Russia halted in the Ukraine.

This is not exactly defeat – Russia has grabbed a lot Russian speaking Ukraine territory, and has connected the Crimea to Russia by land. It has also inflicted huge costs on the GAE, the Global American Empire, or rather it has provoked the Global American Empire into inflicting huge costs on itself.

You may have heard that the Russian financial system is in chaos. Nope. The Russian financial system is fine. Their problem is that they were using the Global American Empire’s financial system, and it is in chaos.

But it is very far from victory.

When this war started, I predicted it would be over in twenty days, a prediction I hastily qualified by saying it would still be a spectacular victory if it took forty. Well, it has been more than twenty days, and it looks highly unlikely it is going to forty.

The problem is that Russia was carrying out twentieth century warfare, blitzkrieg and tanks, which has been stopped by twenty first century warfare, man carried autonomous self guided anti tank missiles. You point the missile in the general direction of the tank, and tell the missile to take care of it.

Ukraine has received a huge supply of man carried autonomous anti armor missiles, which makes blitzkrieg impossible and suicidal, and has just received thirteen of the latest Turkish drones, which makes bombarding cities impossible and suicidal.

These drones, if given instructions to fly an autonomous mission, cannot be jammed. The Russians appear to have destroyed the earlier drones. To take out a drone operating under human guidance you jam it, it becomes stupid and predictable, then you kill it. Ukraine will lose these drones like it lost the others if it tries to fly them under human guidance.

The more recent drones are capable of autonomous warfare, and figure out where they are by looking at the scenery.

Giving them the instructions they need to carry out an autonomous mission is difficult, and the UI is dreadful, which does not make it any easier.

But the Ukrainians have managed to figure it it out, so it will be impossible for the Russians to bombard cities.

Needs smart operators and a better UI, but if directed to go on an autonomous mission, they take off by themselves, fly to the destination by themselves, recognize four targets in succession, take them out, find a friendly airstrip by themselves, and land by themselves. Difficulty is telling them how to recognize the targets. UI needs to be improved.

Now that the Turkish drones are capable of autonomy, flattening cities will not be possible either. Takes artillery a while to flatten a city, and it is not going to survive long enough to do so.

Blitzkreig and artillery bombardment is twentieth century warfare, as obsolete as the cavalry charge.

There was the stone age, the Bronze Age, and the iron age, the materials ages. Then there were the energy ages, the age of steam and the nuclear age.

And now we are in the information epoch, which unlike the others, began at an exact time: 1970-01-01_00:00:00

And now information warfare is dominant. You deliver a quite small amount of explosives, currently around one or two kilograms of high explosive and getting smaller every year, to exactly the right spot at exactly the right time. Which means you have to know the right spot and the right time.

Albeit the minimum useful size for a nuclear warhead is still rather large.

A typical example of information warfare is Trump taking out the top Iranian General Qasem Soleimani in a civilian airport with insignificant collateral damage.

Trump taking out Isis headquarters similarly – a lightning strike by a handful of elite warriors who entered deep into hostile territory, destroyed everything, then immediately vanished. In the future, similar strikes will employ a small nuclear warhead or a rod from space.

Trump was the first twenty first century military leader. His great failure was his failure to deal with his enemies within America in the same manner. He needed to have better connections to the front of the spear, and he needed to understand that normality is over, the republic is over, which he failed to do, and is still failing to do. Julius Caesar similarly failed. Took his adoptive son, Caesar Augustus, to figure it out.

Ukraine has hastily learned twenty first century warfare.

Russia is not going anywhere until it can do the same.

I await the appearance of a twenty first century military leader with military and political power. Trump failed because he failed to understand that normality is over, the Republic is over, and the time of holy war has begun. Putin understands this just fine, but unlike Trump, failed to understand we are now in the age of information warfare. Blitzkrieg is over. Georgia was the last blitzkrieg.

727 Responses to “Russia halted in the Ukraine.”

  1. Kunning Drueger says:

    Here are a few news items of note:

    Finnish MPs want to join NATO. The silent part: Finns are opposed to joining NATO:
    https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/news/2022/04/mil-220407-sputnik03.htm?_m=3n%2e002a%2e3297%2edk0ao43u5w%2e323s

    Turkey sends another quiet signal that it is non-aligned with NATO:
    https://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/library/news/saudi/2022/saudi-220407-voa02.htm?_m=3n%2e002a%2e3297%2edk0ao43u5w%2e3248

    Australia reinforces the growing sentiment that Hypersonic Kinetics are actually the future of warfare (the US had been maintaining a rhetorical framework that they were all sizzle, no steak):
    https://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/library/news/australia/2022/australia-220407-voa01.htm?_m=3n%2e002a%2e3297%2edk0ao43u5w%2e324d

  2. Kunning Drueger says:

    https://www.isegoria.net/2022/04/the-information-that-most-us-military-machines-collect-is-not-actually-processed-onboard-the-machine-itself/

    “The information that most US military machines collect is not actually processed onboard the machine itself… it is streamed back to an operations center in real time, terabyte by terabyte, which places a huge burden on military communications networks.”

    This seems like an interesting potential for “tactical ‘noise’ insertion.”

    • jim says:

      This is also a command and control flaw. While you want to collect buckets of information about the enemy, and share it widely, you are also sending buckets of information about yourself, which you do not want shared widely. The center is overwhelmed by data that it cannot handle, and is likely to leak. Large amounts of low value data carry patterns likely to reveal high value data to the enemy, even though there is a huge rigmarole about keeping top secret data top secret.

      Information should be analyzed in location physically close to the man on the field, and should not go up the chain to the center except on the basis of need to know, for the center, being far too big, has been penetrated. Information about the enemy, no problem. Information about the activities of the men on the field, big problem.

  3. Kunning Drueger says:

    https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-04-03/niall-ferguson-7-worst-case-scenarios-from-putin-s-ukraine-war?sref=ZMFHsM5Z

    There is much I don’t agree with in this article, but it is nonetheless interesting. At the very end, I feel like Ferguson is intimating that Corona was lab-leaked, but I may be misreading that…

    • jim says:

      He pays pious service to Cathedral lies, while implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, acknowledging that they are lies. A considerably better article than I expect from a name fag.

      • Kunning Drueger says:

        I think of Niall Ferguson as “chased,” which is a woebegone “based.” Chased intellectuals are about the only ones that should be spared and allowed to continue doing their “work,” but they must also have some kind of real job to prove their loyalty.

  4. Jamesthe1st says:

    Col. Macgregor speaks about 21st century warfare as belonging to whoever can master the art of precise rocket artillery strikes to take out enemy command structure. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbJ4FlTgEkA

  5. Kunning Drueger says:

    https://www.zerohedge.com/commodities/paradigm-shift-western-media-hasnt-grasped-yet-russian-ruble-relaunched-linked-gold-and

    Summary: The Russian central bank promised they’ll redeem a gram of gold for 5000 rubles no matter what happens. So it made a price floor. And since gold is traded in USD, they basically pegged the ruble to 80 rubles to 1 dollar. So back to the pre-war exchange rate. In addition, people will have to buy commodities using rubles, so since the rubble is pegged to gold (and Russia is the biggest exporter of natural gas, 3rd in oil, and so many other things) commodities can now be bought by using gold as a standard instead of the dollar.

    • Mayflower Sperg says:

      The Bank of Russia will buy gold for 5000 rubles a gram, but isn’t selling gold at any price.

      A floor on the price of gold is a ceiling on the price of rubles. What they’re saying is, you have to pay for Russian goods with rubles, but if you only have gold, a gram of gold counts as 5000 rubles. As long as this policy remains in effect, one ruble cannot be worth *more* than 1/5000 gram of gold, but it can be worth less.

  6. restitutor_orbis says:

    The date of April 1 having expired, I must declare I was wrong and Jim was right about the fighting in Ukraine. Russian forces were halted exactly as he predicted and nothing close to even a negotiated victory occurred on my timeline.

    I leave this here as a permanent record of my poor predictology!
    Please do not change my name to restitutor_obit 🙁

    • Kunning Drueger says:

      How dare you attempt to be as incorrect as myself.

    • Severian says:

      Actually it looks like decisive UKR victory in freeing Kiev Oblast and probably Chernihiv.

      If Putin doesn’t call reservists I assume they will stay with conquering Donbass and keeping a land bridge to Crimea up to Kherson, and give up on taking the East.

      • Kunning Drueger says:

        >decisive UKR victory

        Someone went to the Trudeau School of Geopolitics.

        • Severian says:

          The Russians are completely withdrawing from the Kiev region so yes, it was a victory.

        • Pooch says:

          Severian seems to be something of a UKR shill.

          • Severian says:

            I actually thought they would hold most of their captured territory to keep Ukraine troops tied up there as much as possible as they were digging up defenses.

            Kind of shocked they are retreating from there completely.

          • InsaneWorld says:

            I don’t think we can say Severian is a shill, to me it seems more likely he is less bullish/confident on Russia than many or most in the comment section.

            I remember before the war started February 24th just a couple days people were making fun of him saying that it seems like a war between Ukraine and Russia would happen very soon and that it was all ridiculous American propaganda and it wouldn’t happen.

            He turned out to be right about that one, all the commentators mocking him wrong.

            • Severian says:

              Is Jim a Ukraine shill? Because my opinions on the conflict are not very different from him.

              • Pooch says:

                I’ve noticed you repeating NY Times talking points about the war on more than one occasion like “decisive UKR victory”. Jim does not say this.

                • Severian says:

                  “A decisive victory is a military victory in battle that definitively resolves the objective being fought over, ending one stage of the conflict and beginning another stage.”

                  Pretty apt description for northern Ukraine.

                • Kunning Drueger says:

                  Severian, what is the objective being fought over? Your argument under the stage element is correct, but I think you’re delusional if you believe it was Russia’s goal to occupy Ukraine.

                • Severian says:

                  I think the initial objectives were to take eastern Ukraine and at least encircle Kiev.

                  I think current objectives are Donbas, land bridge to Crimea , and probably Kharkov and Odessa. I don’t know if they can take Kharkov and Odessa with the current force.

                  In related news, mass UKR surrender in Mariupol.
                  https://twitter.com/ELINTNews/status/1511059265905172485

                • Pooch says:

                  In related news, mass UKR surrender in Mariupol.
                  https://twitter.com/ELINTNews/status/1511059265905172485

                  I find it odd you cite ELINTNews which is a known UKR shill account (one of the worst offenders of all the OSINT shills).

                • Severian says:

                  He is but it’s the video I wanted to share.

                  For reliable info, one of the most credible sources from the conflict I’ve found are translations from Russian personnel on the ground.
                  Here’s a great view into the Donbas front.

                  https://twitter.com/AllThisEvil/status/1510713711098535938

                • Wulfgar Thundercock III says:

                  I do not get the same sense of suspicion from Severian as from Basil. Severian seems like someone who doubts the capabilities of Russia more than someone rooting for Russia to lose. I might disagree with him, but he sounds plausible as an actual person arguing from a different set of assumptions. Basil just sounds like a shill, whether or not he is paid. One more microphone for the mouth that speaks the party line.

            • Kunning Drueger says:

              Not really true, not really the point. Dissent is not the issue, it is the tracking with MSM/GAE talking points that trips my sensors, like with Basil. At least Basil the Coward puts effort into his Submit pilling.

              Most thought war unlikely. This was normalcy bias. Time and again, we forget to acknowledge Tyson Dementia: no matter how intelligent or accomplished you are at one thing or on one topic, you are an ignorant amateur on most topics.

      • jim says:

        Official Russian truth is that their objectives never changed from their prewar objectives. Peace (which they did not have for eight years) and buffer states.

        So if they wind up with peaceful borders on their client states and a Ukraine that is as much a nonalighed state as Hungary (the polls in Hungary show 75% support for neutrality), then victory.

      • Severian says:

        So it’s confirmed now Russians are pulling away from Sumy as well as Chernihiv. The whole Russian force in the North is withdrawing back to Belarus and Russian borders.

        • Mayflower Sperg says:

          This is liberating for Russia in a sense. Feint or not, by officially abandoning their plans to occupy Ukraine west of the 2010 election boundary, they can now bomb its infrastructure into dust, secure in the knowledge that the West, not Russia, will get stuck with the cost of rebuilding.

          • jim says:

            Even in World War II, bombing cities was more difficult and expensive than expected.

            Today, a lot more difficult and expensive, short of nukes.

            To resolve the war, to end it, it will be necessary to employ Information Epoch weapons, methods, tactics, and strategy.

            World War II warfighting methods just don’t work well enough to settle things.

            • Mayflower Sperg says:

              I don’t mean carpet-bombing cities into rubble. They did that in WW2 because it’s all they could do without precision guidance. I mean destroying airports, power plants, communication towers, bridges, factories, fuel storage and pipelines, i.e. anything that could help resupply the soldiers fighting in the Donbass.

              Especially bridges. You never want to bomb bridges in a country you plan to invade because you’ll need those bridges soon.

    • pyrrhus says:

      Nevertheless Putin has used only minimal forces, yet caused the US and its puppets to commit the own goal of endangering the dollar’s reserve status and forcing Russia’s customers to massively support the ruble…almost like a masterful judo stroke…
      And Russia will have no difficulty securing the Donbass and the corridor to the Crimea…

  7. Kunning Drueger says:

    Zelensky strips 2 generals of their rank for being “anti-heroes,” pledges to punish all “traitors” when he gets a free moment.

    https://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/library/news/ukraine/2022/03/ukraine-220331-voa01.htm?_m=3n%2e002a%2e3291%2edk0ao43u5w%2e31w2

    French Intel chief sacked for “lack of understanding of the issues in Ukraine,” which sounds suspiciously like a lack of sufficient holiness…

    https://www.globalsecurity.org/intell/library/news/2022/intell-220331-sputnik01.htm?_m=3n%2e002a%2e3291%2edk0ao43u5w%2e31wc

  8. Kunning Drueger says:

    From a Memri TV clip circulating at the moment:

    (translated from the Arabic)
    Harden your heart, oh Putin.
    Increase the attacks.
    Banish them to Palestine
    and we will marry the Ukrainian women.
    Also, we say to China:
    Invade Taiwan!
    Also, we say to China:
    Why don’t you invade Taiwan?
    This way we will smash the nose of the Americans
    who make the (Israeli) airplanes.
    Harden your heart, oh Putin.
    Increase your attacks.
    Banish them to Palestine
    and we will marry Ukrainian women.”

  9. Kunning Drueger says:

    Look at these Mountain Mohammedans having a ball fucking up the GAE:

    https://twitter.com/RWApodcast/status/1509279202201247752

    POV: Wulfgar, Aidan, and Kunning on vacation in San Francisco at Google headquarters. Pooch is holding the camera. TC is around the corner chatting up a whore.

  10. Kunning Drueger says:

    Here’s the source:

    https://twitter.com/RealScottRitter/status/1508813631311466496?s=20&t=7DxYGlucU-kIAv0wsnIVDQ

    Here’s the text:

    1/ Big Arrow War—a primer. For all those scratching their heads in confusion, or dusting off their dress uniforms for the Ukrainian victory parade in Kiev, over the news about Russia’s “strategic shift”, you might want to re-familiarize yourself with basic military concepts.
    2/ Maneuver warfare is a good place to start. Understand Russia started its “special military operation” with a severe manpower deficit—200,000 attackers to some 600,000 defenders (or more). Classic attritional conflict was never an option. Russian victory required maneuver.
    3/ Maneuver war is more psychological than physical and focuses more on the operational than on the tactical level. Maneuver is relational movement—how you deploy and move your forces in relation to your opponent. Russian maneuver in the first phase of its operation support this.
    4/ The Russians needed to shape the battlefield to their advantage. In order to do this, they needed to control how Ukraine employed it’s numerically superior forces, while distributing their own smaller combat power to best accomplish this objective.
    5/ Strategically, to facilitate the ability to maneuver between the southern, central, and northern fronts, Russia needed to secure a land bridge between Crimea and Russia. The seizure of the coastal city of Mariupol was critical to this effort. Russia has accomplished this task.
    6/ While this complex operation unfolded, Russia needed to keep Ukraine from maneuvering its numerically superior forces in a manner that disrupted the Mariupol operation. This entailed the use of several strategic supporting operations—feints, fixing operations, and deep attack.
    7/ The concept of a feint is simple—a military force either is seen as preparing to attack a given location, or actually conducts an attack, for the purpose of deceiving an opponent into committing resources in response to the perceived or actual actions.
    8/ The use of the feint played a major role in Desert Storm, where Marine Amphibious forces threatened the Kuwaiti coast, forcing Iraq to defend against an attack that never came, and where the 1st Cavalry Division actually attacked Wadi Al Batin to pin down the Republican Guard.
    9/ The Russians made extensive use of the feint in Ukraine, with Amphibious forces off Odessa freezing Ukrainian forces there, and a major feint attack toward Kiev compelling Ukraine to reinforce their forces there. Ukraine was never able to reinforce their forces in the east.
    10/ Fixing operations were also critical. Ukraine had assembled some 60,000-100,000 troops in the east, opposite Donbas. Russia carried out a broad fixing attack designed to keep these forces fully engaged and unable to maneuver in respect to other Russian operations.
    11/ During Desert Storm, two Marine Divisions were ordered to carry out similar fixing attacks against Iraqi forces deployed along the Kuwaiti-Saudi border, tying down significant numbers of men and material that could not be used to counter the main US attack out west.
    12/ The Russian fixing attack pinned the main Ukrainian concentration of forces in the east, and drove them away from Mariupol, which was invested and reduced. Supporting operations out of Crimea against Kherson expanded the Russian land bridge. This phase is now complete.
    13/ Russia also engaged in a campaign of strategic deep attack designed to disrupt and destroy Ukrainian logistics, command & control, and air power and long-range fire support. Ukraine is running out of fuel and ammo, cannot coordinate maneuver, and has no meaningful Air Force.
    14/ Russia is redeploying some of its premier units from where they had been engaged in feint operations in northern Kiev to where they can support the next phase of the operation, namely the liberation of the Donbas and the destruction of the main Ukrainian force in the east.
    15/ This is classic maneuver warfare. Russia will now hold Ukraine in the north and south while its main forces, reinforced by the northern units, Marines, and forces freed up by the capture of Mariupol, seek to envelope and destroy 60,000 Ukrainian forces in the east.
    16/ This is Big Arrow War at its finest, something Americans used to know but forgot in the deserts and mountains of Afghanistan and Iraq. It also explains how 200,000 Russians have been able to defeat 600,000 Ukrainians. Thus ends the primer on maneuver warfare, Russian style.

    So… is Russia still stuck? Is this all just a reorganization of the narrative? Or was the Donbas the goal and Kiev and subsumption a feint? If Russia pulls out of everywhere except the Donbas, Crimea, and the Corridor, GAE is going to have a hard time manufacturing a not-war, particularly if UKR has an intact army in terms of manpower with all of its toys broken or captured.

    • jim says:

      If it was a feint, and quite possibly it was, it was a feint I found highly convincing.

      Possibly it was no feint, but Russia, having gained experience in twenty first century is now restructuring its military goals to accommodate the new reality, making it retrospectively a feint.

      Or possibly it was feint all along, but if so, cost Russia rather more lives and tanks than expected.

      But, feint in retrospect, or feint from the beginning. It now was a feint.

      • Jehu says:

        Or perhaps whether it would be a feint or not would be determined by which World was closest to the Real World.

        Was it

        1) The Ukrainians would fight about as well as the Afghan auxiliaries of the Americans did

        or

        2) The Ukrainians were rotted significantly, but hatred of Russia and the Eastern european thing means they’ll fight pretty hard

        or

        3) The Ukrainians would fight very hard, at least at peer capability to the Russians

        If you don’t know in advance which world is true, you have to make your plans incorporating all 3 possibilities and hopefully divining which is most true very quickly once the shooting starts.

        If 1) is true or likely to be true, it’s foolish not to try a coup de main early. It’s also wise in 1) case not to be as harsh initially.

        if 2) is the case or 3), you need to grasp the nettle. If 3), you need some fancy maneuver to avoid the attrition that you can’t really afford.

        All things considered, I don’t think the Russian general staff did all that bad. Maybe in a year or so we’ll get real casualty figures and see what the new borders are.

  11. The Cominator says:

    https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/26/president-joe-biden-to-propose-new-20percent-minimum-billionaire-tax-.html

    20% on over 100 million
    Where did you hear I want 30% on over 10 million
    I can’t believe you think I want 40% on over 1 million

    You better have my 50% on over 100000

    https://img.ifunny.co/images/1a1bbb4798fc2ad2760d55119671a0d1cc5922d7ccf7f9afaa27cc0361d6d08e_1.jpg

    • pyrrhus says:

      When their accountants and lawyers get finished, the billionaires will pay minimal taxes as usual…the giant corporation for whom I practiced law paid no taxes at all for years on end…

  12. Severian says:

    This business of Europe having to pay for oil and gas in rubble is interesting. They say they wont.
    Will Russia allow them to pay in gold? They seem to be serious about this.

    • Pooch says:

      I’ve heard “unfriendly” countries must pay in Ruble. “Friendly” countries can pay potentially pay in anything including Gold or Bitcoin.

      • pyrrhus says:

        Yes, Putin just reaffirmed that they pay in rubles or get no gas–“we are not a charity”…Europe hasn’t offered to pay in gold, and might not have enough, but that would be interesting…

        • Pooch says:

          Gold payment would only be allowed for friendly countries ie China, India, etc as far as I have read.

          • jim says:

            It is impractical for Russians to receive payment in gold from an unfriendly country, or even from a friendly country with high levels of elite defection, because the gold would be intercepted. And these days every major trading country has high levels of elite defection, particularly China.

            And impractical for Russians to receive payment in Euros or dollars, because the Euros or dollars would be intercepted on the ground of sanctions.

            Thus the Putin policy simply reflects what is in the individual interests of individual businessmen who are simply trying to do business and are horrified that war is in the way.

            Every businessman in every country has one foot in the same boat, since every businessman doing business internationally is evading sanctions, or might well be evading sanctions unknowingly, because there is no clear way of complying with sanctions, or doing business with someone who is evading sanctions, or likely to be accused of attempting to evade sanctions by someone who wants to seize money in transit.

            This is making it very difficult to do business internationally.

            I would like to say “crypto currency to the rescue”, but …

            Bitcoin and Monero are both hitting their scaling limits hard, even though the Monero blockchain is nowhere near as large as the bitcoin blockchain.

            Neither data structure was designed to handle enormous sizes, and the Monero data structure handles enormous sizes considerably worse even than the Bitcoin data structure.

            There is no way of knowing the bitcoin current mutable state (the set of unspent transaction outputs, the set of public keys that govern non zero value on the blockchain) other than grinding through the entire immutable append only data structure from the beginning without a single error or failure, and in Monaro, there is in a sense no way of knowing the current state at all, which makes it very possible that due to subtle bugs or coordinated fraud (brigading), Monaro is being inflated under the covers.

            To scale, you have to have a data structure that gracefully handles some small part of the data getting lost, corrupted, or incorrectly processed. And we just don’t have that. It has long been known how to do that, but it just has not been done.

            If you have a single corruption or data loss issue in the bitcoin blockchain, you have to re-index, which takes a very long time. And if you have a single corruption or data loss issue in the Monaro blockchain, you have to re-download the entire blockchain from the beginning, because the Monaro blockchain is all one gigantic memory mapped file. Which takes a very long time. And as the blockchains get larger and larger, data corruption necessarily happens more and more often.

            Once a single memory mapped file gets big enough, it is always going to have data corruption and data loss issues. Monaro does have all sorts of measures to mostly accommodate this problem most of the time, but as the blockchain gets larger and larger, they take longer and longer, and failures that cannot be accommodated happen more and more often.

            • Kunning Drueger says:

              Can you help me understand how this buggy, error prone, slow, easily infiltrated, complicated to use, impossible to understand currency that doesn’t hold its value is going to replace fiat currency? The situation Russia is facing as well the Canadian truckers, hard Right politicians, all of these were specific situations that cryptocurrency was supposed to address. What happened?

              • jim says:

                Crypto currency is replacing fiat currency. The breakdown of trust and trustworthiness means that there is no alternative. That is why scaling problems are now biting hard, and will soon be biting a great deal harder.

                People creating crypto currencies want to get something up and running in a hurry. It works, at first, it continues to work for a very long time. And after a while, there are problems, and the problems get bigger. And then you try to get around to fixing it. And often the original design failed to anticipate these future fixes, and the fixes are hard to install on top.

                • Kunning Drueger says:

                  Do you at least see why I am pessimistic about war 2.0? There’s all these grandiose ideas and assertions about what could be done, and people are off and running as if it is exactly what will be done. But when the rubber meets the road, the implementation doesn’t stand up to actual use.

                  We forget that it was many centuries and billions of lives that went into representational currency and banking and social trust networks. Just like marriage and mannerbund, some things can’t just be innovated into being, no matter how cool they sound. We aren’t ready for cryptocurrency. We can’t even protect male friendship or traditional marriage.

                • jim says:

                  > We forget that it was many centuries and billions of lives that went into representational currency and banking and social trust networks

                  We do not forget it. We observe it burning. The fire started in 1928, and has been getting bigger and bigger. And anyone trying to put the fire out is likely to get shot.

                • Adam says:

                  The money problem is not nearly as hard to solve as the pussy problem. Pussy is more valuable, more motivating and has a mind of its own.

                  Seems like bitcoin is a victim of its own success. I don’t foresee infinite trust across an infinite timeline anymore than I foresee perpetual motion, but someone will come up with a solution. Then the next problem will appear and it will get replaced again.

                  I don’t know that I see one coin to rule them all so much as one coin for now, then another later, and another and so on.

            • Mister Grumpus says:

              @Jim:
              “It is impractical for Russians to receive payment in gold from an unfriendly country, or even from a friendly country with high levels of elite defection, because the gold would be intercepted. And these days every major trading country has high levels of elite defection, particularly China.”

              I have to pause on this one and let it sink in. That is one heck of an assertion “if true”.

              The idea that no human organization anywhere, not the Russian security service or their Ministry of Defense or anybody, could “simply” set up some desks or branch offices (I’ve suggested inside Russian embassies, but whatever), guys with sunglasses and guns standing around, where someone could bring in an invoice and some gold bars and walk out with the invoice stamped “PAID”, is just shocking to me.

              I’m not saying it’s therefore not true. I’m saying that to imagine that there isn’t one single “club” of guys who can set up and conduct something so simple and conducive to world peace as this, is highly alarming.

              I know I know. Covid response, for example.

              But this doesn’t involve the public, the majority. This is just some guys paying their bills, like how we paid our own bills with cash at the grocery store back in the day. If this is where I’m exactly wrong, please do explain, because I must need this.

              • jim says:

                Sure, the Russian embassy could find some people with guns it could trust with a pile of gold. But then it has to move that pile of gold from those people with guns to some other people in another country with guns.

                Suppose embassy is in, for example, Germany. Then they are buggered, because the gold will be intercepted if they try to move it.

                Gold is only valuable if you can move it around. It is hard to move it around and rapidly becoming harder to move it around.

                I cannot take gold through an airport, and Russia cannot take gold through an airport. Russia says that friendly countries can pay in gold and unfriendly countries cannot. What is a friendly country? It is a country where Russia could probably take gold through the airport.

    • Mister Grumpus says:

      If gold really is “worth” what it’s “worth” officially, how many years of the EU buying oil & gas with it until there’s none left?

      • Cloudswrest says:

        Why would it get “used up”? Gold is a element, it’s not a consumable. The gold gets “recycled” buying other sh!t from the original party.

        • Kunning Drueger says:

          But there is a hard limit to the amount of processed gold, right? People will be banking it away as well as spending it.

          TBQH fam, I would love to revert to a gold economy, because I bet other precious metals would be used, meaning hack silver and war bands are back en vogue. There’s also a level of enforced honesty when the wealth holders have to hire men to keep their hordes safe. It wouldn’t be perfect utopia, but it would be better… if somewhat more brutal, slow, and complicated. But a lot of the Cathedral’s power and influence is predicated on “ease and simplicity.”

          • jim says:

            > But there is a hard limit to the amount of processed gold, right? People will be banking it away

            Banking gold is unsafe, and rapidly becoming less and less safe.

        • pyrrhus says:

          If the sanctions are removed, Europe would get some of it back most likely…in the present situation, not only is trade blocked, but ethnic Russians are having their stuff confiscated without the slightest legality..That will discourage trade, since there is no way to protect what you buy unless it is delivered inside Russia…

    • pyrrhus says:

      They pay in euros to the pipeline’s bank (which is not under sanctions), which then buys the rubles…

  13. The Cominator says:

    To paraphrase doctor Zhivago

    In leftst media terms the Ukraine war is between the sovereign liberal Democracy of Ukraine and Putin’s Russian dictatorship.

    In reactionary terms the Ukraine war is a proxy war between globohomo satanic elites and Putin and the Russian security state and while we want Russia to win neither side is ideal.

    Nonetheless our task the shitposters task is to meme humiliation and defeat for globohomo, to meme all the hardships imposed by this war on our leaders… and from defeat will come the Restoration, and the Restoration will be victory for us. The reaction looks to the normies and disaffected military officers to overthrow the system… when oil and food become unaffordable they’ll be ready to listen.

    • The Ducking Man says:

      >when oil and food become unaffordable they’ll be ready to listen

      I need reactionary explanation why Great Depression 1930s happened. Mainstream literature put the blame on the Fed. But the depression lasted almost on entire world economy and Fed issue (like we observed 2008-2009) is last piece of domino falling. Also they still had gold standard around, so I don’t think the blame is entirely on Fed.

      So, what happened during those time?

      • Karl says:

        The blame is entirely on the FED. Austrian economists blame the FED for allowing way too much credit growth in the 20s thereby creating a bubble. Mainstream economists blame the FED for not inflating enough after the bubble bursted

        • The Ducking Man says:

          So in short, it was basically pre-2009 recession but on high dose steroid?

        • The Cominator says:

          The Fed system as setup by Woodrow Wilson and boys was particularly retarded even worse than now…

          Not only did you have a debt based currency that constantly had to expand or collapse… you had a debt based currency that was also in gold.

      • pyrrhus says:

        The Rothschilds allowed their bank in Austria to collapse, in 1931… though they could have saved it, and FDR was anti-business so killed off the US recovery in 1936 with huge new taxes…

      • Kunning Drueger says:

        I can’t tell you why it started, but it lasted 10 years because the cure was worse than the sickness. FDR and his cronies were experimenting with Keynesian bullshit and consolidating disparate elements of the economy. Nothing they did worked; the war pulled the US out completely, but only after FDR was in firm control memetically, meaning intervention, statalization, and command economy had become precedential.

      • Pooch says:

        Also they still had gold standard around, so I don’t think the blame is entirely on Fed.

        The Fed was brutally abusing the gold standard.

      • Red says:

        There was a lot of inflation during WW1 and inflation & debt inflation continued after the war. The US kept bailing out other countries and international banks as they became insolvent mostly with inflation generated debt. Eventually this was no longer enough and the bubble popped. The depression lasted exactly in nations as long as it took to liquidate the debt. Some nations like the US generally made it illegal to foreclose and started doing a whole bunch of socialism which dragged the depression on forever. Other countries like Japan and German existed the depression very quickly as Japan had no debt and Germany had inflated it’s debts away.

        Depressions always end once the debt is liquidated which in the US didn’t happen until 1947 when most states ended there no foreclosure laws and FDR’s socialism was somewhat repealed by congress.

        • jim says:

          Bankers have an incentive to create unsustainable debt bubbles. To prevent this, need to pop term transformation bubbles early and often, and have draconian consequences for bankers that fail. But, because bankers have a lot of pull, and because sovereigns tend to lose control of their bureaucracy, the opposite policy tends to be followed.

          Popping a term transformation bubble is painful and hurts a lot of people, primarily powerful and influential people, so the problem keeps getting kicked down the road until it gets too big to kick.

          That the Rothschilds were out of power was suddenly revealed to everyone when their too big to kick any further bubble got popped in 1931. Which is why today all the the Soros shills say “Rothschilds, Rothschilds, Rothschilds, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain”

      • Aidan says:

        Why did it start? The credit bubble popped. Why did it last so long? Socialism

  14. Imran Khan may be couped out of power soon:

    https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/pakistan/imran-blames-foreign-hand-for-his-trouble/articleshow/90481859.cms

    Seems his recent Russia visit is not appreciated by the CIA handlers of the Pak Army.

  15. Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pike_(munition)

    These are the sorts of things i expect to see becoming more common; both for shooting down portable air platforms (eg, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AeroVironment_Switchblade); and also for portable air platforms to shoot down each other.

    • Red says:

      Anti-Done drones do seem like the optimal way to protect areas and troops against drone attacks.

      • Red says:

        Anti-Drone*

      • Kunning Drueger says:

        I think point defense lasers would be better, but expensive. Maybe an EMP generator of some sort? Is that possible?

        • jim says:

          point defense lasers are impractical.

          If you want to deliver a lot of power really fast on your target, your power conversion system has to be reasonably efficient or else ridiculously big, otherwise the power will do more damage to it than to your target.

          The only reasonably efficient laser system is the free electron laser, which is ridiculously big, despite being reasonably efficient, because it has to accelerate electrons to a decent fraction of the speed of light, and then run them through very strong magnetic fields that change very rapidly over a very short distance.

          In principle we could make it smaller by making the distance over which the magnetic fields change very small, but this requires really small electron beams, which gets in the way of delivering a lot of power. One could use a lot of very small electron beams, but this complicates everything.

      • Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

        On larger (that is, vehicular) scales of course, besides used of cheap tube fired PGMs, I continue to bang on the HPM drum. All the potential in terms of capabilities already exists, the biggest obstacle is ‘first mover’ inertia, the lack of preconceived notion of such things existing in most people’s mind; much like drone proliferation itself; but in turn of course, as proliferation of small long endurance delivery platforms increases, so too will demand for means of quickly and easily churning through a whole lot of them at a time.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter-battery_radar

        >Counter-battery radars operate at microwave frequencies with relatively high average energy consumption (up to the tens of kilowatts). The area immediately forward of the radar array for high energy radars is dangerous to human health. The intense radar waves of systems like the AN/TPQ-36 can also detonate electrically fused ammunition at short ranges.

        For that matter, power generation multiple times greater, on the order of exponents, and at significant levels of gain/directionality, is within the means of components in use even now.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next_Generation_Jammer

        >One unique aspect of the NGJ is that its AESA array combines EW, coms, radar, and signals intelligence; AESA is known to perform EW and radar, but also handling SIGINT and serving as a communications array are new capabilities.

        The pieces are all there, it waits only for a man with an organization to see and put them all together.

        • jim says:

          No weapon is a useful information epoch weapon except in its use of information.

          Weapons that can reach out a very long way and target very precisely are apt to be useful in the information epoch, but it is their targeting and control that makes them likely to be useful and effective.

          Lasers and such are a distraction. Thermal infrared sights are likely to be a critical technology.

          In the information epoch, what matters is gathering information on the enemy, and denying the enemy information on oneself.

          Point defense systems assume you have already been targeted. At which point it is a bit late for information epoch warfare.

          What makes the Bayraktar TB2 highly effective is that by the time you see it, you are probably dead.

          An aircraft carrier is a gigantic point defense system. The more point defense you pack on a system, the more expensive it is, and the more valuable a target it is. We will likely soon see how carriers do against mach 7 Chinese drones. In the event that they survive, which I do not expect, then next up, mach 14 drones.

          • Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

            My view is i don’t see these use-cases as mutually exclusive. A hammer can hit many different nails.

  16. Red says:

    FAA is still stalling on Starship. They kicked the can for another month.

    • jim says:

      If stalling this long, will stall forever.

      • Starman says:

        The FAA is trying to get the Fish and Wildlife Service to go along with Boca Chica spaceport.

        • Ghost says:

          Anyone remember the Mars One project (not movie) where volunteers donated money and a video application?

          Well, I have yet to hear of a planet we could actually reach. A more realistic goal would be to set up a space station on the surface of the Moon. A Mars station… somethings goes wrong, its curtains.

        • Ghost says:

          Anyone remember the Mars One project (not movie) where volunteers donated money and a video application?

          Well, I have yet to hear of a planet we could actually reach. A more realistic goal would be to set up a space station on the surface of the Moon. A Mars station… somethings goes wrong, its curtains.

          • Kunning Drueger says:

            If something goes wrong on the ISS, like really wrong, it’s curtains as well. Movies have people believing you can engage targets at 50+ feet with a pistol using one hand, get in a fist fight with head blows and just go about your day, and that space is easily navigable. Until a tether or skyhook is set up, as well as intermediate craft that can navigate between counterweight base/ hook gantry, space ops should just come with an assumed “if you fuck up you die” clause.

            There was a startup trying to get a rotating space station set up, something that rotates to give artificial gravity… found it: Orbital Assembly.

            https://investorplace.com/2022/02/orbital-assembly-corp-gives-exposure-to-explosive-market/

            If you go to the website (I did this a while back) it is lousy with the typical progressive drivel. So I am not super hopeful. But we’ll see. I think we should leave Mars to Musk and focus on LEO/HEO semi-permanent stations.

          • Cloudswrest says:

            To “safely” go to Mars, or even the moon, requires a fleet for backup and redundancy. Columbus didn’t discover the New world with one ship, neither did Magellan circumnavigate the world with one ship.

            The ideal setup for a Lunar, or Mars, base is to:

            1. Locate a suitably sized small crater.
            2. properly grade it with robot equipment.
            3. Plop down a gas tight inflatable enclosure, like those big tennis courts.
            4. Gradually inflate as you back fill over the top with regolith, which serves as pressure ballast.
            5. Reinforce the interior with columns/cable stays at your leisure.

            The regolith ballast serves three functions.
            1. Pressure ballast.
            2. Thermal insulation.
            3. Radiation shield.

            For larger settlements one should build a circumferencial rail vehicle system inside the perimeter to provide 1 G of acceleration for normal gravity.

            Other improvements would be large vertical cylinder/weighted piston pressure regulators.

    • Severian says:

      What’s SpaceX’s word on it? Are they ready for orbital test now?
      I think they’re still doing testing.

      Maybe they’re invested in flying the SLS before starship just out of sheer embarrassment.

      • Ash says:

        Lone skun and his spacesex

        Sorry, weird elon musk has an anagram with these letters
        multi billionaire

        It feels like satan laughs at us and destroys

        • Ash says:

          Lone skum presenting his spacesex..

          Need more pornos for my blue eyes

          • Anon says:

            lmfao nice to see the actual schizos out in full force today

            • Ash says:

              Oh look, a white idiot with his superior culture insulting me..

              You go girl, get your pornos!

              • Anon says:

                didn’t you say you were Dutch in another thread? If you’re Dutch why are you such a self-hating white person, or are you just colored person who hates whites/

                • Kunning Drueger says:

                  This troll has 2 goals: complicate the board with pointless contributions, and force useful responders to waste bandwidth engaging with him. This is why he throws in risible and preposterous claims at a rate of 1-3 per statement. The moment you respond, he starts to move diagonally through orthogonal topics. He will not be pinned down, or respond in good faith. I am of the opinion he should be taken out back and shot, but for convenience and to save on paperwork and legal fees, best to just put him on moderation.

                • Ash says:

                  Pardon me kind sir, let me explain this as best as possible without breaking laws

                  But I doubt very much whether you care..

                  I ponded what you know of Western culture.. until USA obliterated western Europe and feeds everyone propaganda..

                  You insulted me kind sir, by stating autism.

                  I know in today’s age we must be tolerant, and in the most intolerant times with the evilist of men, when a man was insulted between 1100-1860 or so, it was typical to duel to death (sometimes varsity students would duel in front of witnesses, miss and declare no contest), sometimes it was business related and not with guns..

                  I must deplore such evil behaviour in front of witness, cannot believe how violent whites are… But do you think I or you would simply insult a man with such ramifications ? Good thing evil white men no longer exist…

                  Your TV is so good now, just call someone racist without consequences : )

            • Ash says:

              Lmfao ? Did it taste nice when lone skum went ass to your mouth… Very cultured, right ? Can’t tell the difference between shit or chocolate?

            • Kunning Drueger says:

              He’s desperately seeking attention. I think it’s a different type of shill attack, similar to the gif/sticker bomb attacks that derail the Telegram channels and imageboard threads.

            • Neofugue says:

              He is not schizo, he is the essence of human garbage. Even lowly fast food employees have the dignity and self-respect to avoid vulgarity if not spell check, though I suspect he may be a dot-Indian shill.

