Russia has activated its fresh Northern Front forces, who now find themselves fighting the tattered remnants of Ukrainian forces who had earlier been chewed up on the Eastern front, and sent to guard the Northern front to give them a break. These fresh forces do not have fresh leadership. They are led by battle hardened veterans who have been through hell and back.
In modern warfare, you cannot follow Kagan’s moron plan — concentrate your forces on a narrow front, and punch through. If you try it, you are just creating a target rich environment for the enemy to have fun with.
A broader front favours the attacker, a narrower front the defender. The Eastern front is so broad that it is rather permeable to people sneaking through, and on May tenth, the Russians activated the northern front, making the front line a whole lot broader.
The Russians have been loudly signalling and very publicly organising an attack for May fifteenth — which was widely believed to be feint to pull Ukrainian forces off the eastern front. As feint, it succeeded, leading to some small Ukrainian collapses on the eastern front, a little village here, a little village there, a hill or two, a patch of trees, a few trenches.
Then on May tenth, the Russians launched several small reconnaissances in force across the northern front. Some of which were horribly defeated, but most of which were startlingly successful, so within a few hours, the successful ones were followed up by a thunder run. (Which sounds a bit like Kagan’s stupid plan, but these are broad front thunder runs, not narrow front thunder runs, so maybe not quite as stupid.)
Well, in modern warfare, thunder runs have a horrifyingly bad record, so the Ukrainians will likely manage to stop it somewhere somehow. Modern warfare favours the small, swift, sneaky, and unexpected, and quietly changing the day by five days should not have been all that surprising, though it looks like it was. The Ukrainians got caught with their pants down. But the key and fundamental Ukrainian problem is that they are just running out of Ukrainians. Too many have died. And having a whole new front and a whole lot of fresh Russian troops to deal with suddenly makes that problem a whole lot worse. Too many have died, and today a lot more are dying.
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Mass Ukrainian surrenders according to Simplicius.
https://twitter.com/simpatico771/status/1790833443997200626
We are seeing a breakdown in the capacity to force people to fight.
I saw an interview with a prisoner from one of the retreat blocking brigades. He gets double the pay of an ordinary soldier, and does not have to go to the front line. Until the front line came to him.
Where can I find this interview? That sounds worth sharing.
Just a quick illustration of science and technology being a “ratchet of progress inside a ratchet of decay”:
Another sign of the collapse: https://youtu.be/2v063wuJtM0
Pro-Ukrainian YouTube channels are being deleted and demonetized, and Google doesn’t seem very interested in resolving the issue.
Hey Jim, I finally found your Red Pill WQ Hollywood scene. It’s hilarious:
https://twitter.com/FischerKing64/status/1789756219969638456
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welcome_to_the_Dollhouse
Interesting storyline. From before my time.
So you aren’t going to rape me today? Hahahahahaha
She was totally disappointed he would not carry out his threat (or promise)
Jim, you mentioned years ago that traipsing through certain Eastern Euro countries was a good strategy for a Western man to grab a decent lady. Asking for a friend, still a viable strategy? Any spots in particular?
Also Our Guy Prigozhin got his wish and Shoigu got canned. Not sure exactly what that entails.
I lack up to date information. Things change fast. Perhaps someone else has more useful information.
The official stance is as follows:
Shoigu is now head of the Russian Security Council, where Medvedev has also dwelled for a while.
Andrey Belousov takes over the military from Shoigu, on the grounds of being a civilian who understands how the Russian economy works best in the current situation.
Apparently the idea is, gleaning from what speaker Peskov said and implied, that the Russian military complex had begun to suck up more and more resources, approaching 6.7% of GDP, which is only one percent lower than the Soviet cold war numbers. Thus Belousov’s task is to manage things in a way in which the military complex continues doing what the prez wants it to do, but without becoming an autonomous golem.
Shoigu is still a big wig to do with Russia’s security, on his new position, but the new guy is expected to cut the fat and bloat from the army, without compromising its effectiveness.
