face, read about her activities + occasionally hear her voice and amoral bullshit, it's easy to hate on Vicky. Frankly, it is not an accident on her superiors part that you know her face. She'll be burned when a scapegoat is needed.
Look farther up the chain of command, always ask "who benefits?" Follow the MONEY.
Really? She has been personally involved in Ukraine since before 2014. I do not see her being made the "face" of Ukraine. Who benefits? Again really? The Biden family, The Clintons, Many of Obama admin are crossovers from Clinton which includes even Bush era NeoCons like McCain , the list of politicians and family members benefitting from the money laundering is very long
@ Billy M. I agree with the caveat that there is no accountability in the US government even at Nuland's
level. Nobody suffers unless wading off the narratives.
I politely disagree. You have to know her background. As an American of Ukrainian Jewish origin, and someone who served in high position at the US Embassy in Kiev, she knew UKRAINE and stupidly thought she thus knew Russia, but she never knew Russia. You cannot penetrate the soul of a nation if you hate it. And she said she hated Russia. So there you are. She was ignorant, but highly influential. Inside the Department she was a shining star to be promoted and promoted, and she learned at the heart of the MIC, the US Council on Foreign Relations in NY where she did her senior training. The Council's powers set their sights on her. The right sort of bellicose "intellectual" that they needed. She would be the female warrior against Russia. And she did her job, with hubby's knee-jerk anti-communist (seriously out of whack with the times) support. They feathered their nests on the anti-Russian schtick. You give Washington too much credit by assuming the top figures have ideas of their own. They steal their ideas from their colleagues.
Why not just fire her?
you just don't do that except under the most DIRE pressure, as it is an admission of poor judgment on your part. so you sidestep the problem, you remove her without demoting her. What can one do but speculate until some disloyal schmuck in DC writes a memoir?
There is zero chance NATO can beat Russia. Nukes all bets are off but you're just not gonna beat Russia conventionally in a land war on it's territory. The biggest issue with slow roll is that Russians get tired of SMO and demand peace instead of draining the swap until Ukraine collapse that Russia is doing now. Then that "peace deal" allows Ukraine to rearm or NATOize and Russia has to keep refighting this war every 5 years. Will Russian public stay behind this 1, 2 or even 3 more years until all Ukraines combatants are "demilitarized and denazified" aka dead?
You bet. Russia ain't gonna quit.
Or Ukraine's military might mutiny first. That happened in Germany in 1918.
Heres the problem
https://www.russiamatters.org/blog/more-russians-advocate-peace-talks-ukraine-devil-details
They were asked "if Russia should continue the so-called special military operation (SVO) or move to peace talks."
Peace talks will take place while the war continues unhindered. Russia will never agree to a ceasefire, not after they were publicly screwed over with the bogus Minsk II accords. The war will continue uninterrupted until Ukraine agrees to be neutral. How neutrality will be guaranteed I don't know but that's Lavrov's problem not mine.
LOL you are using a DC think tank to gain "insight" into the Russian public?? You have to know this is not based on any real evidence of public opinion. Next you will be linking "The Moscow Times" as a source
the people AND their governments so-called are afraid of Russia. what we witness is the panicked reaction of a whole smug bloc of war-makers who suddenly realize all those it has warred against could come for them en masse. Come one, come all is not the motto of a strong and unified organization. Both NATO and the EU are fracturing, not cohering. More members will mean more trouble for NATO. What a joke those European organizations are.
You guys are as deluded as NAFO fellas
I think the Russians are proceeding with lightening speed , relatively on the cheap .
Just think of it, they gone thru in less than two years of the majority of ammunition stock of the western world . Plus unknown number of specialist personals in many many places , like Mariupol . Odessa , etc. Not to mention the immense amount of learning curve the Russians piled up . The west is hoping for some sort of a miracle of AI , pushing forward more " Apache warriors " ? If other country's want to try they luck , under whatever pretext the Russians will have no choice , but take the gloves off. Who will hold out longer is clear by now . The Russians have to worry about , some sort of sneaky attack . Chemical , nuclear of some kind , or large scale concentrated attack on the Presidential leadership . The Russians are way behind the West in meanness , and back stabbing tactics . But the God of war will decide .