              It is surprising how he continues to make it past moderation. His comments contribute nothing to the conversation other than demonstrate pride in hedonism and perversion.

              • Neofugue says:

                *apologies for comparing human garbage with lowly service workers, no one should be compared to someone like that

                • Kunning Drueger says:

                  My guess is Jim is ignoring, or documenting this latest iteration. The destabilization shill tactic, like porn threads on /b/, works well for disrupting with disagreeing or debating. More than actual entryists and ShareBlue, the pornographic deluge posts suffocate discourse and drive out moral men, not to mention distracting younger men and encouraging the onanistic tendency.

                  It’s a powerful tactic; if you ignore it, it festers, and if you engage, it goes nowhere.

      • Starman says:

        They are still doing testing. They are waiting on Raptor 2 production and the results of the OLT/Full launch vehicle testing.

        Also, OLT (Orbital Launch Tower) segments are already in full production for KSC Florida (Pad 39A) which is already approved for launches up to the size of the Nova rocket (27 million LBF).

        • Red says:

          They’ll never launch out of Boca unless the faggots running this country orders the FAA to stop gumming up the work. It’s likely that they’ll never launch from Florida either for the same reason.

          • jim says:

            On the one hand, the US government wants access to space for reasons of national prestige and military capability.

            On the other hand, the holy priests of woke are angry with with priests of tech for whiteness, maleness, heterosexuality, and suspected heresy, and believe that all tech was stolen from brave warrior women of subsaharan Africa, and needs to be returned and buried there so that it can sprout again from the fertile African soil.

            If Caesar wants rockets, even if it is tranny Caesar, he is going to have to shoot a few of the priests of woke.

            Mao, alas, believed in the labor theory of value, which meant he believed that if he commanded peasants to labor at producing steel, then there would be steel.

            There was no steel. I fear that trannie Caesar may spend a very long time waiting for rockets to sprout from the fertile soil of Africa.

            • Starman says:

              @Red @jim

              If “tranny caesar” won’t maintain the USG space supremacy, then Russia and China will KILL the United States elite.

            • Ash says:

              Lol, this is the funniest and most accurate comment I’ve read

              Ye, if enough people believe bitcoin, it will continue, last and do well..I would buy in late and if electricity is out in the West, unsure how it could be valued correctly

              Your response for the latest article is a very chinese and jovial manner with high information discussion.. typically in Chinese culture you can joke and point out a name or business name, everyone laughs and someone with more information gives a laugh about the name before explaining in detail the success and hard work..

              Pardon me, of course I bring up porno, majority of westerners are engulfed in it.. can bring up for example Elon musk’s name is an anagram for lone skum.. instead of joke, just hatred..

              As for recording my messages.. don’t care, more than welcome too, I never insulted any individual until they insulted me

              • jim says:

                > Ye, if enough people believe bitcoin, it will continue, last and do well..I would buy in late and if electricity is out in the West, unsure how it could be valued correctly

                If electricity goes out in the West, bitcoin is likely to become a great deal more valuable in the world than it is now, and if you are still in the West by that time, it will be the only thing of value you can take with you when you flee.

  17. Calvin says:

    Whoever has their hands on Biden’s strings today is calling for regime change in Russia now:

    https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/biden-calls-for-regime-change-in-russia-putin-cannot-remain-in-power/ar-AAVw4et

    Prep your fallout shelters, I guess.

    • Pooch says:

      Only for a “White House official” to quickly respond with damage control:

      A White House official said after Biden’s remarks: “The President’s point was that Putin cannot be allowed to exercise power over his neighbors or the region. He was not discussing Putin’s power in Russia, or regime change.”

      https://www.axios.com/biden-poland-russian-invasion-ukraine-1cc38b00-abb8-4167-bf89-2671a42cab6f.html

      Sounds like infighting between whoever is shoving the speech in front of Biden’s face and other members of the Admin.

      • Kunning Drueger says:

        Per the MSN article, the claim is that Biden’s statement wasn’t originally part of the script… I mean speech. If we look back to the campaign, Biden has a penchant for saying the parts that aren’t supposed to be said aloud. Interestingly enough, this seems to be the glimmer of honest morality left in the man; he lacks that aura of hifalutin deceit characteristic of the Obama era. “We know better than the filthy white commoners, so we will do what’s needed, but we can’t actually say it or the rednecks will whine.” This comes off as a tendency to say what was discussed behind closed doors. All the highlighted gaffs of the campaign were examples of this, like the “you ain’t black…” statement. This was obviously a statement by some Ivy League mulatto on the staff that tickled his fancy.

        I think the two camps are Cold War v. Hot War, or not-war v. holy war. It isn’t No War v. War. The former is decidedly worse than the latter, because the not-war camp are the “adults in the room.” It looks like the drums are beating out a staccato inevitability. With the endemic incompetence, things will get out of hand. If/when Bolton and the neo-con warhawks get brought in, then it is bunker time.

      • jim says:

        The not-war faction is still sort of in charge, but it is getting a rough ride.

        Which is likely to get considerably rougher. I anticipate quite a few of them committing suicide by two bullets in the back of the head in a few years.

  18. DavyCrockett says:

    While we can’t know with 100% certainty, I think that Jim is right for the most part that Russia seems to have had maximalist aim, or at least very significant goals of either installing a puppet government or more than simply getting Ukraine to stop performing not-war in the Donbass and giving some recognition or partial recognition of Crimea/ the Donbass, against some of the commentators here that think Putin/Russia were always going for fairly minimalist goals from the beginning when they tried to invade Kiev.

    I have to say that it would be kind of sad and weak if Putin really would go all out trying to capture the Capital on all of the Major Eastern, Northern, and Southern cities and invading on all fronts including via Belarus after joint exercises if all he was planning to gain from all of that\

    This is why I’m extremely skeptical of commentators who claim that Putin/Russia was always planning to have a war that would take more than month to complete with heavy fighting to try to take the Capital, Kharkov, etc. while not going for maximalist or very strong goals.

    Not full proof evidence ofc., but there was a Russian article posted by Ria Russia (a state owned Russian news company) on February 26th at 8 AM exactly Russian time, seemingly automatically, unclear whether intentionally or by accident. This article seems to assume that Ukraine already was or was about to have a solidly pro-Russia puppet government in the vein of Belarus that would conclusively put it back in Russia’s sphere of influence. It’s in Russian so you can read it if you know the language, though the automatic google translate conveys the meaning. Link below.

    https://web.archive.org/web/20220226051154/https://ria.ru/20220226/rossiya-1775162336.html

    • DavyCrockett says:

      if all he was planning to gain from all of that was a minimalist or moderate victory with concessions. *

    • Red says:

      It’s always best to plan for multiple outcomes and to accept limited objectives when the costs become to high. But it’s very unlikely the GAE will allow peace in the Ukraine. I think it likely that Putin is making another serious mistake. I can’t predict the future, but the future’s so bright I gotta wear shades.

      It’s a weird world we live in where every major faction is lead by incompetent leaders.

      • jim says:

        Blitzkreig did not work, does not work in the Information Epoch, due to man carried anti tank missiles that are autonomous once fired: “fire and forget”

        Attrition is not working either, and the Russians have also given up on it, apart from the port city of Mariupol. World War I attrition was artillery steadily banging away. When artillery steadily bangs away, it reveals its exact position. It is a high value target, and it was pounding low value targets. Similarly, area bombing. The bomber is a high value target, bombing low value targets.

        Attempting to inflict costs on the enemy using World War I methods are considerably more expensive these days.

        I think Putin is a smart cookie, and has some more cards up his sleeve.

        I have confidence that things will take a considerable turn for the better in Ukraine – but not through attrition and blitzkrieg. It will take a while to re-orient, prepare, and adapt.

      • alf says:

        I think it likely that Putin is making another serious mistake.

        If priesting is all you’ve got, you give your support to the most likely next Caesar.

        Trump was the most unlikely of next Caesars, but Jim was still correct in giving him his support while he had the chance.

        Putin already is a Caesar with about 20 years of experience under his belt. He ain’t perfect, nobody is, but he’s got my support. To be honest, folk on the internet saying they’d do a better job than Trump back in the day bored me back then, and I’m sure folk telling me they’d do a better job than Putin today will have the same effect.

        • Kunning Drueger says:

          Hey Alf, I have edit notes for your project if you want them. I saw you were doing a draft proofread and thought it might be helpful. If that is unwanted, please let me know and I’ll stop. I’m up to “The return of the scientific method: economics,”

      • jim says:

        It was a huge mistake to go with World War II tactics, but the generals around the world are set in their ways, and every military except Turkey’s would have made the same mistake.

        Putin has made a whole lot of very smart moves, and it is likely he will make some more by and by.

    • Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

      In combat sports like vale tudo or boxing, you can sometimes see episodes where you have a guy with a reputation for heavy hands. And you have guys matched up with him, they go into the fight thinking, ‘i dont wanna be knocked out by this guy’. Reasonable enough. What behavior arises out of this though? Their lizard brain is feeling, ‘this guy is dangerous’, and so the instinct becomes, ‘hes a hot potato, i should keep away’. How does this instinct play out in a fight, though?

      One thing that so often happens is they become real tentative, not taking initiative at any time, and letting the other guy pick his moments at his leisure without worry. The opponent’s fear of the reputed guy’s power, basically solves the whole distance management game for him, without even really having to actually excel at it.

      Another thing that often happens is when they do move to take a shot, so often it’s just one and done, and then they immediately try to back strait out again. This is one of the worst things you can possibly do in a fist fight; because, it is basically ‘crossing the line twice’; by moving in and then immediately out of the pocket along the same vector, an opponent would basically be gifting you the opportunity to crack him a good one while they are both in range, yet at the same time also on the back foot, and in no position to defend or maneuver or retaliate. What needs to be impressed on the athlete in training is the seemingly counterintuitive notion that when you move into the opponent with an attack, the safest direction you can go is to *continue* forwards, moving into the clinch, which allows you to stifle their counterattacks, and open the opportunity to beat them up through infighting (which you of course have trained him to be proficient in); or at the very least use combinations and hit them with a quick bump before stepping off at a different angle, circling around them.

      Ultimately, the behavior that arose out of the desire to not be knocked out, greatly increased the athlete’s chances of being knocked out. Happens all the time, something even very good fighters have fallen prey too.

      Which is something that helps illustrate a broader point; where a certain sentiment is felt, and a behavior arises from that sentiment; but does the behavior actually connect in reality with what is desired? That is another question.

      It is a stumbling block that is both subtle, and also highly common. The thinking that if a being desires a certain end, that actions they take will necessarily help serve it; or likewise that if a being does not accomplish a certain end, they must not have actually wanted it.

      The impression i got in the early days of conflict is that the russians intended not to stick around in ukraine; that the plan would be to go in, flex muscles, and leave a trail of kicked butts and more favorable government behind.

      It’s an notion i consider maladaptive for several reasons.

      Powers are always going into wars with a ‘the boys will be home by christmas’ attitude, and then likewise always find themselves themselves wrongfooted by events blithly carrying on past the scope of their temporary preparations, even though that is the norm, and lightning wars remarkable exceptions.

      You can see these sorts of things play out all the time. Expectations for short war leading to even longer war. Desire for less damage leading to even higher damage. Multiple incoherent desires conflicting and resulting in none being satisfied.

      There was in fact an opportunity for setting off a quick rout like desired; but that would require a desire to drop the hammer in the first place. The power their computers and phones run on; the fuel their trucks and CVs run on; the commanders and authority figures their organizations run on…

      As they say in chess, it’s never too late to make a blunder; likewise, it’s never too late to start doing the right things.

  19. Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

    Ex-pats in Tel Aviv waving russian (and soviet) flags as they drive down the streets. Surprising, or perhaps not. It’s a large community, and more generally, Israel never saw itself as a subject of the anglo-american empire, and has frequently crossed them in the past if they felt like it.

    Probably won’t mean anything openly major (or majorly open) happening, but it does indicate people on the peripheries feel increasingly bold to signal against a GAE [current thing].

    • S says:

      How many of the ex-pats are jews versus ethnic russians?

      • InsaneWorld says:

        Unclear. I imagine there’s a mixture of both ethnic Russians and Ashkenazi Jewish Russians, as well as some mixed-race mischlings.

      • Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

        Most of them. Although there were plenty of SU emigres who claimed semitic descent just to get out and in.

  20. Kunning Drueger says:

    This is a disgusting topic, and it may not be worthy of discussion. But the sub-thread about a tranny Czar is unsettling for me because of the logic of it. Pooch points out, rightly, that an American Cromwell is going to be someone from within the confines of power. I hate this, but that is beside the point. Within the confines of power, only a few types get to exercise aggression: negresses, cat ladies, and trannies. Negresses are stunningly incompetent; the supreme court nominee is just the most recent example, but she is a perfect example. Watching her try to yassabossa for a court seat is pitiful and loathesome. Kamila Harris isn’t black, but she is stupid. I think she is actually just a pretentious white cunt in terms of personality, and she is better defined as a cat lady. One need not search long to find examples of negresses and cat ladies being aggressive with no consequences, but they are just fucking dumb. Within this unholy clade we also have the Hillary archetype, God help us. No amount of cheerleading and deer pointing will make these heifers competent or capable. I’m fairly confident in asserting that, should a biological female from within the confines of power take control of the state, the State is doomed and that swiftly.

    But what would happen if a Jenner, or a Pritzker, or some other abomination, takes power? Is there any hope? To my mind, a creature so evil, so wrecked by the pozz, would only bring about calamity. But I am forced to admit that there is a difference between the late stage in life tranny and the sex addicted young adult tranny (there’s a generational infection of pre-puberty conversion trannies, but these won’t survive to adulthood and they are little more than perverse playthings). Is there enough of a difference to matter, or is it just rearranging deck chairs on the titanic?

    Dear Lord, Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

    • jim says:

      Cromwell was good, despite being a leftist in many ways that left an immense amount of damage, and, because good generals tend to be rightist, gave us Monck, who fixed what Cromwell left broken. Stalin almost gave us Beria.

      But Stalin merely stabilized a very bad system. Tranny Caesar might be a Cromwell, might be a Stalin.

      Deng was very very good, but left an undead state religion in charge, which is starting to bite.

      • S says:

        Deng did the once-child policy. If it isn’t as crazy as Mao, it isn’t for lack of trying- nothing destorys patriarchy faster then forcibly sterilizing women for having children.

      • The Cominator says:

        Its arguable that Mao had purity spiraled communism bad enough to cure most of the CCP by Deng’s time…

        • Ash says:

          I am very white with blue eyes.. I cannot infer too much into the Chinese mind.. they are very foreign to me, alien, near impossible to see insight too.. he implemented these crazy stages to out develop the west I believe, at UN council he or his representatives stated if USA and Russia used nucleur bombs, the west may kill +400 million Chinese, but the people and society were to survive..

          I think from the 1950s till 1970s china was desperate and thinking they would be genocided by whites… At one point they put around 200 million Chinese men on the soviet border for full scale war..

    • Karl says:

      Whoever grabs power to become Caesar probably won’t last long. The original Caesar certainly didn’t. Once a Caesar has grabbed power, however briefly, there is no way back to pretending democracy and no easy way to a legitimate government.

      So if a trannny grabs power, it will be a step in the right direction. Maybe the man who grabs power from the tranny will last.

  21. Dr. Faust says:

    Well it looks like WWIII is starting tomorrow.

    Biden finished his tour of Europe and is going to make a “big announcement” which means escalation because why otherwise make an announcement? If they were doing normal CIA not-peace type stuff then no announcement. If more sanctions than no announcement. If they don’t escalate then the war will wane shortly, a month at most.

    I expect to hear the words. “Joint action. Global community. Together with NATO allies.” And then some poorly verbalized speech by Biden on how this isn’t war and he’s not sending boots on the ground. As with all things from globohomo expect it to be fake and gay. Then Russia will counterattack in five to six days in a very real, very war type way and give them the casus beli they want so bad.

    • Severian says:

      Obviously Biden was jus having another dementia episode. Wouldn’t read much into it.

      • jim says:

        Two processes are happening under the covers. There is a power struggle inside Washington between the peace faction (which is approximately the department of defense) and the war faction (which is approximately the state department)

        Simultaneously escalation is happening away from the Ukrainian battle front, with Russia responding to defection by the international transaction network and internet network, with defection against the the international transaction network and internet network. These counter measures are likely to result in further sanctions and escalating warlike acts by the Global American Empire.

        ICANN has, to my astonishment, declared neutrality in this war, with the result that it is likely to come under attack by both sides.

        • notglowing says:

          ICANN has no such power. As soon as they make it impossible for Russians to use their standards, Russians and others will simply have no choice but to not rely on ICANN and instead take direct control of their infrastructure.

          The only result would be balkanizing the internet and giving Russia more power. They realized any action they could take would be fruitless and counterproductive.

          • jim says:

            > ICANN has no such power.

            ICANN has considerable power, and has been doing very bad things for a considerable time, albeit there seems to have been a whole lot of resistance and foot dragging in ICANN on doing very bad things.

            At this point, continued implementation of very bad things would likely have the consequences you predict, and they seem to be unambiguously backing off, declaring support for freedom of information, which should, at least for the moment, halt the drift – a drift that is likely to render ICANN irrelevant.

            When they declared that they “cannot” do the latest round of very bad things, what they actually meant is that they will not do the latest round of very bad things, because such things would undoubtedly result in each country going its own way, rendering ICANN irrelevant.

            It is as if the SWIFT system refused to commit suicide. However, the SWIFT system is committing suicide, while ICANN is, so far, refusing to do so.

            • Mister Grumpus says:

              Can ICANN break Bitcoin? Or is Bitcoin entirely outside of nameservice, or whatever ICANN is in change of exactly?

              • jim says:

                ICANN is entirely disconnected from bitcoin, and completely irrelevant to it, but if ICANN is weaponized, then we get splinternet, which is going to be inconvenient.

                Workarounds for splinternet are already part of bitcoin core. How well they will work if the internet splinters is unknown.

                • Kunning Drueger says:

                  I know it has been compromised in some ways, but wasn’t the original intended application of the darknet precisely for the *splinternet* scenario?

                  Also, does blockchain work on Tor, or is the distributed network just make it unworkable?

                • jim says:

                  Works on Tor, but Tor is owned by the enemy. Also has another privacy system, which I think more likely to work if splinternet.

                • notglowing says:

                  Bitcoin core has options to enable connection to Tor if you’re running it on your system.

        • Dr. Faust says:

          The war faction is winning. Is going to win. Amid those two factions the more progressive is the war faction. They are more holy, more willing to die for tranny story hour. They have support from neocons and prowar republicans and the peace faction is seeing that their sanctions are failing or worse and the Great Reset crowd seeing the war coming to an end.

          By escalation I mean something like a naval embargo or at most a no fly zone. They won’t launch an attack or invasion because they have no balls but they’ll do everything they can up to that line.

          Another possibility is Biden could be announcing sanctions against states bypassing the Russian ban. That does fit the fake and gay mold well enough I guess but it’s just another way of choosing sides.

          • notglowing says:

            > The war faction is winning. Is going to win. Amid those two factions the more progressive is the war faction. They are more holy, more willing to die for tranny story hour.

            I do not think they will. If they managed to keep complete focus on this particular issue for an indefinite period of time, that could happen. But I think the focus will shift to something else sooner rather than later, just like what we’ve seen before. It’s going to escalate until it loses energy and there is a new replacement issue to obsess over.

            • Dr. Faust says:

              I’m watching the stream now. Listening to this guy is boring me. Looks like a nothing burger is going to happen. A big hole is being dug and it will be painful to climb out of when Ukraine loses this war. His big announcement was that he made announcements before. That’s it.

          • Mister Grumpus says:

            Years ago I asked Jim for a piece about the Tet Offensive, and what was that anyway? And we argued a ton about the Khmer Rouge, and still do, because it looks more relevant every day.

            One thing he said was that the left, being holy rather than merely realistic and practical, always has the massive advantage of being willing and ready to go genocidal.

    • Kunning Drueger says:

      If there is truly going to be an escalation by GAE, I predict the Slavic Response will be to Kinzhal the carrier group in the Eastern Med. I keep thinking about Jim’s InfoEpoch warfare memeplex, and I have to admit there’s an elegance to it that sidesteps a lot of the convention of 20th century imbalance of power.

      Here’s a metaphor I’ve been using for the current state of the GAE: Imagine that the US, UK, and EU are 3 dudes that grew up together in a small town. They were pretty wormy, nerdy kids in elementary school, but in high school they got fit, faced down their bullies, and became the local Chads, winning ball games, swimming in pussy, and getting As in their studies. They were the best at all the stuff, so it just became accepted by everyone that you shouldn’t mess around with them, because they’ll make you look dumb and kick your ass.

      Fast forward a couple of decades, and these three dudes have gone pretty soft. No one messes with them because to do so is unthinkable, but they don’t lift, they don’t read, and they don’t get challenged. One day, some stranger from out of town is in the local bar. One thing leads to another, and Stranger makes the 3 buddies look stupid by being clever. When they try to gang up on him, he cracks the leader of the 3 across the jaw. Everyone jumps in and separates the Stranger and the 3, warning the Stranger that he should be really careful not to get on the wrong side of these guys.

      The 3 dudes are in a quandary. They know now that they are out of shape, soft and dull, and they don’t have what they used to. Everyone in town just assumes they are staying fit and nobody messes with them, but what if word gets out that some stranger made them look dumb and could kick their collective asses? Even if they went full keto, started lifting, and started learning again, it’s going to months, more likely years, before they can get anywhere near to what their Legend implies. But they can’t agree on a workout schedule, they like to eat carbs, and jerking off is way easier than exercising game reflexes. So long as no other Strangers come along, everything should be fine. And then one night, a guy named Vlad walks into the bar…

      Even if Biden and frens want to move toward a war posture, I’m not so sure that they can. Their militaries are severely degraded, their industrial base is top-heavy and reliant on subsidy, their cultures are weakened, and their faith is contingent upon no external opposition and internal suppression of dissidents. If the economic situation continues to collapse, domestic upheaval is likely. If GAE goes to war, they are going to (probably?) go in with a 20th century posture. This mean a massive air and naval joint operation while they build and transport ground forces. B-52s and carriers only work because they can hit without being hit back at. S-300 and -400 would make strategic bombing a turkey shoot, and if half the claims of Russo-Sino missile tech are true, those carriers won’t be able to get within striking distance without very high risk. So are they just going to ICBM barrage?

      • Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

        >The Russian military of 2014, which Christian Brose describes in The Kill Chain, seemed disturbingly competent:

        > This was not a Russian military that most in Washington recognized. It had highly capable weapons, such as electronic warfare systems, communications jammers, air defenses, and long-range precision rocket artillery, much of which was better than anything the US military had.

        […]

        > The Little Green Men could jam Ukrainian drones, causing them to fall out of the sky. They could also jam the fuses on Ukrainian warheads so they never exploded when they hit their targets, but instead landed on the ground with an inert thud. The Ukrainians talked about how the Little Green Men could detect any signal they emitted and use it to target them. Minutes after talking on the radio, their positions were wiped out by barrages of rocket artillery. Their armored vehicles were identified by unmanned spotter drones and immediately hit with special munitions that came down right on top of them, where the armor was weakest, killing everyone inside.

        […]

        > The Ukrainians tried to dig themselves into bunkers and trenches, but the Little Green Men hit them with thermobaric warheads that sucked all of the oxygen out of those closed spaces, turning it into fuel that ignited everything and everyone inside. Entire columns of Ukrainian troops were annihilated by cluster munitions.

        […]

        > One day during the conflict, the man’s mother received a call from someone claiming to be the Ukrainian authorities, who informed her that her son had been badly wounded in action in eastern Ukraine. She immediately did what any mother would do: she called her son’s mobile phone. Little did she know that the call she had received was from Russian operatives who had gotten a hold of her son’s cell phone number but knew that he rarely used the phone for operational security reasons. This Ukrainian commander, being a good son, quickly called his mother back, which enabled the Little Green Men to geolocate his position. Seconds later, while still on the phone, he was killed in a barrage of precision rocket artillery.

        […]

        > What emerged in Ukraine in 2014 was more than just Little Green Men; it was a battle network of sensors and shooters that closed the kill chain with remarkable speed and lethality. It was a Russian reconnaissance-strike complex.

        The military of 2022, though, seems to not quite remember a lot of the things it knew in 2014. The ousting of the old defense minister (an unfortunately straightforward man primarily concerned about kiddy shit like ‘performance’ and ‘results’) by the new and current one (a skilled hacker of monkeyspace by any measure) is an obvious correlation.

      • Kunning Drueger says:

        The prose seems a bit alarmist and a bit amateurish, but that doesn’t mean ArmstrongCapital is wrong. They made a pretty big claim about the predictive power of “their model.” What is their model?

        • pyrrhus says:

          Armstrong’s model consists of a cyclical model based on pi and an AI that does massive data mining…Armstrong was imprisoned for contempt for 7 years for refusing to turn over his code to the NSA…which was of course grossly illegal (female federal judge)…

          • Red says:

            He went to jail in 99. AI didn’t exist at that point.

            • pyrrhus says:

              Apparently you are wrong, since that was the whole point of the trial…

              • InsaneWorld says:

                Refusing to turn over code/ going to jail for it doesn’t mean in of itself that said code works as intended, or works much at all.

                • pyrrhus says:

                  It worked well enough to predict Brexit, Trump’s victory and a few other things, which is why the Feds wanted exclusive possession of it…

                • jim says:

                  No it did not.

                • Kunning Drueger says:

                  So he went to jail in 1999… for an algorithm that predicted Brexit and Trump?

              • InsaneWorld says:

                Also looking into it it appears that Japanese fraud investigators accused him of running a Ponzi scheme and scamming his investors. The trial seems to have been related to these accusations by multiple parties that he was defrauding them of their money. Do you have a link to something more along your point of view, and evidence that the code was the primary part of the trial and not these accusations?

                • pyrrhus says:

                  If you were an attorney practicing in Federal court, as I did, you would know that he couldn’t be held in contempt for defending himself from fraud charges…BTW, he was released when his appeal reached the Supreme Court…

                • Red says:

                  Since you’ve refused to provide any evidence, I’ll have to go by wikipedia which states he was held in contempt for failure to turn over goods that where forfeit due to his fraud conviction. I don’t consider wikpedia a good source, but I don’t believe in magical AI algorithms with solid evidence. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

                  I’ve heard of similar cases of people being held in contempt for 10+ years over divorces cases for similar reasons, where assets the courts demanded be handed over either didn’t exist or the defendant lied that they didn’t exist. Courts have been shitting all over the Constitution for 70+ years in this country and the supreme faggots don’t give a fuck.

  22. Anon says:

    “Russia cancels the teaching of sociology, cultural studies and political science in all pedagogical universities of the country”

    https://twitter.com/IrisovaOlga/status/1507252961122078756
    putin establish sovereignty in academia.

    • jim says:

      This is a declaration of independence from globohomo.

      It is likely to result in massive and dramatic escalation by globohomo.

      I favored escalating the war by going directly, Trump style, to Information Epoch elite assassination, but this is a less extreme and less drastic escalation of Information Epoch warfare, the smallest step in escalation likely to have impact.

      Obviously it is preferable to escalate in small steps, and force your enemy to take the bigger steps, so, this may well turn out to be a wiser course than I suggested. But it is course that is likely to wind up at the same destination.

      If they were not trying assassinate the Russian elite earlier, chances are they soon will be.

    • Dr. Faust says:

      Only good things can come of this. These soft sciences should die and the useful bits rolled up into other areas.

      • Kunning Drueger says:

        I know this is an unpopular opinion, but I think there is so much potential for Political Science and the Sociology Family of studies (Cultural Studies is what you do when you’re trying to fuck a foreign girl or looking for raw materials). The reason they are so perniciously evil IMO is that they were areas of study in their infancy with nothing more than a few useful questions as guideposts for methodology and praxis. The Frankfurt School types used them to gain entry into the academy and spread from there. I don’t think they should die, I think they should be purged and neutered of status. Then we’ll see who wants to actually develop them and who was just using them to play priest.

        Political Science is a near perfect analog of alchemy and its relationship to physics and chemistry; it is the necessary mistake that will lead to a hard science of human social constructions for power management. One very obscure branch of the PoliSci world is cliodynamics, which is fascinating and hated by the establishment. Worth checking out. This topic has come up before, and I am an advocate of reinstituting amateur scholarship and reintroducing the term Natural Historian.

        Regardless, the baby has drowned in the bathwater, so it probably all needs to be chucked. Add it to the list of Things They Took From Us.

        • jim says:

          I predict Biden will be dragged a little bit closer to the abyss of total war, without falling into it yet.

          I also predict that the raft of new measures will rely on the State Department to give effect to them, rather than the Pentagon.

          • Pooch says:

            I predict forcing war on the Pentagon results in a Caesar averting it.

            • jim says:

              That would be a very good outcome. But it would take a man to do it.

              • The Cominator says:

                Well the transfer of planes directly via NATO got blocked by the Pentagon and not overridden. Its quite possible that the prospect of being nuked caused Milley the tranny and co to find their backbones and threaten a coup.

                • Karl says:

                  Are you arguing that it does not necessarily take a man to do it, but that a tranny might suffice?

                  I doubt it, but even a tranny Caesar might be an improvement.

                • The Cominator says:

                  Milley and the Joint trannies of staff are not literal trannies but spiritual ones…

                • Mister Grumpus says:

                  “I doubt it, but even a tranny Caesar might be an improvement.”

                  Czar Jenner? I mean sure OK.

                • Kunning Drueger says:

                  I mean… Is there any other way the Progressive Religionists and their flock of NPCs would get off the suicide train besides a tranny leader? There’s a certain logic to it: they know they’ve fucked up and that they’re only making it worse, but they can’t back down and admit failure. They know they need a man to lead. They know in their hearts that trannies are still men.

                • Pooch says:

                  We should all get resigned to the fact that if we get a Caesar, a Napoleon, or a Stalin, he’s going to be someone from within the system. He’s not going to be someone from the outside. He’s not going to be a right-winger. He’s going to be someone brought up within the leftist system. The historical precedent is someone who is leftist in his origins who makes a turn towards to stability.

                • Cloudswrest says:

                  Speaking of manly trannies, Sailer had an essay on this topic just yesterday!

                  https://www.unz.com/isteve/ex-mean-lean-to-the-right/

                • yewotm8 says:

                  Why threaten a coup? If they realize that they can coup, then they would. What is gained from waiting for the State Department to get a little more insane first?

        • jim says:

          Cliodynamics is an attempt at Isaac Asimov’s psychohistory.

          A crippling weakness is that they are not allowed to take virtue, faith, religion, and religio into account, while their predecessors before the nineteenth century viewed those as the prime movers of macro history.

          Which virtue, religion, and religio quite obviously are.

          They are also strangely mealy mouthed and waffly about the coordination problem. Not sure why. They way they act, there must be some crimethink bomb attached to it somewhere, but what the bomb is, I cannot guess.

          • Kunning Drueger says:

            It is exactly psychohistory, and they are minimal in their attempts to expand the research because they are unable to add the variables you mention to their models, unable to mention these variables at all. They also know that without them, they’re stuck.

            Cliodynamics, probably more than any other observation tool, shows how backward browns are in terms of civilization construction. I think that is the crimethink bomb. Imagine a cliodynamic model trying to grind through the data on the African kingdoms; line go up, line go down, line go away.

          • Wolf says:

            Isn’t asabiya essentially virtue? Tuchin focusedbon it a lot in “War and Peace and War.” Thought, maybe he considers it irrelevant when it comes to domestic politics.

        • ahah says:

          Sociology as a field of study was actually invented by counterrevolutionaries. Bonald, De Maistre, Haller etc.

  23. Anonymous Fake says:

    [*deleted for repetitious unresponsiveness*]

    • jim says:

      Every time you say “the best people” I challenge it, and in your next post you say the equivalent thing again, as if it was the universal consensus, as if everyone accepted it, as if I accepted it.

      This is not a conversation, because you fail to respond, leading to endless repetition and waste of space.

      But I will respond to you one last time, as I have responded far too many times. I will, as always, ignore what you are ostensibly saying, will not reply or respond to what you are ostensibly saying, and instead respond to the assumptions and presuppositions that what you are saying takes for granted.

      1. Academia:

      As I have said before far too many times, wasting far too much space:

      Academia is inherently a religious institution, training priests to be priests in the state religion. Always has been, always will be. When we are in charge, it will continue to do what it has always done, but with a saner state religion, and vastly fewer students.

      The state religion does not need all that many priests. Therefore very few people should go through academia. Also we will follow Saint Paul’s policy of filtering for virtue and demonstrated competence in a paternal and high status role. Filtering purely for smarts, though important and valuable, fails to filter for the most important and valuable priestly functions.

      Academia used to filter hard for the very smart people, with the result that our state religion used to be staffed by very smart people, and the vast number of excess students who had received a useless training in priesting could easily get high level jobs in unrelated activities, because their useless priestly training proved to the employer that they were smart and industrious.

      An academic degree still proves the graduate is industrious, but as the state religion became ever stupider, Academia increasingly filtered against smart people, rather than for smart people. They impose both a floor and a ceiling on graduates, and the ceiling has been dropping like a stone.

      2. Megacities.

      Big cities used to perform a useful function in distributing goods and enabling smart people to get together with other smart people to organize economically valuable activities. This useful and value creating coordination function has been largely obsoleted by the computer mediated network. Goods today generally move over the most direct path between producer and consumer. Big cities are today largely parasitic, living on the quasi statal FIRE economy, on government jobs, and on distributing goods and services to people on welfare. They consume value through state power, rather than creating it.

      Big cities have always been value consumers, but they enabled the state elite to coordinate. Today the top of the state elite is, like everyone else, like the top of every other hierarchy, relying less and less on big cities for coordination, hence my argument in discussions about the current war that a countervalue nuclear strike would lack effectiveness as a beheading nuclear strike, and that a beheading nuclear strike is only likely to be effective if guided by penetration of social and computer networks.

      3. Economics.

      You don’t seem to notice that economics is about the creation of value, not about status, still less about priestly status, making all your discussions about economic matters completely meaningless, irrelevant, and unworthy of response.

  24. Severian says:

    Looks like Russia might be rolling back it’s maximalist aims. Now says the first stage of the operation is over and they are now focusing on liberating the Donbas.

    • Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

      That was their aim from the beginning though?

      If anything, the criticism is Shoigu/Putin *didn’t* go for maximalist aims right out the gate.

      • Kunning Drueger says:

        The two biggest assumed claims of the GAE propaganda machine and, and this feels really weird to type, Jim’s piece, is that 1)Putin/Russia ISN’T getting what they want and 2) UKR is doing this well/right/correctly.

        The first one is really the only one I care about, the only one that really matters, and likely the one thing I’ll never get to learn. Intention is everything. Imagine finding a letter Hitler wrote to his gay jew lover saying he was going to wreck Germany for the keks and he was going to make France pay for it. It would change literally everything we understand about the war. Gay, made up example, granted, but I believe my point stands.

        Any success by the UKR forces is, IMO, attributable to the CIA and other foreign intel/ops people telling them what to do. All the smart Ukrainians are in other countries, dead, or on Russia’s side. The idea that Zelensky & frens are prosecuting 21st hax0r warfare is just laughable to me.

        • DavyCrockett says:

          It wasn’t just GAE people who thought Putin was going to go maximalist though. There were plenty of Russians who thought that was the case, like akarlin and eharding. akarlin predicted that there was a 90% chance serious resistance would be over within 2 weeks.

          I’m not saying that the Russians aren’t getting what they wanted, I don’t feel confident enough to say it is what they wanted. But plenty of Russian commentators thought they were going to go maximalist and/or install a puppet government, and plenty of them predicted that Russia would’ve already seized Kiev by now. And this wasn’t just many Russians on twitter etc., but also many people who aren’t Russians but support the Russians, ie many commentators on Jim’s blog here for example in previous posts.

          • lines crossed says:

            The Russians wanted to replace Zelensky’s pro-Western government with a pro-Kremlin government. So far, they have failed.

            • jim says:

              The only way to replace Zelensky is to take advantage of modern Information Epoch weapons guided by human and computer network penetration for selective assassination.

              It is long past time for elites to discover that they are now on the front line too.

              If this form of warfare becomes standard, we eventually wind up with aristocratic elites composed of manly men.

              And hackers, drone programmers and such will start to look and act like me, rather than look and act like the hollywood stereotype.

              • Ash says:

                You have incredibly insight and are so well structured, I don’t know what to make of your intelligence kind sir, on paper, eliminating igor kolomoisky boy toy

                seems like it will work, but he will be replaced by the entire gay parade standing behind him. Pardon me – for abrasive comments

                • Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

                  If anyone who steps up to be an organizational schelling point then finds themselves becoming a head shorter, you just get chaos.

                  The anarcho-communist militias in republican spain were famously ineffective; the only thing they were well know for was the depths of their depravity as they terrorized the countryside with sadistic tortures, profanities, and orgiastic revels of violence over anyone they could get away with it. Something worse than animals.

          • DavyCrockett says:

            Correction, looked it up and akarlin thought there was a 90% chance that serious resistance would be over within a week, not 2 weeks as I said here.

            https://twitter.com/akarlin0/status/1496606377153814530

        • James says:

          I think it’s tremendously unclear what exactly their aims were. I think based on the logistical preparations they made (ie only enough for a very short, close-range war), and the scale of the invasion (only a couple hundred thousand fighting men), they were not expecting full occupation of Ukraine. That much is clear.

          Beyond that, would they have tried to secure a diplomatic agreement that everything south of the Dnieper river is in Russia’s sphere? Tough to say. But officially they are there for the Donbass and only the Donbass, and regardless of what happens in Kiev they are in a position to get that, assuming the West doesn’t get involved in an air war or put boots on the ground.

      • Severian says:

        Was it? We never really knew for sure what the real aim was. But assembling 60% of all your combat power just so you end up with the other half of Donbas seems weak.
        I guess you could use the rest of the occupied territory as leverage for the west to lift all sanctions.

        Personally I think the original aim was topple the government and annex half the country. That’s just my guess considering the scope of the operation.

        • jim says:

          The initial moves were clearly aimed at taking half the country, roughly along the 1914 border. Failed miserably.

          • Severian says:

            The Russian narrative is that the Kiev and Karkhiv offensives were just meant to tie up UKR troops for them to easily take Donbas.

            Not sure I buy that, I guess it’s at least plausible since the Kiev troops were more inexperienced guys from eastern Russia and there weren’t all that many to begin with for a siege.

            Still, sounds more like damage control if anything.

            • Anonymous Fake says:

              Based on Ukraine’s belligerent behavior since 2014, it’s entirely believable that Russia was prepared for a hard war of attrition the entire time. The maneuver elements would best be reserved if needed for Poland, Hungary, Baltics, etc, the true neutralish states.

              If the Kiev siege were a feint, the Russians still knew it would work somewhat because Ukraine’s corrupt and selfish elites would fall for it by nature. DC tied down lots of soldiers in the American Civil War even when it become obvious the South wasn’t going to invade.

              I suspect the more sane, less fanatical Ukraine army elements are going through the motions around Kiev and Crimea, knowing they’ll be fine as the fanatics in the cauldron get cooked. They won’t fight heroically against Russia and Russia has no need to escalate. Both sides are saving face here.

          • Varna says:

            For a more precise division, here is an 18th century map:
            https://wiki2.org/ru/%D0%A4%D0%B0%D0%B9%D0%BB:1800_Novoros_gov_jpg
            The yellow bit is “Novorossyia” (New Russia), and the pale blue bit is “Malorossia” (Little Russia). The rest is later conquests.

            Novorossyia takes up the Black Sea coast and reaches Transnistria.
            Malorossia takes up the rest of the eastern half up to the Dnieper river.
            These two, I think are a given as conquest spoils.

            The remaining western part will likely be “Ukraine proper”, either as one country, or split into different parts.

            The major mystery for me is where Kiev goes. Berlin-style split?

    • Varna says:

      If this was a Harry Turtledove or Tom Clancy novel, up to now Putin has been mainly rotating his officers making them smell gunpowder and learn to do trad war in Europe. Sacrificing the chaff up to general level.

    • Dr. Faust says:

      Well the first offer is just a bargaining position.

  25. OT but what’s the general opinion of the commentariat here on amerika.org? He seems quite anti-Russia in this and also his theories seem quite woolly headed and long winded compared to Jim. Is amerika.org to be considered a reactionary right winger?