For now Russia has performed economically well beyond anyone’s initial expectations. If new guy Belousov is from the group that made this possible, it sort of makes sense that they use him to make sure the army stays straight.
Things change fast, in one direction. My personal experience is that in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Russia and Eastern Europe were full of attractive, friendly young women. Those women are old now and have no daughters.
Russia doesn’t have gay parades, but young women focus on school and career. If they’re horny, they have a cute boyfriend within five years of their own age. When they have an argument with said boyfriend, they discard him and find another. The concept of Christian marriage does not exist; church is for old people.
I see children in the playgrounds, but small numbers for a place that’s surrounded by ten-story apartment blocks. On an unused patch of grass by the playground they recently fenced in a dog park, and there congregated about twenty middle-aged people with short-legged apartment-sized dogs eagerly sniffing each other’s butts.
People say oh no, that’s not true, lots of Russian women want to marry and raise families, but they don’t introduce me to these women, and the 1.30 TFR, which includes Muslims, suggests that they are quite rare, if they exist at all.
I have a chance to visit Dagestan this summer, and I’m curious to see if things are different there.
Of course Papa Utkin and Uncle Prigo are vindicated, but the magic of Wagner was spent, and that above all was an intolerable sin.
Assabiyah doesn’t grow on trees. What can possibly calculate the benefit that Russia had in its hands a corps of world beating organizational vitality. There is nothing in life that is harder than getting anything done at scale. Yet there Russia had in its hands a bund of men who could get things done. Germinating seeds of so much more. Opportunity for things truly transformative. An example of rising faustian thymos to follow, turned instead into yet another object lesson of strangulation by small-souled bureaucrats. The cattle dourly return to their mud, and dare not dream of anything greater.
Russia well may yet prevail regardless, but her stock was indelibly docked by the affair.
Did Putin have another choice after Prigozin’s march on Moscow?
The difficulty of that question is what makes the whole thing worth any greek tragedy.
The prigo not coup I think is destined to be one of those events in history nobody on the outside can quite understand and that the truth will be concealed by all forever… much like the Hess mission.
Wagner getting stiffed by the socialist supply chain was one thing; but the brewing plan by MoD officials to usurp and skinsuit Wagner by converging it into yet another branch of the bureaucracy was a bridge too far.
Prigozhin protested. The MoDniks replied that they had duly noted his protestations and consulted The Process and The Process duly indicated that his protestations are invalid and duly sorted into the circular filing drawer.
How does a man handle such a situation? Well you know what they say; if you have a hammer, lots of problems start looking like nails. Prigozhin pushed back with the most eminent means he had available; the loyalty of fighting men.
Now, throughout history, there is a long tradition of mercenary companies mutinying in protest when they feel like they are getting done raw by a patron, standing down or holing up unless their interests are properly seen too. On a parochial level, you could argue that occupying Rostov-on-Don was already a sufficient demonstration of protest, and that sending an armed column down the turnpike to Moscow was a bridge too far, changing all the optics.
On a more transcendent level, you could say that the reason Utkin and Prigozhin died was due to lack of priesting.
Shoigu, to use an archetypical example, was a man who spent much time schmoozing with Putin and other Nomenklatura. Friends of Wagner should have been doing the same thing.
They were the kind of men who say things like ‘my results speak for themselves’ and actually mean it. But that’s not going far enough. Virtue must be embodied. And virtue must furthermore be *proselytized*. The Organization Men in the MoD could present a mass of inertia in a clear field as their targets, relative to themselves, neglected the connections between men.
When dealing with great things, the weakest link that ultimately does them in can be unexpected, as in the event they are done in, it has to be *something* that does it. To have *lack* of priestliness as a weak link is a rare flaw indeed for a public figure in 2024, but there it is all the same.
You have your theories but its just that…
I think it is one of those events that as I said like the Hess mission are so embarassing to everyone involved that it will remain mysterious for centuries.