I think you underestimate the Russian leadership intelligence, they probably have wargamed most scenarios, the concerning point is demography imo, time will tell if they can make sufficient technological progress to counterbalance this issue.
The only think can not be wargamed in advance , is the variance of the internal snakes , that are lurking amongst themselves .
It is not the style that needs to be changed. It is the goal. Military strategy, as in war is mere continuation of policy by other means, absolutely reflects political goals.
If Russian goal was to somehow persuade Ukraine to choose neutrality, now confonted with Ukraine ruled by extreme nationalists, who are willing and with West support able to fight until the last Ukrainian, and with zero trust left for politicians both Western and Ukrainian, a new goal is forming an Ukriaine that is friend and connected, linked to Russia, like Russian speaking Ukraine, NovoRossiya as a part of RF. A goal of neutrality that was acceptable to at least half of original Ukrainian population and that would be a better solution to majority is now impossible. Dividing the country makes it possible to support Ukrainians who refuse to fight a proxy war against Russia into shaping their part of Ukraine into a viable allied state. Redefining the war as a civil ear between CIA supported extremists, former Nazzies, and normal Ukrainians.
Goodness will pay off in number of soldiers ready to surrender, and ability to progress and be supported by local population.
Military strategy will reflect changing political goals.
Not victors, survivors.
The US is obsessed with decapitation strikes, but currently lacks the means which Russia actually has. The Russians are smarter than to waste resources as there's a clearer understanding leaders are also expendable. As for the civilians - why increase the motivation to resist by unifying the population (as the Germans did bombing cities as their military objectives failed in the air war) President Putin is both humane and level headed. It's the collective west that keeps making critical errors, AI or no AI (GIGO)
Sorry, whether it was on purpose or not, this has saved Russia from turning to a public enemy like Israel. Israel has lost all credibility and has horrible pr. Imagined if Russia had acted as callously. This was their saving grace
After seeing what is happening to Israel reputation, for y'all to even call for a heavy hand. This slow hand saved Russia reputation and is destroying the West reputation . Most people don't want bloodbaths. Look what is happening to America after bombing the middle east all the time
You are correct. If Russia had copied NATO's policies of destruction Putin and Lavrov wouldn't be the political rockstars they are everywhere except in the EU and NATO.
> At some point Russia has to send the signal.
I agree, I can't see the point in playing for time.
The Russian man harnesses long but rides fast. Folk saying
You mis-perceive the situation, in some ways like those behind this war, but differently (as a result of reading this substack).
Only those with a very narrow point of view will choose to fight Russia, one might even call them brain-washed in some cases. And that is a very finite resource, quickly squandered.
Look at the front line participants, they are mostly Gen-X, with some Boomers and Millenials/Gen Z. The Western mercs are generally ex-military who spent their whole careers being told Russia/China/Iran is behind everything. Ukrainian conscripts (and large parts of DPR LPR forces) are "blue-collar" workers.
Poland/NATO/Western Europe has a much smaller pool of such from which to draw, and most of them will NEVER volunteer to be in the Army. After that you get the draft, which would require an never before seen unity of purpose in the EU.
Western Millenials/Gen Z are *totally* unwilling to be servants of war (look at the pro-palestinian protests)
and they were raised on the myth of US and NATO invincibility as their mother's milk. they have no grounding in reality, but they are about to get some.
As an American who is familiar with our style of leveling everything I agree but when is the last war we won? Russia is a winner. Russia is also only place on Earth Europeans never conquered despite hundreds of years of trying so they must do doing something right. Russia also has 80%+ world on it's side while America is feared and despised. Russia probably has 50% of Western citizens on it's side.. Russia has former Ukraine POWs willingly fighting for Russia. I guess I'm trying to say there is a lot one could say good about nice war even though I'd prefer they drop a nuke on Lviv and ask "who's next?..sign here"
Russia's position today is much stronger than it was in 1941. And back then they won anyway.