    • Varna says:

      Back when the world was young the Amerika.org was known as Prozac and wrote delightfully pretentious theories on death and black metal. Still anti-Christian.

      Today he’s a one trick pony — “civilizational solipsism is bad and monarcho-fascism is the cure” — but the central concept of civilizational solipsism which he keeps looking at form different angles is pretty solid.

      Hilariously racist in the old-school sense where even the Irish and Italians are subhuman apes, and beyond that it’s all guttural orcs and goblins running into trees and falling down holes.

      With him it’s not “the kikes” and not “the satanists” but “evil Chinamen” and “the rot started with the Irish”. Seems to be believe the major threat to freedom is Genghis Khan and Darius and their spiritual descendants today (everyone except a few chosen trve kvlt Aryans).

      Ironically, when he tries to go beyond monarcho-fascism and invent a system of government which would be a “proper non-globohomo democracy”, he ends up with literally the current voting system of today’s China (and the one back in the USSR), but remaining utterly oblivious that he is reinventing the wheel of small scale Soviets choosing representatives into medium scale Soviets which in turn send delegates to macro scale Soviets.

      In a sense, he’s like an underground version of Scott Adams — when he sticks to a couple of topics (civilizational solipsism + sane environmentalism in Prozak’s case) in which he’s good, he’s very good. On the remaining 90% of topics, it’s more about being amused with a cup of covfefe while skimming his stuff, and appreciating the occasional smart zinger at globohomo.

      • Dharmicreality says:

        Thanks. That seems about an accurate summary to me from what I’ve read.

  26. Kunning Drueger says:

    Niall Ferguson is definitely a member of the Cathedral, but he seems to be a bit more realistic than those of his cohort.

    https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-03-22/niall-ferguson-putin-and-biden-misunderstand-history-in-ukraine-war

    • jim says:

      The important fact I learned from that link is that Putin is not distracted by the current year.

      We approach a turning point of history, and at such turning points the events of recent millennia matter more than the events of recent weeks.

      “Putin wants to transport post-Soviet Russia back into a mythologized tsarist past”

      Republics have reached their use-by-date. A peaceful and stable future for Russia, and for the world, whether Putin manages the transition or not, is divine right monarchy with a live state religion subject to the authority of the sovereign. Tsarist empire and Holy Roman empire all over again.

    • Tech Priest says:

      ‘“The only end game now,” a senior administration official was heard to say at a private event earlier this month, “is the end of Putin regime. …”‘

      This concerns me significantly… Putin will remember what happened to Qaddafi and may well prefer nuclear war to that outcome. Meanwhile it seems like a lot of people are willing to ignore nuclear risk for the sake of holy defiance of the evil Putler… hopefully not the top decision makers yet but who’s even making the decisions?

      Ferguson presents one possible solution – conventional Russian victory without an escalation that would draw in NATO. But, the slowdown makes this look not so likely – if there’s a war of attrition NATO can supply more weapons than Russia and Ukraine can supply more manpower than Russia can without a (potentially destabilizing) mobilization of many more troops.

      Also, I earlier posted some links to argue on the importance of low level autonomy in a command structure for carrying out a modern war. Here are some more links (recently posted on the Motte) about why Russia does not have such low level autonomy. (basically, Putin is afraid of revolution and does not trust the army)

      https://twitter.com/kamilkazani/status/1493968165717561346

      https://twitter.com/kamilkazani/status/1502673952572854278

      https://twitter.com/kamilkazani/status/1505923154018938880

      Also, it doesn’t seem to me that Putin is making effective use of a state religion to prop up loyalty. While Jim has posted indications of top Orthodox support, it seems either the prevalence of sufficiently convinced Orthodox is not high enough or Putin just doesn’t want to use it

      • jim says:

        > > ‘“The only end game now,” a senior administration official was heard to say at a private event earlier this month, “is the end of Putin regime. …”‘

        > This concerns me significantly… Putin will remember what happened to Qaddafi and may well prefer nuclear war to that outcome. Meanwhile it seems like a lot of people are willing to ignore nuclear risk for the sake of holy defiance of the evil Putler

        I hope he does not try twentieth century nuclear war as he tried twentieth century conventional war.

        Twentieth century conventional war did not work, and twentieth century nuclear war is unlikely to work in a holy war.

        If nukes needed, then to win, will need to applied in Information Epoch nuclear war. You need to decapitate the enemy, not diminish his potential resources. Decapitation will only succeed if informed and targeted by network penetration.

        • Tech Priest says:

          “twentieth century nuclear war is unlikely to work in a holy war.”

          I don’t know about that, seems to me widespread destruction of major cities would significantly change the west’s holiness dynamics.

          If it comes to that though I hope Putin does follow your advice since that would greatly enhance my own chance of survival relative to a city-annihilation approach.

          • jim says:

            > I don’t know about that, seems to me widespread destruction of major cities would significantly change the west’s holiness dynamics.

            It would help considerably, as all the thought control infrastructure and apparatus is located in the big blue megalopoli.

            But if the strike fails to take out the head of the beast, all that infrastructure will be rebuilt in a more geographically distributed fashion.

            If, on the other hand, if you take out the head of the beast, and leave most of that infrastructure intact, the surviving infrastructure is going to suffer severe dysfunction and will cease to be effective.

            Total area of effect of all Russian nukes is approximately equal to total urban area of the United States, but the key people are spending an increasing amount of time in exurban locations, the stereotypical example being the golf course clubhouse. So you want to nuke a central location when key people have gathered together at a central location.

            If you take out the buildings, but not the center of the social network, you have accomplished very little, even if those buildings were full of the enemy’s little worker drones dutifully doing their nine to five. The drones are replaceable and interchangeable.

            If an opponent of the Global American Empire were to take out all the Global American Empire’s little nine to fivers, that would certainly make a big dent, but it is not in itself likely take out the Global American Empire.

            • Jehu says:

              3 And I saw one of his heads as it were wounded to death; and his deadly wound was healed: and all the world wondered after the beast. 4 And they worshipped the dragon which gave power unto the beast: and they worshipped the beast, saying, Who is like unto the beast? who is able to make war with him? 5 And there was given unto him a mouth speaking great things and blasphemies; and power was given unto him to continue forty and two months.

            • Calvin says:

              If an opponent of the Global American Empire were to take out all the Global American Empire’s little nine to fivers, that would certainly make a big dent, but it is not in itself likely take out the Global American Empire.

              If things came to that point, it’s doubtful that the Cathedral would have either the financial or more importantly human capital sufficient to restart operations necessary for maintaining the empire. Assuming Russia is pretty much wiped out as well, China is going to be asserting its own dominion and every two bit local actor held under by GAE military power is going to be making land/resource grabs or dealing with troublesome populations. You would see knock on effects like the collapse of Saudi Arabia, the renewal of ISIS (or some knock off), etc. for decades. America’s financial and military power is not so easy to rebuild even should the elite survive and not get taken out by anarchy and/or a Caesar.

              • Ash says:

                Close the damn cathedral.. take a 50 year break and don’t let foreigners in… The Lord is going to mandate you to rebuild your damn civilization

              • Ash says:

                Here’s my advice..

                After almost a decade of warning to ex colleagues.. go watch what was considered gay or tranny porno in the 1950s from today’s latest conservatives… Every conservative from English and americans my ex colleagues send me are of tranny’s or homos… It’s odd that in the 1950s and 1960s, it was so well established that homosexuality is closely followed by pedophilia statistics rates..

                Pardon me.. a very racist, sexist, bigot homophobe statement… We should get back to pornos

                • Ash says:

                  Here’s how I know propaganda works on the weak skull of western children..

                  There are hundreds of photos on Chinese media from the 1940s showing Chinese babies bayonetted by Japanese (despite the fact the Japanese owned fewer cameras than Germans)

                  Show me 1 photo of a Jewish baby bayonetted by us blue eyed hating people

                  Oh what’s that ? It’s only Jewish imagination… Close your damn border and do not watch tv

        • Kunning Drueger says:

          Decapitation strikes are an interesting issue. It makes San Francisco a higher priority target, as well Crystal City v. Downtown. And not just nuclear, there are so many vulnerabilities in the grid and basic lifestyle resource chains. Add to this the carrier groups and the floating assault platforms.

          Another interesting dimension to this is that you’d actually want to maximize civilian survival in tandem with critical target elimination. Fewer “innocent” casualties with a significantly reduced capacity to keep them alive would severely cripple a response. So it appears that targeting port facilities, IT infrastructure, and the ability to “respond” would be better than a human infrastructure decapitation strike. The last thing RF would want is the GAE leadership purged of the octogenarian morons running it.

          • Ash says:

            You have a really good name.. I feel as foreign to American strategists as to Chinese strategists..

            Really love your name.. too be honest, more fluent in English, some Chinese colleague gave me a novel based on the various philosophies of the ancient countries of china.. the 3 kingdoms.. wtf.. I just memorised 5000 characters around 2014.. it’s like memorising 5000 carplate numbers to the models, makes colour and regions.. every Chinese person fluent in a European language seems to think this is a very inefficient to way to learn to read.. learn each stroke for +5000 characters just to read a single current date news article…

            Really powerful way to keep foreigners out… Maybe some cultured are much older than we can truly imagine..
            The colleague that gave me a novel based on the philosophy of the 3 kingdoms, I had to say I can’t spend so much time… 20 pages into a basic novel based on philosophical history and I was lost..

            Just give me a damn German, Dutch eastern European book from 3000 years ago please, I am not that smart

            • Ash says:

              Talk about kunning drueger, I had an Italian ex girlfriend listen to a Chinese person telling her a good Chinese name for her yoga, it translated to stingy cunt…

              Amazing westerners are so stupid they have to wait for a Chinese person engaged to their friend to say, “no really, you used the words for stingy cunt as a business name”

              Retard culture.. better watch more pornos

              • Ash says:

                You know the old saying.. Chinese guy jokes about how stupid women of European descent are, as a western man, head taller than losers, the woman will shit test and pick a fight… Instead of ace the shit test, just test out your lingual skills on girls that speak the language..

                Unfortunately a bit too much debauchery for that time in life

      • S says:

        Did we not already go over this? The USSR did not have NCOs in any real sense. The Russian Federation under Putin has adopted the NCO system and was professionalizing the Army.

        Also, both Ukraine and Russia inherited the institutional knowledge from the Red Army. While Ukraine has been trained by NATO over the past 8 years, there is a limit to what they could learn, especially if all the doctrine assumes you have air-superiority.

        • Tech Priest says:

          Just because you have someone who’s nominally an “NCO” doesn’t mean you’ve let them exercise initiative.

          And 8 years can be a long time especially if you’ve been fighting (even if lower-intensity) for most of that time. Plus, the Ukrainians have better morale.

          An article in the Atlantic about this sort of thing (admittedly, it doesn’t give any verifiable evidence, but at least it’s asserting the kind of thing I am, and it meshes with my impressions of what’s going on):

          https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/03/american-volunteer-foreign-fighters-ukraine-russia-war/627604/

          linked from:

          https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/654o5j5WXtysgYBuA/ukraine-post-7-more-data-and-peace-terms

          • S says:

            “Just because you have someone who’s nominally an “NCO” doesn’t mean you’ve let them exercise initiative.”

            It shows that the Russian Federation’s military has more initiative then the USSR’s, hence ‘Putin is afraid of his military’ is nonsense.

            “And 8 years can be a long time especially if you’ve been fighting (even if lower-intensity) for most of that time.”

            Those would be the Ukrainian forces in the East. There does not appear to be a significant difference in advance depth by front.

            “Plus, the Ukrainians have better morale.”

            How can we possibly know that?

            “An article in the Atlantic about this sort of thing (admittedly, it doesn’t give any verifiable evidence, but at least it’s asserting the kind of thing I am, and it meshes with my impressions of what’s going on):”

            It doesn’t. Notice how it lacks examples of the Russians failing to use initiative. It has
            -Russian soldiers getting lost
            -Russians getting into a traffic jam
            -Russians repeating tank assaults

            None of those actually show a lack of low level initiative. The article doesn’t lack verifiable evidence- it lacks evidence period for your claim.

            • Tech Priest says:

              > It shows that the Russian Federation’s military has more initiative then the USSR’s, hence ‘Putin is afraid of his military’ is nonsense.

              It might show some attempt at more initiative, though easily thwarted by punishments from above.

              Even if it did, I included a link before on the USSR also being afraid of the military and lacking low level initiative. So, even if it were higher than the USSR’s it could still be low.

              > Those would be the Ukrainian forces in the East.

              You don’t think they rotate at all?

              > Notice how it lacks examples of the Russians failing to use initiative.

              One reason someone might do obviously stupid things in a military is because they are following orders from someone else who is not fully aware of the facts on the ground. Admittedly it is not the only reason.

              • jim says:

                1. Fog of war. In war, people do lots of things that in retrospect were obviously stupid. Everything is more difficult when people are shooting at you.

                2. Every military establishment except Turkey’s is still living in the 1940s, magnificently prepared for World War II. Now they are all shocked and discombombulated to find that things are different now, and are all taking a while to re-orient.

              • S says:

                “It might show some attempt at more initiative, though easily thwarted by punishments from above.

                Even if it did, I included a link before on the USSR also being afraid of the military and lacking low level initiative. So, even if it were higher than the USSR’s it could still be low.”

                What makes you think the organization of the Red Army was significantly different then the organization of the Czarist army? The original Russian army had lifetime conscription! As long as they have had a professional military this is how they have done things.

                “You don’t think they rotate at all?”

                I have no idea. Even if they did, we’d see differences in results because the command staff doesn’t rotate.

                Jim covered the other part.

  27. John says:

    I want to discuss future plans. Our host believes large scale war/collapse will really kick into gear around 2026, and I agree, even if I am unsure on the precise year.

    Given this, what should one do to prepare in the West? If we know large scale lawlessness is coming, well, an isolated farm doesn’t seem too helpful (South Africa), nor does solo prepping, as once a bigger group comes along you will be alleviated for all of your belongings and possibly your life. City life is bad obviously.

    This potentially leaves small towns (probably only in USA, as West European small towns that I have visited are quite cucked, with no or low amount of guns), where you have ties to the community and would protect each other. Seems okay as GAE gets weaker, maybe in for a rough ride until then if the eye of Sauron unfortunately turns on you as a group of whites with property rights, defending themselves. Either way, I am not from a small town in the USA, nor from the USA itself, and I doubt I can move to and get settled and integrate into a US small town before the shooting starts.

    So what can I do? I don’t want to stay in Western European cities for obvious reasons, and I don’t think Western European towns are much better, at least in my country.

    I think, as Jim mentions below, my solution will be to move to the edge of Chinese Hegemony in Asia, and hope to avoid as much of the decay and lawlessness as possible.

    However, surely there are other EUcity posters here who are in a similar situation. Can we not pick a small country/city outside of the west that already has just a few Westerners living there, and move there? Not in a doxxing way, but if you run into a westerner who has moved recently, you entertain the idea that they may be a based Jimian, and build from there to real life shill tests.

    Assuming not too much strife on the edge of Chinese hegemony, which I think is fair, this dodges the collapse of GAE, establishes a community/network of high IQ high fertility westerners which would not be allowed to go uninfiltrated in the West currently. Also secures high IQ mates for children, and would have much cheaper cost of living, and a much higher quality of life compared to the currently crumbling West.

    What do you guys think? Is my plan missing some Opsec flaw? Does anyone have any better ideas? Is this just a retarded pipedream, or based & Jimpilled?

    • Adam says:

      Many years ago I left a very blue state to move to a tropical vacation destination in a very red state. Lots of wealth on the coast, lots of guns pretty much everywhere. It’s not fool proof but I can’t imagine anyone who can pull their weight is going to go hungry. Every year things get worse where I left, and every year things get better here. Judging from that I would say it was a good decision.

    • Pooch says:

      Get out of the wicked Western urban cities full of demon worshippers for now and be near family. Surely places like this must exist in your home country. Fleeing your country entirely is premature in my opinion. It may be a century or more until the GAE comes down for good. No point turning your life over tits over ass getting ready for something that may not even come in your lifetime.

      • ExileStyle says:

        As the local exile-in-residence I must point out that moving somewhere where you do not have mastery of the language and/or many years of immersive experience in the native culture means that you will be even more isolated than you were where you began. Hell, I am near-natively fluent in the language here and have married into the culture and I am still 100% an American outsider and always will be. And that’s in Europe. I can’t even imagine how it is in a non-Western culture.

        Part of that is, well, I am indeed 100% All-American (the cowboy boots don’t help) and make no real effort at integration (and in fact find myself becoming more American culturally with time), but I know other Americans who do try and are no more integrated than I am, maybe less for pretending to be something they simply are not.

        And we’re talking well over a decade abroad. So, I’d focus on finding a niche in or around your home country.

        Also, as we learned from Ukraine and Libya etc., almost any government is susceptible to immediate regime change by GAE, and then suddenly you are a much more conspicuous presence in the new place than you were in the old place…

        • Pooch says:

          Also, as we learned from Ukraine and Libya etc., almost any government is susceptible to immediate regime change by GAE, and then suddenly you are a much more conspicuous presence in the new place than you were in the old place…

          Exactly right. After Alaric and the Goths sacked Rome in 410, many wealthy Roman refugees fled to Roman North Africa only to see Roman Africa sacked by the Vandals only a few decades later.

          Fleeing should be an option one should keep in mind, but there is no guarantee where you flee to will be any better than where you are coming from. May in fact even be worse.

    • Varna says:

      >I think, as Jim mentions below, my solution will be to move to the edge of Chinese Hegemony

      In a sense today the edge of Chinese Hegemony is Serbia and Hungary, overlapping nicely with the West’s and Russia’s peripheries.

      The edge of West’s hegemony also works, as long as the country is officially part of the EU or NATO or some such. If you’re officially inside, external forces are unlikely to attack you, but if you’re on the periphery, the center’s rot tends to reach you in a very diluted way. Unless you’re the Baltics, which have their own very specific brain goblins.

      So, a peripheral eastern member of the EU, or a broadly equivalent community in the US or Canada and so on, that should be OK.

      Even on a basic racial level integrating into an Asian society sounds very iffy, unless it’s a post-Soviet Central Asian white-mongoloid mix such as Kazakhstan or Kirgizia.

      • James says:

        Worth noting is that on the periphery of the Western Empire, Czechia has actual gun rights and is a blend of eastern and central European cultures — it feels less foreign to a westerner than, say, Hungary.

        Hungary, however, is a good bet in that it’s part of the EU, and NATO, but it has its own currency and has historically been very warm towards Russia.

        Poles hate Russians almost as a racial instinct, but the government there has nationalized all NGO funding, no telling how long that will last, though.

        There are many European options on the periphery, although all of them involve some compromise.

    • ten says:

      sweden is pointless and hamstrung. eventually we will have to deal with the niggers and muslims we imported, but that is going to happen after the gay empire lost its grip, and noone will target us for any reason during any war regardless of the combatants and stakes involved.

      denmark is less safe because border to germany, norway is less safe because rich in oil and sea border to UK. in a maximal SHTF scenario, in europe sweden is the place to be.

      • Ash says:

        Doesn’t Sweden have the wallenberg family ? Don’t they own like half of North America’s telecommunication hardware.. talk about a unique country untouched by war

      • Oog en Hand says:

        Sweden is on the cutting edge. Learn Swedish.

        • Ash says:

          Oog en hand,

          Nee, te druk met mn familie. Ik geef niets om deze taal. Ik zal daar niet wonen

          • Ash says:

            Unless this becomes a regional or continental language, I won’t learn it..

            If it does, ja, well, kan ik deze taal leren

        • ten says:

          As far as i know, the Wallenberg create things and shut up and are hated by communists for creating things. I don’t see how their presence would make sweden a target when niggaz start yeetin nukes.

          I think my point was the opposite, as far away from any cutting edge as you can get while still not poortugal.

  28. simplyconnected says:

    Thought some might enjoy a very recent interview with former weapons inspector Scott Ritter. Talks about the bioweapons labs in Ukraine, quite interesting.

  29. Reziac says:

    The Saker is good to follow for less-mangled information. Being an expat Russian he’s biased in his own way, but I have not seen him fabricate BS. Anyway, Russia itself seems to have a different perspective:

    http://thesaker.is/briefing-by-russian-defence-ministry-comment-on-strategy/

  30. Basil says:

    The Kremlin’s peacemaking rhetoric is one example of how Kremlin propaganda shoots a dick. The Kremlin now says that Ukraine should capitulate and agree to the Kremlin’s demands – this will stop the senseless bloodshed. The rhetoric is not new. Even von Clausewitz wrote: “The conqueror always wants peace, because he wants to enter the country without obstacles, in order to stop him, we must choose war.” Ukrainians respond by choosing war, which the Kremlin tries to portray as senseless and self-destructive behavior.

    However, let’s remember the main military narrative that brought up the entire post-Soviet space, including Russia and Ukraine – the Great Patriotic War. In the first years of the war, the USSR used the scorched earth tactics during the retreat. Order number 0428 of November 1941 provided for the destruction of all settlements behind enemy lines 40-60 km deep and 20-30 km from the roads. For this purpose, artillery and aviation were used, sabotage groups were created – the heroized Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, for example, was just one of those. During the retreat, the Soviets mined their own cities in order to blow them up later – for example, the center of Kyiv was blown up. The question of the ethics of such an approach is now put out of the brackets. It is important that within the framework of the Soviet narrative, such a format of resistance has always been presented as unambiguously fair and morally justified. Those who agreed to any cooperation with the enemy were unequivocally condemned as traitors, and the very idea of ​​a possible surrender in recent years has received the ironic epithet “would drink Bavarian” (implying that there would be no Bavarian, of course).

    So, everything that the Russian authorities are now accusing the Ukrainians of is the destruction of their own infrastructure during the retreat, the transformation of cities into fortresses, etc. – this is a small percentage of what the very grandfathers who defeated fascism did. It turned out funny. On the one hand, the Kremlin globally relies on the great narrative of the Great Patriotic War and tries to attach it to the current conflict (“we continue to defeat fascism”). But, if you really look at what is happening through the prism of this narrative, then Ukrainians today speak from the position of uncompromising Soviet partisans, and the Kremlin literally broadcasts “give up and you will drink Bavarian.” At the same time, they themselves, for sure, are surprised: “why is our propaganda not working?” Although you should ask yourself another question: “Hans, are we villains?”

    • Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

      >“Hans, are we villains?”

      No

      >“The conqueror always wants peace, because he wants to enter the country without obstacles. In order to stop him, we must choose war.”

      A neat encapsulation of the atlantic empire’s conduct in Ukraine; indeed, around the world in general, at home and abroad.

      • Basil says:

        At home, they could do this without invading Ukraine. Did not do. They won’t do it even after the victory.

        Russia has been stewing in progressivism for too long, and this has affected the mentality of the elite.

        • Pseudo-Chrysosto says:

          Well then globohomo’s response to Putin’s adventure has done Russia a great favor, as they have completely discredited their patsies in that country, and voluntarily pulled out all the socioeconomic hands they had that could be used to nudge the socioeconomic levers.

          As much as there is a complete regimentation of opinion in GAE polite society with regards to ukraine, it is matched by an equally total complete route of globohomo identification inside of Russia. Indeed one has lead naturally to the other. The russiamania of the ruling classess occuping countries in the west, has now fully convinced the average russian that opposing them is both good and inevitable.

        • Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

          Peace was never an opinion. Intolerable globohomo aggression in and through the ukrainian province demanded response, and that response has two choices; surrender, or conquer.

        • Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

          >Russia has been stewing in progressivism for too long, and this has affected the mentality of the elite.

          Well then the atlantic empire’s response to Putin’s adventure has done Russia a great favor, as they have completely discredited their patsies in that country, and voluntarily pulled out all the socioeconomic hands they had that could be used to nudge the socioeconomic levers.

          As much as there is a complete regimentation of opinion in GAE polite society with regards to ukraine, it is matched by an equally total complete route of globohomo identification inside of Russia. Indeed one has lead naturally to the other. The russiamania of the ruling clades presently occupying countries in the west, has now fully convinced the average russian that opposing them is both good and inevitable.

    • Kunning Drueger says:

      Can someone explain to me how this isn’t shilling for GAE? Genuinely curios. I keep reading his screeds, and they all just elaborate on “russia man bad” and “winning is losing, hate is love, submit to be free” payload. Basil hates Putin and despises Russians. Fine. But what is his argument? Submit to the GAE?

      • Basil says:

        I hate Putin and the Russian government, but I don’t despise Russians who are not homosoviet like the Russian government. If you cannot separate the attitude towards the government and the people, then you are simply stupid.

        So what will the Russians get as a result of victory? Thousands of killed Russian guys? The final estrangement of Ukrainians from Russians? Destroyed Russian cities that will be restored by Russian taxpayers? Loss of the status of the Russian army? The growth of separatist sentiments within Russia and the strengthening of the position of all Chechens? Very low status = the only ones to hate in a world of victorious equality? Another impoverishment and the closure of social elevators? The next regulation of sugar prices? Another wave fighting with fists? Depending on the fastening of Russia from the Chinese? An increase in the level of defenselessness in front of the security forces? Great win though.

        • Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

          >So what will the Russians get as a result of victory?

          Sovereignty

          >Thousands of killed Russian guys?

          Thousands killed would be a remarkably small price

          >The final estrangement of Ukrainians from Russians?

          Were Germany and Japan estranged from USG?

          >Destroyed Russian cities that will be restored by Russian taxpayers?

          Construction is easy when devils are not actively stopping you.

          >Loss of the status of the Russian army?

          Winning is not losing, winning is winning, and losing is losing. And losers have low status, and winners have high status.

          >The growth of separatist sentiments within Russia and the strengthening of the position of all Chechens?

          There are no casuals in the People’s Republic of Taimastan.

          >Very low status = the only ones to hate in a world of victorious equality?

          If they lose it will be high status to mock their weakness; if they win, it will be high status to mock globohomo’s weakness. Mocking weakness is a universal tongue of humanoid man.

          >Another impoverishment and the closure of social elevators?

          Indeed, whatever will Roissya do without faceberg, didney, starcucks, and every other wokist tentacle of globohomo’s socio-spiritual control apparatus?

          >The next regulation of sugar prices? Another wave fighting with fists?

          Now you’re just going on deranged tangents of psychosis.

          >Depending on the fastening of Russia from the Chinese?

          Mainlander chinks are duplicitous and can’t be relied upon, and there is strong evidence they are in league with the global anti-american empire, helping to promote their treasonous conduct in the regions they occupy; but these events are driving a wedge between them, and all the stupid unironic believers in regressivism who have inherited this empire are acting to drive that wedge through into a split, much like how they piously cut off all their fingers in russia.

          >An increase in the level of defenselessness in front of the security forces?

          ‘Winning is losing’

          >Great win though.

          Yuge.

          • Basil says:

            Russia already had a sufficient level of sovereignty to carry out the necessary reforms. The problem is that your ideas about the necessary are different from those of Putin, who by nature is an old Soviet prick. It was possible to stop sending money stolen from Russia to Swiss banks and children to study progressivism at Harvard without a war.

            “small price”
            For what? Thank you, but in almost any country globohomo any person with minimal talent and diligence can build a better life for himself than in similar conditions. Russia is no longer the country with bottomless peasant fertility that can afford to waste lives so easily.

            “Were Germany and Japan estranged from USG?”
            Sorry, you don’t seem to understand me. I believe that Russians and Ukrainians are one people. Now, Putin has done everything to make one part of the Russian people hate the other part. Perhaps, as a result of the war, this will change and Ukrainians will cease to be Russian, regardless of its results. Comparing Putin to Hitler is incorrect, given that he was still able to go to the Anschluss. But for this you need to be at least in some respects an attractive country …

            “If they lose it will be high status to mock their weakness”
            You need to think about this before the war. Russia will not only lose, it will lose to the failed state of Ukraine: Any outcome other than a complete annexation/puppet government will look like a defeat. “Victory” in the spirit of the Finnish war, when Putin simply changes the real goals of the war, will cause the same laughter, and this is the most realistic scenario so far. Also, poverty also causes ridicule, and Russians have become poorer again.

            “Now you’re just going on deranged tangents of psychosis.”
            No, such Cuba economic practices now the reality of the new Russia, if you are not already aware. And that means impoverishment, more corruption, less opportunity to create and protect yourself from lawlessness.

            But if Putin said he was against gay marriage, then all is well.

            • jim says:

              > Russia already had a sufficient level of sovereignty to carry out the necessary reforms.

              No more so than Trump had the necessary presidential authority.

              The Cathedral’s soft power in Russia derived from hard power, a hard power manifest in stationing NATO forces ever closer to its borders, cutting off water, power, and land access to Crimea, and endlessly shelling Donbas.

              We now see all soft power being exercised to the max, reaching its limits, and hard power being cautiously exercised. The nukes prevent hard power from being more vigorously exercised.

              Had Putin done more of what was needful, soft power would have been exercised more vigorously, and hard power would have escalated, though not to current levels.

              Nukes provide independence, by preventing the more vigorous exercise of hard power. But the application of hard power and soft power was ratcheting upwards, precisely because Putin was doing a little bit of what was needful.

              Now that soft power and hard power are maxed out, Putin is free to internally escalate by doing more of what is needful. We shall see what get done.

              Information Epoch warfare starts on the home front. China hopes soon to have at least its elite running made in China chips and using compiled in China software. That is currently the most critical step in the struggle. Building the Cathedral of the Resurrection of Christ was also a critical step. Cannot win an Information Epoch war without a Cathedral. A lot more needs to be done, but the speech by his Holiness Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia was a good step in the correct direction. Chips and software remain a huge vulnerability, and are a major foundation block of the Global American Empire’s soft power.

              I hope to purchase made in China cpus in a couple of years, but currently they are crap, and far too expensive because the Chinese elite is forced to buy them.

              Russia and China also need to do something about the GAE takeover of linux, but what China is now doing is utter crap. What China is doing about cpus is better, but still needs considerable improvement.

              To win the Information Epoch war finally, to defeat the GAE, need a sound fork of linux and a sound fork of Arm. And China needs to something about its undead state religion.

              • Upravda says:

                Can you elaborate more about progressivists’ take over of Linux?

                I use Linux for almost everything since 2012 (winblows only gets started as a virtual machine when a business need arises) and one of the reasons back then was “free as in freedom”.

                I can see “Codes of conduct” popping up all over the FOSS, but it seems that it didn’t have much overall impact.

            • Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

              >Sorry, you don’t seem to understand me. I believe that Russians and Ukrainians are one people. Now, Putin has done everything to make one part of the Russian people hate the other part.

              No, i understood what you meant to say, but you do not seem to have understood the example used in response.

              Neither Germany, nor still less Japan, shared thedeship with American. And, did not Germany, Japan, and America fight? And, did not the latter in fact inflict tremendous death and destruction upon the former? Enemies for life, yes?

              Actually, no. They became very close partners in alliance (irrespective of the dubiousness of allying with USG).

              The thing about fighting and winning is, it doesn’t make enemies, it makes friends. That’s another thing the GAE priesthood makes sure to never tell you.

        • Kunning Drueger says:

          St. John said it all. It is obvious you are a GAE shill, but the worst kind: the one that does it for free.

        • jim says:

          > So what will the Russians get as a result of victory?

          Sovereignty.

          In a nuclear world, the Cathedral has been increasingly waging not-war.

          To resist it, necessary to escalate. It is now apparent that this escalation was insufficient. Russian sovereignty is likely to require further escalation.

          • Kunning Drueger says:

            > It is now apparent that this escalation was insufficient.

            Not at all apparent. Time is not pegged to social media attention span. The sufficiency of Putin’s Move cannot be assessed accurately until the next stage begins, and even then… The greatness of a man is measured after he’s in the ground.

            > Russian sovereignty is likely to require further escalation.

            Imagine if Putin had gone in properly, which is to say, imagine if he had Grasped The Nettle. This conflict would have probably ended faster, with lower friendly casualties, and fewer expended assets. Do you think the GAE would have rolled over and begged for mercy, ashamed of their wickedness? The NATO & frens would have probably felt entitled to act more aggressively and the escalation would have been severe. As it stands now, the subjects of the GAE are already starting to get bored and turn inward. The backroom deals to sidestep the sanctions have begun, and (according to the article I posted) the GAE establishment is settling down into a Cold War posture. If Russia had gone in with hypersonics, Spetznas, and full network chaos + node removal, GAE would have pivoted into Information Epoch warfare (or tried to). The best outcome for anti-GAE is a return to complacency by the GAE.

            • jim says:

              Victory condition is an outcome where the GAE does not feel free to engage in not-war with impunity against places that fail to hold a gay parade and fail to adequately educate nine year old girls in how to put a condom on a banana.

              The GAE has mighty soft power: Facebook, “Sex in the City”, and the gay parade. But soft power rests on hard power. If the GAE is unable to kill thousands of people in a not-war any time it feels like it without facing any consequences, its soft power will swiftly fade.

            • jim says:

              GAE strategy is forever war. This looks workable. To end it, further escalation will be required.

    • Ash says:

      What if everything you believe is a lie ? Get married and have children…

      My childhood friend in western Europe was telling me to buy land in Russia 2 days ago…

      Maybe the faithful are correct.. I am not a prophet.. maybe he is?

      • Basil says:

        Of course, you need to get married and have children. But what does the Russian Federation have to do with this? Nothing says that in Russia it is easier to do.

        Of course, I could be wrong. But nothing prevents me from moving to Russia when it is restored. What will that Russian guy who went to fight do? What if he was wrong? What if everything he believe is a lie?

        • Kunning Drueger says:

          What if no one takes your course in the fall, and you have to be a barista full time again? GTFO with that post-modern shit.

          • Basil says:

            Iuppiter iratus ergo nefas

            Killed and crippled Russian guys deceived by the government of the Russian Federation is not postmodernism, but reality. The murdered do not marry and do not have children, the crippled most likely too. Your worries about whether the unlikely hypothetical Beautiful Russia of the Future will accept me are groundless.

            • jim says:

              The war has been more expensive for Russia than anticipated.

              But the sanctions have also proved more expensive for us and considerably less expensive for Russia than anticipated. This is a big whack against US soft power.

              The Cathedral intends forever war, and if forever war, Russia will lose – not soon, but in a decade or so. It is likely that they will not accept forever war, since they declined to accept forever not-peace.

              The Chinese seem fairly optimistic that simply by declining to accept forever not-peace, the Russians have won. I see countries on the border suddenly becoming a whole lot less enthusiastic about NATO expansion.

              Three important strategic goals have been accomplished. NATO expansion has been exposed as potentially expensive and dangerous, Russia is now free to roll back Cathedral penetration, and the Cathedral is being forced to back its soft power with hard power around the world.

              I don’t regard the land bridge to Crimea as an important strategic goal, but it will come in handy.

              • Basil says:

                As a result, the beneficiaries will be those forces that do not participate in this conflict, and the main losers will be Russians, Belarusians and Ukrainians. In essence, Putin is pulling chestnuts out of the fire for Pakistanis and Malaysians, diverting the all-seeing eye of Evil on Russia.

                • Kunning Drueger says:

                  I mean, if we just stay in the foxhole, some other squad is bound to take out the MG. Why take risks if you might lose, right?

                • jim says:

                  We shall see.

                  You are assuming that the Russians go along with the Cathedral forever war strategy.

                  Which if they do is likely to have the outcome you expect.

                  I expect that they will therefore either not go along with it, or will so credibly threaten to not go along with it that they get a satisfactory peace in the Ukraine.

                  Check out this video. https://rumble.com/vzea9i-rt-follows-russian-tank-crew-as-it-battles-azov-battalion-in-mariupol.html

                  After eight years of not peace, they seem pretty happy with escalating to real war.

                  Which was always the risk with the not not-peace strategy, and is a much bigger risk with the forever war strategy.

                • Skippy says:

                  Russian leadership and Russian fighters are in it to win.

                  Russia has 140m people and Ukraine has 35m people.

                  But Russia has not mobilized, while Ukraine has totally mobilized. Ukraine only needs to mobilize 4x as much as Russia to achieve parity. That’s not implausible especially with foreign subsidies.

                  Russian society as a whole needs to accept that it is in a death struggle BEFORE the decision point, and generally mobilize.

                  Otherwise all they have achieved is forever-war with a higher cost and death rate than before.

  31. Severian says:

    Mariupol just about to fall.

    • jim says:

      It is, but it has been just about to fall for quite a while.

      • Pooch says:

        Mariupol is all but liberated from Nazi control. House to house clearing tends to be expensive in terms of time and casualties, which is what the Russians are doing in Mariupol.

        I doubt the Russians will want to do the same in Kiev and Kharkov which are larger than Mariupol and the two largest cities in Ukraine.

        After the Ukrainian army in the east is encircled and destroyed, Putin may simply elect to declare victory at that point and leave the Kiev regime intact albeit in a less militarized state, but this war has been hard to predict as war often is.

        • Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

          One ideally needs a symbol to point to and say ‘this shows we swung our dick and succeeded’; regime change is one such symbol, though arguably revanching eastern Ukraine to the 1900 borders could also work.

          • jim says:

            Peace on their borders, instead of not-war, is sufficient victory.

            But to achieve it, likely to need to escalate to Information Epoch warfare.

            The Cathedral wants return to the status quo ante, where they are free to engage in warlike acts that the Cathedral officially defines as not-war, even though they are apt to involve bombing and heavy artillery, thus maintaining a constant steady pressure on anyone who fails to hold a gay parade as a symbol of submission.

            • Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

              Our modern carthage is primarily theocratic in character, so likewise naturally it tends to pursue theocratic forms of power first and foremost.

              It is constantly invading other countries; not so much militarily (although it does so often anyways), which is obvious, but above it invades spiritually, which is deniable. It invades with priests, not it’s own soldiers; by which it then seeks to get other people’s soldiery to fight and die for it’s ends, hollowing out the psychitecture of target societies and replacing it with themselves, like fungal cordyceps in an ant colony.

              Invasion by priests is no less violent an act of aggression as any other; indeed, it is supremely violent; dropping a plane full of ivy league law graduates on an area has frequently proven to do more damage than a plane full of high explosives. But inability to perceive invasion by priests as a violent act of aggression is a canonical blindspot in the normie weltanschauung – by design, of course – which is one of the keystones of the ‘putler suddenly starts world war 3 for no reason’ thought terminating cliches (along with goldfish tier historical amnesia).

              If one wishes to fight globohomo most effectively, one needs an official state religion of their own to point too, and by which likewise identify minions of globohomo as not just ‘normal ordinary person with normal ordinary business’, but as infidels and apostates who in deed and in fact represent mortal threats to their folk, and deservedly merit dealing with in like kind.

  32. Calvin says:

    Selective Service is tweeting about a draft all of a sudden:

    https://twitter.com/SSS_gov/status/1506677659182551040

    Freudian slip, or just some retard office worker? You decide.

  33. Joe W. says:

    First time here in over a week. Carrying over from the last thread:

    Jim said: “What you propose invariably turns out to be organized and operated by feds. It is a classic and obvious fed operation. We prepare for the time. The time approaches.”

    (Not sure how specifically advocating AGAINST any type of organization outside one’s own community would constitute an “obvious fed operation,” but I’ll leave that aside for now.)

    Jim has long been predicting mass violence around 2026. That’s now just four short years away, so “the time” indeed “approaches.” My question for Jim is, if organization even at the local/neighborhood level is “nuts,” then who is going to be engaging in all of the 2026 violence? Are you predicting no violence in 2026 if a Caesar doesn’t emerge? (People finally seem to have realized that Trump isn’t and will never be Caesar.)

    Also, what are you predicting the 2026 violence will look like? It seems obvious we won’t need a huge army marching on the north or the west, but, instead, we’ll need 50 mini-armies in the suburbs that take care of business in the urban centers. But you seem to disagree with that, since you’re constantly talking about the need for a Caesar-type national figure rather than local leaders.

    We talk a lot about The Cathedral, but most of The Cathedral aren’t living in fortresses in D.C. They’re living right down the street. It seems like our efforts and planning should be centered around that fact, but you seem to believe any type of local/guerrilla effort would be futile, even though we all know our enemies are mostly unarmed pussies. (And even in the armed division, there’s never been an Antifa or BLM gathering that couldn’t have been obliterated in 20 minutes by the guys from the suburbs.) Given these facts, it seems there’s way too much defeatism here.

    • jim says:

      > who is going to be engaging in all of the 2026 violence?