An embarrassment for everyone involved for sure. But a theory in the sense that gravitation is theory.
RuMoD officials literally stated that that was what they were in the process of doing. The question of their motivations as to why they did what they did is something more dependent on your powers of judgement; but that they did do what they did is a matter of empirical fact; as was Prigo’s response.
I think Prigo would have taken Russia to be heights, a return to Imperial Russia, putting away the 100 year diversion into communism. But, as hard as the GAE is working to destroy the Rodina now, if Prigo or Utkin had become the Dear Leader, that effort would be magnified immensely. We can look at the dual assassination as Putin protecting his position and legacy just as easily as we can see it as yet another Olive Branch to the Occupied Occident.
While many of the Mind killed, Russians have fled the country for the West that hates them, it is probably the case that the Russian people are not ready to become imperial, Russia quite yet. So maybe Prigo was early. Just as there is a lot of ruin in a nation, so too is there much softness and cowardice that has to be trimmed away before a people can step out of the shadows and into the imperial Sun.
Re: the Russian hipster exodus. The manner of it illustrated how the times have changed, which I myself only realized a few weeks back. In the past, similar developments in Russia would have led to a hard reaction and a vegetarian reaction.
The hard reaction (1920s – 1950s) would have been to grind this demographic cluster into a pulp and send the remains to dig a channel connecting the North Sea to the Black Sea, or to build a railroad between Mongolia and Belarus.
The vegetarian reaction (1960s – 1980s) would have been to send the “ringleaders” into loony bins for some mandatory brain-frying, and expel the rest, confiscating their shit beforehand, stripping them of citizenship, and not allowing them to ever return.
What we have today is super chill. Like “You guys left? Fine. Want to come back and see your folks? Welcome. Want to come back forever? Sure. Want to sell your property in Russia and relocate to Belgrade? Do it. Want to stay abroad half the time and stay in Russia half the time? Whatever floats your boat.”
Likewise the country is still not closed to random westerners. Want to visit? Get an easy visa and visit. Sixteen days I think is the easy visa stay limit today for random visiting westerners.
Compared to Russia’s history of centuries of overreacting to anything and everything, today’s systemic reaction of *yawn, whatever, dude* is very striking.
The Internets can give a guy the 50 least covid vaccinated countries in the world, for example.
In Europe these are Bosnia, Macedonia, Georgia, Armenia, Bulgaria and Romania. Of those the ones without having existing frozen or hot conflicts are Bulgaria and Romania. Of those the one which isn’t balancing on the edge of entering the Ukraine war and/or annexing a neighboring country, is Bulgaria.
Ukraine also was an option before 2022.
Last year, approx this time of year, I went to Russia and got me a wife. There are plenty of women there, but beware that they can be very much into material status, and have expectations aligned with that. Particularly, given that their appetites have been whetted, that many of them have travelled outside of Russia and have also been exposed to Western culture and ways of thinking via smartphones. Nonetheless, you can still meet decent women, just filter accordingly and don’t be a naïf.
They’ve distracted you, they own you and your mind,
from one manufactured bullshit issue to another, they employ you,
they’re intentionally wasting your time, you’ve been captured.
There is only one thing that matters in the world now,
and that thing is crypto… everything else, and every other
topic on this blog, simply does not matter, period.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWjOnPiOBps
Total control of all humanity is now being rolled out via the CBDC of evil.
Stop wasting your time on all that other pointless bullshit they’ve
got you trapped up in. Join the fight for crypto freedom.
You won’t get your freedom back by voting for it; they closed that loophole if it ever existed. You need a crypto currency that scales to a billion active users that’s also completely opaque to governments. No one has yet figured out how to do this, even in theory. Implementation is no obstacle; there are programmers out there who can turn a white paper into a working prototype in a week or two, and they’d do it for fun, and the chance to pre-mine the first billion units of the new global currency.