The book to read on this subject is Weigley, The American Way of War. Very good read and solid military history. Highly recommended.
https://science1arts2and3politics.substack.com/p/how-the-usas-world-domination-plan
Russia is far too small to defeat Europe. It is even too small to occupy the hostile portions of violent Ukraine. Russia is well aware of this fact. (The population of Russia is less than Nigeria. It is about the same as Japan or Bangla Desh.) The US is trying to provoke Russia into occupying Ukraine but it is not working and will not happen. Even if somehow Russia convinced themselves they were strong enough to occupy Ukraine, their dominant Christians and Slavs are strongly opposed to becoming an exploitative empire, oppressing others with the iron fist of torture, secret police, etc. This is not going to happen. They aren't going to try it, and if somehow they did they would fail.
By conducting the war following international law Russia is winning the larger game of garnering international support. This is far more important then what happens in Ukraine. Having Saudi Arabia join BRICS was a major defeat for the West. The USA's Risk move to take over the world is failing. Bombing Nordstreem should end up costing them the EU, after which there could be no rational hope of success.
Politically the US offers the "rules based order," which is just might-makes-right lawlessness. This is not attracting popular support outside of the USA. The USA's rulers are resorting to propaganda and censorship to maintain control of their subjects, to win support as a lesser evil. This will not bring anyone outside of the bubble to their side and is repellant to neutralish nations. The US is failing to make suicidal stooges of the Taiwanese. The Taiwanese are far too smart to fall for that.
Losing the wider war will not stop the USA. The true goal is large transfers of wealth from ordinary people to the politically well connected. This can continue all the way to the end. If the US populace can figure this out then they can put a stop to it, but there is no sign at all that this is happening.
A Ukrainian mutiny is possible but this is a minor theater of the larger war and doesn't make all that much difference. I expect the USA's Risk move will be over when the USA loses control of the regrettably democratic EU. This will not prevent the US from exploiting its own populace but it least it won't lead to nuclear war.
Why do so many assume Russia wants or wanted to occupy or conquer Ukraine? It was simple in the beginning they wanted a neutral country without NATO missiles and without losing their Black Sea port. Maybe Putin should have known better, but even so things still had to play out with a conflict. The US is ruled by ego maniacs without much intelligence. Now Russia must make Ukraine as useless as possible to the corporate fascist's which control US policy, and I think little by little they are doing that.
99% sheep? Too much. 66% maybe. It just looks like 99% because all peace voices have been excluded from Big Media.
but Israel killed itself with this latest slaughter, at least for me and I was far from being anti-Israel. But now all I see when I see an Israeli is the victims of the Zionist belief that the Jews are better than everybody else and innumerable humans can be slaughtered if an Israeli is hurt. It is the philosophy of brutes and tyrants.
The only reason admitting Ukraine to NATO is not dismissed as crazy talk is because the West continues to ignore red line after Russian red line with impunity.
The result of there benevolence is the entire global community outside of the lilly white west firmly being on their side. And even in the West more and more people ste waking up.
Once fortress Donbass is fully secured the Russians will roll all the way to Kiev and oust their Nazi government and destroy the West’s bridgehead in Ukraine. If the Europe starts preparing for war they’ll bopefully move all the way to Brussels to cut the head off of the snake for good.
You have my agreement and sympathies. But do not discount the Russians as a thwart to the hegemony. To my mind (and I am Canadian) the US and its empire are mostly the walking dead. Both Russia and China are in the ascendant and building civilization and the West is in free fall decline. You need a healthy economy and monetary system to build a civilization and this is what the BRICS+ is building. The US announced its RIP statement in 1971 unknowingly when it went off the dregs of the gold backed system (defaulted). The East is building to stabilize under gold now.