      Probably the same people who were engaging in all the 2021 violence, only considerably more of it. Also, we might be at war, though that will be intended primarily as a distraction from what is happening closer to your home.

      Ask yourself how did defending Kenosha against those who were there to burn it down turned out.

      Pretty much like Charlottesville. Next time around, it will be considerably worse for defenders.

      Without a leader and a chain of command, those who engage in resistance will die.

      I have made this point many times, and I am getting tired of repeating it and you ignoring it.

      Yes, local forces could do all the things you suggest, and then get picked off one by one.

      Feds always want us to try this, and any time anyone tries it, turns out he was being manipulated by feds. It is stupid and suicidal, always fails, always has failed.

      You cannot fight a national struggle without national leaderhip. There are millenia of history showing this.

      A white grandmother was dragged through the street by four black carjackers. Her arm is torn off and she dies in the middle of the street. What do you think is going to happen to thas carjackers. What do you think would happen to anyone who tried to stop it?

      Obviously as individuals and as a group, the defenders were enormously superior to the attackers. Look how Kyle successfully defended himself against multiple assailants.

      But the difference was that the attackers knew that they could commit arson, assault, and attempted murder on video with absolutely no consequences, while the defenders knew there would be very grave consequences for resisting arson, assault, and attempted murder.

      For persistently posting the same fed shill material over and over again, and failing to respond to rebuttals, putting you on moderation. I don’t care whether you are a fed shill or not. You are repetitious and unresponsive, leading to endless repetition and endless waste of space. You ask questions that have been answered far too many times, and ignore questions that people ask you.

      I will allow your next post through if you respond to the rebuttals made far too many times, and attempt to rebut the rebuttals. Also if you attempt to answer the questions that have been asked.

      • Karl says:

        Sure, without a leader and a chain of command, those who engage in resistance will die. Those who do not resist will also die.

        For an individual or a small grup flight is the only option that offers a chance to survive.

        • Pooch says:

          Fighting back against underclass mobs protected by the state seems like a losing battle. Fleeing to places without underclass seems much more reasonable although if this cycle is not broken the places to flee to will be much more expensive.

          Plenty of mostly white safe neighborhoods in Mexico and Columbia although they are prohibitively expensive.

          • pyrrhus says:

            Based on my experience in AZ, I think moving to a Cartel protected area is currently a good option…Antifa and BLM don’t operate in those areas for good reason, which is that the Mexicans will not tolerate it, and they will not be bothered by the cops or the Feds for taking out the trash…They firebombed blacks out of the areas they wanted in California, and the Feds did nothing…

            • Pooch says:

              I can see that. One may even fare better if they have something to offer.

              During the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, Roman aristocrats who collaborated with the new barbarian Gothic kings fared infinitely better than those who resisted, realizing a stationary bandit instead of a mobile bandit was not all that bad.

  34. Yul Bornhold says:

    @Kunning Dreuger

    >>>Has Russia or China even attempted any initiatives or programs to entice Americans to emigrate en-masse? Given the worsening circumstances, it wouldn’t be that hard. The risk they run is getting dead weight or corruption, which would exacerbate problems. I bet both countries host significant expat populations already, but I’d also bet that they are progressive missionaries. Having intimate familiarity with these types, no sane elite or citizenry would want them.

    >>>A simple offer of land, start up capital, a reasonable measure of agency/status, and access to lightly used pussy (good as new! trust Vasily! and she keep yuo happy with close mouth and open leg!) would entice plenty of males in both US and Europe.

    Neither China nor Russia are reactionary states. Well, I’m not sure what China is but Russia is merely conservative because the USSR was insulated from globohomo influences. It’s response to current day GAE is more or less how hypothetical dictator Bill Clinton would respond if 1992 US were teleported to the south Pacific.

    As such, Russia (and China?) don’t know the solution to low birthrates. They don’t understand biodiversity. And they don’t understand the light handed feudal approach that would work best with large number of Amerikaner colonists settled in Siberia.

    • Adam says:

      I find it hard to believe that the elites anywhere are trying to solve the birth rate issue. It’s not that difficult of a problem, as far as understanding what the solution is. Implementation might be difficult but even if so, failing to do so is even worse. I just don’t think the elite anywhere are interested in the issue.

      • Red says:

        It’s a difficult problem when all the elites believe in a false nature of women. Even great men like Augustus Caesar were fooled.

        • Adam says:

          While I agree with you, how elite can they be if they can’t figure this out? Makes more sense that they are apathetic rather than incompetent. I could be wrong though. I just can’t see the best and the brightest beating their heads against the wall not being able to figure it out.

        • Adam says:

          I’m not sure I can prove it, but it seems like male authority is incompatible with material abundance. Far easier to achieve and more natural when resources are scarce. Males have a far greater advantage over females and are more motivated to cooperate with other males during hard times.

          I think the elites could solve the problem, but it interferes with other conditions that they prefer over high birth rates.

          • S says:

            Greater resources can be achieved just by not hiring women and not have Uncle Sam the pimp give them money. The simple answer is the correct one- they are no longer capable of significant cooperation and the upper level of what they can do keeps declining. They will go through the motions but eventually that will stop working.

            • Adam says:

              Where has there been both material abundance and successful suppression of hypergamy?

              Look at the US. Where are resources scarce? Rural areas. Where are birth rates highest. The same.

              It’s not only the suppression of hypergamy, it’s the relative absence of temptation.

              • Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

                >Where has there been both material abundance and successful suppression of hypergamy?

                17th century Europe.

              • S says:

                “Where has there been both material abundance and successful suppression of hypergamy?”

                Every single aristocracy in human history?

              • jim says:

                &gt Where has there been both material abundance and successful suppression of hypergamy?

                English elite before 1820. I don’t have data indicative of elite fertility before 1700, but 1700 to 1820, pretty good. High general fertility, higher elite fertility.

                Vietnamese aristocracy within living memory.

                • Adam says:

                  In general on this blog are you looking to solve the woman problem/fertility problem for the the ruling elite or for everyone under their rule as well?

                  I never considered it before but solving the fertility problem for the ruling elite may conflict with the needs of the general population.

                • jim says:

                  For all soldiers, net taxpayers, and merchants that at least outwardly and superficially conform to the state religion.

                  Those guys get their marriages enforced, their abductions tolerated provided they keep the chick around, and their use of personal violence to uphold their property rights in their wife and kids is tolerated to a greater or lesser extent.

                  Old Testament had it right:

                  Penalty for abduction or seduction of a wife or betrothed virgin: death.

                  Penalty for abduction or seduction of an unbetrothed virgin: Indissoluble shotgun marriage and a fine. (It does not clearly say what happens if the abductor ditches the girl, but shotgun marriage implies the potential application of shotguns.)

                  Penalty for abduction or seduction of an unbetrothed unmarried non virgin: crickets.

                  If state, society, and Church help enforce the property rights of a husband and father over his wife and children, men will stop at nothing to get married.

              • James says:

                Mormondom is successfully repressing hypergamy, at the cost of being Mormon. They are the only modern population group where IQ and fertility are positively correlated.

          • jim says:

            Male authority derives from superior capability to resist and inflict violence, and from the fact that men innately seek independence, and women innately seek men capable of securely owning them.

            Material goods do not matter. Wealth and poverty do not matter. The statistics show this, and I have massively confirmed it my personal life.

            • Pooch says:

              Male authority derives from superior capability to resist and inflict violence

              And here in lies the dilemma. Civilization inherently is the reduction of violence for cooperative behavior. Civilization and reproduction will naturally always be at odds. Requires careful priesting to get everyone the same page. Even the Roman and the British Empires at the height of their greatness could not sustain it for more than a few centuries.

              • Adam says:

                This is kind of my point, civilization and material wealth and abundance are fundamentally at odds with patriarchy.

                If you want a high birth rate, much easier to do it where resources are scarce.

                Having both seems like a case of wanting to have your cake and eat it too.

              • Ash says:

                Oh pooch, been married for 12 years.. find a good woman with a good family la. I can attract bad women, but pray to Christ and lead your woman .. I know in English speaking countries it is a gamble, but as a bright man, take a leap of faith and have children. Good luck, man

            • Adam says:

              So how does that explain beta bucks? Why do women become alpha widows by defecting to a man willing to place her on a pedestal?

              How does Mr 1 in 30 defend himself against a nearly limitless supply of men who’s understanding of male authority has been perverted to mean female authority?

              I mean it’s not like you can beat them all or kill them all. And your never going to stop a woman from trying to take authority from you. Not as they get older. As they get older and more insecure I don’t think you can expect them to stay with a man that can easily replace them when they have the option to be with a man they can dominate.

              So if seems like material abundance and widespread prosperity has given rise to the beta bucks problem. A problem that does not seem to be as prevalent during hard times.

              • Pooch says:

                So how does that explain beta bucks? Why do women become alpha widows by defecting to a man willing to place her on a pedestal?

                The old Manosphere/RedPill community saying was alpha fucks/beta bucks.

                In other words, women adapted their reproductive strategy to fuck the alpha to get pregnant (who then doesn’t stick around given his limitless access to women) and then find a beta to provide her with resources. An alternative but similar strategy is for a woman to marry a beta then cheat and get pregnant from an alpha, with the beta none to the wiser raising the child as his own.

                • Adam says:

                  Yeah but that doesn’t seem to square with what Jim said as far as woman innately seek men who are capable of securely owning them. Beta bucks can’t securely own them. She’s still fucking the alpha if she gets half a chance. I think post wall woman just largely prefer to be the man of the house. Deep down they are all jealous of men and want to become men, the alpha male most of all.

                • Pooch says:

                  After marrying the beta bucks she will almost assuredly be trying to cheat on him with the alpha and will divorce rape him as well. Divorce rape is key component of the beta bucks-alpha fucks strategy.

                • Ash says:

                  Unfortunately true.. want a virgin ? At age 20 be athletic and when strangers pick a fight with your friend group, show your teeth and show how aggressive you are.. see how many options you will have

                  This is an outdated version of finding a partner, within 24 months, just procuring food, electricity, and a house will give you access to the 20 year olds you want…. Strong backbone and nice arms

                • Ash says:

                  Care, I am not saying bluff..

                  But do what you think is right

                • Ash says:

                  Don’t believe the blue pill or red pill garbage…

                  Do not take any pills or drugs from a black man offering you poison (isn’t the blue red pill a movie reference?

              • jim says:

                > So how does that explain beta bucks?

                As a possessor of a sufficient supply of beta bucks, I can tell you that beta bucks do not get you laid, even when you are touring very poor countries. Trying to apply beta bucks even in a very poor country is excruciatingly painful and humiliatingly unsuccessful. Been there done that, failed miserably, tried something very different instead.

                If you have money, you have to apply it, whether the country is rich or poor, as Trump applied it, to create or simulate signifiers of alpha that a woman’s pussy can recognize. Because the signal goes straight to the pussy, the affluence level of the target females are irrelevant. It is not how much wealth the women have, it is how much wealth the men that you need to pay to keep the show on the road have.

                Because Trump wound up doing what I wound up doing, and because Bezos has not been doing too well, I conclude that even billions of beta bucks will get you the same results as I got.

                • Adam says:

                  I agree it is not a good sexual strategy I’m more looking at suppressing that side of female hypergamy. I know a lot of couples where the woman divorced the alpha, took his kids, and now is married to beta bucks. Someone she can manipulate, someone that will let her be the man of the house as far as decisions go. The wife rules over the man. Seems to be the preferred way of life for post wall women that had kids with alphas they could not dominate.

                  This doesn’t seem to square with what you said about wanting to be owned by a man. Yes her pussy will get wet for that man but she would prefer to live with the beta.

                  It seems like the only way to suppress that is by calling it adultery (which it is) and punishing it accordingly. But that has to be authorized by a bigger alpha.

                  There doesn’t seem to be much of a solution if your not incredibly wealthy or powerful. Which is fine, I’m just making sure I understand everything.

                  I’m in my early 40s and if I had an individual solution to this problem other than possibly murder I would probably find a young woman and have more kids. I just don’t want the same headache with wife #2 that I had with wife #1.

                • jim says:

                  > I agree it is not a good sexual strategy I’m more looking at suppressing that side of female hypergamy.

                  Beta bucks do not matter, even in the poorest of countries, so you are looking at suppressing a side of female hypergamy that is absolutely nonexistent. Bezos being exhibit A.

                • jim says:

                  > There doesn’t seem to be much of a solution if your not incredibly wealthy or powerful

                  You are seriously out of contact with the reality of women.

                  Wealth does not matter, and female perceptions of male power are wildly out of contact with reality.

                  Money only matters if you use it to stage situations in which you match female perceptions of alpha, which perceptions are two million years behind the current environment of evolutionary adaptation.

                  Women are not attracted to men at the top of the male hierarchy today. They are attracted to men who look and act, and, more importantly, to whom other men act, as if they were at the top of the male hierarchy two million years ago, when we looked rather like apes.

                • The Cominator says:

                  RE women in the west are insanely capricious because their instinct for herd conformity (to demon worship and being a stronk independent womyn) is set dead against their more basic instincts…

                • Adam says:

                  I am saying if you are incredibly wealthy and powerful you can get away with abduction and murder. Not in the sense that todays wealthy and powerful are attractive to females.

                  One man alone today is going to have a hard time no matter how alpha he is, when he is up against state power. The woman may fuck him willingly and often, but her feet are apt to move at some point if he cannot stop her.

                  I know too many very alpha men who ended up divorced while the wife ended up with a lesser man.

                • Adam says:

                  To continue clarifying, and this has been my experience and observations, women are problematic if they are not getting attention from an alpha male. Even if he is present, if he is not giving her the attention she requires because she is older or he has other interests she will default to being problematic. If he does not tolerate this problematic behavior and she is unwilling or unable to get his attention, or any other alphas attention, she will settle with a beta that will provide for her and somehow tolerate her.

                  And the only real fix for this is property rights and Old Testament solutions to adultery etc.

    • Anonymous Fake says:

      What usually happens is that the red tribe realizes that it has been pushed out of the most important administrative cities, and it tries to get back in, and this fails, before going into great trek mode and swearing new loyalty oaths to a new nation.

      We haven’t tried to take the cities back, [*radical Harvard left agenda reframed as Republican or reactionary agenda deleted, yet again, after having been allowed through far too many times*]

      • jim says:

        You are not “we”.

        You are posting from inside the leftist bubble, as culturally and intellectually isolated from regular mainstream Republicans as you are from us.

        • Anonymous Fake says:

          You censored the flying car hypothesis too. 🙁

          If the technology is physically impossible I’ll forget about it but so far it looks like the macguffin that will move the plot forward. Not autonomous drones or rods from god, but rather an innovation ordinary people would really want and that would also expose the elites more than anything else.

          • jim says:

            We had flying cars, in the form of private planes that were quite affordable and usable by the ordinarily everyday wealthy, the kind of person that I often enough meet and sometimes have a meal with, fifty years ago.

            Tech decline.

            A few years ago there were a few private planes owned by ordinary modestly wealthy people, in their late seventies or eighties. They had been grandfathered in, and their planes had been grandfathered in. Theoretically they were extremely old planes, though in fact every part had been replaced several times because impossible to get permission for a new plane.

            • Cloudswrest says:

              By “private plane” are you including piston powered general aviation aircraft? Or do you mean turboprops and jets?

              Also why are there no electric GAV aircraft (maybe there are but I haven’t heard of any). It would seem to be a natural. No need to worry about thinning air (for engine power) as you ascend in altitude, and potentially much quieter. Small planes are extremely loud for the occupants. At least they were when I was a recreational private pilot almost 40 years ago.

              • jim says:

                Private piston powered planes – that theoretically had their old engines, but in fact had considerably newer engines.

                • FrankNorman says:

                  This is sounding as if the tech did not so much decline as was made illegal.

                • Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

                  Yes, it effectively is made illegal; and such is a major vector by which one may say, ‘whigism causes tech decline’.

                • Cloudswrest says:

                  Jim,

                  I’ve been out of the general aviation loop for 30 years. Can you fill me in on what’s going on? I still see small planes flying hither and yon over my house all the time. And the small general aviation airport near my house is fairly busy. I do remember County Supervisor (now Congress woman) Zoe Lofgren had a hard on for getting rid of Ried Hillview airport (still there) in San Jose.

                • jim says:

                  A short walk from my house there used to be a private airport that consisted of a shed where the owner kept his theoretically very old two seater plane and a runway that was a gravel track over his farmland, which gravel track was kept in very good condition, very smooth, but a quite short track. He and his visitors were the only people that used this airport, just as you and your visitors are the only people that use your car, your driveway, and your garage. When he died, so did the grandfathered permissions for the airport and the plane, the airport got upgraded and it now flies commercial flights of what you are calling small planes. And they are small, though a lot bigger and more expensive than the planes that used to fly in and out, requiring a much longer and better runway. (Not that you could buy the planes that used to fly in and out, they were only flyable by people whose permissions to fly them were grandfathered in a long time ago.) There used to one hell of a lot of these private airports”, airports that worked like garages, in that only the owner of the plane, the land and the shed, and his similarly equipped guests and visitors would use it. The plane was used the way you would use a private car, the shed and the track like a driveway. As their owners die, the airport disappears if it is in a rural area, or gets upgraded for commercial flights of what you are calling small planes.

                  He seemed to be an ordinary guy, not obviously wealthier than some well off people that I know. And he and his guests were using planes like cars a very long time ago. Not any more.

                • Tech Priest says:

                  An interesting (IMO) book that goes further along the lines of what jim is saying here is “Where Is My Flying Car” by J. Storrs Hall.

        • pyrrhus says:

          This is interesting–SCOTUS nominee says she will recuse herself from Harvard case…The left has apparently given up hope of continuing O’Connor’s goofy time-out from the Constitution for affirmative action…

      • jim says:

        The fundamental problem with your agenda is that it is a program to provide employment for the vast oversupply of useless people trained in priestly occupations, like yourself, by seizing everything that actually productive people produce.

        I initially figured you for a shill, and perhaps you are, but your desire for a vast increase in the supply of priestly jobs is clearly your own, not that of a scriptwriter.

        Providing jobs for all those that the professoriat promised well paid high status jobs to would be economically catastrophic.

        Those guys took your money and lied to you. And now you want someone else to be forced to make good on those lies.

        • Anonymous Fake says:

          The fundamental problem is that the “free market” simply does not create enough jobs in the deep blue island cities without government intervention, and this is largely because the capitalist elites are workaholic sex deviants with no natural interest in providing family formation friendly careers for ordinary workers who are mostly conservative at heart.

          And our problem is that politicians overwhelmingly live in the cities because that’s where all the talent is [*usual shtick deleted yet again, having been answered far too many times*]

          • jim says:

            “does not create enough job” is another way of saying “bloated beyond what is needed for the creation of value”

            Modern communications have reduced the need for the best people to live close to each other, which has reduced the economic need for big cities, and as a result, the bloated blue cities are no longer where the talent is.

            The economies of the blue cities is the parasitic quasi state FIRE economy, which is parasitic upon the real economy, parasitic on the actual creation of value, which exists in the red areas.

            Your program is the FIRE economy completely smashing the real economy, it is the communism of cultural marxism, which presupposes that buildings sprout from the ground, and the supermarket shelves magically refill themselves from the magic dirt.

    • The Ducking Man says:

      You are delusional because you’re basically asking average US citizen who thinks $15/hour is poverty wages to a country where average wages is $2/hour.

      Your idea has been thoroughly implemented by Soeharto’s regime in 1980s to populate Borneo island. It only managed to entice lower end class of society who already knew how work on agriculture. They run the program for decades barely made a dent. Borneo was only recently populated mostly because of economic development driven by palm oil industry.

      Your socialist measure didn’t work then doesn’t work now.

      • Varna says:

        The average wave in the provincial member states of the Russian Federation is about 20K rubles, which today is about $200. Used to be about $300 not long ago.
        https://ria.ru/20201123/zarplata-1585826589.html

        For these $200 a month, due to price difference, one can lead a generic middle class existence outside of the Russian megapolices and regional capitals.
        https://fxssi.com/big-mac-index

        In theory, it is completely possible for globohomo to pay its deplorable undesirables $200 a month to have them live in Siberia. Or even $100. If the deplorable adds another $200 from work, he can already afford another holiday in the Crimea.

        Not that this will ever happen, but I just had to remind some folks that prices in dollars are not the same everywhere. Sometimes $200 a month is generic stingy dissatisfied townfolk level, and anything above that is already fairly contented middle-class existence.

        Of course, we are now living in real time through upheavals which include great resets, clot shot manias, petrodollar shakes, and whatnot, so nothing is solid data anymore and nothing can be really planned for more than a few months at a time, but up to until 2019 it was completely feasible to take a monthly $200-$300 income from some source and fuck off to Russia or the Ukraine or Moldova and just chill. If alone. Or work your ass off if with family, kek.

    • Basil says:

      If Russia were the place envisioned by some on the Western right, no measures would be needed to encourage migration for Europeans, Americans or Boers. But Russia is not such a place, and modern Russia cannot even bring ethnic Russians back from abroad, cannot win over even Ukrainians who look the same and most of whom speak the same language. That Russia has the potential to be an attractive country only makes the reality more annoying.

      Well, yes, if you think that the state should provide start-up capital (and not even to citizens), you are just a leftist. Leftists (albeit white ones) are not needed by Russia. If you have useful skills and can become a worthy worker / start your own business, you can move to Russia without any assistance programs.

    • Ghost says:

      Bringing in outsiders to solve low birthrate has been tried before in Russia. Free land was offered, laws were changed to accommodate the immigrants. In the end, their government was overthrown and Czar murdered in a basement.

      The solution is to encourage existing Russians to reproduce. It may take a few generations. Teach family value in school and perhaps some government incentive to kickstart it. Feminism must be rejected.

      Bringing people from the United States would not work because they are too propagandized.

  35. Varna says:

    Putin has given his experts one week to prepare a new scheme by which gas will only sold to the west for rubles.
    https://www.gazeta.ru/business/news/2022/03/23/17466439.shtml?updated
    Apparently from now on Europe will have to first buy rubles, and then use these rubles to buy gas.
    Ho boy.

    • Jehu says:

      Presumably that will bolster the value of the ruble, in addition to weakening the petrodollar.

      • Ash says:

        But Russia is not allowed to use US debt or Porno.. they just have oil, fertilizer, grain, precious metals and more… Without porn they cannot masturbate anymore… A dead people with beautiful cathedrals

    • Fireball says:

      Good thing that i live in the south.

    • pyrrhus says:

      Yes, the financial warfare is getting more intense than the actual warfare…European dollar reserves won’t be able to buy Russian goods eventually…that should strengthen both the euro and the ruble…

      • Ash says:

        As my western colleagues assured me years ago… The west kicks ass..

        But now that Russia is no longer allowed to masturbate to porno… How much ass do us westerners penetrate ? It’s like the old fable.. if a tree falls in the forest, and no one is there to hear it.. how many anuses were penetrated?

    • jim says:

      A week is likely to be difficult.

      You need atomic transactions between one currency and another, so that it is possible for two individuals to safely exchange different currencies.

      This is coordinated action by untrusting and untrustworthy actors. It is a soluble problem with known solutions, but they are complicated, tricky, subtle, and difficult to explain or understand.

      It is taking me a great deal longer than a week to solve a different instance of the same problem

      If everyone is in the same room, and they have piles of cash in their suitcases, easy, because there is an implicit threat of escalation to potentially deadly violence if someone grabs a suitcase and runs. If they are all in the same big city under the same sovereign, not too hard, because if something goes wrong, the sovereign applies violence, though making sure that the sovereign is able to apply violence appropriately gets complicated.

      Different big cities, under different sovereigns, very hard. Not impossible, but very hard.

      Blockchain based solutions are based on escalating the issue, should something to wrong, to a large crowd of peers on the blockchain, whose collective computing and financial power is considerable. Putin wants a solution where the issue is escalated to the relevant sovereigns. But the relevant sovereigns have to be able to agree that something went wrong and what it is that went wrong.

      The problem is that a vast crowd of peers on the blockchain have to agree on what happened and what went wrong, and two sovereigns have to agree on what happened and what went wrong.

      The consensus problem is known hard, and the solutions, though known, have complicated issues.

      Making sure one sovereign is able to apply violence appropriately is tricky. Two sovereigns, considerably trickier.

      • Mister Grumpus says:

        So just as India will require a Rupee-Ruble trade system, the EU will require an analogous Euro-Ruble trade system? Is that a fair way to put it?

      • Mister Grumpus says:

        Quite curious to see how trading and financial centers (New York, London, Singapore, etc) might attempt to deal with this.

        I can vaguely imagine them setting up entirely new buildings, infrastructure and paperwork to accommodate and lubricate these “game theory” type situations that you’re referring to.

        I’m reminded of how hood jewelry stores have “airlock” rooms that you have to be buzzed into and out of in order to enter or leave the place.

        Do I truly understand what I’m talking about? No. But I get the sense that these complications and needs are rushing at us far faster than the One True Crypto is coming along.

      • Mister Grumpus says:

        “It is a soluble problem with known solutions, but they are complicated, tricky, subtle, and difficult to explain or understand.”

        Is this a subject of study? Does it have a name? “Transactional game theory?” Something like that?

    • Mister Grumpus says:

      Saw a thing about the Russian trade ministry looking to help “friendly” customers, like Serbia for example, buy gas in whatever currencies they have.

      “Or gold or bitcoin.”

      So we might just be a few months from the first international sale of a commodity natural resource in bitcoin. Just imagine. Because then using bitcoin for things is “good for Russia”, which is just begging for a blood diamonds attack. A nuclear blood diamonds attack, even.

    • James says:

      I’m a bit confused about why Russia is even selling gas to the west. These governments have literally stolen their national treasury and don’t let them buy anything with the money they do give them. Who cares if it’s rubles or anything else if they can’t offer anything back in trade?

      • Pooch says:

        It’s an escalation card Putin is holding back that he may very well play at some point.

      • jim says:

        Russia is twisting the knife that SWIFT has plunged into its own heart.

        If they have to pay in rubles, they have to buy rubles, hence, a market in rubles.

        Putin has ordered the central bank to create such a market in a week. It is unlikely to succeed. But we now have a powerful financial incentive for someone to succeed.

        • Mayflower Sperg says:

          To buy and sell with rubles, people need Russian bank accounts, and the biggest obstacle there is the same problem you had with WebMoney: Russian banks cannot provide customer service in languages other than Russian. It’s much easier to be a nexus of global business when millions of your people were born somewhere else.

  36. Ash says:

    Sorry not meaning to hog this channel, many members smarter than me.. but since 2016 I told several dozen western colleagues that Chinese military sites were bragging they have started installing Mach 7-9 missiles along their coast lines.. every English speaker insulted me and said there is no way these regions could compete with the West… I have given up on any advice or predictions other than “you are going to lose.” This blog is the only blog to illustrate and publish the beautiful cathedrals that Russia is building. Godspeed to the believers of Christ

    • Ash says:

      Ignore my complaint, I am 183 cm Dutch man that reads several languages… English speakers have told me for the past 6 years that Mach 7-9 missiles are nothing compared to us Mach 2 missiles (I mean, maybe English speakers don’t understand units) or that china has tested Mach 28 missiles and some of their Chinese sources say successful.. and no, I am not sharing information, last time some Norwegian angry with me for pointing out that a single Chinese sight has pointed out that Russians in Ukraine have been getting shelled for the past 8 years.. angry because the Chinese site (Chinese read social media like weixin or weibo.. not websites) may try and share malware..

      • Ash says:

        Can drunkenly discuss this with mandarin speakers.. but as soon I speak to an English speaker.. dismissal and hatred..

        Here’s an interesting story, at a bar , 3 years ago before covid I was out with 2 mainland friends (all mandarin) discussing the future of Taiwan and what we should expect.. one Chinese asks me (these two waiguoren) are chatting, what are they discussing… I had to explain they were discussing some gay TV show called “friends”

        We keep chatting and the same guy asks in mandarin what the blokes are discussing… Told him the Brits were now discussing a show called “sex and the city”

        See I point Mach 7-9 missiles, no white person believes my turquoise eyes
        .. I discuss sex and the city, the Chinese not knowing the word wouldn’t believe how degenerate whites are… But the ones that understand western culture dismiss it and say “don’t waste your time on garbage”

      • jim says:

        Mach 7-9 missiles are likely to be effective against aircraft carriers, though the question has not yet been tested. Will likely be tested when China takes Taiwan. Mach 15 may well be needed.

        A mach 28 missile is an orbital missile, a rod from god. I don’t think anyone has them yet, and for China to use them effectively, would need Musk tech, which it does not have. Chinese rockets are old NASA tech, though NASA’s capability to use that tech is collapsing.

        Old NASA tech makes rods from god too expensive. When the time comes, will need to the capability to launch many of them, and keep on launching a dozen more at regular intervals.

        • Ash says:

          Paragraph 1.. completely correct – the military officials were bragging that’s what they were designed for.. to take out air craft carriers

          Mach 28 super weapons… Seem like whispers with some stating successful testing.. I am uncertain, but as a regular human being, don’t think I am capable to withstand an object traveling at 28 times the speed of sound..

          Paragraph 3, almost no westerners care about technology, majority care about tv or Porno, pardon me, I am not well versed with the ability of the west other than the bragging of the 1980s capabilities

          • Ash says:

            Not to be Rude. But majority of westerners I speak to and point out capabilities of china for example.. they reference top gun and their speech is pretty much “fly Mach 2 plane… Shoot gun hard… Everyone dies”

            Maybe the future doesn’t belong to us / the west for the next 500 years

            • Pooch says:

              The future belongs to whoever reproduces.

              • Ash says:

                Pooch, that is the best statement I have read all night… Have children. Be fruitful, Mr. Pooch

                • OldMinsk says:

                  Which is ironic because despite the many commentators who profess admiration for Russia and China to varying degrees, China has a lower fertility rate than much of the West, or about the same fertility rate. Russia too has about the same fertility rate as much of the West, or barely higher or barely lower depending on the country.

                  What will really be telling is if millions of self-hating Westerners move to China and/or Russia en masse, that will convince me of all the triumphalism by some in the comments.

                • jim says:

                  Significant numbers of the best in the west are moving to China or the periphery of the Chinese hegemony.

                • Kunning Drueger says:

                  Has Russia or China even attempted any initiatives or programs to entice Americans to emigrate en-masse? Given the worsening circumstances, it wouldn’t be that hard. The risk they run is getting dead weight or corruption, which would exacerbate problems. I bet both countries host significant expat populations already, but I’d also bet that they are progressive missionaries. Having intimate familiarity with these types, no sane elite or citizenry would want them.

                  A simple offer of land, start up capital, a reasonable measure of agency/status, and access to lightly used pussy (good as new! trust Vasily! and she keep yuo happy with close mouth and open leg!) would entice plenty of males in both US and Europe.

              • Ash says:

                Norwegian identity or something ? Recognise your name.

              • Joe W. says:

                > The future belongs to whoever reproduces.

                Africans? Indians? Latin Americans?

                No.

                The reproduction rate would be irrelevant if white shitlibs hadn’t
                flooded the country with 70,000,000 immigrants over the past 60 years. Hard to have kids when the value of labor has been driven so low that most adults can’t even take care of themselves.

                • jim says:

                  In the long run, the reproduction rate is always relevant.

                  Eventually there will not be enough Japanese left to defend Japan – indeed, that condition has already arrived. When the world gets more turbulent and less safe, Japan and the Japanese are likely to disappear.

                • jim says:

                  Japan should indeed invest in nuclear weapons, but that it will buy a lot of time presupposes that nuclear weapons are never going to be used.

                  You presuppose that countervalue strikes are an effective deterrent. The time rapidly approaches when they will not be.

                • Calvin says:

                  Japan could, and should, invest in nuclear weapons. Won’t keep your nation from eventually disappearing due to failure to reproduce, but will buy you a lot of time to get the trend reversed. If you can turn any enemy nation into radioactive ash in a few minutes, number of soldiers doesn’t look nearly so important. Best Korea proves even a backwards impoverished shithole can make that model of defense work.

                • Calvin says:

                  Not seeing it. What country in the region do you think is willing to turn itself into a suicide bomber for the sole purpose of destroying Japan, specifically? None of the countries of East Asia have the tfrs to support aggressive wars of conquest, even the muslim ones like Malaysia are sub-replacement. Who exactly would want to attack a nuclear-armed state that was just turtling up and trying to fix its fertility rate, and why?

                • jim says:

                  > What country in the region do you think is willing to turn itself into a suicide bomber for the sole purpose of destroying Japan, specifically?

                  The word “country” presupposes a social unity that is falling apart. Countervalue presupposes an elite that cares about value, presupposes stable stationary bandits. We are sliding into mobile banditry.

                • Calvin says:

                  The word “country” presupposes a social unity that is falling apart. Countervalue presupposes an elite that cares about value, presupposes stable stationary bandits. We are sliding into mobile banditry.

                  Ok. What significantly large group of sufficiently technologically advanced people do you see that is willing to embrace a war of conquest against a distant, nuclear-armed island as opposed to their immediate neighbors?

                  Invading mountainous islands is hard work at the best of times, let alone when social unity in your group is falling apart and the island has an apocalypse button. Invading the guy next door is a lot easier and requires far less coordination and technical sophistication. I could see, say, South Korea getting invaded from the North, but I can’t see anyone with the wherewithal, let alone the will, to mount a naval assault on Japan. Would take a big navy. That requires a lot of unity and technical skill.

                • jim says:

                  > What significantly large group of sufficiently technologically advanced people do you see that is willing …

                  The question presupposes the continued existence of existing groups as organizational institutions. Probably true for the next decade or two, maybe three, but not forever.

                  I hope we go directly from a decadent Republic to a divine right monarchy via a series of far sighted and competent Caesars, but consider what happened in the British isles during the fall of the Roman Empire in the west. Similarly, the history of China.

                  If depopulation continues, and the Global American Empire falls as the Roman Empire in the West fell, the Japanese are not going to invaded by someone like Russia or China or Korea. They are going to be invaded by someone like the Angles and the Saxons.

                • Calvin says:

                  The question presupposes the continued existence of existing groups as organizational institutions. Probably true for the next decade or two, maybe three, but not forever.

                  I don’t see any high-fertility barbarian groups with naval skills worth talking about in the region either. I agree that the present order will fall apart, but I think Japan is in a position to turtle up and ride it out relatively successfully with some wise policy making. All their neighbors are as or more infertile than they are. A nuclear shield would give them they space they need to rejuvenate themselves, I think.

                • jim says:

                  You assume present day normality, a normality that infertile peoples are incapable of maintaining or defending.

                  Peoples that remain stuck in low fertility disappear. And they usually disappear long before population goes to zero – there are a pile of social pathologies associated with low fertility that make people less martial.

                  Normal rests on the Global American Empire. Without it, things will be different.

                  There is a substantial risk that they may resemble conditions in the fall of the Roman Empire in the west, and conditions in the fall of the Han dynasty. Which I would rather avoid, and a high fertility population is better able to avoid.

                • The Cominator says:

                  “In the long run, the reproduction rate is always relevant.

                  Eventually there will not be enough Japanese left to defend Japan ”

                  Japan’s problems as far as defense go more to lack of raw materials. Their lack of fertility today is not so bad given that they aren’t allowing mass immigration of 3rd worlders.

                  They aren’t failing to reproduce… you do hit mouse utopia density at a certain point. Japan has feminism the way everywhere outside Afghanistan does now… but they are the least feminist country outside the Islamic world.

                • Calvin says:

                  You assume present day normality, a normality that infertile peoples are incapable of maintaining or defending.

                  The closest high fertility peoples are in Central Asia, and even those are trending down. It’s true that infertile peoples won’t be able to maintain the status quo, but the idea of mass conquering barbarian tribes relies on there being such high fertility, aggressive peoples with the technical know how and unity within a reasonable distance of the island. I don’t see a base of such people within a thousand miles of Japan. And even if they existed, with a nuclear arsenal you could turn any port they tried to mass at into a radioactive crater long before they got near the shoreline.

                  But anyway, here is my three point plan to save Japan:

                  1) As the GAE fades away, acquire nuclear weapons. Don’t announce anything until you’ve already got the bombs built, and present it as a fait accompli. Say it’s to deter Xi, or Kim, or big bad Vlad.
                  2) Under the protection of your nukes, begin abolishing feminism and reinstating traditional Japanese patriarchy. Build a great firewall of your own to keep poisonous globohomo influences out, all under the banner of security of the nation.
                  3) Ride out the storm as your demographics begin to right themselves, pursuing an aggressive nuclear deterrence strategy towards anyone plausibly massing along the coast to invade you. Wait and see what the new world brings.

                  Will it work? Maybe. Maybe not. But it’s a better shot than doing nothing and sliding quietly into the grave.

                • jim says:

                  > I don’t see a base of such people within a thousand miles of Japan

                  The saxons, in so far as anyone knows where they came from, came from a thousand kilometers from England, and that was probably not their original location just a place that they snatched up during the decline of Rome.

                  During the fall of empires and civilizations, high fertility people tend to be highly mobile, and will probably be more mobile this time around. During the decline of the Roman Empire in the west “Saxon” was generic term for raider, but the Saxons who conquered Britain and biologically replaced the Romano Britons had a distinct ethic identity.

                • Calvin says:

                  During the fall of empires and civilizations, high fertility people tend to be highly mobile, and will probably be more mobile this time around.

                  We will see. Assuming that the fertility of the Central Asian peoples survives the poz to the end of the GAE, which is questionable, I say they will be far too busy raiding into Europe, China, and India, all of which now have below replacement tfrs, to take any time to attack a distant mountainous island chain with no particular resources. Especially if they try it once and get nuked for their troubles.

                  You yourself have said the next wars are poised to be more aristocratic, requiring high tech and few soldiers. Japan may not have many young, but it does have a very good tech base and high quality people. Numbers don’t matter if they can’t be brought to bear.

            • pyrrhus says:

              In the West, declining IQ, toxic elites, and vanishing resources are likely to result in a Bronze Age Collapse type of scenario..The Sea Peoples will raid the coast as usual..Eurasia will last a bit longer due to better leadership and much greater resources… Japan will revert to feudalism, at which point its birth rate will recover to pre-WW2 levels…

              • The Cominator says:

                I don’t think Japan is going to collapse nearly that badly. The Japanese apparently have the most reactionary view of women on the planet outside the Middle East.

                • Pooch says:

                  Need a healthy state religion to reproduce. Those without it disappear.

                • jim says:

                  > The Japanese apparently have the most reactionary view of women on the planet outside the Middle East.

                  Globohomo propaganda. The slightest deviation from the official line is apt to be represented as an extreme deviation.

                • DavyCrockett says:

                  Even if it were true (which is very questionable) in private/underground, doesn’t matter if the views don’t manifest publicly. A faith without any works is a dead faith, pro the traditional Eastern Orthodox/ traditional Catholic understanding of James, anti Protestant way. The extremely and sadly low TFR of japan and late marriages are the works which prove the “faith” in patriarchy is dead or dying in Japan.

                • Anon Poaster says:

                  Cominator, the Japanese girls and young women I have met were significantly less likely to engage in shit-tests, spread globohomo propaganda, etc. than those of other backgrounds. And those were the ones from families Westernised enough to send their children abroad for education.

                  Objectively speaking though, Japan has a fertility rate of 1.36. What this suggests to me is that poz ideology has a particularly deleterious impact on fertility among East Asian nations. South Korea has a TFR of less than 1.0; Taiwan (which recently got gay marriage forced on it) has a TFR of about 1.2.

                  You can attribute low East Asian fertility to any number of reasons, but my gut feeling is that it’s simply because of greater vulnerability to poz. I’m pretty sure everyone here’s seen the graph with Japanese TFR after American occupation already.

          • Neurotoxin says:

            Teh Interwebz gives the speed of sound as 343 meters per second. 28 times that is 9,600 meters/second. Wouldn’t a Mach 28 missile melt before it got where it was going?

            If materials science has advanced to the point where the answer is No, I’m seriously impressed.

            • Wulfgar Thundercock III says:

              There would be a lot of friction, leading to heat buildup, but there is also a lot you can do with heat dissipation, or onboard cooling elements. At hypersonic speeds you have to solve for frictional radicalization of diatomic atmospheric gasses, which was an interesting problem when I first read up on it. There are a whole host of problems, but last I heard, Mach 10+ has already been done, and they just keep inching the numbers up.