I disagree. The question that needs to be asked is "how successful have been offensive scorched earth tactics in the past." Of course, Sherman was on the victorious side in the U.S. Civil War, but did his burning of Georgia really contribute to the victory of the Union or simply make reconstruction that much more difficult? Wasn't the conquest of Vicksburg, the loss of the Mississippi, and the final collapse of Lee's army in Virginia owing to attrition the real cause of victory, with Sherman's ransacking merely a sideshow?
Did allied strategic bombing in World War II really affect the surrender of Germany and Japan? The Japanese were deliberating terms of surrender months before Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the firebombing of Tokyo. Alan Dulles, working outside the chain-of-command and producing his own foreign policy in Switzerland, ensured that most of Krupp's manufacturing base remained intact, even as allied heavy bombers flamed the residential sections of German cities. German arms manufacturing was not severely impacted by the bombing. What was far more limiting to German war capacity was the lack of oil and the loss of the synthetic refineries in Romania. So, did Germany surrender because of the heavy bombers lighting civilians on fire or because of a general collapse at the front in both the east and west?
I think the answers to these questions are clear. Scorched earth attacks on civilian populations have done little to affect the outcomes of modern wars. In general, wars are won by the side that can produce the most artillery tubes, ammunition, oil, and trained combatants. There is no substitute or shortcut to achieving military superiority at the tip of the spear.
Ukrainians and Russians being fellow Slavic peoples have a lot in common including family ties, the way the people of Israel and Gaza don't. Also Russia wants to capture the cities, not pound them into dust for future juicy rebuilding contracts the way the GAE did in Iraq.
Wow. You guys are no different than these NAFO folks. Listen, the Poles have not even joined Ukrainians in masses. But you think that they will fight when Ukraine collapse? Sure.... 🙄
The music is very soothing. Soulful, heart, breaking, yet…This addition reminds me of…VOS. The long game, civilizations and perhaps, the human species… change is afoot. Shelf life over this side of the pond. Grateful I have lived well and loved often, giving so much more than…taken…inhale exhale ❤️🐈⬛
Russia will never agree to a cease fire. The war will continue until they get a neutral Ukraine.
The war is a cash cow for the elite. I expect it will continue until either the Ukraine army mutinies or the European NATO countries vote out their governments.
https://open.substack.com/pub/science1arts2and3politics/p/how-the-usas-world-domination-plan
What is your read on what China is doing? When would we see direct Chinese military support (if ever)
Why should China support? Russia has not asked for it, is not in a losing position and is getting/has received 10 million 155 mm shells from North Korea. All is hunky dory on Russia's side.
If there is direct Chinese support, it's going to be ww3. China is still hoping to remain 'neutral' for diplomatic purposes, but if a train load of unassembled drone parts gets sent to North Korea and then shipped off to 'parts unknown'...
If NATO objective is the strategic defeat of Russia, this is diametrically opposed to china's interest. My read is that they are best served in a "stalemate" scenario, where nobody wins. But that's very destructive
Totally agree that if NATO strategically defeats Russia, China will be in a lot of trouble.
However, since Russia does not look like it is losing, China can afford to "fold its sleeves and observe", in order to keep its diplomatic options open and ensure BRICS systems are not disrupted. Almost certainly this has been coordinated between Russia and China. China is focused on the economic and diplomatic defeat of the US "rules based order", above and beyond a military defeat of NATO in Ukraine. Even if Ukraine collapsed today, the US would simply pivot to new conflicts over Taiwan, the middle east, central asia, or even south east asia, with its ability to fund an unlimited string of vassals and color revolutions.
However, I absolutely believe that if Russia was about to collapse, or if NATO directly intervened in Ukraine, that China would enter on the side of Russia, and that would be ww3.
Russia has to thread the needle, where they win but not so spectacularly such that western societies are really mobilized for war
We have seen what happens when one side underestimate the other.
Needle? Seems pretty easy to me. Insist on a neutral Ukraine but don't conquer any more (hostile) territory. It appears that this is the plan .
I think the general plan is to take enough territory of Ukraine that it functionally becomes an economic drain on the EU and US to support it, but not so much that it outright collapses into Poland.
Probably taking Odessa and Kharkiv, and enough territory to THREATEN (but not occupy) Kiev is the goal.
When the West says "frozen conflict", do you think they mean "just stop attacking [Ukraine]" and they will assume Russia won't attempt any large scale offensives? And then the war more or less freezes automatically? I have wondered about this, like, why would they just assume that it would freeze without even thinking about what the Russians would do - can it be they genuinely don't think the Russians would do anything?
China is doing what is the most beneficial for Russia and itself: maintain a united front, support economically and diplomatically, work with Russia to unite more and more of the World Majority against the aggressor West, keep working on tying more and more of the Eurasian continent together with OBOR transport and trade infrastructure, and work with the BRICS to build out a parallel financial system starting with correspondent banks.
This is plenty, and more importantly, what will make the biggest difference going forward for both countries.
That video of the solo tank working is wild. No drones against him no arty against no ATGMs even and he's literally just sitting firing at was is basically point blank. Ukraine is fing acrewed.
That beautiful girl getting killed in a pointless war instead of having children is a tragedy.
how do you know she was killed?
Are you thinking fake grave marker?
Sorry, I don't understand what you mean.
I was referring to the girl on the grave marker in one of the videos above.
Oops, sorry, misunderstood, I thought you were talking about the video with the Palestinian-Jordanian singer.
I’m fascinated by the thought process behind this “beachhead” Ukraine is hurling so many souls into.
Is there nobody with any sense left? They are in a known location, on the bank of a river, with limited ammunition and only light infantry weapons.
One assumes that they are aware that there is this weapons system - actually a whole combat arm - called “artillery”. Its main purpose is to blow up anything stupid enough to stay in place for too long. And then there are these things called drones....
Our author is right that they have trapped themselves. Western press loves the bridgehead story. I read an article where they hypothesized that the 300 marines could mount an offensive towards a road crossing a few klicks from the bridgehead and cut off most of the Russian army.
300 solders marching from an observed location with no motor mech air or armor support assaulting across several kilometers with hand held infantry weapons. Anyone ordering such an attack should be court martialed.
Sense has no place in the post-truth world.
Rudy Guilliani enters the chat...
This isn't rocket science. I have been saying since almost Day 1 of the SMO that Ukraine is fighting a Twitter war whereas Russia is fighting a real one.
Twitter war is precisely Snake Island, Khrynki, Russia border/Belgorod selfies vs. Russian attritional warfare and taking of Artemovsk (and soon, Avdiivka).
military Schengen is ultimately about EU/NATO suppressing European citizens who object to their dictators' behaviour.
People in Hungary objecting. No problems, rush in military units from Germany, Poland, France, etc. Look like the AFD likely to get control of German government, no problems, rush in military units from France, Spain, Poland, rump-Ukraine, etc.
That's why it's going to be Hungary and Slovakia who will put a stop on it.
Every single day, their news tell them about how Russia bad because 1956 or 1968.
And now suddenly, it's going to be repeated by their "democratic NATO allies"?
That alone will turn the remaining doubters into Orbán's team.
Don't kid yourself. Hungarians and Slovaks like EU structural adjustment monies more than they like freedom. They'll do anything not to be kicked out of the EU.
As one of them, I strongly disagree. 😂
It's not 2004. Today they understand they've been played and a lot of them now realize they've been nothing else than a German industrial colony.
And when the industry goes wrong, they'll become good cannon fodder.
But they aren't going to do anything about it.
I wouldn't underestimate these people. They had two world wars happening right on their land, they've been stuck between two big blocks for the entire Cold War and they're frontline states right now.
And, as a result of geography, their dependence on Russia (both in terms of imports and exports) is greater than that of Western Europe. The sanction war is causing them more harm in the short term than to countries further West and they would've never profited if the sanctions worked.
For 100 years, they've been caught in between foreign interests.