            • Kunning Drueger says:

              Here’s the Sprint ABM:

              https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msXtgTVMcuA&t=1s&ab_channel=IrisHo

              1960s or 70s IIRC. It’s going inhumanly fast, but if you look at 01:04, you can see the ABM crawl through spacetime while the reentry vehicle flits by like a hint of the future they took from us.

            • jim says:

              Musk’s proposed sweat solution:

              On a hypersonic cruise drone this would take the form of the front ending in a sharply pointed cone, and the wings strongly backswept, and at the very point of the cone, a tube that squirts methane into the oncoming shock. Thus the very point of the cone is not refractory material, but relatively cool methane gas. The tip therefore does not melt, being gas, and the actually solid part of the cone does not melt, because not directly facing the shock.

              Frictional heating imposes a limit, but that limit is a bit further off than the limit imposed by shock heating.

              • Cloudswrest says:

                “Musk’s proposed sweat solution”

                I thought of something like this a long time ago. Steam powered re-entry retros.

                1. Water circulates and cools the skin, turning into steam.
                2. Exhausted steam serves as a retro rocket.
                3. Exhausted steam serves as a continuously generated heat shield (leidenfrost effect).

                Only *problem* is water is heavy. Not worth it if you have to haul the water up with you. But if they find adequate water sources on the moon or asteroids it could be useful of earth reentry.

            • Neurotoxin says:

              Wulfgar, Kunning, Jim: Wow, cool stuff.

              If you watch the video that Kunning linked to, look at the acceleration right at the 1:00 mark. Holy shit!

        • Ash says:

          Much obliged to your comments and research..

          The American capabilities seem irrelevant for westerners or the average Chinese..

          The Mach 28 missiles (this was not bragged about on Chinese media… It’s only been mentioned a handful of times since 2016) is a device maybe 6-7 meters from nose to tail. It’s a disc that is oval shaped, the side concave contains the propulsion. I really cannot verify this, but it would appear that whatever this device is made out of, it would appear to be fired straight up into space, readjusts it’s position in earth’s orbit, and then uses its propulsion system to steer it as it uses the planets gravity to slingshot itself at the target. Up to Mach 28 speeds.. maybe a secondary rocket carries it to space (I don’t know, it’s not open to the public) I don’t know the materials used.. just around 2016 (around the time trump was elected and sworn in) the chinese reassured Mach 7-9 missiles were being installed along the coastline in case of warfare and at that time this device was being tested. Around 2018/2019 seems there was confidence the device was ready to be implemented for defensive measures

          As for calls that china is bankrupt, or low birthrates… They have survived for thousands of years and grown. I personally believe they do not want war with the West.. if America were to economically shrink, close its borders and focus on its population, china would probably wish everyone good luck

          • Ash says:

            I don’t know if it was Hilary stating war with Russia around 2015 or trump’s hard-line close borders and reduce trade with China… I think Chinese leadership sees America as chaotic and untrustworthy, which is sad, because after the Prussian Invasion in the 1870s or so of china, china has taken a big liking to Germans (maybe no more)

            The Prussian army (what we know as Germany/Austria etc) marged across their lands after decimating the Chinese mercenaries and armies.

            The people now known as Germans did something unknown of, as they walked the roads, village elders from Chinese villagers would run out and beg “please spare our town.. please” and the commander would shout in German “get out of the way or you will be shot!’

            It was the first time in China’s history that an army marched through their lands without burning down every town and raping every woman they came across.. apparently every Asiatic army to have done invasion has had some exceptional aggression towards the unarmed (mayhaps reflects USA in the middle East unfortunately)

            • Ash says:

              Oh one more thing..

              Not a prediction.. USA is going to try and come to the aid of Taiwan forgetting it’s been neglected for 6 months..

              Taiwan will decline help unless from the USA (unless the USA threatens violence against Taiwanese officials) and every Taiwanese official will try and be amicable…

              It’s how is this not so predictable?

              • Ash says:

                Calvin, Japan is a semi puppeted state like Germany.. except they have extreme hatred towards anyone from outside their archipelago…

                It wouldn’t surprise me if Japan has had nuclear bombs for the past 20 years, since I was a wee teenager (china has based their defensive strategies on this)..

                Most official documents are lies.. talk to locals, if they can discuss geopolitics, average person enjoys making predictions for the next 5 years, a worthy culture.. a people speaking of TV and pornos… I don’t know ? Maybe a dead people

                • Ash says:

                  Did USA spend billions to convince the Japanese they genocided trillions of Jews ? No.. the Japanese have already successfully genocided precious cultures in Asia.. they don’t give a shit about propaganda, they care about USA weakening and closing their borders

  37. Zach says:

    It’s my understanding that the Russians are now leading with electric:

    “The Russians are already adapting, and by doing so are narrowing the Ukrainians’ tactical edge. The one-sided culling of Russian armored columns that characterized the opening days of the war, and kept YouTube subscribers around the world happy, are a thing of the past. The Russians now lead their formations with electronic attack, drones, lasers and good-old-fashioned reconnaissance by fire. They are using cruise missiles and saboteur teams to target logistics routes, manufacturing plants, and training bases in western Ukraine. Realizing that the Ukrainians lack thermal sights for their stinger missile launchers, the Russians have switched all air operations to after dark. It may be for this same reason that Russian cruise missile strikes in western and southern Ukraine have also been at nighttime.”

    https://taskandpurpose.com/news/russian-military-tactics-ukraine/

    • Varna says:

      I’m starting to look at a number of scenarios of different scale in order to try and see who is fighting who in the name of what.
      1) small scale: Russia vs Ukraine
      2) medium scale: Russia vs NATO, Ukraine is the battleground Korea and Vietnam style.
      3) planetary scale: China vs ZOG, weaponized buffers Russia vs EU, kinetic battlefield — Ukraine.

      If we look at the 10 year scale, we can see Russia and China starting to hoard gold more or less at the same time.
      https://tradingeconomics.com/russia/gold-reserves
      https://tradingeconomics.com/china/gold-reserves

      Xi got himself the option to be emperor for life in 2018
      https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-43361276
      Putin got himself the option to be tsar for life in 2020
      https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/putin-presidential-term-limit-2024-next-russia-president-a9391131.html

      In hindsight, this seems coordinated. As if Putin and Xi were both going through the steps of a shared strategy, building up toward what we see now.

      It’s all blurry in my mind for now, but I’m starting to discern a few interconnected layers of which the current kinetic Ukraine theater is part.
      1) kinetic goals — take the east and south of the country; ensure the remaining Ukraine accepts Finlandization
      2) civilizational goals — force the West to rig up its own Iron Curtain
      3) monetary system goals — wound the petrodollar system
      4) economic system goals — force great reckoning on the EU through quality of life crash and shortages
      5) theoretical interaction with (“undermining” or “hijacking” or “amplification”) of ZOG great reset goals including the clot shot drama.

      A vague and blurry picture, but it’s slowly starting to come into focus. The current consensus in the west, around me as well, is that Xi and Putin have both lost their marbles and are acting increasingly erratically for no reason, beyond general incompetence, craziness, and evil.

      I guess we’ll see.

    • pyrrhus says:

      Competent militaries adapt…Incompetent militaries still have cavalry along with tanks..

    • Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

      https://www.isegoria.net/2022/03/the-little-green-men-could-jam-ukrainian-drones/

      In 2014, the military was Serdyukov’s military. In 2022, it was Shoigu’s military.

      Since modern institutions have no memory, they’ll have to relearn a lot of the same lessons.

  38. Kunning Drueger says:

    Interesting observation here:
    https://twitter.com/Irkutyanin1/status/1506328961567051788

    I am not going to die on this hill, but I do feel as if this conjectured “21st century warfare,” hyper kill drones, handheld weapons that can engage a full spectrum of targets, and fatal obsolescence of all equipment, armaments, strategy, and tactics that have come before is… kind of bullshit. It seems to be the fever dream of a post-history defense industry that used powerpoint to make anything and everything seem possible.

    I am not at all saying that autono-drones, selective grenade launchers, and individual HUDs are impossible, nor am I asserting that they would suck. But, at the risk of sounding Hegelian, I believe the future of warfare will be a synthesis of drones and tube artillery, in a manner of speaking.

    This may or may not be unrelated, but I also think the Iron Dragoon concept would kill the GAE faster than anything else, and not just their legions of paid war monkeys and donut munchers. I think, if these kinds of biker-bunds started cropping up, particularly in lawless areas, the ideological and spiritual underpinning of GAE core territory would start to unravel very quickly.

    • Red says:

      This rather proves Jim’s point. The way to deal with fixed fortifications is to go around them, like the Germans did when they invaded France. The fact that the Russians slugging their way indicates that armored warfare, AKA war of movement isn’t working. The most likely reason it’s not working is either the armored vehicles or the logistics vehicles don’t live very long during large encircling maneuvers.

    • jim says:

      > and fatal obsolescence of all equipment, armaments, strategy, and tactics that have come before is… kind of bullshit

      Trump defeated ISIS with twenty first century warfare, Information Epoch warfare.

      – no artillery, no tanks, no bombers, no fighter planes.

      – no blitzkrieg, no encirclements, and no attrition.

      He just kept nailing one Caliph after another.

      Tanks and artillery are obsolete. Battleships were obsolete the day the Bismark sunk, and now aircraft carriers are obsolete. Manned fighters and bombers are obsolete. Attrition, which is now happening in the Ukraine, was obsolete when World War II started, and now blitzkrieg and encirclement are obsolete.

      Doing attrition in Ukraine is like doing a horse mounted cavalry charge in World War II.

      What your twitter link shows is people still using twentieth century weapons,tactics, and strategy, and getting nowhere with them. World War II tactics failed, now they are falling back on World War I tactics. Next, horse mounted archers and chariots.

      In the Information Epoch, you penetrate the enemy networks, social and computer, and apply small amounts of precisely targeted explosives.

      The rod from god at the correct moment on the correct room of the presidential palace is the ICBM of the future.

      • Karl says:

        This Information Epoch war sounds like politics by assassination – which has been tried before. The usual response was to kill anybody related to the guys ordering the assassination or executing it.

        I don’t see how such an Information Epoch war could stay limited to assassinations. I expect there would quickly be 20th century war, maybe with nukes, where nobody cares much abot what precisely is destroyed or who precisely is killed.

        • jim says:

          > This Information Epoch war sounds like politics by assassination – which has been tried before. The usual response was to kill anybody related to the guys ordering the assassination or executing it.

          Assassinating people used to be a great deal harder before smart weapons, is now a great deal easier for a great power, and killing anybody related to the guys ordering the assassination is now a great deal harder. What is the targeted power going to do? Blitzkreig?

          It is different now.

          > I expect there would quickly be 20th century war

          There is already twentieth century war happening right now. Needs to escalate to Information Epoch warfare, or else it will go on forever inconclusively.

          We are now seeing a demonstration that twentieth century warfare is no longer capable of resolving the disputes of sovereigns.

          If nukes are used counter value, twentieth century style, still will not resolve it. This is a holy war, and countervalue strikes will not settle it. For nukes to actually be useful in resolving the question to the satisfaction of one of the sovereigns, they will need to be used as part of an Information Epoch Warfare strategy, rather than attritively, used to behead the enemy and disrupt his networks, rather than to make war expensive for the enemy.

          • Karl says:

            Information Epoch warfare as an escalation of 20th century makes sense. So it will be assassination in addition to 20th century warfare. I misunderstood your point to be more of replacement than an addition

            Nonetheless, I do not think that 20th centruy war can go on forever inconclusively. Both world wars were conclusively settled after about 4 to 6 years. I assume it would have been faster if nukes had been used extensively.

            I agree that Information Epoch warfare might resolve conflicts much faster and with less destruction

            • jim says:

              I expect nukes eventually, though not any time soon. I do not expect nukes, used merely countervalue, to resolve this war.

              I expect that Information Epoch warfare will likely escalate to small nukes from time to time, and though less destructive to the civilian population than attritive counter value nukes, still very destructive.

              • FrankNorman says:

                ” This is a holy war, and countervalue strikes will not settle it.”

                It seems to me that if one side was able and willing use *enough* nukes, they could settle a religious war good and harm.
                Kill all the Baal-worshipers, no more Baal-worship.

                It’s only less simple than that when one sees people on the opposing side a potential converts, as souls to be saved, rather than as enemies to be destroyed.

                • jim says:

                  If everyone applies all the nukes at their disposal, it would thin the population considerably, but substantial proportion of the population, and most of the wealth and technology needed for effective warfare would remain. The effect of nukes has been exaggerated by a bunch of intellectuals who reside near ground zero.

                  Full on countervalue nuclear war will destroy all urban areas. But that is less of a big deal than those who reside in urban areas appreciate. Most real wealth, and roughly half of all technology is outside urban areas.

                  The FIRE economy of the big cities does not make a substantial contribution to war fighting capability. Manufacturing, trucking, warehouses, and all that have been moving out for some time. While the instrumentalities of the state are all in urban areas, and their destruction would be seriously incapacitating, the central vertices of the social network at the top spend a lot of time outside urban areas.

                • Karl says:

                  If Information epoch warfare is sucessfull there is no need for extensive use of nukes. If nukes fail to kill all enemy high priests and commanders (which I think rather likely) widespread use to kill all unbelievers is an (almost inevitable) escalation in a holy war. I share your assumption that a holy war can be settled in this way.

                  In fact, I think such settlement to be more like than less blody alternatives, at least while both sides have a religion that is alive.

      • Fireball says:

        ISIS didn’t have air defense and the penetration of enemy networks would be a bit harder if we all didn’t have the same internet.

        • Kunning Drueger says:

          This is part of why I am hesitant to buy into IE warfare; the examples given are all State actors going after non-state entities. As we get more peer/near-peer conflicts, the picture will resolve further. I don’t think it will be this clean cut, perfectly crafted warfare, not right away. It will be trial and error, with false starts and missteps along the way.

          Further complicating the matter, both GAE and PRC are controlled by evil state religions. For different if similar reasons, both empires are struggling mightily to continue forward, as tech decline and decay bites deeper and deeper into the social fabric.

          The Russian Federation seems to have a healthy state religion, but it is not fully or honestly implemented yet, and they are at a numerical and fiscal disadvantage. They must rely on GAE or PRC as an ally, and no matter how healthy or moral you are, if you are in bed with evil, evil is begotten.

          There is an opportunity for disruption, in the GAE and not the PRC IMO, by Iron Dragoons. If a man of strength, will, and tenacity were to start gathering men under his banner, which I guess would be a QR code on the back of his biker jacket, the path to power is pretty wide open. This doesn’t have top be at the national/nation state level. It could just be a languishing township or a broken and depopulated city. Remember how ISIS gathered power? Slick marketing videos and a stable, healthy religion. The marketing was aimed at the type of recruit they wanted (disaffected, young Muslim youth in the Occident) and the religion was proffered as a solution to what ailed them. There was also the promise of as many wives as they could handle.

          So we can confidently assert that the Jimian thesis regarding what men really want, and what they will do to get it, is correct. But there are obviously pieces missing, because ISIS was smashed and is only now beginning to recover. A replica of ISIS wouldn’t work in the Core GAE, but with reconfiguration and deft implementation, I think there are thousands of young men who would flock to a real leader riding a dual sport offering meaning, money, and women.

          • Fireball says:

            There is no missing pieces, GAE is simple to powerful but its core religion is infertile and likes to undermine its own warriors so it is inevitable that it will collapse.

      • Pooch says:

        The rod from god at the correct moment on the correct room of the presidential palace is the ICBM of the future.

        I have heard this argument before for centuries. That this technology or that technology will make large scale armies obsolete and battles a thing of the past. Well armies don’t seem to be going away.

        If rod from god becomes perfected and common place, large scale armies will clash in space.

        • Kunning Drueger says:

          Yeah, it’s the old trope of the scientific caste: with this new technology, everything has changed. And they aren’t wrong about the change aspect, but their conclusions always go awry. The cannon, the musket, the rifled barrel, the howitzer, the dreadnought, the maxim gun, the bomber, the rocket, the guided missile, the strike drone. There’s also this same situation in logistics with ball bearings, sea transport, automobile, steam engine train, containerized shipping, computerized logistical scheduling, satellite comms, JIT, etc. As well, the art of communication with writing being the first and computer translation software being more recent.

          Radio was supposed to obviate human strife by connecting every people with every other under the sun. Strategic bombing was supposed to obviate arms build ups by making land armies obsolete. And socialism was supposed to obviate politics by centrally providing all goods and services equally between all people. Cherry picked and manhandled and brutally summarized, admittedly, but this “now is the end of X with the introduction of Y” theme never seems to pan out. What does happen is that some man or group uses Y to their advantage, and X gets changed seemingly irrevocably.

          War isn’t going away. History doesn’t end until humankind does. Technology will always be a tool employed by emotional beings for personal reasons. Singularity can be safely left in the category of Yellowstone Eruption and Chicxulub Impact; not impossible, but impossible to prevent or plan for (at a societal level).

          So,
          The Information Epoch is here, but I posit that it is reliant on global interconnectivity, global energy networks, and hegemonic state actors. All of these are the fruits of the Boomer Era/Pax Americana. If these massive network of networks degrade sufficiently, the edge provided dulls considerably, if not completely. An airgapped computer with no power is a shitty paperweight, but a knife is a knife until it’s melted away.

          Unrelated, S to spit on Madeline Albright’s grave. Rest in piss, you globalist cunt.

          • Pooch says:

            I suspect we will start seeing drones with surface-to-surface missiles and some epic drone battles for drone supremacy.

            Once drone supremacy is established, ground troops can pound away who may also have drone tanks at that point.

            • Pooch says:

              air-to-air missiles rather*

            • Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

              Yep. The same technology that can allow a platform to find and fly itself into a target, can also allow a platform to shoot a penitrator through the camera lens of a target.

        • pyrrhus says:

          Neutron bombs in space to take out satellites and maybe space stations…

      • pyrrhus says:

        So Trump attacked ISIS, a Deep State production from the git-go, with military drones, and won when the Russians intervened in Syria…? Was this all theater?

        • jim says:

          Not all theater. Real people really getting blown up.

          But ISIS was enabled by the deep state, and the conflict with ISIS was in substantial part a proxy conflict within the US between US Military Intelligence and the State Department. US Military intelligence was blowing up US State Department assets in the Middle East. Trump was talking to Putin to make sure that our Military Intelligence with explosives did not step on their Military Intelligence with explosives.

          A some point in the future, probably around 2026 or so, this is likely to escalate to two arms of the US government blowing up each others assets in the US.

    • Pseudo-CHrysostom says:

      In the dynamic of strike methodologies vs intercept methodologies in the salvo economy, there is a dividend for systems that can serve as both.

  39. Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

    Mariupol looks to be wrapped up soon.

    • jim says:

      Was supposed to have been wrapped up twenty four hours ago. It will take a little longer than planned. But chances are, wrapped up soon enough. Attempts to prevent civilians and deserting soldiers from fleeing Mariupol are inconsistent, erratic, and of limited effectiveness, because regular army commanders have decided to get the hell out. Fleeing Mariupol was still dangerous and unauthorized last time I checked, but not effectually forbidden. Their capability to keep civilians hostage has failed through lack of will and lack of physical capability.

  40. Anonymous Fake says:

    https://twitter.com/trtworld/status/1504978935901261828

    Back on topic, Putin is starting to understand that this is a holy war. I don’t know what it even takes anymore for a pope to call for a crusade. Or to consecrate Russia without mysteriously and inexplicably botching the ritual.

    I wonder what kind of response I would get from my (Republican) representative if I showed him this and compared it to Zelensky’s behavior. I know I would get put on a government list (and I know I’m certainly already on one so whatever) but what does a Christian Republican say in the face of this? More tax cuts and deregulation?

    I ought to bring up the aborted babies used to make the vampire vaccines too. Just to prove a point. The point being, ordinary if not virtuous citizens are fed up with their clown show.

    • Aryaman says:

      Other than under Trump, what tax cuts and deregulation has your “Christian Republican” representative called for or supported?

      Tax cuts and deregulation, especially deregulation, would be welcomed heartily by “ordinary if not virtuous” citizens if they were forthcoming, which they are not.

      https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-03-22/the-sec-will-regulate-climate

      Is the SEC here telling large public companies “you have to pressure your private suppliers to stop emitting so much carbon”? No; that is again beyond its authority. It is just saying, look, you do what you want, but if you don’t pressure your suppliers to reduce their emissions, you’re gonna have a heck of a hard time reporting your Scope 3 emissions. The disclosure regime effectively deputizes public companies to be climate enforcers: If their suppliers don’t start measuring and reducing their emissions, the companies won’t be able to do the required disclosure.

      I very much doubt your “Christian Republican” representative is up in arms about any of it.

      • Aryaman says:

        To be clear, what I’m opposed to is the frame implied by the meme: “muhh… tax cuts and deregulation”.

        Republicans do not and have not supported tax cuts or deregulation. And if they did those tax cuts and that deregulation would help productive white Americans more than whatever the wignats complaining about it would prefer Republicans focus on instead.

  41. alf says:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpzUCSdxi7k&ab_channel=NotWhatYouThink

    this guy argues that RF
    a) does not have air superiority
    b) that is because the Russian air force is just not good enough to perform Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses. ‘Incapable of complex military operations’.

    • jim says:

      Russia has not suppressed Ukraine’s ground to air capabilities. No one ever entirely succeeds in suppressing the other guy’s ground to air capabilities.

      But they are unchallenged in the air. Ukrainians just cannot send planes up and expect them to live.

      Ukrainians just cannot fly stuff around, cannot give their troops air to ground support. In this sense, Russia has unquestioned air superiority.

      Trouble is, in the age of smart weapons, ground to air is getting considerably better, so unquestionable air superiority is worth less than it used to be.

      • Fireball says:

        Nothing much change about the value of air superiority since the invention of SAMs and MANPADs. The difference is that what we are seeing is not the US bombing some middle easter country.

    • Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

      Word on the street is the shoulder fired missiles being supplied to ukes are not proving sufficiently effective against russian air support. Probably some combination of insufficient delta-v for an intercept course (too far, too fast), and on board countermeasures.

      https://gab.com/ASBMilitary/posts/107980787716809889

  42. The Cominator says:

    https://twitter.com/SecBlinken/status/1506001259907665936

    My God I do not think the Biden regime is going to be overthrown by people more insane than them… I’m not sure its possible. Picking a fight with China and Russia at the same time… MADNESS!

    “Greatest” foreign policy decision since Hitler declared war on the US while still at war with England and Russia.

    • The Ducking Man says:

      US has been provoking China since Trump days, this is nothing new. What I don’t understand is why Biden don’t roll back US’ anti china policy as soon as he came into power, I though dems are china sellout.

      I know for certain that God like to clean up evil in 1 swoop. The convergence of entire world power into 1 big pile of messy events is inevitable. Might be a lot sooner than we thought.

    • Pooch says:

      Blinken is an insane radical leftist Jew. I actually think the military would rather coup then allow him to go to war with China and Russia simultaneously.

      • jim says:

        This looks like another concession to the war faction.

        Which will only act as blood in the water to them.

    • pyrrhus says:

      Is Zelensky ready to cash in his chips for a settlement?…https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/jpm-trading-desk-asks-if-zelensky-close-capitulation

  43. Kunning Drueger says:

    A pro-Russia YouTuber that is a resident of Latvia, Kirill Federov of Riga, was detained on 17 March before he could flee to Russia. He’s being held on charges of assisting Russian Intelligence and, allegedly, will be charged with Treason. His channel, History of Weapons, is purported to be one of the biggest Russian language channels.

    For those of us here, this is not shocking. We have taken the clear pill and aren’t *usually* taken in by fabricated A/B narrative construction. But many people are. We’ve been arguing about what Putin is doing, what his strategy is, and where it is going. The many sides, with the exception of the blatant shills, all have good points. We disagree on efficacy, tactics, strategy, and goals. It is goals I wish to discuss.

    “My name is Dunning, and I’m a Truth copium addict.”

    “Hi, faggot.”

    Many conservatives stupidly believe that if we provide enough evidence, if we can perfect rhetorical frames, if we could only just explain things simply enough, the scales will fall away from our kin and friends and strangers we contact, and the truth will set us free. The Cathedral is ahead of this kind of process; if it was going to work, we would hear about McCarthy more than FDR. No amount of data or examples will break through the common knowledge bulwark of the Brain and the Voice. Accepting this to be true, we must also begin to consider that there is a finite buffer, a data point stack, that exists for the NPCs. They can carry a lot of cognitive dissonance, more than should be possible. Gramsci Compression is a stunning memetic algorithm. But it should have its limits. I would argue that we saw this limit being approached with Coronatarianism.

    Maybe the anti-Cathedral is attempting to shatter Gramsci Compression by constructing circumstances wherein GAE societies have a buffer overflow that cascades into a societal collapse. This could be a fool’s errand; it could be that the NPC capacity for comfortably internalizing cognitive dissonance is limitless. But trees can only grow so high. I guess the question could be posed differently: is Putin building long term strategy based on Zhukov, or Dugin?

    • lambada equis says:

      Every liberal I grew up with thought the Medical Establishment was engaged in a conspiracy to hide the efficacy of natural remedies in favor of expensive profit-laden pharmaceutical boondoggles. Until Covid came along, and then they made it nearly illegal to even talk about Ivermectin.

      There is no line that connects the two points that stays within the space of acceptable thought. That space is no longer convex. I fear you’re right that there’s no hope of convincing any of them with any evidence.

      The only thing I can think of to explain this shift is that people naturally want to agree with “what’s on TV,” and the Cathedral controls what’s on TV. The internet enabled them to extend this capability in novel ways. Machine learning enabled them to refine and converge it very effectively.

      For the subset of us willing to be hated, life is more interesting, but if we cannot change what’s on TV, we can’t make any progress. Putin is changing what’s on TV (so is Zelensky for that matter)

      • Pooch says:

        Convincing people with evidence will never work because they are worshipping the state religion. Can not beat a religion with “evidence”, can only offer them a competing religion, for which we have none.

        • jim says:

          Sure we do. In my personal life I am not preaching, let alone prophesying. Not my job, not my mission. But I can see impact even though I am not trying to have impact. People are hungry for a religion that does not hate them. They want bread, and our elite has nothing but stones.

          My faith is as a mustard seed, and I have posted plenty of cynicism and doubt on this blog. Likely my cynicism greatly outweighs my faith. And yet, what little faith I have, if it cannot move mountains, can nonetheless move people and drive out demons, whether they be real or figurative.

          What we do not have is organized religion. And, at the moment, while we are facing a live state sponsored faith, organized religion would likely be suicidal. We would get Wacoed.

          Need a protector with nukes for organization under current circumstances.

          If we were facing a dead state religion as the early Christians were, we could do as they did, and as the protestant Churches in China are doing.

          • Pooch says:

            What we do not have is organized religion. And, at the moment, while we are facing a live state sponsored faith, organized religion would likely be suicidal. We would get Wacoed.

            If we were facing a dead state religion as the early Christians were, we could do as they did, and as the protestant Churches in China are doing.

            Looks to me what the early Christians did was suicidal. Many, if not most, of the important Christians before Constantine were martyr’d by the state or mobs protected by the state.

            Hard to explain the faith of the early Christians given the near certain death of doing what they were doing. The Cathedral loves to downplay the persecutions of the pre-Constantine Christians as not that bad. It was most definitely suicide.

            Perhaps, they didn’t have much to lose. They likely didn’t have much to lose. We have no faith like that, but we may need to rediscover it yet again as the early Christians rediscovered the lost ancient Hebrew faith.

            • alf says:

              Hard to explain the faith of the early Christians given the near certain death of doing what they were doing.

              Not so hard to me.

              Your religious identity, much like your game, is not something you outwardly describe. It is not a set of conscious decisions. Like game, it is animalistic, instinctive. A kind of feeling hard to describe, but easily recognized. You may have experienced it when you got really hyped with friends. Or from that time you felt very connected with someone. Or hell, around 2 AM on a festival with the right kind of drugs.

              Put differently, what do you think your state of mind would be if you would dance like this for half an hour? You can only dream, because like all post-Christians you’ll barely get one friend and your mother to join.

              There is nothing more powerful in the universe than a strong sense of belonging. Yes, it transcends fear of death. We are pretty good at rationally explaining that, but we have yet to tap into that instinct. Then, we shall have a religion.

            • jim says:

              > Looks to me what the early Christians did was suicidal.

              They exaggerated.

              Enforcement was ineffectual, capricious, and erratic.

              It was from time to time intended by the emperors to be severe, savage, thorough, and extreme, but if you have a zombie state religion or a dead one, this does not work all that well. We see in China a lot of protestant Christians with thoroughly anti party belief systems, that are prohibited by drastic measures. The measures are not working all that well, even though Chinese are even more conformist than whites, and communism is showing disturbing signs of life.

              In the west, which has a live state religion, attacks on Christianity rely on shilling and entryism. If you run into trouble with a Christian entryist, and you will if a member of an organized religion, he is an unpaid employee of that religion who is quietly drawing pay for his duties from somewhere else, a somewhere else somehow connected to an ngo funded by Soros.

              If someone of high authority in that organized Christian Western faith religion finds such employees are a problem, chances are he will get in trouble with the state. Vigano is now thoroughly underground. He has bugged out.

              Suppression of old type Christianity is overt in China, but ineffectual, because the state religion is walking dead. Coercive and forceful suppression of old type Christianity is covert in the west, but gets quite forceful for organized religion. Russian Orthodoxy appears exempt, though perhaps it is now no longer exempt, or will not be exempt for much longer.

              • Pooch says:

                Enforcement was ineffectual, capricious, and erratic.

                This is exactly what the Cathedral tells us, so I am immediately suspicious of Cathedral myths. Academics and Cathedralites seem to go to great pains to describe the persecutions of the early Christians as exaggerated.

                Yet when I ready about early Christians in the first three centuries, mighty hard to find ones that weren’t maryr’d. Funny that.

                • S says:

                  We have Pliny the Younger’s letters to Trajan describing his methods on dealing with Christians and asking for advice.

                  Trajan’s responce
                  “You observed proper procedure, my dear Pliny, in sifting the cases of those who had been denounced to you as Christians. For it is not possible to lay down any general rule to serve as a kind of fixed standard. They are not to be sought out; if they are denounced and proved guilty, they are to be punished, with this reservation, that whoever denies that he is a Christian and really proves it–that is, by worshiping our gods–even though he was under suspicion in the past, shall obtain pardon through repentance. But anonymously posted accusations ought to have no place in any prosecution. For this is both a dangerous kind of precedent and out of keeping with the spirit of our age.”

                • jim says:

                  Dead state religion means limited risk of denunciation. People are supposed to care, because supposed to be adherents of the state religion, but do not.

                  Early Christians, however, faced a big risk of denunciation by Jews, who had a live state religion.

                • Pooch says:

                  Dead state religion means limited risk of denunciation. People are supposed to care, because supposed to be adherents of the state religion, but do not.

                  Do people in America care about the state religion? I see people no longer caring about the Covid demon. Have not cared about worshipping the Covid demon for some time. Nobody cares about the climate. Nobody cares about Black Lives Matter. The masses don’t care. Seems like a dying state religion.

                  The only people who seem to care are the elites.

                • jim says:

                  It is dying, but far from dead. Its death may come soon, but I fear it may take quite a while.

                • Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

                  >The only people who seem to care are the elites.

                  Holders of power are also where opinions get their teeth, so that’s the most important people who care.

                • Pooch says:

                  Holders of power are also where opinions get their teeth, so that’s the most important people who care.

                  Exactly, and I see this directly analogous to early Christians of the Roman Empire. The only people who seemed to care were the holders of the power, the Emperors and Imperial authorities.

                • i says:

                  @Pooch

                  Its actually nothing compared to China:
                  “The Chinese rebels led by Huang Chao slaughtered Jews, Muslim Arabs, Muslim Persians, Zoroastrians (a.k.a. Parsees or Mazdaists), and Christians when they seized and conquered according to the Arab writer Abu Zayd Hasan As-Sirafi. Huang Chao’s army was in Guangzhou during 878–879.[8][9][10][11][12][13] Mulberry groves were also ruined by Huang’s army.[14] Only the Arabic source of Abu Zaid mentions the massacre, Chinese sources of the Tang dynasty history say nothing of the massacre and only mention Huang Chao occupying Guangzhou and retreating after disease struck his army.

                  The main motivation for the killings were that the victims were foreign and wealthy.[15]

                  The death toll could have ranged from 120,000 to 200,000 foreigners.[16][17][18]

                  Foreigners have at different periods settled in China; but after remaining for a time, they have been massacred. For instance, Mohammedans and others settled at Canton in the ninth century; and in 889, it is said that 120,000 foreign settlers were massacred.[19]

                  — the American Baptist Foreign Mission Society, “The Baptist missionary magazine” (1869)”

                  Romans didn’t massacre all Christians they can find no matter Clergy or Laity.

            • clovis says:

              We underestimate the extent to which faith in a crucified God undermined the perceived authority of the Roman state. Rome had a lot of carrots to offer people in the form of aqueducts, roads, and baths, but if you questioned Rome’s divine mandate they crucified you. But if God had been crucified and raised and redeemed the world on a cross, it didn’t leave Caesar with a whole lot he could do to you.

              • Pooch says:

                Good and interesting point when you describe it like that.

              • Ash says:

                The bible (I don’t remember which section of the old testament) predicted foreigners from far away (north) would invade their lands and overthrow them for their sins – our Lord displeased by sinners and the extreme evil.. 200 years later the Romans marched upon their lands… It’s written in the bible

                As a sinner myself, most times I feel blind too

              • Oog en Hand says:

                Hell is eternal…

            • ahah says:

              > Looks to me what the early Christians did was suicidal. Many, if not most, of the important Christians before Constantine were martyr’d by the state or mobs protected by the state.

              Not in the first century. Persecution of Christians for being Christians did not start in earnest until the mid 2nd to early 3rd century, when Christianity was already widespread. The martyr stories in Acts of the Apostles, the Epistles of Ignatius, the various apocryphal Acts etc are fictional.

              • jim says:

                The martyrdoms at the time of the Acts of the Apostles are well attested historically, independent of Christian sources, but they reflect persecution by the Jews of Christians (and just about everyone else) that the Roman authorities acquiesced in for the sake of peace, not Roman persecution.

                This Roman tolerance of a hostile state religion bit them hard. They were tolerant because to Jews had a live state religion, and they had a dead one. Turned out to be a very bad idea.

                • Pooch says:

                  This Roman tolerance of a hostile state religion bit them hard.

                  Not seeing them on being all that tolerant. Peter and Paul were martyr’d in Rome.

                  There were more interested and less interested Emperors on Christian persecution, but as Christianity grew out of Jerusalem and spread throughout Rome, tolerance is not what I would describe by the Roman authorities.

                  This a Cathedral myth that Harvard strangely goes to great effort for us to believe.

                • Pooch says:

                  throughout the Roman Empire*

                • ahah says:

                  > The martyrdoms at the time of the Acts of the Apostles are well attested historically, independent of Christian sources, but they reflect persecution by the Jews of Christians (and just about everyone else) that the Roman authorities acquiesced in for the sake of peace, not Roman persecution.

                  Uh, where? I am not aware of any such historical attestation. as far as I know, we have no more basis for asserting the historicity of the Acts of the Apostles than that of the Acts of Paul or the Acts of Phillip.

                  In all of Josephus’ voluminous writings there is not a single reference to Christianity or Jesus, except for the Testimonium Flavianum, which is an obvious forgery (Origen says somewhere that Josephus does not mention Jesus at all, implying that the Testimonium Flavianum was not in his version of Josephus. Our first reference to the passage is from Eusebius, and the Testimonium suspiciously resembles Eusebius stylistically). There also seems to be an interpolation in the passage about James “the brother of the Lord”; another Jesus is mentioned in just a few sentences before, and the passage makes much more sense if James is the brother of that Jesus, not Jesus Christ. Seems that if any of the stuff in Acts had gone down, we’d have some reference to it somewhere. Unless those whom Josephus calls “Essenes” are the same as early Christians.

                  That’s not to mention the fact that Acts seems to be trying to mediate early ecclesiastical conflicts between “Pauline” and “Petrine” Christians (which can be reconstructed from the Pauline Epistles and the Pseudo-Clementines among other sources) by making Paul and Peter as similar as possible. This implies a late date, as FC Baur argued.

                • Pooch says:

                  The persecution of Christians in Rome by Nero after the fire of 64 AD is well attested to. Roman sources don’t mention specific martyrdoms by name (as far as I know), but we know many Christians were martyred around that time.

                • ahah says:

                  > The persecution of Christians in Rome by Nero after the fire of 64 AD is well attested to. Roman sources don’t mention specific martyrdoms by name (as far as I know), but we know many Christians were martyred around that time.

                  I assume you are referring to that passage in Tacitus, but it also looks like an interpolation. TLDR: Nero’s blaming of the fire on Christians and the subsequent persecution is not mentioned by any Christian writers until the late 4th century. It’s not in Tertullian, it’s not even in Lactantius’ De Mortibus Persecutorum (On the Deaths of the Persecutors). They would certainly have mentioned the event if they knew about it. The passage in Tacitus makes sense with the interpolated sentence removed (in that case, it is referring to the “Chrestus” that Suetonius mentions, a Jewish agitator who was alive decades after the supposed death/ascension of Jesus Christ). So, probably an interpolation.

                • Pooch says:

                  Your “interpolation” is a major reach.

                  Tacitus writes (translated):

                  Christus, after whom they were named, suffered the extreme penalty at the hands of the procurator Pontius Pilate when Tiberius was emperor.

                • The Cominator says:

                  RE the toleration or lack thereof of Christians. It depended greatly on the Emperor and the Governor.

                  Under Trajan who forbade the use of informers and did not require an annual mandatory ritual to the divine gens of the Emperor they were perfectly safe.

                  Under Marcius Aurelius who did not require the mandatory sacrifices but did allow informants against Christians less safe.

                  Under Diocletian who both required sacrifices of all but Jews and did allow informers (and Jewish informers would of course be willing to denounce any abstaining christians as not jews) they prettymuch had to go into hiding.

                • ahah says:

                  All the oldest manuscripts read “Chrestians”. It was changed to Christians later in the transmission history. Seems like “Chrestians” is the original reading, just like “Chrestus” in Suetonius. Chrestians are said to be “hated for their abominations”, and “criminals who deserved the most extreme punishments”. Sounds like what they would say about followers of the Jewish political agitator Chrestus, mentioned by Suetonius, not Christians. At least, you better hope they are not talking about Christians.

                  Read the article, it proves the case. Again, Christian writers don’t mention the supposed persecution of Christians by Nero until the late 4th century. Lactantius wrote an entire book about persecutors, in which there is a section about the Nero, and he only mentions what could have been gathered from Christian tradition: the martyrdom of Peter and Paul. Nothing about blaming Christians for the fire of Rome. Tertullian mentions Nero and only refers to the martyrdom of Peter and Paul, no one else.

                • Pooch says:

                  Christianity was never officially made religio licita (“legal permitted religion”) until the Edict of Serdica of 311 AD.

                  So indeed enforcement or non-enforcement of its illegality did vary on the Emperor as well as the local authorities of the region.

                • Pooch says:

                  Sounds like what they would say about followers of the Jewish political agitator Chrestus, mentioned by Suetonius, not Christians.

                  Was Chrestus also killed by Pontius Pilate during the reign of Tiberius? Tacitus explicitly states it. Perhaps you can save me the time of reading through your “interpolation” source by answering that question.

                  Christians by Nero until the late 4th century. Lactantius wrote an entire book about persecutors, in which there is a section about the Nero, and he only mentions what could have been gathered from Christian tradition: the martyrdom of Peter and Paul. Nothing about blaming Christians for the fire of Rome. Tertullian mentions Nero and only refers to the martyrdom of Peter and Paul, no one else.

                  Sticking your head in the sand as Jim has said. If these Christian sources are describing the martyrdom of Peter and Paul during the reign of Nero, than its fairly obvious for one to come to the conclusion that Nero was persecuting Christians

                • ahah says:

                  > Was Chrestus also killed by Pontius Pilate during the reign of Tiberius? Tacitus explicitly states it. Perhaps you can save me the time of reading through your “interpolation” source by answering that question.

                  This line: “the author of this name, Christ, was executed by the procurator Pontius Pilate in the reign of Tiberius”, is an interpolation. Here is Suetonius on Chrestus (Claudius 25.4): “since Jews constantly made disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus, he [Claudius] expelled them from Rome”. Tacitus and Suetonius were friends, so if Suetonius knew about “Chrestus”, Tacitus would too.