Something is going to snap and it's the land between Germany and Russia where this is going to happen or these people will have another world war happening right in their home.
Whichever comes first.
And with the sinking West, it will be more and more beneficial to flip sides or at least assert neutrality (something in terms of Cold War Yugoslavia).
Orbán and Fico are manifestations of that and there will be more in other countries.
I lived in Poland, speak Polish and know the Polish mentality well.
The "Powers that Be" pinning hopes on some sort of economic miracle arising from A.I. are doomed to have their dreams shattered on the reality of GIGO. All these AI models only "know" the information that is available on the internet, with its well known signal to noise ratio....
Well, if recent 'leaks' are true, then that's about to change. Look up Qstar / OpenAI
The inability for "AI" (that should actually be called "auto-computers") to invent anything is a hard limit on the technology. There is no way to code or data their way out of this problem. New technologies reliant on new physics will have to be invented for this problem to be over come. All this "AI" bullshit is just smoke and mirrors to make the gullible too afraid to call their bluff. I know all this because I've worked extensively with "AI" and have actually coded things. You would not believe how stupid computers and "AI" actually are.
I would agree based on history. However, something new has come up with Qstar - apparently this AI module has not only the ability to learn math but to figure out math solutions on its own without being taught. That is groundbreaking. And yes, as it can only figure out solutions to primary grade-level math problems today, this shows huge potential for tomorrow.
Ok cool. That's just moving the goalposts a bit, as the inherent issue still remains: the AI cannot understand what math, addition, or subtraction are. All it knows is how to get the input to become the desired output. It's figured out how to invent a process that works for itself and nothing else, but there's no telling what that process actually is or how it actually works. That doesn't mean that logic gates and pulses of electricity can suddenly grasp number theory. It's still just smoke and mirrors for the inept.
That's the point I am trying to get across. If by teaching AI 2+2=4 and 2+3=5 (which is what programmes like ChatGPT offer today), that AI can then figure out that 2+4=6, then AI has taken a huge leap forward - think of it this way - teach basic math to AI and then watch AI derive algebra from it and then calculus. If AI can be taught and then project those teachings into new solutions for similar problems then you have witnessed the beginnings of a vast advancement in technology, possibly one that could eventually, as we become more dependent on it, not only change the course of the future but lay the foundation for the destruction of humankind if it ultimately turns against us.
Elon Musk is right - we are summoning the demons.
If AI can reproduce Nikolai Teslas understanding of the world, or better yet, reconciles General and Special Relativity, all well and good. If it just rehashes our current understanding (or worse, makes an intelligible mathematical construct that is wholly self consistent, yet meaningless) then AI is a dead end.
Cool. We made a mimic. Now make that addition AI do 3-D vector calculus and see what happens. This is just a machine governed by the logic and data we give it. That's all there is to it. There's no need to elevate "AI" to some metaphysical, supernatural force. The actual problem with the "black box" of "AI" is that this is how catastrophic errors can worm their way in which is how these things will get people killed for seemingly no reason at all when they're trusted with operating heavy machinery such as cars and aircraft, especially when in unpredictable, chaotic environments that all forms of "AI" (even the new "Ay-Gee-Eyes") are known to struggle with.
The real fear is that it has cracked 128-bit encryption. That would enable a gang of cyber-thieves or a foreign adversary to empty all US bank accounts in two days.
that's mathematically not feasible. PK algorithms used in bank encryption nowadays rely on problems which are inherently unsolvable in polynomial time by deterministic algorithms (thus the keys are not breakable in realistic time).
Nobody ever proved that. It's just a conjecture.
For what it's worth, all the hot bro-money that was in blockchain has moved over to AI. Keep that in mind. Most of people talking about AI these days are AIbros, and about as sensible as cryptobros - BECAUSE they are the exact same people!