                  > Sticking your head in the sand as Jim has said. If these Christian sources are describing the martyrdom of Peter and Paul during the reign of Nero, than its fairly obvious for one to come to the conclusion that Nero was persecuting Christians

                  Well, obviously, it is a legend. How do we even “know” about the martyrdom of Paul under Nero? Not from the Acts of the Apostles, of course. It’s in the Acts of Paul. According to that same Acts of Paul, when the soldiers tried to decapitate Paul, milk spurted out of his neck instead of blood. “Early Christians” believed all sorts of ridiculous legends.

                • Pooch says:

                  And your evidence for this, that the Chrestus of Suetonius is a different person than the Christus of Tacitus, is simply that they were spelled differently?

                  Your claims go beyond even those of the most anti-Christian elements of the Cathedral.

                • ahah says:

                  Pooch, there is complete silence about this event, the large-scale persecution of Christians by Nero on pretext of the fire of Rome, in the Acts literature, Tertullian, Lactantius, and all Christian literature for four centuries. There is mention of the martyrdom of Peter and Paul, but they are the only Christian martyrs under Nero known for four centuries. This is simply impossible if the “Neronian persecution” was recorded in the editions of Tacitus and Suetonius available to those early Christians. The line connecting the “Chrestians” with Jesus Christ, then, must be a late interpolation, and early Christian writers, when they read Tacitus, must have understood “Chrestians” to be violent Jewish agitators, which is why they do not press that passage into their service anywhere. Ergo, this passage cannot be used as evidence for the historicity of the martyrdoms of Peter and Paul.

                  Again, in the earliest manuscript of Tacitus we have, the group being persecuted is referred to as “Chrestians”. Tacitus’ book covering the reign of Claudius is sadly lost, but he would have explained who Chrestus and the Chrestians were in that book, just as Suetonius did, so it makes sense that in this passage he just would call them Chrestians without explanation.

                  The general question here is whether there is any historical attestation to the martyrdoms in Acts outside of the legendary Christian literature, and the answer still seems to me to be no. Don’t have to be a “Cathedral” “anti-Christian” to believe this: it’s just where the evidence seems to point.

                • jim says:

                  > Pooch, there is complete silence about this event, the large-scale persecution of Christians by Nero on pretext of the fire of Rome, in the Acts literature,

                  Acts of the Apostles and the epistles ends suddenly just after the imprisonment and before the execution of Paul. That it ends suddenly in mid story indicates that the writers of the gospels were killed or went underground for a while. We know from sources outside the bible that Peter was already in hot water and went underground.

                  You are inverting evidence that the gospels were written early, before the troubles depicted by Josephus that eventually led to the prophesied fall of Jerusalem and the Temple, by interpreting that evidence within the frame that everyone agrees they were written late.

                  This is argument from fake consensus, which is an absolute no-no on this blog. Stop now, or you are going on moderation.

                  You can argue that the gospels were written late, but I am not going to let you confidently take it for granted as if everyone agreed.

                • ahah says:

                  > And your evidence for this, that the Chrestus of Suetonius is a different person than the Christus of Tacitus, is simply that they were spelled differently?

                  Do you believe Jesus Christ lived until the reign of Claudius and… organized violent Jewish riots in Rome? Because that’s the “Chrestus” Suetonius is talking about. Impulsore Chresto he says, “at the instigation of Chrestus”. “Chrestus” was a common name at the time, it means “good”.

                • jim says:

                  > Do you believe Jesus Christ lived until the reign of Claudius and… organized violent Jewish riots in Rome

                  Christians certainly believed that, and believe it still. Suetonius wrote what Christians believed motivated the conduct he complained about. He probably did not inquire into, or was not interested in, the details. He is unlikely to have known or cared enough to disagree.

                • Pooch says:

                  Because that’s the “Chrestus” Suetonius is talking about. Impulsore Chresto he says, “at the instigation of Chrestus”. “Chrestus” was a common name at the time, it means “good”.

                  And how do you conclude Suetonius is to know “Chrestus” is living or dead? He simply says “at the instigation of Chrestus”. Another translation reads “From Rome he (Claudius) expelled the perpetually tumultuating Jews prompted by Chrestus.”

                  J.G. Cook, “Chrestiani, Christiani, Χριστιανοί: a Second Century Anachronism?”, Vigiliae Christianae

                  Cook describes that the term Chrestus was common at the time, particularly for slaves, meaning good or useful. However, Cook points out that this name was only a common name among pagans. While 126 individuals named Chrestus are known from Rome alone, 59 of whom were slaves, there is only a single documented Jew named Chrestus and even this Jew practiced paganism. Therefore, Cook finds it unlikely that the Jewish agitator Chrestus could be someone other than Christ.

                • ahah says:

                  > Christians certainly believed that, and believe it still. Suetonius wrote what Christians believed motivated the conduct he complained about. He probably did not inquire into, or was not interested in, the details.

                  That is just untenable. If these riots mentioned by Suetonius were Christian, Celsus and Porphyry would have certainly mentioned them, and Origen and other apologists would have had to come up with some excuse for it. Again, while we do not see any reference to Nero’s persecution until the late 4th early 5th century, and we do not see any reference to Christian riots under Claudius anywhere. Why exactly is Pliny all “I find no fault in him” in that famous letter to Tiberius, if Christians were known rioters and troublemakers in Rome? Cassius Dio mentions the expulsion of Jews under Claudius, but he says only some Jews were expelled, and does not mention Christians at all.

                  And what Christians believed that Jesus was alive during the reign of Claudius? Okay, Irenaeus believed that, but nobody else.

                  > And how do you conclude Suetonius is to know “Chrestus” is living or dead? He simply says “at the instigation of Chrestus”. Another translation reads “From Rome he (Claudius) expelled the perpetually tumultuating Jews prompted by Chrestus.”

                  In Latin, an impulsor is the man who instigates something, not the reason for instigating it.

                  > Cook describes that the term Chrestus was common at the time, particularly for slaves, meaning good or useful. However, Cook points out that this name was only a common name among pagans. While 126 individuals named Chrestus are known from Rome alone, 59 of whom were slaves, there is only a single documented Jew named Chrestus and even this Jew practiced paganism. Therefore, Cook finds it unlikely that the Jewish agitator Chrestus could be someone other than Christ.

                  Again, the silence of four centuries of Christian authors proves me right. It is more likely that a Jew would be named Chrestus than that this Neronian persecution would go unremarked by every heated Christian propagandist for three centuries.

                  From the paper:

                  “In the final analysis, given the immensity of the persecution Tacitus describes, its scale in terms of the number of victims, its barbarity, and the injustice of it being based on a false accusation of arson to cover up Nero’s own crimes, what are the odds that no Christian would ever have heard of it or made use of it or any reference to it for over three hundred years? By any reasonable estimate, quite low. Not even prolific and erudite professors of Latin like Tertullian or Lactantius? Lower still. That for nearly three centuries no Christian martyr tradition would develop from either the event or Tacitus’ account of it? Lower still. That no known legends, martyrologies, or tales would adapt or employ it as a motif in any way, not even in the various stories and legends of the persecutions and martyrdoms under Nero that we know did develop and circulate? Lower still. And on top of all that is the additional unlikelihood that all other pagan critics of Christianity (like Suetonius and Pliny the Younger, but even such critics as Celsus) would also somehow not have heard of the event or never make any mention of it.

                  “Lowering the probability further is the way Tacitus describes the event. Tacitus treats the persecuted group as unusually large, and no longer existing, and at the time widely and inexplicably regarded as composed of the most vile criminals, who could credibly have committed arson— three features that do not fit “Christians” that well, but would have fit followers of the instigator Chrestus. It is certainly less likely that Tacitus would say these three things about the Christians in Rome in the year 64 than that he would say them of the Chrestians.”

                • ahah says:

                  > Acts of the Apostles and the epistles ends suddenly just after the imprisonment and before the execution of Paul. That it ends suddenly in mid story indicates that the writers of the gospels were killed or went underground for a while. We know from sources outside the bible that Peter was already in hot water and went underground.

                  What sources? We have the Acts of Paul, that’s it. An abrupt end to Acts is perfectly consistent with there being a running (but unhistorical) legend circulating about the martyrdom of Paul under Nero. Philippians looks inauthentic to me, it has a kind of retrospective, hagiographical character that screams pseudoepigraphy to me. I am willing to argue this, of course — do not say I am using “false consensus”, I am just stating my opinion.

                  > You are inverting evidence that the gospels were written early, before the troubles depicted by Josephus that eventually led to the prophesied fall of Jerusalem and the Temple, by interpreting that evidence within the frame that everyone agrees they were written late.

                  Now you’re going to accuse me of being a Cathedral shill. For the record, the “scholarly consensus” is that the New Testament was written early (though not as early as Christians would like). Alas, that “consensus” is as worthless as any other “consensus” in current year. In fact, the Cathedral has a vested interest in keeping up the belief in the partial historicity of the New Testament. If critical historians were allowed to conclude that it’s all fiction, the Cathedral would have no leg to stand on when they tell Christians that the real “historical Jesus” was a communist, feminist, homosexual, etc.

                  It looks mightily like the “prophecy” of the fall of Jerusalem was written… after the fall of Jerusalem. This is how “prophecies” work: they are astonishingly accurate up to a certain point, at which it goes off the rails. It goes off the rails right about when the “prophet” is writing. “Verily I say unto you, That there be some of them that stand here, which shall not taste of death, till they have seen the kingdom of God come with power.” Happens all the time: Daniel 10-12 contains astonishingly detailed “predictions” of the Seleucid persecution and the Hasmonean struggle, while Daniel’s descriptions of 6th century exilic Babylon, i.e. the time period when it was supposedly written, is confused and inaccurate to the extreme, and the later predictions… well.

                  > This is argument from fake consensus, which is an absolute no-no on this blog. Stop now, or you are going on moderation.

                  > You can argue that the gospels were written late, but I am not going to let you confidently take it for granted as if everyone agreed.

                  I can argue, but one thing at a time. And I have not been talking about the gospels, but Acts. I am arguing, not assuming anything. The “silence” I referred to is the silence of ancient authors, not modern scholars, so no “fake consensus”.

                • jim says:

                  Putting you on moderation. You are not arguing in good faith, and I am tired of it.

                  You are not making your claims ostensibly – your claims are presuppositions, fake consensus, for what you are ostensibly saying.

                  I don’t think you are a shill, but you are arguing the way shills argue. Make better arguments, and I will take you off moderation.

                  The claim that the prophecy of the fall of the temple was written up after the fall of the temple is too stupid and absurd to be worth rebutting, but I am going to rebut it now, wasting space. Putting you on moderation to prevent you from provoking me into wasting more space.

                  If I allow people to use dishonest arguments for stupid claims, my comment section fills up with endless repetition.

                  In Jerusalem at the time, the Jews believed they were subject to unpleasant foreign domination for infidelity to the law, which was in fact true, albeit not in the sense the Pharisees believed.

                  They were holiness spiraling the letter of the law, while legalistically evading the spirit and intent. They were Jewing Gnon. They were holiness spiraling away from the law, while loudly claiming to be doing the opposite.

                  They were speaking Greek, or at least the educated classes were speaking Greek, as were the writers of the Gospels, and the Greek concept of the Logos, confusingly translated as “the word” corresponds to the Dark Enlightenment concept of Gnon. In massively violating the spirit of the law, they were defying the Logos, we of the Dark Enlightenment would today would say violating the law of Gnon. And had I been around at the time, I would have reprimanded them, as I reprimand Jews today, except I would have then said “The Logos” rather than saying “the laws of Gnon”.

                  Had I been around at the time, I certainly would not have thought or believed that the Logos had shown up in person to reprimand them, but I would have told them that this holiness spiral and violation of the Logos was likely to lead to the destruction of the temple and Jerusalem, and, because Gnon works through material and effective causation, would not have needed divine inspiration to make that prediction.

                  Given that Jesus was apt to rip into the Pharisees, he, and anyone else ripping into them, was likely to make that prediction, and had I been around at the time I would have ripped into them, saying to them what I say to Jews today. And, because I would have been speaking Greek, would have said “the Logos”, though I would have been highly unlikely to believe that the Logos made flesh was around at the time.

                  Then he said, the temple and Jerusalem will fall unless they repent, and today I say that Israel and Jerusalem will fall unless they repent. Though the way I say it today is “No nation with a gay parade has won a war, and Israel has been losing wars since it started gay parades.”

                  We have historical record that they murdered James the Just, brother of Jesus, so I suppose he was ripping into them also, in which case he also probably said then what I say now. With or without divine inspiration.

                  It was not a very remarkable prophecy to make, and by the time that James the Just was murdered, considerably less remarkable. Even if we had no records of people making it, we could reasonably assume it had been made.

                  It is a prophecy that religious critics of the Pharisees would have made, and a prediction that people apt to use the the phrase “the Logos” would have made whether they were religious or not.

                  The Jews were massively violating the spirit and intent of the law, and this was likely to lead to the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple. It is therefore likely that critics of them violating the spirit and intent of the Law would have said so.

                  Christianity is a heresy from holiness spiraled Judaism that split with the Pharisees and Sadducees in large part over this issue, so even if we had absolutely no record of the early history of Christianity and absolutely no record of this prophecy, we could assume that something like it had been made.

                  Like the Exodus it is something that, given the circumstances of the time, was bound to have happened. We know from history and archaeology that Bronze age civilization fell through bands of armed and organized refugees united through faith and through real or fictious common descent in the paternal line burning cities. The cities of Canaan, like the vast majority of Bronze age cities during the fall of Bronze age civilization, burned. Therefore they were likely burned by armed and organized refugees united through faith and through real or fictious common descent in the paternal line. It is just that all the refugees were illiterate except for the ones that burned Canaan, so they are the only ones that wrote the story from their own point of view.

                  Similarly, we know from history that the Jews were holiness spiraling the letter of the law at the expense of the spirit and intent of the law, and that this eventually led to the fall of Jerusalem. We know from history that not everyone agreed with holiness spiraling the letter of the law at the expense of the spirit and intent. Therefore likely that some of those critics made this prediction, whether anyone recorded them doing so or not.

                  Just as something like the Exodus must have happened, given the circumstances of the time, whether or not we had any record of it, something like the prophecy of the fall of the temple must have happened, given the circumstances at the time, whether or not we had any record of it.

                  Claiming that the prophecy is a second century invention is as blatantly ridiculous as claiming that Exodus is an Iron age invention.

                • Pooch says:

                  and at the time widely and inexplicably regarded as composed of the most vile criminals, who could credibly have committed arson— three features that do not fit “Christians”

                  Sounds exactly like how the powers that be describe actual modern day Christians. Some things never change.

                • ahah says:

                  [*Material lifted wholesale from the modern pharisaical Jewish account of the dispute over holiness spiraling the letter of the law deleted*]

                • jim says:

                  I am not going to do a line line rebuttal of a pile of lies that no one cares about any more.

                  Plus you are still taking for granted universal and unquestioned consensus on matters that are not only disputed, but that no one genuinely believes – using illegitimate methods of argument to push a story that is not only untrue, but which no one still cares about.

                  You presuppose that current year Jewish sabbath law represents universal and unchanging sabbath law, when it does not even represent 2016 Jewish sabbath law any more than 2016 “tolerance” is similar to 2022 “tolerance”.

                  From the fall of the Hasmodean dynasty to the fall of Jerusalem, and from the sixth century to the present, the Jews have been industriously erecting new laws while simultaneously boring loopholes in old ones.

                • ahah says:

                  [*deleted for the same reasons as before – confidently reporting rather recent Jewish orthodoxy as unquestioned, universal, and universally accepted truth that I “could easily verify for myself”*]

                • jim says:

                  No I cannot easily verify it for myself, and no one can ever verify it, because in Roman Israel around the time of Jesus, then as now, each priestly faction was industriously rewriting history to say that their faction was in power, had always been in power, and that the current year consensus was the universal and unchanging consensus and had always been accepted as the universal and unchanging consensus.

                • ahah says:

                  > They were speaking Greek, or at least the educated classes were speaking Greek, as were the writers of the Gospels, and the Greek concept of the Logos, confusingly translated as “the word” corresponds to the Dark Enlightenment concept of Gnon. In massively violating the spirit of the law, they were defying the Logos, we of the Dark Enlightenment would today would say violating the law of Gnon. And had I been around at the time, I would have reprimanded them, as I reprimand Jews today, except I would have then said “The Logos” rather than saying “the laws of Gnon”.

                  No, Jews did not speak Greek in 1st century Palestine. Josephus, writing in the second century, mentions that Jews did not speak Greek and frowned upon learning the language.

                  [*equally confident claims about Christianity made by someone who clearly is not Christian, and is clearly unfamiliar with Christianity, and Christian concepts that have been around for two millenia, deleted*]

                • jim says:

                  You don’t frown upon people adopting another language, unless your own language is under threat of dissolving and disappearing.

                  You are, as you have been, inverting the meaning of evidence. I allowed this through because I did not reprimand you for this method of debate the first time. Having reprimanded you, not going to allow it through again.

                  If I allow illegitimate methods of debate, the comments fill up with discussion that does not go anywhere.

                • ahah says:

                  [*deleted*]

                • jim says:

                  You are presenting valid arguments, and presenting relevant evidence, but the evidence you present, and the arguments you make, fail to respond to my arguments, which you ignore, rather than challenge.

                  And if I went to the considerable effort of rebutting your arguments and presenting counter evidence, you would ignore the rebuttal and go on to present more evidence, which though relevant to the argument about the historicity of the bible, ignores the counter evidence and the rebuttal.

                  We are talking past each other, and are going to go on talking past each other. The conversation, if I responded, would go on without end, So, shutting down this discussion.

                  I am tempted to repeat, yet again, my arguments, because they equally rebut your new arguments and new evidence. Which temptation tells me that this is going to go nowhere.
                  It starting to resemble the conversations I had with 911 troofers.

                  I would point out that the fall of building seven was evidence for planes and terrorists, not evidence for demolition, to which they would respond, not with discussion of building seven, but with evidence about the Pentagon. (No entry hole in the pentagon, and no plane wreckage.) To which I would respond that there was handkerchief sized plane wreckage all over the place, and a commercial airliner sized entry hole in the Pentagon. To which they would respond with molten steel pouring out of the tower, while continuing to confidently assume that building seven fell straight down like a demolition, and there was no entry hole in the Pentagon.

                  Your evidence is not troofer tier bullshit. But it fails to engage the evidence for the historicity of the old and testaments, dismissing it with exaggerated confidence and refusing to debate it.

                  You are not responding to my arguments, so I am not going to respond to yours.

                • ahah says:

                  > If I allow illegitimate methods of debate, the comments fill up with discussion that does not go anywhere.

                  Illegitimate methods of debate = disagreeing with your uninformed pet theories.

                  Also, ancient Hebrews did not burn Canaan. We know from the Amarna letters that the people who burned Canaan were Sea Peoples. Hebrews were native Canaanites who regrouped after the Sea Peoples got bored and left the country and the Egyptians had been driven out (by the Sea Peoples, not Hebrews). Exodus is fiction.

                • jim says:

                  The Danites were a sea people.

                  According to Greek legends of the heroic age Dan and his sons and his servants sailed to Greece, from approximately the area where the Bible tells us that Dan was born, and brought with them then modern ship building techniques to Greece.

                  According to modern archaeology, the Dannites had a major ship building facility at the Eastern end of the Mediterranean during the decline and fall of Bronze Age civilization.

                  And the letters confirm that the people burning the cities of Bronze Age civilization were in large part land people.

                  And we have plenty of evidence that the invaders burning the cities of Bronze age civilization were armed refugees, and evidence that at least some of the groups were united by real of fictious patrilineal descent from a single famous ancestor.

                  So something like Exodus happened many times in many places during the decline and fall of Bronze Age civilization, and the descendants of Dan have their fingerprints over quite a lot of it, showing up in old clay tablets here and there, because they got around a lot more that than the other descendants of Israel the patriarch who stuck to herding cattle.

                  While the sons of Dan get short shrift in the old Testament, their thumbprints show up in the decline and fall of Bronze Age civilization from one end of the Mediterranean to the other, and Samson also shows up in Greek heroic age legends.

                  Dan and the children of Dan are independently attested as part of the decline and fall of Bronze Age civilization from sources outside the bible.

                  Also, scroll of Ipuwer is reporting the same events and same conditions in Egypt as Exodus, and is reporting events that we know from archaeology happened at the same time as the carbon date on the scroll – the collapse of international trade, making it unlikely that it was a moral tale about events long ago, but rather was a lamentation about events under way.

                  So, we have two independent overlaps between records of the decline and fall of Bronze Age civilization, and the Old Testament. Three if you count Samson.

                • ahah says:

                  [*troofer tier bullshit*]

                • jim says:

                  Your argument presupposes and takes for granted issues where I have already issued a rebuttal, without responding to that rebuttal. I am not going to allow you to get away with that.

                  There is a lot of relevant evidence and relevant arguments against the historicity of the bible, and fair treatment of discussion and evidence requires me to permit them, but I am not going to permit them from someone who uses the debating tactics that you are using, because those tactics lead to endless discussion that goes nowhere.

                  I am not going to allow stuff through presenting evidence against the historicity of the bible unless you respond to and address the evidence for the historicity of the bible, and I am certainly not going to let you invent your own straw man Christianity out of thin air.

                  You respond to arguments I did not make, and ignore arguments I do make. You presuppose the nonexistence of evidence that does exist, or worse, like the troofers with building seven, invert the significance of that evidence. You are allowed to argue that significance should be inverted, but not to confidently presuppose the inversion.

                  Your key argument is that the New Testament must have been written late by people far from Israel because it is incorrect about Jewish consensus on Jewish law. But, given that holiness spiraling was under way at the time, we can be confident that no end of Jews in Israel were “incorrect” on Jewish consensus about Jewish law, which debate rapidly turned lethal. That a great deal of blood was spilled indicates a great deal of “incorrectness”.

                  Christianity reflects and was a Jewish faction whose position in this debate that invoked an eternal and unchanging spirt and intent of the law, which should be reflected in letters of the law appropriate to the particular place, time, and people.

                  Which position you write right out of Christianity, and right out of Christian and Jewish history. You cannot discuss, I will not allow you to discuss, the historicity of the bible without addressing this position.

                  Nor will I will allow you to confidently assume well established and well known consensus on Jewish law while blithely failing to notice large scale murders being committed in the course of that debate.

                  You present a lot of evidence against the historicity of the New Testament that is worthy of discussion and debate, but I am not going to debate it when you cheerfully sail on presupposing as self evident and universally accepted Jewish straw man account of what Christianity is and was.

                  Your account of Christianity and the New Testament is troofer tier nonsense. Your present a lot of good evidence for Jewish consensus on Jewish law – which evidence I would find more convincing if Jews had not been busily murdering other Jews over the issues.

                  Your evidence for consensus is many worthy independent sources agreeing. My evidence against consensus is a big pile of dead bodies, Paul, Peter, and James the Just among those many dead bodies. And I am not going to allow you to present evidence of many worthy independent sources agreeing while you continue to piously avert your eyes from a big pile of dead bodies, because that would lead to endless debate that leads nowhere.

                • ahah says:

                  [*deleted for unresponsiveness, failure to address the evidence, and flat out lying about the evidence*]

                • jim says:

                  I have told this story before, too many times. And I deleted your comment, because it was written as if no one had ever told this story, and no one, not even me, could possibly believe it to be true.

                  Repeating it yet again, and if you keep on ignoring it, will go to silently deleting your comments.

                  I will allow your comments through if you argue against it and present evidence against it. But you are not even dismissing it, just ignoring it.

                  At least some of the sea peoples were the descendants of Dan, and a lot of their ships were built by the descendants of Dan, and most of their ships were based on technology that legend says were introduced to Greece by Dan himself.

                  The bible says Dan was a son of Israel the patriarch. Greek legend does not identify his descent, though it does say he came from roughly the right area for him to be a son of Israel the Patriarch. Maybe the bible lies, but if it lies the lie was written by people who were around at a time when the descent of the children of Dan mattered – which is to say, written during the collapse of Bronze Age civilization.

                  The depictions of the “sea” peoples depict at least some of them as travelling in the style of land based nomads or land based armed refugees, carrying their homes, their possessions, and their families with them, as the children of Israel did in their wanderings in the wilderness. So at least some of the sea peoples did something very like what is depicted in Exodus. And at least some of the sea peoples were Danites, who show up in the Old Testament doing the usual Dannite things that we know that Danites did during the collapse of Bronze age civilization.

                • ahah says:

                  jim, I suppose I should stop arguing as if with somebody who is halfway intelligent. You have not refuted anything I have typed. [*piles of entirely relevant arguments and evidence deleted*]

                • jim says:

                  Indeed I have not refuted anything you have typed. And you have not refuted anything I have typed.

                  Which is why this conversation is a waste of space.

                  But there is a difference between us because I refrain from confidently presupposing things that the other guy vehemently disagrees with.

                  You are using debating tactics that lead to endless waste of space. Your entirely relevant and evidence based arguments are interpreted and applied within a frame that presupposes things that are not generally accepted, are unsupported, and against which there is strong and compelling evidence.

                  And when I raise those issues, you sail right on ignoring them. Which leads to debate that wastes space forever and never reaches a result.

                  Any discussions of the historicity of the New Testament need to happen inside a frame that acknowledges the historical reality that there were serious and valid objections to Pharisaical legalism, and that that debate rapidly turned lethal, killing a whole lot of people and destroying vast amounts of property, including the food reserves of Jerusalem while it was under siege.

                  You cannot discuss the historicity of the New Testament while dropping Jewish internal and external conflicts over religion down the memory hole.

                  The history of religion is in substantial part the history of people cohering to commit or avoid collective violence. Delete that collective violence from the story, you get a story full of contradictions, and you can deduce anything you like from a contradiction.

                  I will not allow it, and if I were to allow it, the discussion would have no end.

      • Neurotoxin says:

        > lambada equis:
        “There is no line that connects the two points that stays within the space of acceptable thought. That space is no longer convex.”

        The math nerd in me thanks you for this comment.

        SimplyConnected, check it out.

  44. Yul Bornhold says:

    Pondering what an Azov Battalion would be capable of in America.

    This is not a suggestion. The Cathedral is very good at subverting and neutering such groupings. The Azov Battalion could not form in America and the real Azov Battalion happens to be up against Russia, against whom it is outmatched.

    Wonder how Azov would do if they gave up on Ukraine and conquered Afghanistan. How would the Cathedral respond? Propaganda offensive about our patriotic duty to support the Taliban?

    As the fringes of the empire collapse, opportunities open up for men of will.

    • The Cominator says:

      Azovniggers are globohomo faggots and i hope they all die… they would get massacred in Afghanistan.

    • Pooch says:

      Azov is wholly owned and funded by the Cathedral. If Azov is attacking a place and killing people it is because the Cathedral wants those people attacked and killed.

    • Kunning Drueger says:

      Yul, I think we shall see what an A3OB U.S. equivalent will do when Antifa is done being helpful. Maybe it is BLM. There are probably many contenders for Dipshits Employed by GAE.

      • Pooch says:

        Impossible on US soil. Eastern Europe still has plenty of white masculine energy that can be directed at the enemy Rooskies. In the US the white masculine energy IS the enemy therefore the Cathedral will resort to its tried and true tactic of roaming gangs of blacks protected by the cops to ethnically cleanse.

        • Kunning Drueger says:

          I think Yul was talking about “an A3OB battalion,” as in, an organization/institution that parallels, not one that is a replica. A3OB is a mishmash of Ukrainian and foreign neo-nazis operating in a country with at least some institutional and social material support for their ideology. A US parallel would be a mix of domestic and foreign extremists with some level of institutional and societal support, both ideological and material, so literally, Antifa. Maybe I misunderstood the OG post.

          • Yul Bornhold says:

            I mean an Azov battalion in the sense of a cohesive group of fighting men not loyal to globohomo. That the actual Azov battalion is willing to die fighting Russia is impressive inasmuch as it requires courage. Are they fighting for gay rights? Don’t think so. They fight because they hate Russia. It is only circumstance that allies them to GAE.

            Antifa are soy-fanatics in service to the GAE.

  45. Mister Grumpus says:

    I can’t think of a better term to describe this than Holy War either. It’s like a portal has been opened to another dimension.

    Of course Islam is a live faith and has been for some time, and those Afghans are on some whole different shit in particular, but it’s easy to not really notice them because, well, they’re balakka-lakka-lakka sand people from dumb dirt planet. It’s like watching tribes of monkeys fight. Just not relevant to my world. Absurdist, almost. Forgettable.

    But with these Russians and Chechens and Dagestanis and whoever it’s like I’m glitching through to a different dimension. Lord of the Rings stuff. They’re intruding from another universe. I’m just amazed and can’t look away. What strange magic is this. Who the heck are these guys and where the heck did they come from. What else about being a human being have I been missing.

  46. Aidan says:

    I disagree. I think we are indeed seeing advanced warfare from Russia. No autonomous drones, but a lot of precisely targeted artillery and rocket strikes. The reports are not “tank battle, Russian forces destroyed”, it’s is air strike this and artillery that. It is not a tiny payload the size of a baseball assassinating people, no, but Russia finds something valuable to the enemy and then drops an explosive on it. It does not look like blitzkrieg to me at all; it looks like the ground troops are there because you need boots on the ground, and they only march in once the area is clear of enemy men and material. Sometimes, Russian intel is imperfect and those guys get ambushed, which is why it looks like man-portable weapons are halting the Russian advance.

    What you left out is that advanced warfare is slow. Takes time for intel on the enemy to come in, and then you hit it, and this process repeats, until the enemy has nothing left but infantry. And then you can move in and clean up. Only looked like blitzkrieg at first because Russia was walking into land either devoid of the enemy, or into forces already broken by the first wave of strikes.

    • Red says:

      There’s 2 types of warfare: War of Maneuver and War of Attrition. Whenever possible and especially when you vastly outgun your foes you want to practice War of Maneuver to capture large number of enemy forces while taking very few casualties yourself. War of Attrition is slow, grinding, and you suffer a lot more deaths from it because it takes a long time for the foe to run out of men and material, especially when being supplied by outside powers.

      Russia clearly started out with with WoM and is now obviously stuck in WoA while attacking heavily fortified positions.

  47. Richard W. Comerford says:

    It is indeed a holy war now, and we really need to wipe out the Church of Woke. Hitler style, with no survivors.

    • Pooch says:

      Hitler died.

    • Anonymous Fake says:

      Liberals are as dead as the jabbed exposed to an ADE bioweapon if only the right would demand [*total rule of everyone and everything by the Harvard Professoriat*]

      • Anonymous Fake says:

        Who said I said anything about Harvard? China has a universal education system based on communism, Saudi Arabia has Islamic madrassas, Israel has its yeshivas, etc. Meritocracy doesn’t have to mean Harvardocracy [*deleted*]

        • jim says:

          What you are calling meritocracy is not meritocracy. It is a single centralized priesthood deciding who has merit, and allocating value that other people produce accordingly. Would suck just as much with our priests running it as your priests, and our priests would be too virtuous to commit such a gigantic crime.

          Work does not deserve material reward. Academic degrees do not deserve material reward. Saintly piety does not deserve material reward. The creation of value deserves material reward.

        • Aidan says:

          All the societies run by a mandarin caste of “civil service” priests are not only miserably faggy and dysfunctional places, but ripe for conquest by martial peoples. Even Confucianism, an ossification and formalization of natural law, and generally fundamentally true, resistant to holiness spiral, etc, got it wrong on governance; need a father-king and a vigorous aristocracy. Maybe Confucius said we need that, but in practice, rule by bureaucrats.

          • Anonymous Fake says:

            I’ve been trying to be more pro-honesty than pro-mandarin. It’s wrong to rear children to be mandarins and then bait and switch them and tell them they ought to be merchants or warriors instead.[*screenfull of rage directed at merchants and warriors deleted*]

            • jim says:

              Why do you not rage at those who gave you a useless and extremely expensive education, consuming those years when you could have been establishing a career and a family, rather than demanding that those who create real value be forced to make good on promises they did not make, that those who gave you a useless and expensive education did make?

              The problem with academia is that the only thing it trains people for is being an academic.

              There is much truth in your criticisms of actually existent capitalism, but your primary objection is that it does not have the professoriat in charge of it forcing businessmen to hand over their wealth to the professoriat.

              People who create no value took your money and years of your life, and instead of being angry at them, you are angry at anyone who creates value.

              • The Cominator says:

                Like most cathedral niggers he is overly proud at heart…

                He can’t truly admit that he was wrong and that he was conned. Pride is the worst foundational sins (one of the few things catholics are right about) because it prevents you from admitting your failings.

                • Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

                  >Xi Jinping has beliefs about meaning. He often articulates them. In his mind the Communist Party and its cause are suffused with it. He dreams of progress. “The system of Chinese socialism represents a fundamental institutional guarantee for progress,” he says. This ‘progress’ is not for China only. The “Communist Party of China and the Chinese people,” he declares, “are more than confident that we can offer a Chinese solution to human society, ” a solution for those peoples who want “to explore a better social system.” The Party’s path is an advance in “human civilization.”[3] These are the great ideals that China’s martyrs and heroes died for.

                  >We might ask: does that include the heroes and martyrs who died after the revolution ended?

                  >Xi Jinping will never say this explicitly. He cannot. But this is more or less how he talks about the Mao years: a time of both pain and glory, of socialist “construction” and “development,” the necessary stepping stone of toil, tests, and tears that made the current regime possible. The wonder that is modern China, he implies, was built from the blood of those countless dead. Their deaths were terrible. Vicious. But they were not meaningless. They were the building blocks of progress.

                  >The problem with the historical nihilists now can be seen in a different frame. Yes, by telling the truth about the Party’s past the historians might make the Party’s hold on the people of China’s present less sure. I doubt it not. But I suspect there is something more personal involved here, something more deeply felt. The Party leadership remembers the bloodshed. They do not want the suffering of their fathers and their mothers to be stripped of its meaning. To have been for nothing. Far better if they suffered for something. Far better if it had been for the cause of national greatness and human progress. Then all of it might have been worth it.

                  >Thus the ‘nihilism’ of the historians. I suspect that what most troubles Xi Jinping most of all is not that the historians write tales of faction, massacre, terror, famine, starvation, torture and destruction—but that in so writing, they suggest a reality China’s leaders do not wish to face: it was all for nothing.

                • jim says:

                  Xi has half a point. The party returned not only itself, but China, to sanity under Deng, after centuries of ruin and technological and intellectual decline (a lot of their old books only exist because stolen by foreign pirates and soldiers), and after centuries of foreign domination and repeated conquest.

                  Spandrel, who knows much about China, disputes my characterization of China after Song and before Deng as a dark age, but if it was not a dark age, not far off it.

                  But because Xi cannot admit the other half of that point – that the party was part of that unending ruin, until Deng, he runs a grave and increasing risk of returning to the path of unending ruin.

                • The Cominator says:

                  Perhaps he can’t admit to himself he was wrong to denounce his parents…

                • Anonymous Fake says:

                  Being conned at a carnival is one thing. Being conned by Boston is another thing entirely. [*usual stuff, much repeated, deleted as usual*]

                • jim says:

                  And yet all the advice you so copiously give to Republicans, conservatives, Christians, the right, the alt right, reactionaries, and the dark enlightenment, would have the effect of benefiting those in Boston who conned you, and punishing those in Bentonville, Arkansas, who provide you with the goods you consume. Most of the stuff you repetitiously post, and I repetitiously delete, consists of passionate condemnations of those who created the stuff you consume, ship it around, and build and defend the places you live in.

          • i says:

            “Even Confucianism, an ossification and formalization of natural law, and generally fundamentally true, resistant to holiness spiral, etc, got it wrong on governance; need a father-king and a vigorous aristocracy. Maybe Confucius said we need that, but in practice, rule by bureaucrats.”

            Confucianism was a call back to the idealized Warrior Aristocratic Society of the Zhou. Of a Father King and of Feudal States of Knights driving Chariots:

            https://www.quora.com/Why-didnt-China-have-a-dominant-warrior-aristocrat-class

            https://www.ancient-origins.net/history-archaeology/honored-zhou-dynasty-warrior-buried-chariot-and-horses-has-been-unearthed-china-020445

            https://infogalactic.com/info/Zhou_Dynasty

            It is in reality actually Legalism as exemplified by Shang Yang and Han Fei implemented since the Qin that is what you are actually talking about only taking bits of Confucianism they liked into their curriculum.

  48. Ash says:

    I think you may be wrong.. bitcoin and such will be cancelled and reduced in market price..

    Various pro russian groups are fighting for Russia, slowing and not cutting electrical power or water to cities, in order to capture the cities (and supplant pro nato fighters)

    Russia has fired off 1980s cruise missiles and some of their newer technology (some Mach 7-8 missiles) at NATO targets. All targets appear to have been turned into craters

    I think maybe your predictions on this one may be wrong (maybe I am wrong.. less than 1 month into this fight).. USA has stopped issuing dollars to Russia (debt) and TV (porn).. these sanctions may not be too bad for Russia and China.. with Pakistan and India pushed into the bosom of china and Russia

    • Ash says:

      Pardon me, I don’t read western media often.. I believe some western and northern Ukraine regions have (had) NATO bases.. or fighters from NATO in Ukrainian bases (distinction without a difference)

  49. Kunning Drueger says:

    Off topic

    Does anyone have any familiarity with this device?

    https://weatherflow.com/tempest-forecasting/

    C/v’d from website:
    How It Works

    Weather observations stream instantly from the solar-powered, wireless Tempest station through WeatherFlow’s data processing center. Tempest performs quality control inspections on raw station sensor data, and may apply calibration corrections as needed.

    All About The Data

    Accurate measurements from your location, along with data from other Tempest Systems combine with ALL other relevant weather data, including measurements from satellites, aircraft, radars, and other surface weather stations. Our process ultimately yields standardized data and a real-time analysis product. Not every measurement is of equal value (e.g. wind ‘shadows’ affect how wind data is utilized) but our big data analytics adjust accordingly, meaning every Tempest System can make a difference.

    Your Better Forecast

    Under the watch of WeatherFlow’s team of meteorologists and data scientists, our forecast system initializes with the ECMWF, the highly acclaimed European global forecast model and the best of NOAA’s forecast models. Over key areas, WeatherFlow’s operational forecast system (WF WRF) assimilates the most valuable observations into this powerful baseline to provide detailed regional forecasts. We then apply powerful machine learning techniques (WF AI) to post-process the model output, providing a more accurate regional forecast than can be produced by models alone. To personalize your forecast we use additional AI based on data from your Tempest.

    END

    So my questions are: is this really localized weather, and how dangerous is this set up in terms of vulnerability to malicious access on my home network? Obviously, if it is localized, trustworthy weather forecasting, it is well worth the $350. If I’m just paying to have some intern google the area weather forecast and have a UDP vulnerability, not worth it. Any input and suggestions welcome.

    • The Ducking Man says:

      You definitely need to read the process picture more, basically you’re paying $350 to gather data for the company, the company give back the data to you after some mumbo jumbo on their server.

      Definitely not localized, definitely won’t be surprised at all if the data is not secure (like 100% IoT on the market).

    • Aidan says:

      I doubt they have an algorithm that does any better than basic meteorological knowledge and common sense. It probably just collates all available data sources and feeds you the most common points of agreement.

      “Big Data Analytics” is not really trying to predict the future, it is selling people the hope that they can predict the future. I know multiple people involved in this area, and they are all hoping to make some quick money, sell their company, and move on.

  50. restitutor_orbis says:

    I will stick with my original prediction. The fighting will be over by the end of March with a Russian victory.

    Russian victory will mean:
    1) Crimea is Russian
    2) Separatist Republics are independent
    3) Ukraine is neutral and demilitarized
    Those were the explicit Russian war goals and they’ll be accomplished.

    The effect of the Ukrainian defense and/or European support and/or flawed Russian operation will mean that Zelensky and his collaborators stay in power. Their “victory” is in avoiding Russian regime change. Had Russian won as it hoped, there’d have been regime change under the nomenclature of denazification.

    Because NATO does not want to lose face, the independence of the Separatist Republics will be handled through something like “provisional federalization with a commitment to allow a vote for independence in 2023” with Russia making it clear that the vote will be for independence.

    Casualties/Losses as of 3/31/2022 will be:
    Russian deaths: 2,000-3,000
    Russian tank losses: 400-600
    Ukraine deaths: 9,000-12,000
    Ukraine tank losses: 1200-1500

    • jim says:

      I certainly hope so.

      However, Zelensky cannot be forced to accept such conditions, unless the Russians resort to Information Epoch warfare – which is to say kill him and anyone who is close to him on the network – close in social network distance, not physical distance.

      To force Zelensky to accept such conditions through twentieth century warfare, Russians will need to cut off and besiege Kiev.

      If they cut off Kiev, you will have been correct, and I will have been wrong, though probably not by the end of march.

      I predict the war continuing at great cost to both sides, until resolved by the methods of Information Epoch warfare. Putin kills Zelensky, or attempts to kill him, Cathedral attempts to kill Putin, and if they fail, Putin starts killing the Cathedral network. At some point in this escalation they might cut a deal, but it is a holy war, making it difficult for Cathedral elements to cut a deal without losing power, and quite possibly their lives. Some of the Ukrainian leadership have been murdered for attempting to cut a deal, and this problem is likely to spread to the US. If Zelensky tries to cut a deal, he will likely be murdered by Cathedral elements, and he is only likely to attempt to do so if faced by a serious prospect of being assassinated by the Russians.

      • Kunning Drueger says:

        I’m not understanding the binary interpretation here. Transition from epoch to epoch seems brief when viewed ex post facto, but in the moment, it is nebulous.

        Zelensky is a front door the real power broker(s) in UKR, but he is agency as the celebrity associated with the Cause. So when I say “Zelensky,” I’m saying Zelensky and the oligarchs behind him.

        Zelensky was sold a bill of goods by Cathedral agents who cannot conceive of fighting a war to protect your country, because they don’t like to fight, and they don’t believe in countries. They told him “be aggressive, nothing is going to happen.” Something happened. Now, Zelensky has to decide who is more likely to keep him/them in power. While Putin was definitely sending a message to NATO with the hypersonic strike, I think the primary recipient was Zelensky. “That’s a lot of really cool and expensive toys you got from the West. Be a shame if the disappeared.”

        • mossad skepticist says:

          They told him “be aggressive, nothing is going to happen.” Something happened.

          Was he “aggressive,” though? What aggressive thing did he do to merit this?

          • jim says:

            Unending not-war upon the Donbas region is mighty aggressive. When it is all done, the total casualties from eight years of not-war are likely to be comparable to total casualties in the Ukraine war.

            If the Cathedral can conduct not-war indefinitely without consequences, no small country is going to dare oppose them. Putin had no choice but to escalate or face bit by bit not-surrender in the face of not-war.

          • Kunning Drueger says:

            Inviting NATO in to build permanent military instillations is enough, but they went further and announced that they were considering abandoning the Budapest Agreement and wanted to (re)acquire nuclear weapons.

            The media blackout if the Donbas semi-war was amazingly well done. Most of us in the West are completely oblivious and dismissive of how UKR was regularly shelling civilian areas.

            And, unless someone can come up with another explanation for why the majority of UKR’s combat units were on the Donbas ceasefire line, they were most likely about to invade DPR/LPR.

            • jim says:

              > And, unless someone can come up with another explanation for why the majority of UKR’s combat units were on the Donbas ceasefire line, they were most likely about to invade DPR/LPR

              I don’t think so. Not-war forever was serving Cathedral objectives very successfully.

              “Hold a gay parade, or be color revolutioned, and if the color revolution fails, what is happening to Donbas is going to happen to you.”

              Unless Putin acted eventually, not-war by the Cathedral was going to eventually end in not-surrender by Russia.

              The Cathedral plan has now escalated from forever not-war in Donbas to forever war in Ukraine. Ending that war short of further escalation is going to be difficult.

              If forever war in the Ukraine, Russia still loses in the long run. So …

          • Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

            A bout a week or so before H hour, Zelensky openly called for nuclear armaments to be based in Ukraine at a security conference. A week or so later, the invasion happens.

            Probably not a coincidence.

            • The Cominator says:

              Zelensky was furthermore definitely told to say that… so i would say definitely not a coincidence.

      • Mister Grumpus says:

        “but it is a holy war, making it difficult for Cathedral elements to cut a deal without losing power, and quite possibly their lives.”

        Please elaborate on this point, about how a holy war is especially like this.

        • jim says:

          I already did so:

          War and the gay parade

          I have been doing so for some time.

          And, more importantly in the short run, his Holiness Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia has done so.

          If you do not find that elaboration sufficient, you need to ask a more specific question.

      • Ghost says:

        Zelensky is likely in Israel now and has zero motive to cut a deal unless told so by his handlers. This conflict is about creating chaos and thinning the heard so they will draw it out until the next big thing.

        • The Cominator says:

          I hope hes in Israel as the Israelis will sell him out covertly to end this if hes hiding in Israel hes stupid…

          Probably however he is in Poland and it seems 95% of Poles not just the elite are eternally seething about the 6 gorillion of them killed by the Russians and will never sell him oyt.

          • Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

            >I hope hes in Israel as the Israelis will sell him out covertly to end this

            Why would you think that? The state of israel is just as globohomo as any other. Sure semites are naturally prone to backstabbing each other, but they are big players in helping to back the uke puppet regime and fund their paramilitaries in the first place.

      • Mister Grumpus says:

        To capture Zelensky and some of his crew, have a trial and keep them like pets in a nice zoo would be both more humane and more humiliating.

  51. clovis says:

    https://gab.com/ASBMilitary/posts/107983927773385353
    https://voxday.net/2022/03/20/why-the-narrative-changed/

    I guess I basically want Jim to be wrong about this and Theodore Beale to be right.

    • Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

      Some of the swamp creatures are starting to become dimly aware of the notion that if things get spicy, Putin could stuff a khinzal down their chimneys at any moment.

      • jim says:

        That is how you win wars in the information epoch.

        I hope Putin figures it out.

        You penetrate enemy networks, both human and computer, find out who needs killing, and kill them. Russia has better hackers than the Cathedral. NSA used to be great, and they have backdoors everywhere, but they have become fat and lazy. On the other hand Russia runs on western software and Taiwanese chips. The western software is all backdoored. The chips not so much.

        The time of aristocratic warfare has not come yet. It will not come for some time. But it will start with elites whacking each other, which may well begin very soon.

        Eventually the aristocrats win and the oligarchs lose. Then the most cohesive aristocratic elite wins. The secular cavalry warfare that led to the rise of the Holy Roman empire, the start of the middle ages, and theocratic governance can only be understood in the context of religious issues and religious conflict.

        The soothsayers told Constantine and his army that the omens were very bad. Possibly they had demonic guidance, likely they were in the pay of the Roman priesthood.

        Constantine told his army he had divine guidance to the contrary. Maybe he did. In this day and age, Christ still beats demons, whether they are real or merely figurative.

        In the information epoch, history is likely to repeat, or at least rhyme, but this time with higher radiation levels.

    • Kunning Drueger says:

      In total, 214 unmanned aerial vehicles, 1,483 tanks and other armored combat vehicles, 150 multiple launch rocket systems, 584 field artillery and mortars, as well as 1,279 units of special military vehicles of the Armed Forces of Ukraine were destroyed during the operation. -ASBmilitary update

      RF MoD claims 14km advance today out of Donbas region. That’s entrenched, heavily fortified by UKR forces area. When Donetsk and Lugansk forces stop advancing, I’ll believe in The Stall.

      • jim says:

        The original plan was to encircle enemy forces in the Donetsk and Lugansk region. Blitzkreig.

        Pushing them back one trench at a time is going to be expensive. I think we are going to see World War I warfare, but with man carried mortars rather than heavy artillery. Neither side has fully transitioned to information epoch warfare.

        • Pooch says:

          Nuts

          Blitzkreig is not Russian military doctrine. Has never been military doctrine. We won’t be seeing WW1 trench warfare because WW2 warfare has obsoleted WW1 trench warfare.

          Russia won’t be leveling cities with artillery in this war because their goal has been and will continue to be to minimize civilian casualties and property damage. Targeted strikes and house to house clearing will continue to be Russian tactics.

          Ukraine doesn’t seem to have anything to counter targeted strikes and house to house clearing as we are seeing Mariupol.

          • S says:

            Pooch he just means maneuver versus attritional.

          • Upravda says:

            Ummm… actually, Blitzkrieg, under the name of “deep battle” or “deep operation” was Soviet military doctrine when Adolf was still in Bavarian prison because of Beerhall Putsch.

            At least I understood so both from articles like that, and from reading Viktor Suvorov.

            It is entirely another question wether they intended to perform it in this war or not.

            I’d say they did, but not for the price of too many casualties among “lost sheep of Great Rus”.

          • The Cominator says:

            Russian military doctrine (Upravada got here 1st but I’ll elaborate more) was not quite blitzkrieg but it was “deep operations”… which if anything called for encirclements more ambitious than used in the tactical encirclements of a Blitzkrieg.

            It did not really become Soviet military doctrine until late in WW2… most of its theorists were purged and Russia until late 1942 was fighting a defensive war with most of its offensives being poorly organized and planned things done on the angry orders of Stalin (and in the most successful application of a deep operation was “Operation Bagration” where German Army Group Center was mostly encircled and destroyed… the general took the unusual step of persisting and arguing with Stalin and saying the operation had to be done his way).

            So Russian military doctrine is in theory if not blitzkrieg something very close to blitzkrieg.

            • The Cominator says:

              To quote from wikipedia which is not the best source but I have no more available now

              “The theory moved away from the Clausewitzian principle of battlefield destruction and the annihilation of enemy field forces, which obsessed the Germans. Instead deep operations stressed the ability to create conditions whereby the enemy loses the will to mount an operational defence.[30] An example of the theory in practice is Operation Uranus in 1942. The Red Army in Stalingrad was allocated enough forces to hold the German Sixth Army in the city, which caused attrition that would force it to weaken its flanks to secure its centre. Meanwhile, reserves were built up, which then struck at the weak flanks. The Soviets broke through the German flanks, exploited the operational depth, and closed the pocket at Kalach-na-Donu.

              The operation left the German tactical zones largely intact, but by occupying the German operational depth and preventing their retreat the German Army forces were isolated. Instead of reducing the pocket immediately, the Soviets tightened their grip on the enemy forces and preferred to let the enemy weaken and surrender, starve him completely, or a combination of those methods before they delivered a final destructive assault. In that way, the Soviet tactical and operational method opted to besiege the enemy into submission, rather than destroy it physically and immediately.”

              https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_operation

              So in some ways the slow pace of annihilation of an existing enemy while having them surrounded cutoff and helpless is absolutely in line with Russian strategic and operational thinking… I do not think the Russians are halted so much as starving out the enemy.

              • Pooch says:

                Russian deep operation is not blitzkreig. In fact, opposite of blitzkreig.

                • The Cominator says:

                  Its not exactly “blitzkrieg” which aims generally only for tactical encirclements deep ops tend to aim for more ambitious ones….

                • Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

                  ‘Blitzkrieg’ itself wasn’t ‘blitzkrieg’, for that matter; it was an invention of anglo-french propagndists covering their asses after the fact from the very beginning. I recommend to anyone to peruse ‘Blitzekrieg Legend’ by the good Colonel Frieser, a highly edifying tome.

                • Upravda says:

                  Is deep operation Blitzkrieg or not is open to intepretation. However, russian war-map I linked:

                  https://riafan.ru/22036603-chto_proizoshlo_na_ukraine_20_marta_obstreli_donetska_i_zahvat_v_plen_liderov_natsionalistov

                  …shows pretty much what I would expect from “deep battle” and “strategic encricling”.

                  Not some Harkov pocket and such, but the entire region of Zaporožje.

                • jim says:

                  Obviously that was the intent.

                  But, the Russians are stuck.

                  They are unable close the jaws around Kiev or Odessa, let alone the entire region.

                  The Cathedral strategy is to replace the forever not-war in Donetsk with forever war in the Ukraine. Twentieth century warfare is not going to resolve this war. Against Information Epoch weapons, you cannot move substantial forces in the face of substantial opposition, no World War II blitzkrieg, and it is unlikely that you can do broad World War I attrition. The twentieth century methods for settling a war between advanced state powers do not work any more.

                  In the Information Epoch, decisive war will be network penetration followed by targeted assassination. Even nukes are likely to be primarily effectual as a beheading strike, rather than a counter value strike.

                  Nukes will follow the trend of chemical explosives downwards to smaller warhead, though there is a minimum size that efficiently uses plutonium – minimum efficient weapon being around sixty kilotons. Yields can be as small as you please, but the smaller yields still use about the same amount of plutonium and weigh about the same. Below sixty kilotons, the weapon is not much smaller, and uses almost as much fissile material.

                • Pooch says:

                  Twentieth century warfare is not going to resolve this war. Against Information Epoch weapons, you cannot move substantial forces in the face of substantial opposition, no World War II blitzkrieg, and it is unlikely that you can do broad World War I attrition.

                  The Russia watchers are saying there has been no TB2 footage from Ukraine in 10 days. They are also saying there is massively more drone footage coming out of Russia than Ukraine.

                  With all do respect Jim, when you say Ukraine is engaging in 21st century warfare and Russia is not, it appears you’re just pulling that out of your ass.

                • jim says:

                  If both sides are adequately transitioning to information age weapons and tactics, which whether or not it is true now will surely be true very soon, neither World War II blitzkrieg and nor World War I attrition will produce a military conclusion. Russia will still have great difficulty performing encirclements.

                  Hence the Cathedral forever war strategy.

                  Information Epoch weapons and tactics will not produce a conclusion to this war unless used as Trump used them, with information age strategy and grand strategy.

                  Putin made an grave error in attempting a grand encirclement of the interior of the Ukraine from the coast to Belarus.

                  He should have worked on nailing Cathedral assets.

                • Cloudswrest says:

                  Yields can be as small as you please, but the smaller yields still use about the same amount of plutonium

                  Yep. They can only lower the yield by poisoning the reaction, not reducing the fuel, although they can lower the critical mass somewhat by judicious use of neutron reflectors. If they are ever able to ignite a fusion reaction by something other than a fission reaction then you will have a completely scalable atomic weapon, from 0 to infinity.

                • The Cominator says:

                  Here is IMHO what has gone poorly for the Russians that I can verify so far

                  Ukraine fought at all, didn’t fall immerdiately (backed up by Gotterdamerung style terror against deserters and shirkers which is really pretty sick…)

                  The puppet government is (under orders backed by terrorism) refusing serious negotiation

                  I do not think Kiev is yet encircled

                  Due to backing from Western powers losses of tanks are probably a lot higher than the Russians expected even in the scenario where the Ukes fought

                  ****************************************************

                  OTOH

                  Uke air force and air defenses destroyed immediately

                  Many lesser objectives have been encircled

                  The Ukraine Azov kikes who actually want to fight are probably being gradually annihilated trying to prevent the full encirclement of Kiev

                  Most of Ukranian army encircled in the East of the country

                • jim says:

                  Russia attempted a grand encirclement of the interior of western Ukraine from the coast to Belarus. The grand encirclement failed, contrary to my expectations, and is not going to succeed.

                  If forever war, Cathedral wins eventually, after a decade or two. A different grand strategy is needed.

                • jim says:

                  > The Ukraine Azov kikes who actually want to fight are probably being gradually annihilated trying to prevent the full encirclement of Kiev

                  Maybe, but I don’t think World War I attrition is going to work in the Information Epoch. We shall see. It has not been tested yet.

                  > Most of Ukranian army encircled in the East of the country

                  No it is not.

                  In the first few days of the war, some small encirclements succeeded. Since then, none have succeeded.

                • The Cominator says:

                  We’re in the fog of war but sources I trust more than western MSM sources make it sound as if the armies in the East are encircled.

                  I could possibly be wrong though, fog of war.

                • jim says:

                  Not seeing encirclement on Russian maps.

                • The Cominator says:

                  Correction, I guess I should say that for the Eastern pocket “about to be encircled” (there are disputed areas behind them not full of big cities).

                  There was some 4chan post (I didn’t bother looking for confirmation at the time) Uke army commander there apparently asked permission to fall back beyond the Dnieper (because likely to get encircled if he stays put) and was refused.

                • jim says:

                  Authority evidently took successful action to prevent the encirclement.

                • yewotm8 says:

                  The Ukrainian troops in that eastern pocket have been “about to be encircled” for a few weeks now, judging from the maps. It is strange how both that has not happened, and that the Ukrainian troops have not retreated.

              • jim says:

                > So in some ways the slow pace of annihilation of an existing enemy while having them surrounded cutoff and helpless is absolutely in line with Russian strategic and operational thinking… I do not think the Russians are halted so much as starving out the enemy.

                The trouble is that the Russians have failed to cut off and surround any new areas since the Ukrainians got their Information Epoch warfare going.

                Information Epoch warfare is going to rely on deep penetration of enemy networks, rather than seige.

                • The Cominator says:

                  Do we know that for a fact?

                • jim says:

                  What new areas have been cut off and surrounded? Mariupol was cut off almost at once, though it took the Russians some time to establish safe conditions for Russian transport through the surrounding area.

                • Pooch says:

                  What you are calling “ Information Epoch warfare” is what exactly? Javelins and drones? To me these look like pin pricks on the Russian onslaught.

                  To the actual Russia watchers, who monitor the war to the minute, they say the most successful aspect of Ukrainian defense has actually been their artillery (who are undoubtedly being supplied with US Intel). Your analysis doesn’t seem to mesh well with what they are seeing on the ground. I am keeping an open mind though so you may very well be proven right as events unfold.

                • Mister Grumpus says:

                  “Information Epoch warfare is going to rely on deep penetration of enemy networks, rather than seige.”

                  Well then I’m putting at least even money on whoever’s lead by a KGB guy.

                • Aidan says:

                  Yup. And Russia is attacking their artillery via the air. Unlikely to see many more troop movements until the Ukrainian artillery is taken offline. Seems like Russia has already taken everything not in range of Ukrainian artillery, at least east of Kiev. Right now, information-era warfare is boiling down to extremely accurate artillery versus extremely accurate airstrikes against artillery. Obviously, not safe to move troops around until you have a decisive advantage in extremely accurate explosives.

          • jim says:

            Mariupol was surrounded while blitzkrieg was still working.

            House to house does not seem to be working in Kharkov, which was not quite surrounded.

            • The Cominator says:

              House to house fighting is always bloody and ugly…

            • Pooch says:

              They have not started house to house in Kharkov. They have largely ignored Kharkov. They are going house to house in Maripol because that’s where the Nazis are.

  52. Upravda says:

    This really is a weird post. I would even say “nuts” as Jim would but I don’t want to offend our courteous host. 🙂

    I don’t think that Putin’s advance is slow because… well, it simply isn’t.

    He never wanted to flatten Ukrainian cities because he considers Ukrainians lost sheep of the Great Rus. He even wrote an essay about that.

    I hear that flying Ukrainian flags is still allowed in Herson, and demonstrations against Russian occupation also! On mainstream media. Pretty much the evidence that flattening the Ukraine and Ukrainians was never, ever in planning.

    All those “autonomous” drones, cars, and all killer robots are firmly in the realm of science fiction. Nothing without a remote human pilot. I’d even say in the realm of pure fantasy, but never mind… I’d like someone to convince me the opposite.

    All that being said, I’m not particular fan of Putin (although I still do have some positive opinion on him) neither Russian empire, nor any empire at all. Neither Russians nor Ukrainians have done any wrong to me or my country. It is clear that progressivists (or Cathedral, or whatever you call them) are those who caused the war by poking the bear.

    The entirely different question is will Putin manage to win a war decisively by being soft to his “lost Great Rus brothers”, many of whom might have another ideas.

    • jim says:

      Go ahead and say nuts. If people mirror me, it is a complement in the form of a backhanded insult.

      I want commenters on this blog to imitate my methods of debate, not my facts and arguments. If I hear only my own voice, I do not learn anything.

      What leads to believe Cathedral claims about smart weapons is:

      1. I have been expecting smart weapons to transform war for some time. The robotic character of smart cars frequently shows, but most of the time, if operating off a detailed map of the world carefully annotated by human intelligence, they can make the trip without driving into truck – the problem is dealing with objects that have not been human annotated. drones are likely to be extremely vulnerable once human spotted.

      2. Kharkiv has not been surrounded, therefore blitzkrieg has ceased to work.

      Whether Russia can bombard cities has not yet been tested, but if blitzkrieg does not work in the presence of human carried smart anti tank missiles, urban bombardment is unlikely to work in the presence of Turkish drones.

      However, for a drone to successfully carry out a mission autonomously, the map has to be human annotated with the latest military intelligence, and I hear things that hint that people are not finding that easy.

      • Upravda says:

        So be it.

        Nuts. 🙂

        After repelling Germans in Battle of Kursk, beginning from August ’43, it took Red Army 9 months to reach Moldavia and Lavov. Yes, Soviet forces were much larger than present-day Russian, but opposing them were German forces, also much larger than present day Ukrainian forces, even after defeat at Kursk.

        So, I wouldn’t expect Putin’s forces to reach, say, Žitomir in less time.

        If the initial attack on Ukraine was really performed by 150 thousand strong conscript force recently turned pros, with older equipment, and if current invasion force was only recently enlarged to 350 thousand, I’d say that their advance is anything but slow.

        Either given official war-map, supposedly updated daily by British Defense ministry:
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine
        …or especially given Russian war-map here:
        https://riafan.ru/22036603-chto_proizoshlo_na_ukraine_20_marta_obstreli_donetska_i_zahvat_v_plen_liderov_natsionalistov

        I’m actually quite surprised and even dissapointed by performance of Ukrainian military, given that they inherited quite a large chunk of Soviet equipment and had at least last 8 years for preparations.

        Yes, it seems they repelled attack on Harkov, and won a battle against Russians there. And yes, it might be that Russkies planned if not storming Kiev, then at least completely encircling the city in first days of war, but they didn’t.

        So what?

        In case someone didn’t notice, Russians crossed southern Dnieper and converted Azov Sea into Russian lake, including some quite significant hinterland. Crimea is no longer an island.

        On the other hand, there’s no war plan that survives meeting with the enemy. Not even Putin’s war plan.

        But, Ukrainian war plan seems to be stalling Russkies as long as possible, in permanent defense, until… what? Until NATO goes to war?

        That’s losing strategy, always was, always will be. Sooner or later, they will be crushed. “Offense is the best defense.”

        Yes, I didn’t expect they would actually manage to stick Ukrainian flag in Donbass, but losing almost entire coastline and having the capital under siege in less than 3 weeks is disheartening. It seems that history repeats itself when, in the aftermath of WW1, Ukrainian Hetmanate failed to achieve anything significant, despite having some support from still existing Central Powers, and later from many others, and initially controlling large parts of proclaimed Second Hetmanate.

        Contrast that with Finns, both in Russian civil war and on the eve on WW2.

        So, no, I don’t think that a few battles won here in Harkov and there somewhere will make any difference. Just add to destruction.

        While Ukes are in league with globohomo, Russians are not, unfortunately, some mythical saviors of anything that’s Good and True, so I actually feel very sorry for this whole affair, and for both sides, and for this fucking stupid Europe.

        Ukes will not achieve anything because they, as after WW1, simply don’t have neither unified Will nor Faith. In context of modern “democracies”, it is wonderfully illustrated in both recent killings and imprisonments of their own folks, and in today’s Zelenski’s banning of almost entire opposition.

        In one sentence: Ukrainians lack their own Franjo Tuđman.

        And they lack their own Franjo Tuđman because often heard comparison: Russian = Serbs, Ukrainians = Croats is wrong, plain and simple.

        Poles would be Croats (and their politicians are almost as stupid as ours), and Russians might be Serbs, although much, much, smarter than Serbs.

        Ukrainians are Montenegrins.

        Who got their state not as a result of Will and Faith, but as the result of their Serb overlords’ defeat, and endeavors of truly corrupted, Western/ progressivist/ Cathedral backed government. Both nations are suffering almost the same problem of dual-loyalty in their own and their (supposed?) orthodox brethren.

        Regarding drones, you said it all yourself.

        • Pooch says:

          Agreed. I will keep an open mind but the Jim/ISW/Cathedral narrative that Russia has stalled is not terribly convincing but I suppose we shall see.

          • Wulfgar Thundercock III says:

            I think Jim is on Musk Standard Time again, this time with the drone warfare. I agree that it will be revolutionary, but having a dozen drones is not a revolution. It is a notice that war will be fought this way. If Ukraine had a couple hundred, I would agree with Jim that Russia is going to be halted. A few drones is not the integrated chain of command at squad level I imagine of twenty-first century warfare, where an aristocratic elite has a drone swarm providing intel on ally and enemy position, calling in fire support from mobile artillery and missile units.

            • jim says:

              > I think Jim is on Musk Standard Time again, this time with the drone warfare. I agree that it will be revolutionary, but having a dozen drones is not a revolution. It is a notice that war will be fought this way.

              Used efficiently, a dozen drones can take out five thousand tanks or artillery a week.

              I don’t think they will take out five thousand a week, but not for lack of drones. Lack of human map annotation in a form intelligible to drones is likely to be the bottleneck.

              • Wulfgar Thundercock III says:

                That is if they are used efficiently. Are they being used efficiently? Are Cathedral assets up to date on the latest and greatest practices of 21st century warfare, or are they a bunch of idiots and fanatics given advanced weaponry and do not yet understand it? Custer got wiped out at Little Big Horn because the tribes had superior weaponry and numbers, but who won in the end? The Souix are on reservations, drunk, and Custer’s coethnics cover America.

                • jim says:

                  Obviously not, or Turkey would not be leading expert in Information Epoch warfare.

                  Our IT technology of war failed to advance under Trump but he was the first leader to understand it strategically.

                  Erdogan, facing unending war, came to understand the importance of Information weaponry, and ordered his department of defense to produce it. They failed miserably, so he turned to private businessmen. Who are doing well. Everywhere else in the world, the department of defense is stuck in the twentieth century, and is unlikely to move unless a leader with real power, such as Erdogan, lights a stick of dynamite under them.

                  I expect that forever war in the Ukraine will have much the same effect on Putin as forever war had on Erdogan.

                  Meanwhile, here in America, the collapse of the supply chain is screwing Musk. The sort of stuff he needs takes a high lead time to build and deliver, and the stuff his suppliers need takes a high lead time to build and deliver, and it is hard to organize that when the currency is collapsing underneath you.

                  Turkish technology is suffering the same problem, only more so.

                  A Trump who could fire bureaucrats and shoot generals would have been able to advance Information Epoch weaponry in America as Erdogan did in Turkey.

                • Pooch says:

                  Russia has TB2-like drones but they aren’t being mass produced yet like the TB2. They are being operated in Ukraine in limited numbers. I believe they are supposed to be deployed in large numbers in 2023. Hopefully Putin can speed that up.

                  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kronshtadt_Orion

                • jim says:

                  Russia’s military technology has a NASA type problem.

                  Erdogan had the same problem, but with war upon him, and dictatorial power, he did something about it.

                • Pooch says:

                  A Trump who could fire bureaucrats and shoot generals would have been able to advance Information Epoch weaponry in America as Erdogan did in Turkey.

                  The US has Reaper drones which are superior to the TB2, but I’m not sure if the US can mass produce them like the TB2.

        • jim says:

          The Russian war map appears to accurately represent Russian controlled areas, but disputed areas not so much. Ukrainian leadership, weapons, and troops, are moving through the disputed areas without too much drama.

          It is also obvious that the Russians attempted an encirclement operation from the Crimea to the Moldovan border, to cut Kiev off from the coast and from war materials transported by ship, and now Russian troops along the Moldovan border are cut off and surrounded.

          I doubt that they can be relieved by twentieth century methods of warfare against an enemy using Information Epoch methods of warfare.

          • Kunning Drueger says:

            IIRC the red area on the Moldovan border is Transnistria. Prior to the Operation, there were ~5000 RF soldiers there. I had not heard they were on the offensive, but I do remember hearing that UKR forces had demolished the main bridge between Transnistria and the closest UKR city. Those guys were already isolated, so UKR gets no points for that one.

          • Upravda says:

            That strip of land along Moldavian border is there from 1992. It is Pridnjestrovlje, or Transnistria, pro-Russian, and in pre-Maidan times even pro-Ukrainian part of Moldavia, in rebellion against Moldavian government.

            It does not have anything to do with current war in Ukraine, nor it is result of russian invasion force being cut-off in current war.

            It is wonderful example of communist “solutions of national questions”, Karabah being other such most prominent example, one of the many more less known.

      • pyrrhus says:

        Why wouldn’t the Russians bring in some of their idle front line troops if they are truly stalled? This war is for all the marbles as far as Putin is concerned…

        • James says:

          More troops wouldn’t help much. Russia’s problems, such as they are, are largely logistical and tactical, not quantity issues. Russia has excellent internal logistics, and those frontline / border troops are virtually guaranteed to be well-supplied and combat-effective. For troops in the front, Russia’s capabilities are a lot more limited — they already don’t have enough trucks for a long offensive line through hostile-ish territory, adding more troops to that just makes the situation worse, not better.

          • Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

            In Desert Storm, the American’s basically just advanced the whole front itself, by systematically destroying everything in front of them. ‘Reconnaissance in force’.

            • James says:

              And they had the trucks to give the troops the food to do it. Russia’s logistics are very train-reliant since they have, for a long time, been a nation of regulars-in-garrison and special forces abroad. The special forces have outsized logistical lines as well as short timelines for operations. This works fine against smaller and more precise targets. But the Ukraine is huge. Reconaissance-in-force just means more logistical problems for the Russians who can’t get food and fuel to their front lines fast enough as it is.

    • Red says:

      I’ve been the one saying from the start that Russia went in too soft and Putin failed to deliver the devastating display of power that was required to quickly break a foe. I also pointed out exactly how effective and easy to use fire and forget weapons like Javelins are if you give your foe time and the morale to effectively employ them. Russia is clearly staled.

      However, that doesn’t mean that Ukraine won’t run out of such systems before Russia decides to sue for peace and it’s looking like NATO’s pretty close to out of such weapons to ship in. Once they run out of supplies Russia will steam roll over them. Western war manufacturing is pretty limited and our stockpiles are not deep.

      The Turkish drones are a more uncertain issue. Since their deployment in Armenia it was clear they were going to change the face of warfare. The Russians clearly have no counter for them, yet. Still early days in this new sort of conflict.

      • Gedeon says:

        Small UAS can be defeated by lasers, but, depending upon the power, that’s if you can coordinate so as not to damage over the horizon satellites in the process. 10 MW lasers can defeat rocket artillery with sufficient signature. The other logistical problem is such systems are not small, so they can’t be everywhere.

        • jim says:

          Laser systems are currently impractical. Too big. Need to be carried on ships.

          So the only likely use of laser systems is intercepting hypersonics.

        • Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

          Coherent radiance in the IR to UV regime isn’t the real wave of the future in terms of weaponry, they have useful niches in sensing and sensor countermasure applications, though. Easier to generate more power at lower frequencies, and the performance in atmosphere is better, too. For harder targets, there’s particle beams.

          • jim says:

            Particle beams have limited range, and they still have the big problem with big machinery needed to produce them. But at moderate range, more effective than lasers.

            For very high power, applied effectively over long distances, you want big free electron lasers. Which at the moment, are big.

            The only practical use of beam weapons is defense of fixed installations, anti satellite weapons, and ship defense.

            • Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

              There’s no specially particular range limitation in a neutral particle beam in comparison with a laser; you hear the terms ‘charged particle beam’ in narrative often mainly because it sounds cooler.

              There is one use-case where inclusion of particle beams in your war architecture is particularly relevant, which is ballistic missile defense.

              The problem of decoys was never really solved. A missile bus can carry anywhere from dozens to hundreds of inflatable ducks, some of which contain warheads, all of which have identical dimensions, electromagnetic signature, and velocity in space, making interception practically impossible for anything short of your own ABM nukes, until it is all but too late. Quickly scanning targets with particle beams at low power provides a means of discriminating between empty or live contacts through mass spectrometry.
              (http://www.markfoster.net/struc/particle_beam_weapon.pdf)

              FEMs are the ‘canonical’ example of using syncrhotron radiation in practice, though in principle a variety of configurations of imparting acceleration on the traveling electron and re-interacting with the radiant fields so produced are possible, and in practice cyclotron resonance masers (gyrotrons) are the most commonly used coherent beam generators, as considerable interest in the field was aroused once it was discovered that HPMs could be used to both ignite and manipulate fusion reactions. (The idea of ‘laser pumped fusion’ was one of the early speculative attempts, but

              Another methodology is the use of spark gap generators, a very old technique, which radiate power across a broad spectrum, much like a lightning strike. Because the signal produced is not finely modulable except in terms of time (eg, temporally coded bursts), it had limited application for use in communication of information; but if construed in a multi-element array with an RF lens, this allows for tremendous power to be focused on an arbitrary point.
              (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1411.6056 https://www.radartutorial.eu/02.basics/UWB%20Radar.en.html)

              Of course, as i occasionally aver, i do not necessarily expect a ‘dedicated’ energy weapon to be the first ‘energy weapons’ with large scale deployment in conflicts, but rather, for it to be a entailed consequence of continuing trends of increasing radiated power of sensor systems. As to put a riff on that classic hard scifi truism, the range of an active sensor’s energy envelope, is directly proportional to it’s utility as a death ray.

              • Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

                A fragment got cut off there.

                >(The idea of ‘laser pumped fusion’ was one of the early speculative attempts, but problems of generating sufficient power levels were perennial, whereas generating massive power levels was much more practicable in the RF regime, in addition to the serendipitous discovery of how EM fields in the microwave frequency range would interact with the plasma masses in useful ways.)

              • jim says:

                > There’s no specially particular range limitation in a neutral particle beam in comparison with a laser; you hear the terms ‘charged particle beam’ in narrative often mainly because it sounds cooler.

                If you attempt to send a high power neutral particle beam through air, it will only go about ten meters or so. Maybe a hundred meters or so for an extreme ultrarelativistic neutral particle beam.

                Not to mention that it is extremely difficult to generate a neutral particle beam with enough power to damage a baby wipe or a sheet of aluminium foil.

                I don’t think anyone has demonstrated a neutral particle beam capable of frying an egg. We have plenty of extreme relativistic charged particle beams capable of inflicted lethal radiation damage, but they very large buildings, not potentially portable devices, and their range in air is not very far.

                • Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

                  >I don’t think anyone has demonstrated a neutral particle beam capable of frying an egg.

                  Yes.

                  Or well, depending on how you define ‘particle beam’. Acceleration of plasma masses was achieved by project MARAUDER, which was then buried under secrecy.

                • Kunning Drueger says:

                  @St. John
                  How many of the various flavors of beam devices have come off the page/screen and moved into the realm of prototype/mock up? The terminology sounds old, as in reminiscent of the 1950s and 60s, by which I mean heyday of white man science. Did these projects and realms of research die out during the 1970s? It is probably irrelevant, but the decay of the great society, the curtailing of pure science research, the Great Malaise, and many other distinct changes in the thrust and tenor of science, morality, politics, and ideology all seem to have hit a wall at the same time. In a different comment, Jim asserted that the Information Epoch began precisely in 1970, but I don’t know why. I thought 1950 was considered to be the dawning of the “next age” in physics, but I don’t recall why.

                  @Jim
                  I once got to go to Livermore. It was fascinating. The primary focus was NIF. These were the heady days of black presidents and bright futures. The infrastructure and logistics were awesome and massive. Anecdotally, they don’t appreciate dimwitted questions about lasers as weapons. Back then, I thought I was being uncouth. Now I wonder if it was more about the Religion of the facility and the scientific community at the time.

                  Even if it needed to be the size of downtown Manhattan, having a point defense weapons array capable of frying anything and everything that was in LoS seems like a valuable defense, a bulwark similar to the Atlantic and Pacific in terms of isolating the Heart of GAE from their colonies and the unwashed masses. Why were they never built? Is it impossible? The laser network at NIF seemed pretty spectacular, but Guess that is magnatudes away from a point defense laser array?

                • Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

                  The chief difficulty with lasers as a weapon, besides the practical physics of translating sufficient power, is bloom; both atmospheric and spallation from the target itself, which attenuates much of the energy. That is one of the main reasons i consider the L-band, or upper UHF, to be an ‘area of interest’ in this field.

                  To your first passage, such is perhaps the great tragedy of the mid twentieth century technocracy; a shining unprincipled exception of that which anteceded the new world order, carrying inertia of bygone civilization forwards, even as the foundations which such would depend on had already long since subverted itself.

                  In 1903, the Wright flyer drifted into the skies at Kitty Hawk; 60 years later, the SR-71 was scraping the edge of space beyond the speed of sound.

                  The glimpses of what could have been; the innumerable scenarios of Top Men Getting Shit Done in inspired way; the potency of organizations, the whole ecosystem of corporate bodies they created; the promise of potential, a direction towards a heady future that exists in the past; serve now only to highlight it’s abnegation all the keener.

                  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrpYXn2RxLQ
                  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwDHSVYZuTc

                • Kunning Drueger says:

                  First off, why doesn’t that play list have Windows 96 on it?

                  Second, markfoster.net is about the wildest website I’ve encountered in a decade.

                  It is painful being nostalgic for a future that never was. I know this is probably trite, but I will never forget what they took from Us.

                • Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

                  >First off, why doesn’t that play list have Windows 96 on it?

                  Cause it’s on the other dozen playlists silly.

                  The invention of the smartphone really ushered in the normie apocalypse of eternal september for good on the series of tubes. It truly was a wild west over those early years of it’s instauration, before the ‘highland clearances’, as internet life retreated from all it’s little spaces spread out like constellations in the sky, and was funneled into The Plantation and the occasional scattering of walled gardens, with only things like encyclopedia dramatica or lurkmore standing as epitaphs to the waning days of that era, the character of it’s existence.

  53. Tech Priest says:

    I doubt drones are sophisticated enough (yet) for useful autonomous fighting (except maybe where they can give it exact coordinates for a hit).

    It seems to me that Russia’s biggest problem, maybe even bigger than lack of autonomous computerized systems, is that they don’t trust the loyalty/fighting spirit of the lower rank troops enough to be able to give them the autonomy they need, not only for twenty-first century fighting, but maybe even for late twentieth century fighting as well.

    Some interesting articles I recently read about need for small-group autonomy:

    https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-chemical-weapons-anymore/

    (about chemical weapons, but also about how modern warfare requires local autonomy. Was linked in comments to: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7kE4t3wdqDEmtPiaB/nuclear-deterrence-101-and-why-the-us-can-t-even-hint-at)

    https://anarchonomicon.substack.com/p/the-antagonists-tech-tree

    (mainly about motorcycle infantry, which would require even greater autonomy. Was linked in the Motte subreddit.)

    • S says:

      Take acoup with a grain of salt- he tends to crap whenever protective stupidity kicks in.

      His thesis is chemical weapons don’t work on armies using ‘the modern system’, a big part of which is
      “which in turn requires both extensive training of junior officers and NCOs and devolving quite a bit of command agency down to them so that they can make local decisions ”

      To understand why this is so ridiculous look up USSR NCOs.

      He also claims the fact they dismantled the facilities to produce chemical weapons means they don’t think they work, ignoring American behavior towards the production of nuclear weapons.

      • Tech Priest says:

        “To understand why this is so ridiculous look up USSR NCOs.”

        I’m not even sure if you’re arguing that USSR NCOs had autonomy but weren’t able to fight in the modern style, or that they didn’t but were.

        “He also claims the fact they dismantled the facilities to produce chemical weapons means they don’t think they work, ignoring American behavior towards the production of nuclear weapons.”

        It seems to me that US is behaving quite differently w.r.t. nuclear vs. chemical weapons.

        • S says:

          You didn’t look them up. For those who are lazy, the ussr didn’t have any. Instead they took some of the incoming conscripts and gave them a course on how to be an nco. I think it was less then a month. In practice this meant low level officers had to do nco work.

          We shut down the production facilities for both of them; the difference is we claim not to have a stockpile of chemical weapons.

    • alf says:

      https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-chemical-weapons-anymore/

      Interesting article. My only question is that the author assumes Assad used chemical weapons. Was that not a false flag?

      • S says:

        A coup is a progressive. So he repeats the party line and twists himself to explain it; when he does so his stuff, like here, tend to be fractally bad.

        • alf says:

          OK I get the message.

          Still, regardless of progressive contamination, the argument that chemical weapons just aren’t that effective makes sense to me. Seems rather hard to make a gas stick in a target location.