In case anybody thinks "AI" will be like in the movies - it won't. "AI" is unable to set it's own goals because it can't inject new axioms into the Universe. Therefore it's only ever going to be an epifenomenon. OTOH, if humans have free will than that necessarily includes the ability to inject axioms into the Universe (everything else is non-free deterministic following of axioms), thus co-creating the Universe with God who gave them their free will to begin with.
>> And it can be proven A free will necessarily exists. << To start the proof, ask: can the world be different than it is and if so, what - if any - reason there is the world is the way it is. The question therefore isn't if free will exists as a thing - it does and there's at least one concrete one - God's, the question is if humans have free will or not. Many people say they do, based on the fact they clearly freely decide on things like what to think. But since free will is nothing other than the ability to inject axioms into the Universe, then clearly it can't be completely based on following axioms because following axioms presupposes (super)determinism. So you can't *inject* an axiom because the axiom you'd inject has to follow from axioms that already exist which in turn means the axiom you'd inject is actualy a theorem. But a new axiom has to be not-derived from exiting axioms which means any algorithm or body that creates it can't be based entirely on axioms.
The bullshitters will poison their precious "AI"s learning algorithm data with their own bullshit which means that their "AI" can never actually be smarter than they are, just quicker to come to conclusions.
Generative AI is not simply a "learning" algorithm. It is far more.
It's incredibly dumb tho.
It's completely farcical at this point and whoever relies on it is simply dumber.
Generative AI is cargo cult intelligence - which is to say, garbage.
Oh, it will be a lot smarter. But will it be misused by stupid politicians? The nation is full of brilliant people who are ruled by the corrupt and feeblewitted.
Will the new so-called "Ay-Gee-Eyes" be smarter? Well, that depends on what you mean by "smarter". They'll have a lot of versatility which will make them more economically sensible in the long run, but they're going to still have all the same hard limitations as standard "AI". The only advantage I can see "Ay-Gee-Eyes" having is interdisciplinary knowledge which would only be intimidating to a society so thoroughly drowned in mediocrity as to have lost all of its polymaths as the modern west has.
It is not smarter in any sense except fleecing dumb investors and customers.
False, OpenAI and LLMs are junk. See above detailed overview.
they already infest it with feminist nonsense, and make it contradict itself.
That was true a couple months ago. But there has been a sudden quantum leap that is even scaring AI researchers. Look up Q-star AI.
Even if AI is the next "big thing" I don't see how USA can lead jack shit anymore teaching kids 2+2=5 DEI and other nonsense.
My money is first on China who a) graduates 20x more engineers than we do and b) smoke our kids in standardized testing even taking tests in English. c) 10 mean IQ pts higher d) work ethic through the roof e) 3x more people
Then Russia for similar reasons - even they graduate 2x as many engineers with half population.
Today's machine learning based AI is truly revolutionary but no chance does the USA ride it to world dominance. If anybody DOES ride it to world dominance it is going to be China. (China is a nation of engineers while the USA is a nation of salesmen.) But my money is against that. I say all the biggies will have a share of the pie. Just like nuclear weapons.
OpenAI is garbage for anything other than making search easier for lazy people.
What people don't understand, who don't look either at the details of how LLMs work and/or who don't understand just how Silicon Valley works, is that the LLMs represent only 1 actual "breakthrough" - properly structured language emission. The LLM tech has achieved sufficient detail to be able to tag parts of sentences such that it can pull out the subjects/verbs/adverbs etc and reorganize/rearrange in a proper sentence. Or in other words, monkey see/monkey do with words.
This proper emission is fine if the source material is correctly identified (i.e. no false info, no incorrect or conflicting info, etc etc), but the danger of the "proper emission of sentences" capability is that the LLMs can lie with complete equanimity.
This is where the hallucinations come in. The LLMs have a control knob where the accuracy of acceptable source material can be tuned down; the possible useful outputs resulting are accompanied by ever increasing likelihood that the LLM literally just makes shit up but types it out in a proper grammatical structure.
There is NO place in combat, industry, whatever you can name for such bullshit.
People are confusing properly configured and controlled machine learning - which is certainly what Lancet drone targeting is being improved by - with the OpenAI LLM bullshit.