          • S says:

            Poison gas is a great weapon when you know exactly where you enemy is coming from and have an area that heavier then air gas will stay in. That way you don’t need to use artillery- you can just rig the containers with explosives or open them manually.

            The best example would be one he gives and misunderstands (I’m not joking about fractally wrong)- the Yom Kippur war where Egypt attacked across the Suez Canal.

  54. Kunning Drueger says:

    It is entirely possible that multiple Telegram accounts and Tweet feeds are lying, but given all the footage of RF advance, the burned out UKR drone pics, and the MSM narrative shift, I think for it to be believable that the advance has stalled, we should get some proof past words.

    Autonomous drones sound cool. So do mighty morphin’ power ranger zords and women that win prizes in mathematics. If you want people to believe in those fantastical things, you have to provide proof they’re not only possible as one-offs (Boston Dynamics), but usefully reproducible.

    • Pooch says:

      Looks like the Institute for the Study of War (“a widely respected DC research group”) is corroborating Jim’s theory.

      https://www.axios.com/russias-invasion-deadly-stalemate-b73bd720-ed1e-45a8-bb36-f77cc583b124.html

      • Kunning Drueger says:

        ISW’s Board: General Jack Keane, Kimberly Kagan, former US Ambassador to the UN Kelly Craft, William Kristol, former US Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, Kevin Mandia, Jack D. McCarthy, Jr., Bruce Mosler, General David Petraeus, Warren Phillips, and William Roberti.

        Their focus of Research: ISW research is divided into three main categories: the Iraq Project, the Afghanistan Project, and the Middle East Security Project.

        Link to the full staff list: https://www.understandingwar.org/who-we-are

        These are the guys that want WW3.

        • Pooch says:

          I wouldn’t doubt that. I have not read the ISW assessment though (link won’t load for me), so I’m not sure they are basing this stalemate claim on outright lies or actual evidence that leads credence to Jim’s analysis in this post.

          • Kunning Drueger says:

            They update regularly with their battlefield assessments, most of which are some flavor of “Russia is failing, will fail, cannot win, the walls are closing in…” They are also purveyors of the “noble Ukrainian freedom fighter” BS. Allegedly, Victoria Nuland is tied to ISW, but I haven’t been able to verify that.

            Col. Macgregor stated that there are 2 factions vying for control: Biden and CIA director Burns (the Brezhnevians) opposing SecState Blinken and Chief Commissar Ron Klane (the Radicals). ISW is a radical stronghold.

            • Pooch says:

              So on one hand we have Jim and the Cathedral ISW claiming Russia has stalled and on the other hand based Col. MacGregor and the other Russia watchers close to the ground claiming the war is all but decided, with the Ukrainian forces of any consequence surrounded and cut off.

              Bizarro world, but I guess we shall find out who is right.

            • Mister Grumpus says:

              Blinken must be a radical. He brought a purple-haired (Chinese) harridan with him to Alaska to bitch out the foreign minister of China.

        • ExileStyle says:

          And if you check the references in their daily roundup memos, they’re mostly to Facebook and Twitter posts, largely establishment accounts. Their veneer of “neutrality” seems to be in tone rather than substance.

        • clovis says:

          [quote] Kimberly Kagan…William Kristol, former US Senator Joseph I. Lieberman[/quote]

          And into the oven it goes.

    • Pooch says:

      Giving Jim the benefit of the doubt with his prediction, maps from Stalin Frog on Twitter who looks to me to have the most accurate maps seem to be trending towards smaller and smaller Russian advances lately. So take that as you will.

      https://twitter.com/Stalin_Frog

  55. Mister Grumpus says:

    And then boom, on a dime, the war news is suddenly about: dropping grenades from prosumer battery drones, air strikes from Gen 5 fighter jets, and cross-country long distance super missiles.

  56. Karl says:

    Why do you think that the latest Turkish drones make bombarding cities impossible and suicidal? What could these drones do against air force? Some bombers protected by figther planes should still be able to flatten cities.

    • jim says:

      To flatten a city requires a great deal of explosives. You have to be able to pound away cheaply and safely for a long time, because you are pounding a great deal of stuff most of it of little military value, while the assets with which you are pounding it have great military value.

      So you have to be able to bomb with impunity or shell with impunity, and do it over and over and over again. Autonomous end guided weapons make this expensive.

      In the information epoch, a man carried autonomous anti tank missile has a huge advantage over a tank, because it easier to find the tank than to find the missile, a drone has a similar advantage over artillery, and an anti air missile a similar advantage over a bomber.

      • Karl says:

        Manpads have a reach of at most 8km according to infogalactic. Bombing from an altitude above that is no problem for a bomber.

      • Mister Grumpus says:

        “To flatten a city requires a great deal of explosives. You have to be able to pound away cheaply and safely for a long time.”

        I’d guess that’s why those self-propelled MRLS rocket launchers are such a big deal, as the next best thing to real artillery, because they can send out a crapload of explosives quickly and then GTFO.

    • pyrrhus says:

      Meanwhile, Russians continue to take out Foreign fighter bases with missiles, this morning…https://t.me/realCRP/3889

  57. Kunning Drueger says:

    Hey Jim, canary post?

  58. https://www.business-standard.com/article/economy-policy/hurting-from-sanctions-on-russia-india-is-losing-faith-in-the-west-122031800125_1.html

    “India losing faith in the West”

    Clearest indication from the Indian media that globohomo has lost and is continuing to lose significant ground in India. The “wrong side of history” argument of the cathedral has drawn a sharp response from the Indian side.

    I’m not surprised. The anti-West sentiment here seems to be getting back to the Cold War era levels. Unlike in globohomo echo chambers, the media here is quickly changing the narrative.

    • Kunning Drueger says:

      My comments on faith were deemed invalid, so take this with a grain of salt.

      India has an endless list of whom to not trust. Until they can put their trust somewhere, just shit testing GAE “alpha.”

    • Oog en Hand says:

      http://www.muslimskeptic.com

      Muslims consider Christians to be stupid people, and Hindus to be evil people.

      Dalit activists set fire to copies of the Manu Smirti. Should this be considered a hate crime?

      • Hate crime is a term used by leftists for describing anything even remotely deemed offensive against their favored victim groups. Hindus in India aren’t a favored victim group and modern India is about as Hindu as America is Christian.

      • someDude says:

        The one who is weak is always evil.

        The one that is stupid is the one whose talents you hope to absorb to your own cause but that fellow stubbornly and bafflingly insists on maintaining his identity.

  59. Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

    >How fares the US hypersonic missile technology compared to Russia, China and India? How important is it?

    https://www.isegoria.net/2022/03/they-would-come-under-immediate-attack-once-they-began-their-multiweek-mobilization-across-the-planet/

  60. Pooch says:

    Bizarre post. Russia is not halted in Ukraine. There are no reports even from the most flattering Cathedral sources that Turkish drones are doing anything significant to halt the Russian advance. It gains more territory, towns, and cities each day.

    It’s obvious that Russia will eventually win the conventional war. The question is what will Ukraine look like after Kiev falls. It’s not a question “if” Kiev falls.

    • pyrrhus says:

      Yes, Russians are about to take Mariupol and the rest won’t take very long, because only the Nazi soldiers are willing to fight to the death…which they will get…

  61. Calvin says:

    It’s honestly kind of disappointing. I would have thought that after turning the tide in Syria and having years to iron out their doctrines and tactics in urban warfare environments that Putin’s military would be more up to scratch. The same guys who were suppling ISIS et al are the ones supplying the Ukrainians.

    • Doom says:

      The Kremlin does not want to be at war with the Ukrainian people; only the belligerent foreign and hostile occupants.

      The general attitude appears to be to attempt to minimise civilian casualties as much as possible. You can tell this is the case as there doesn’t appear they have knocked out the power or phones, though they well could have.

      It takes much longer when you want to be precise and careful.

  62. Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

    Reproducing an earlier comment here:

    High ROF autoloading artillery systems (like archer) are capable of quickly switching between munition types. Good fire support in advanced conflicts should come with a range of ballistic and guided munitions for engaging a variety of targets, both in the air and on the ground.

    The value potential of integrating battlefield awareness with kill-chains as fast as a press of a button (detect target, ping assets, drop ordnance on them) was understood by both soviet and american planners a long time ago (eg, https://warontherocks.com/2014/11/the-cold-war-offset-strategy-assault-breaker-and-the-beginning-of-the-rsta-revolution/ ); but like a lot of things in a demotist environment, it was as if there was a mass brain-fog that prevented everyone from ever really putting all the dots together as a whole; ‘the system’ could not remember what it did yesterday, nor relate it to what it would do tomorrow; every day was a new day zero.

    Like the airplane before it, drones can be viewed as in essence another form of guidance package for munitions; or from another angle, you could see guided missiles as basically a special kind of drone, with aerodynamic vehicles as a reusable boost phase.

    Somewhat tangential, but touching back on the Gerald Bull reference last article, there is a further use-case for HARP gun space tubes that is a killer-app all by itself (literally), which is pumping out clouds of boosted god rods to high orbit, which can be used right away or at any time on demand for global precision strike of any hard target; once you go past a certain point, you essentially gain the ability to ‘store’ the force of an exoplanetary cannon shot indefinitely.

  63. Analysis says:

    It seems our inept overlords have successfully disfailed in adapting the Ukrainian armed forces into 21st century warfare.

    This is getting repetitive and tedious. Our inept elite are obviously nowhere near as inept as we constantly describe them and we are going to take some more massive losses if we keep underestimating them.

    • jim says:

      That the drones are Turkish tells us much about the dysfunction of our elite.

      Everyone refights the last war. Russia attempted to refight the Georgian war. Which initially worked, but which quickly turned out to be a bad idea. Russia needs to stay out of war until it has modernized its military, which will take a while.

      • pyrrhus says:

        Yes, who knew the Turks were more advanced in technology than the superpowers?!

        • jim says:

          They under a tech ban, and are still producing better drones.

        • A2 says:

          Because muslim tech superiority seems unrealistic, I’m wondering where the Turks source their software, etc. First guess: their Nato pal the US. Second guess: Israel, perhaps?

          • T. Rex Sex says:

            If they have radically superior drones than anyone else, it stands to reason that they source the software from themselves.

            • jim says:

              Their software reportedly sucks. But their drones are still superior to anyone else’s because the people building the drones and writing the software correctly understand drone warfare, while everyone else’s military is stuck in World War II.

              • Pooch says:

                The US Reaper drone is superior to the Turkish TB2, although much more expensive to build. The TB2 is not superior in tech but superior in cost-benefit.

      • Analysis says:

        That the Russians are considered the main opponent to the Cathedral tells us much about opposition to the Cathedral.

        • jim says:

          Seems to me it tells us the Cathedral is insane, but we already knew that.

          What do you think it tells us about the Cathedral?

          • Analysis says:

            I am supposed to believe our insane inept elite has completely outmanoeuvred its only real rival Putin in his backyard and will force him to accept a humiliating defeat. I am supposed to believe trannified Shaniqua understands the demands and contours of modern warfare better than those inside the Kremlin.

        • pyrrhus says:

          Russian missiles, perhaps hypersonic, destroy large NATO weapons depot in Ukraine…https://gab.com/ASBMilitary/posts/107983927773385353

          • pyrrhus says:

            With substantial, if unconfirmed, loss of life including “former” NATO officers…

    • Contaminated NEET says:

      The proggies are the greatest propagandists in all history, they’re good fighters, and they have a real, living faith. They’ve won every important fight for the last 200 years. It’s fun to laugh at trannies, Shaniqua, and all that, but we easily forget how powerful and serious the enemy really is.

      • Starman says:

        @Contaminated NEET

        ”The proggies are the greatest propagandists in all history, they’re good fighters, and they have a real, living faith. They’ve won every important fight for the last 200 years”

        They lost in Afghanistan, and Afghanistan revealed that they are now dependent on mercenaries. Thus revealing that their faith is now dying.

        • Contaminated NEET says:

          Afghanistan is a meaningless backwater whose exports are dust, poppies, and sodomy. It was a fight they could afford to lose, and they knew it. The Afghans are also adorably swarthy Muslims, and disliked by the progs’ domestic enemies, so they had trouble working up the self-righteous hatred they need for a real holy war.

          The progs also lost in Spain the ’30s, and a handful of other times and places that don’t really matter. When they’re playing for serious stakes, they don’t lose.

          • Wulfgar Thundercock III says:

            The left always wins, and when it loses, those do not count. I wonder how that happened, with such brave opponents like yourself?

          • Starman says:

            @Contaminated NEET

            “Afghanistan is a meaningless backwater whose exports are dust, poppies, and sodomy. It was a fight they could afford to lose, and they knew it. The Afghans are also adorably swarthy Muslims, and disliked by the progs’ domestic enemies, so they had trouble working up the self-righteous hatred they need for a real holy war”

            Key words that you ignored:

            “Afghanistan revealed that they are now dependent on mercenaries…”

            And Ukraine, a major exporter of wheat and next to the heart of Russia has revealed this fact as well. Compare the tiny Reddit Legion with Lincoln’s massive Wide Awakes.

      • Anonymous Fake says:

        No one would care about progressives if conservatives would [*ignore the power of the Cathedral*]

        • jim says:

          You presuppose that soft power is not backed by hard power, that there is no mailed fist inside that velvet glove. This is the same theme as your suggestion that we do Charlottesville and January sixth all over again.

      • Neurotoxin says:

        “The proggies are the greatest propagandists in all history…”
        They are good at taking over the social mechanisms of information transmission. That’s important (vitally) but it’s not the same thing.

        “…they’re good fighters…”
        Not when they don’t have the state apparatus at their back. Of course, they are great at taking over the state apparatus. Note the similarity to the previous point.

        “and they have a real, living faith.”
        Hard to judge, but I don’t think so. I think the tipping point was the transvestite thing, where they made the strategic blunder of overreaching. “That man in a dress is actually a woman” marked the transition (heh) between “I’m repeating leftist talking points because I honestly believe them” and “I’m repeating leftist talking points because I’ll lose my job if I don’t.”

        That was a watershed moment, a change from whatever semi-plausible crap there was in 2014 to O’Brien holding up four fingers and thundering, “Say I’m holding up five fingers, Winston, or I’ll torture you to death.”

        Terrified, Winston says, “Five fingers”… but not because he believes it.

        “They’ve won every important fight for the last 200 years.”
        You’ve forgetten the Cold War. The Cold War shows that we can beat them.

        Yes, the left is a serious enemy. It’s a lethal mistake to underestimate them. But they’re not invincible.

      • jim says:

        > The proggies are the greatest propagandists in all history

        They are terrible and hopeless propagandists. Compare and contrast the Taliban’s propaganda directed at us, with proggie propaganda directed at Afghans. It is like night and day. The Taliban were just incomparably better.

        Proggies were damned good propagandists, though hardly the greatest in history, back when Academia was selecting priests primarily for smarts.

        Today, they suck. They suck stupendously.

        But Russian propaganda is sucky also. Proggies are doing OK in the propaganda war with Russia. But the greatest?

        Hardly. It is OK, when compared to the low bar it has to meet.

        Both sides could do a lot better.

  64. The Cominator says:

    Not sure they’ve been halted… if the enemy won’t surrender and you aren’t willing to flatten the cities you either need to starve them out or go house to house.

    Starving them out takes time…

    • jim says:

      Starving them out requires cutting off the cities that have not yet been cut off. The cities that have been cut off and surrounded will fall. The cities that have not yet been cut off are unlikely to be cut off.

  65. Anothername says:

    To counter autonomous, ground-attacking self-targeting drones,
    you need autonomous, drone-attacking self-targeting drones.

    Also,
    jamming is not necessarily an issue,
    Rheinmetall has a system that uses lasers instead of RF for comm,
    range 50+km, even in somewhat rainy conditions,
    ground control has a small balloon lifting the laser transceiver 5km or so in the sky,
    and then there are passive, stealthy, high-endurance relay drones, every 50km or so,
    which extend the laser signal to the attack drones multiples of 50km away.
    More relay drones, more redundancy.
    Without a capable airforce or special detection drones in the sky,
    the system is pretty much unjammable by current means.

    Then there’s RF, with very low RF side lobes, communicating only to satellites (only transmitting into the sky, only accepting signals that come from the sky),
    which is also hard or impossible to jam (depends on tech level of enemy).
    The French have a system for their drones that secretly exploits some civilian TV and telepohone/comm satellites (even weather satellites that use RF transmitters for weather radar) as stealthy comm transceivers(information hidden in the TV streams etc.)

  66. Dr. Faust says:

    “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” This quote seems applicable here. Russia understands itself but not the enemy and so wins as many battles as it loses.

    Personally, I would have done things differently. The first being the timing of the attack. With covid waning in public attention the attack lined up perfectly with the Next Big Thing in the media. But the GAE is run on outrage and Russia didn’t need to place itself in that position. Instead, they could have waited until some other distraction inevitably happened and drew the eye of the public. And it would happen. Then attack and force your enemy to divide it’s attention. Meanwhile, bolster troops and weapon on the border, wait for Biden to cry wolf, then cancel plans at the last minute. Do this until everyone ignores him and discredits his information and US intelligence.

    Then forget the idea of an invasion and instead use small scale, laser precise attacks to inflict the greatest damage and retreat across the border before anyone can react or even know what’s happening. Instead of 24 hour talk about Russia the attacks would be just another blurb to be read and forgotten.

    But none of that happened and instead we get a proxy war between NATO and Russia with Ukraine as the theatre where billions of dollars in weapons are pumped into a nation that could have never created them on their own.

    And the Chinese are balking, trying to ride the fence. It’s disappointing.

    • The Cominator says:

      There was talk of putting missles there, there may have not been time…

  67. Mister Grumpus says:

    If this can tell me anything about the China/Taiwan situation, it’s that it won’t be settled with amphibious landings and guys trudging up the beaches with machine guns.

    Rather, it’ll be done by 100-1000 smart strong guys, with lots of Pelican cases full of whatever, who I presume have been living there already for years. Just put a bunch of paintballs on all the right targets in one night and that should do it.

    • jim says:

      China has been preparing both the former and the latter.

      Events in the Ukraine indicate that the former is likely to be a very bad idea.

    • A2 says:

      I can see two approaches: color revolution to set things off, and/or blowing up TSMC’s facilities. The latter should, I think, cool off any fanatic US defenders because what’s the upside again? The best opportunity would, I think, appear if and when the US gets too deep into Ukraine.

      Then again, my impression is that Taiwan is getting fairly integrated with China businesswise. Perhaps they could cut a deal instead.

      • Dan Kurt says:

        Dan

      • James says:

        > Then again, my impression is that Taiwan is getting fairly integrated with China businesswise. Perhaps they could cut a deal instead.

        I have some experience in Taiwan due to my travels in the area.

        My understanding is that their older generations and very politically keen and although they truly hate China, they recognize that reunion is inevitable, and that the correct approach is to try to integrate with them. This is especially prevalent amongst the elite, to the extent that even the young elite women largely hold the opinion they should be trading and engaging with China more than the West. This is all embedded in the KMT, which has historically held essentially every political office from the beginning of the nation until recently.

        Recently, the anti-KMT party has come to power. It has essentially defined itself by refusing to integrate with China while ramping up gay pride parades to the max. Unlike in Ukraine, this happened without significant bloodshed amongst the previous elite, and the KMT may still have a chance to win future elections.

        As far as blowing up TSMC goes — it seems extremely unlikely to me. That is quite possibly the most advanced fabrication technology in the world. It is also principally owned and operated by the faction of society most interested in aligning with China. They simply don’t need to do it, and given enough patience, they will inevitably win.

    • Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

      For most of the history of industrialized warfare, a chief factor supervening tactical outcomes was the problem of granularity.

      A soldier with an automatic grenade launcher is an effective transportation, surveillance, and fire control system for engaging soldiers with this ordnance; however, he would also lack sufficient range to reach out and touch the strategic bombers flying over head to hit his fuel depots and transportation hubs behind the lines. Contrapositively, with weapons that could reach out and touch the high flying bomber, it would often also be less easy to quickly and accurately engage more granular targets, like soldiers on the move.

      Successive improvements in the sophistication of artifacted control systems has largely transformed this problem. In principle the same kind of systems that can put a round through the window of that bomber, can also put a round through the window of the building or truck Mr. Suleimani is riding in, as well. Matters of acquisition, and economies of scale, begin weighting more heavily.

      Something that is perennial though, is the pertinence of range; and tube firing is one of the easiest and most economical means of boosting the range of a munition. Much of the art of war in general, can essentially be construed as the effort of construing means, by which you can touch the opponent, but he cannot touch you in return.

      One of the most valuable functions mobile tube firing systems on the larger end will have in future conflicts is theater defense against high flying surveillance assets and other intruders. As far back as the ‘PAVE MOVER’ concept, the potential value of detecting and flagging targets for instantaneous destruction all across the battlespace has long been presaged.

      It will likely come to pass that a conflict in the future will be decided by both sides throwing a swarm of autonomous drones at each other, with victory going to whomever comes out on top of the fracas.

      Many minds will feel instinctively unsatisfied by such ‘banal symmetries’, though, and will wish to cast about for means of upsetting the dynamic. This touches on something which you could say is the more general case of what the matter of granularity was in specific, which is, asymmetries of engagement envelopes.

      A principle component of ground assets under this paradigm may be reconstrued as ‘area denial’ assets. Small wheeled or tracked vehicles, autonomous or manned, with bed mounted weapon systems copacetic for sweeping granular targets in the sky or ground. Such as an automatic punt gun for downing drones like a duck hunter with a 10 dollar shot shell. Or on an upper end, high power ‘early warning’ radar systems that also double as directed energy for frying the same.
      (Related: https://www.isegoria.net/2021/12/the-russian-approach-is-to-stick-a-machinegun-and-a-rocket-launcher-on-the-mule-and-send-it-ahead-of-the-troops/https://www.isegoria.net/2021/12/russia-has-placed-emphasis-on-targeting/ )

      HPM weapon systems are very adaptive to this ecological niche; as in terms of granularity, the speed and accuracy with which they can engage a target approaches one; as well, their ‘magazines’ can dramatically exceed massive munitions in ‘depth’, and the cost per ‘shot’ is also negligible in comparison.
      (Some related readings: https://csbaonline.org/uploads/documents/Crossroads_web%2C_14Nov.pdfhttps://www.saveusnow.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/2010-Microwave-Weapons-1.pdfhttps://user.eng.umd.edu/~vlg/MSIC%20lectures.pdf )
      (And speaking of Turkey’s advancing the state of military art: https://web.archive.org/web/20200205165711/https://www.roketsan.com.tr/en/product/alka-directed-energy-weapon-system/https://web.archive.org/web/20200416181957/https://www.armyrecognition.com/weapons_defence_industry_military_technology_uk/turkey_uses_laser_weapon_technology_to_shoot_down_chinese_uav_wing_loong_ii_in_libya.html )

      Foot mobiles figure into this dynamic in a similar manner, with grenade rifles in the 1.1 to 2.2 inch range, that can deploy a variety of munitions, like airburst rounds for man portable air defense, and mounts for ‘smartphones’ that may plot firing solutions for targets in view of the cameras and superimpose them on the screen – basically, irl aimbot; and also ability to ‘flag’ targets for engagement by pinging other assets through directional coms; or likewise receiving target information from other assets that detect a bogey out of their reach, plotting an engagement trajectory on the screen before the target even appears.

      The character of weapon designs in coming conflicts will likely be highly influenced by how they may operate autonomously, and interoperate with other systems also operating autonomously, which may prove a rather thrilling competitive environment. (We Skynet now.)

      • Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

        Addendum.

        A lot of this will basically boil down to a ‘salvo economy’; the costs of strike methodologies vs the costs of interception methodologies, with a subsidiary dynamic of working for increasingly longer reaches on increasingly smaller platforms, for increased granulation. The new battle of attrition essentially.

        And like the last major battle of attrition, there becomes a niche for new ‘tanks’ too; platforms or combat groups that can handle their own terminal defense, which advance until they can reach the enemy with their own ‘breakthrough’ weaponry; that is weapon systems which are very difficult to intercept, like large number of kinetic penetrators, or directed energy.

        • Kunning Drueger says:

          Weird, wild stuff. Doesn’t all of this assume and completely rely upon the network of networks (NoN) as well as the networks of networked operators, engineers, technicians, and decision makers (NoNh)? It seems like a lot of what you’re proposing would be “dead stick” if the NoN is fragged by malware while the NoNh is fragged by an anti-social memeplex. The autonomous war bots need their “IoT” to do their jobs, and the human operators need their culture, religion, and society to give them something to fight for.

          • jim says:

            Exactly so. War in the Information Epoch.

            You don’t encircle the enemy physically, you penetrate their networks, obtain information, and disrupt their networks. You do this all the time, but it is war when you escalate beyond entryism, shilling, and hacking to the use of explosives to disrupt their physical and social networks, as for example Trump nailing Soleimani, taking out ISIS headquarters, and taking out one ISIS Caliph after another.

            Soleimani was a critical vertex in the social network, uniting the military with the priests. You need to nail the people who are nailing the peace faction in Ukraine. Start with Zelensky.

            War in the future will have entryists who can call down a rod from god to point not far from where they are standing, thereby avoiding the exposure that results when they concoct sex crimes and accuse Linus of them.

            • Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

              Imagine if there was a weapon system with intercontinental range, pinpoint accuracy, indefinite loiter time, and adaptive environmental camouflage…

              …as far back as 3 days into the festivities, i had thought to myself it would have been very convenient if there were bunches of ‘migrant workers’ who had moved into Ukraine over the years, and who one day just happened to t-bone Mr. Zalensky’s car as he is driving home from work one night – whose movement patterns they were keeping tabs on – bundling him into their under-armoured kia minivan, while another team takes out the transformer substation routing power to the whole area, as they drive off into the night.

              Multiply to similar cases across the country, while kalibrs rain down on strategic targets everywhere, and you got yourself an invasion.

              • jim says:

                The Songar drone is man transportable, though not something you can stuff in your backpack, and takes off and lands vertically. It can be equipped either with a two hundred round machine gun, or a forty millimetre grenade launcher, or for surveillance and electronic warfare. It is not autonomous, but does not require a highly trained pilot. The operator tells it what to do, and it then does it like a regular consumer drone. Including aiming its weapons itself, after the operator points and clicks on the video. It can land a grenade on a pocket handkerchief at two hundred meters, but it is loud and highly visible at four hundred meters.

                The Bayraktar TB-2, however is something a little bit more like what you are thinking of.

                It is surprisingly hard to see, it can loiter for 27 hours. Its range is strangely short, considering its very long loiter time. I cannot make sense of the long loiter time and short range. It can land several kilograms of high explosive on a pocket handkerchief from far enough away that no one is likely to notice it.

                • Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

                  It was an elliptical reference to the Mark 1 Humanoid.

                • doom says:

                  re: Loiter time vs range

                  Does “loiter” mean “hover? I assume so. And thus, the engine/ propeller is geared and tuned (and aerodynamics etc) to hang the drone in one spot with minimal fuel use.

                  This comes at the cost of any kind of legitimate fuel economy while travelling.

                • Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

                  >Does “loiter” mean “hover?

                  It means hanging around, which for a flying object usually means orbiting a designated area.

  68. Anonymous Fake says:

    Autonomous drones are just begging for friendly fire and civilian death incidents. They’re going to be ideally programmed by autistic/psychopathic sex deviants who do not care about this. How fitting that their leader is a cross dressing Jewish comedian.

    Cavalry charges and blitzkrieg, for what it’s worth, are very sexually attractive however. Ineffective but manly warfare is how nations like the Celts or Africans could lose wars against the Romans, but win the peace against those excessively civilized cucks. No woman is ever going to romanticize a heroic drone programmer.

    Interestingly, this is happening as Turkey’s fertility rate is falling down to decadent and low modern levels. They’re looking like the new 1980’s America, able to win wars with all the latest gear but unable to win the peace because no excess babies and thus no Ottoman revival. All that gear is purchased with the surplus wealth of 2 income families that do not have enough children.

    War nerd behavior is looking ever more like regular nerd behavior, a dead end. Russia needs spiritual warfare against opponents who fight like the demon possessed (because they are) as well as for their own good. A stalemate here might just be the best outcome to straighten them up. Ukraine is doomed though.

    But small arms successfully stopping tanks in an urban warfare context sounds like exploiting an enemy who doesn’t want to flatten cities, taking advantage of his charity. Autonomous drones are legit in some sense, but the javelins are PC warfare that would go away if things escalated just a bit more. Maybe they already have.

    • jim says:

      > Autonomous drones are just begging for friendly fire and civilian death incidents.

      As I said, the UI needs improvement. But twenty first century warfare means you use vastly less explosives, delivered in a more expensive manner, by smarter people. Thus twenty first century warfare will inherently go easier on the civilian population and civilian assets.

      This in turn means that rational warfighters will aim for control of the civilian population and civilian assets, rather than the destruction of enemy populations and enemy assets, which in turn leads to aristocratic governance and aristocratic warfare, where the aristocrats whack each other, while the civilian population pays little attention.

      The most cohesive group of aristocrats wins, which in turn leads to theocratic governance, Byzantium and the Holy Roman Empire being the beginning of the middle ages. Histories that focus on the secular events of Constantine’s rise and rule miss the point, miss what matters.

      > No woman is ever going to romanticize a heroic drone programmer.

      In my own personal life I fixed the nerd programmer problem. When our aristocratic class is nerd drone programmers, they will have the capability to fix that problem for the whole society.

      > But small arms successfully stopping tanks in an urban warfare context sounds like exploiting an enemy who doesn’t want to flatten cities,

      Initially this what happened. Russia should have flattened cities when it could. Now it cannot.

      • Anonymous Fake says:

        You are saying we could fix the women problem with White Sharia, because [*deleted*]

        • jim says:

          Not what I am saying, directly contrary to what I in fact said, and blithely ignores the evidence that I presented showing the opposite to be true.

          We need white sharia to escape from defect/defect equilibrium, the game of players and bitches. This is unrelated to problem of female perceptions of manliness and status.

          Women are not impressed by measures of manliness nor status that impress men, thus we need a social order that represents manliness and status in a manner intelligible to the female hypersensitive, but seriously out of date to the current evolutionary environment, alpha radar.

          Male perceptions of status and manliness are adaptive in the current environment of evolutionary adaptation, female perceptions two million years out of date, and need to be accommodated.

          When we have aristocratic governance, drone programmers will be high status in male perceptions. The aristocratic order will then need to do for the social order as a whole what I have done in my personal and private life, and what Trump did in his life on a considerably grander scale. Which is entirely unrelated to white Sharia. Rather, it is about how males dealing with males needs to be perceived by women.

          • FrankNorman says:

            Pardon my asking a rather basic question, but why would female perceptions be so frozen in time? Wouldn’t it be a selective advantage for a woman to be sane in terms of mate selection?

            • Karl says:

              If she can’t select a mate, her perceptions don’t matter.

              For most of our histrory, she could not select.

    • Calvin says:

      Interestingly, this is happening as Turkey’s fertility rate is falling down to decadent and low modern levels. They’re looking like the new 1980’s America, able to win wars with all the latest gear but unable to win the peace because no excess babies and thus no Ottoman revival.

      It’s not just that. It’s also that the most fertile areas of the country are the Kurdish ones, whereas the Turks in the east have Western European levels of tfr. A terrible combination, and a huge reason why Erdogen is so paranoid about the Kurds in Iraq and Syria forming an effective parallel state.

      Incidentally, Jim, do you mind taking me off moderation please?

      • jim says:

        The reason you are on moderation is to protect rectification of names.

        I will not allow commenters on my blog to argue by giving new and unusual meanings to words. It leads to pointless waste of space.

        • Calvin says:

          What do I need to say or do in order to be removed?

          • jim says:

            I will eventually get tired of checking your comments to see if they are OK – just keep on making OK comments.

            What is an OK comment?

            It is not a comment that no one disagrees with. We would never learn anything if no one disagreed.

            It is a comment that is unresponsive to the resulting disagreement.

            In particular, in the discussions on Christianity, you confidently assumed that all mainstream regular decent Christians think X, when no Christians have ever thought X, and when I and others pointed this out you sailed right on assuming that all Christians think X, while I and others wasted a great deal of space producing evidence of Christians who clearly did not think X, and you just went right on taking for granted that all right thinking Christians think X, without bothering to produce any evidence of any Christian anywhere ever thinking ever X.

            I became extremely pissed off when you asked for Christian definition of forgiveness and mercy, as if there was any difference from the regular mainstream definition, and when I nonetheless answered at great length, you went right on assuming that everyone everywhere, including me, agrees that forgiveness and mercy means something suicidally stupid.

            When you ask for an answer, and get it, it is grossly discourteous to just sail blithly on as if no one disagreed with your position. I spent far too much time typing..

      • i says:

        Its paradoxical that those highly fertile Kurds are supplying the women fighters of the YPJ fighting for the feminist/leftist state of Rojava.

        • Calvin says:

          I’d imagine those are mostly for propaganda purposes. But, then again, a substantial number of Kurds appear to be genuine commies so I guess there’s a hefty amount of genuine insanity among them. I don’t know how the kurds have managed to combine high tfrs with leftism, but they apparently have. The maps are pretty damn clear:

          https://everipedia.org/wiki/lang_en/Demographics_of_Turkey

          Whatever the case, I hope they continue to outbreed the turks and one day march the thieves of Constantinople off into gulags. Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of roaches.

          • i says:

            I suspect the feminist ideology is acting quite parasitically also. By brainwashing the women from more traditional societies and drawing them out of Traditional Islam.

            Maybe they are the exception.

          • i says:

            “The PKK’s gender policy, which includes maintaining a fighting force that is 40% female and the promotion of women’s liberation as a key component of its political platform, makes the PKK an outlier among both Kurdish nationalist groups and leftist armed movements in the Middle East. Based on interviews with members of the PKK’s allied civilian political movement and former PKK combatants, this paper argues that rather than being a function of the PKK’s ethnic or ideological identities, this policy emerged as a result of a confluence of four other factors: the PKK’s leftist ideology, the preferences of its leadership, and the need to recruit selectively all served as permissive factors. Ultimately, however, it was the greater participation of Kurdish women as a result of Turkish state violence in the Kurdish southeast in the 1980s that ultimately changed the PKK from within.”

            https://doi.org/10.1080/1057610X.2020.1759265

            • Calvin says:

              Well fuck me, apparently they actually do use them to fight. I hope they have the sense to at least stick them on the defensive somewhere where it’s not too tough. Anyway, maybe intense nationalism is the key to combining women’s lib and high fertility? The Kurds are certainly doing something right that the rest of Turkey is failing at.

            • jim says:

              “PKK an outlier among both Kurdish nationalist groups and …”

              Kurdish high fertility reflects the fact that PKK are outlier among Kurdish national groups.

              “and leftist armed movements”

              That it is an outlier even among leftist armed movements reflects the fact that feminism is a militarily suicidal policy, with the result that other Kurdish nationalist groups are able to bully the PKK and frequently do so, even though the PKK gets Cathedral backing and the rest get Cathedral murderous terror.

              The Cathedral pretends the PKK is the dominant Kurdish Nationalist group, but it is the little kid that gets sand rubbed in his face.

              Covert Cathedral backing for the PKK has caused relationships between Turkey and the rest of NATO to become increasingly tense,

              • Calvin says:

                “Covert Cathedral backing for the PKK has caused relationships between Turkey and the rest of NATO to become increasingly tense.”

                To be honest, as far as I’m concerned that’s a good thing. Fuck the Turks, thieves and murderers all. They should have never have been allowed in the first place.

    • i says:

      “Ineffective but manly warfare is how nations like the Celts or Africans could lose wars against the Romans, but win the peace against those excessively civilized cucks.”

      Lack of Armor, lack of training and discipline as a unified unit compared to the Romans. And lacking not so manly missile weapons like Baleric Slingers:
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uDtrwNY0Zk

      And Archers. Inflicted many casualties disproportionately on the Celts. And along with good strategy and tactics on the part of commanders led to victory for the Romans.

  69. jim says:

    > Do you really think UKR has fought RF forces to a standstill?

    Not yet, but they are now fighting a twenty first century war, while the Russians are still fighting a twentieth century war. This gives them an enormous advantage.

    Telling the cavalry to charge harder is just not going to work.

    • Kunning Drueger says:

      Cauldron warfare is still in play. Kadyrov is putting paid to A3OB and Mariupol isn’t being flattened, it’s being swept. Conservatively, ⅓ of UKR military, and most of their best, is trapped in the East with the men of the Donbas showing RF how it’s done.

      I absolutely admit that I am pro-RF, and I choose to be optimistic. I’m pro-RF for all the reasons belabored in previous comments, but I’m optimistic because until we get some sense of what the goal is/was, we can only guess at success or failure. So many angles in play. Has anyone made a tally of what GAE has dumped into the battle space, in terms of dollars and stocks/reserves? Do we have reliable casualty/L&D for both sides? Is UKR operation a one-off, or is it step 001? I think the 40 day mark will be telling, one way or another, and I think GAE missteps aren’t going to be felt for at least 3 months.

      Before I read Jim’s Blog perspective on self driving car tech, I would have had a much higher opinion of autonomous drone tech. Turkey makes robust simple stuff (I love their shotguns and coffee). I don’t have an opinion on their software because I’ve never read about any notable examples. We have yet to see RF lean into drone tech. Last I heard, they were “autonomizing” old airframes.

      • notglowing says:

        >Before I read Jim’s Blog perspective on self driving car tech, I would have had a much higher opinion of autonomous drone tech.
        All things considered, much easier to make an autonomous drone than an autonomous car.

        Fly to X and bomb Y, not that complicated. And it doesn’t have to be perfect and work every time to give a huge tactical advantage. Orders of magnitude better than flying a helicopter with live soldiers and losing it.

        Friendly fire and killing civilians accidentally is a problem, but if you consider how drones can penetrate enemy territory and do surgical strikes quickly, it’s a lot less unneeded killing than traditional warfare overall.

        A self-driving car has to be perfect. A drone doesn’t, and flying is easier than driving on a road.

        • notglowing says:

          Even my simple drone has some rudimentary autonomous capabilities, though only through third party apps.
          It doesn’t have any sensors for obstacles or any way of avoiding them, but it can just fly over everything at the right height.

          I can tell it to go around an area, passing through some waypoints, and then come back, retrieving the SD card with the footage it captured.

          This isn’t truly autonomous, as it’s still being controlled by a program on my phone, so jamming works all the same. But put that computer on the drone, and you already have some rudimentary jamming-proof autonomous surveillance.

        • jim says:

          The self driving car does something stupid, the human driving it dies. The drone refrains from doing something stupid, the enemy dies.

          • Kunning Drueger says:

            You’re skipping over the Targeting Phase like it’s a Red Alert game. HUMINT underpins 21st century warfare. You need up-to-the-minute targeting locations if the drone is hunting for dynamic targets. Yes, depots, caches, static targets are vulnerable, but for every advance in repeating rifles, there’s a commensurate response in trench building, metaphorically speaking.

            The notable coup de mains in this conflict, assassinations or reddit battalion or sleeping russians or (alleged) hypersonic strike, all of them were good intel being converted into quick strikes. Contrary to the mainstream opinion, I think Russia is playing a bigger game here in terms of cyber/hybrid warfare

            BUZZWORD LIMIT REACHED. IF YOU’D LIKE TO KEEP PRATTLING ON, PLEASE INSERT MORE BLOCK CHAINS

            …as in, they are building an nmap of GAE intel chains and weapons chains. What would GAE do if there’s a “second” UKR Operation launched, somewhere at least 1000 miles distant from Ukraine? Will they just pivot there and memory hole Ukraine?

            The auto-drone thing is a big deal, but on-paper qualities and practical realities never overlap perfectly. This is the Spanish Civil War, a proof of concept, and it isn’t clear who’s toys are better, or who will use those toys best. Counter-drone ops seems like a big potential market in the near future.

  70. Kunning Drueger says:

    Thus far, GAE intel and sats have been how UKR is finding and killing RF assets. UKR forces on film have been begging for something better than manpads because they aren’t one shot/one kill. Allegedly, a hypersonic missile just vaporized ~$400mil in GAE equipment.

    20th century warfare is dying, but it isn’t dead yet. Human assets in play means a single Kalibr can eliminate a Drone Gap. I can definitely see a pause, but there are a number of factors that could make that a logical choice. Do you really think UKR has fought RF forces to a standstill?

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