What I say about LLMs is not speculative - we have many many examples already of how this GO (garbage out) situation can occur any time for any reason. (Note that in the past, computers only spewed garbage out GO if there was garbage in GI. LLMs can spew out GO at any time for any reason).
The first public example was the Avianca lawsuit case: https://www.forbes.com/sites/mollybohannon/2023/06/08/lawyer-used-chatgpt-in-court-and-cited-fake-cases-a-judge-is-considering-sanctions/
NYT talking about hallucinations: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/06/technology/chatbots-hallucination-rates.html
Lawsuit because some lazy fuck used ChatGPT to find dirt on a political target: https://www.zdnet.com/article/chatgpts-hallucination-just-got-openai-sued-heres-what-happened/
More examples: https://www.datanami.com/2023/01/17/hallucinations-plagiarism-and-chatgpt/
The point is that these hallucinations are not a bug - they are a feature. And as such, they won't be fixed until literally computer awareness is achieved.
Thinking the West has some kind of lead in AI is utterly false.
OpenAI will throw a lot of white collar people out of work - processing language and forming proper language out is what a lot of white collar work is. Paralegals, junior lawyers, accountants, bookkeepers, customer service, graphic artists, technical writers, all these poor saps are facing the fate of HTML programmers of the Y2K era. But note that precision doesn't actually matter for any of the above - the net effect is to allow ever greater micromanagement by managers and/or replacement of the extra bandwidth for principals that the above professions represent.
I will correct the one part of your statement that is false: "All these AI models only "know" the information that is available on the internet, with its well known signal to noise ratio"
This is one form of training data for LLMs, but it is not the only one. In particular, the LLM usage as sold to customers is to train LLM models on each customer's data. The source for LLM S/N ratio being bad is not the internet source information problem, it is the structural LLM problem as noted above.
For example; an LLM understands what the subject, verb, object, adverb etc part of any sentence or a million sentences are. The way LLMs output a response to a question is to use secondary tags. Let's say you want to learn about underwater basket weaving. An LLM will first look for "underwater basket weaving" subjects. This group of subjects will have a cloud of associated verbs, adverbs, objects etc from all of its training data sentences that include "underwater basket weaving" as a subject. The LLM looks through this cloud and assembles what is the most likely verbs, objects, adverbs etc (frequency is probably the default, but there certainly can be others) into the final response to the query.
The hallucinations arise because if the "accuracy" parameter is tuned down, the LLM can search through other clouds associated poorly or even not at all with "underwater basket weaving" as a subject, pull in those other associated verbs/object/adverb etc clouds and then output a sentence.
This is how LLMs will prove 2+2=5. They don't actually know the laws of mathematical proofs or understand anything about addition. What they will do is find a similar proof - maybe it is 1+1=2, and then replace the relevant bits: 1 --> 2, the 2nd 1 -->, the 2 -->5 but otherwise the same bunch of sentences in that 1+1=2 proof.
This is literal cargo cult "intelligence". Cargo cults were Pacific islanders who built wooden planes and runways because they thought these symbols were what brought goods to their remote island; LLMs/OpenAI is the same thing only with software.
There will be no ceasefire or even pause in this war..The Russians are far too smart, and why would they stop when they are winning hands down? It's becoming clear, as Simplicius points out, that NATO will never give up throwing European bodies into the meat grinder, unless European leaders simply refuse...And I'm pretty sure that the Russian public will not settle for half a loaf at this point...
I don't see today's supine European leaders refusing the USA anything. However the next elections may change that story.
Doubtful. The voters' hardship levels are not high enough yet. I see these European doobs (they haven't cornered the market on doobishness btw) complaining about the increasingly visible problems with their society, but still thinking that voting for the same liberal parties (who brought on the shit) will change something. More pain is needed to get them to vote for "hard/far-right" candidates. Not saying such candidates have better solutions necessarily, but without them given a chance, there is no improvement process.