Meatspace matters too. A government that can’t see or touch your money can still throw you in jail, inject you with mandatory vaccines, draft you to fight for gay sex in Ukraine, seize your physical property, brainwash your children, flood your neighborhood with third-world immigrants, etc. etc.
We have figured out how to do it, and it will take vastly more than a couple of weeks.
Blockstream is well funded by multiple big businesses. They plan to fix lightning in much the way I proposed. It is not done, and their lightning implementation sucks big ones. If I could produce what they and I have imagined, I would charge them ten million dollars or so, and they would pay.
> Meatspace matters too. A government that can’t see or touch your money can still
a cryptocurrency that has certain properties can be used to conjur up spirits that can eliminate a government that can be seen and touched. neither bitcoin nor any other coin has such properties yet, thus those spirits await their calling.
Bitcoin was created for market mediated coordination over the internet. Once we have a coin that facilitates sovereign corporations (Daos with a pseudonymous CEO, a pseudonymous board, and book keeping based on an immutable append only journal, then the next step is sovereign private military companies.
A successful DAO usually has someone who does the kind of stuff a CEO does, a group of people who do the kind of stuff a board does, and people keeping track of money in and money out, but its all informal, vague, and vulnerable to scamming, which makes it difficult and dangerous for outside investors to invest in the DAO coin.
When you buy a DAO coin, you are investing in something like the shares of something like a corporation. Or maybe you are not. It is hard to tell.
What do you mean by the sovcorp books being their own blockchain? Wouldn’t you rather have something like RGB? Or is this a misunderstanding on my part? By blockchain are you referring to something with consensus or just the hash linked data structure?
I merely meant the hash linked structure. Obviously the books of a business are the opposite of distributed consensus. Because of the ambiguity (blockchain means no end of things, though the correct meaning is an immutable append only data structure, since on bitcoin, everything is one thing) people call all the various components of Bitcoin “the blockchain”, though there are a several things.
I should just stop using the word, and call things by their ten dollar names.
> Bitcoin was created for market mediated coordination over the internet.
Market mediated coordination over the internet was created for Bitcoin.
> Once we have a coin that facilitates
Once we have technologies that can facilitate whatever people want to construct, they will.
“I know not what the future will hold, but that, as in the past, it will come in great waves, when and from where you are not privy. — Anon”
We do not yet, afaik, have a sufficient set of primitives and protocols that can be assembled to construct whatever amazing apps that futurists are dreaming up.
But we are close, perhaps very close, to the next wave.
Bitcoin and Ethereum were Gen 1.0, they were scholarly academic research proofs… that it was possible to make something that goes BOOM.
The whole cryptosphere are now not-so-quietly screaming for things like better TXRate, Privacy, ZK, P2P, Functions, VM, DEX, DAO, and API.
The demand for brain cells to solve some of these key problems is extremely high. And where there is very high demand, there is large money invested and ideal environments created in order to foster the supply to fill those needs. Global resources are now being reallocated towards this task.
So we have now begun to launch the real Manhattan Project, the real Microchip Revolution.
This is where the first academic light bulb moment that an unexplored field does in fact exist, is opened up far and wide and deep for advancement.
Current status of that is that we are kindof in Gen 1.5 phase now… lots of people are trying to assemble new Gen 2.0 apps using Gen 1.5 widgets but are failing because they don’t yet have the full set of Gen 2.0 parts needed to make their incantations work.
Likely within about 5 more years of hardcore brainstorming research and development we will begin to see the first of the genuine Gen 2.0 apps emerge into public knowledge.
Gen 2.0 will be far more powerful, and almost all of 1.0 will move over to adopt 2.0 within 10 years.
That includes the possibility that 1.0 apps will incorporate 2.0 tech to become a genuine native 2.0 app, rather than be obsoleted by the forthcoming 2.0 apps.
While Gen 3.0 primitives and protocols will be developed and proven, 2.0 will have so much embedded Metcalf that similar to Govt, Banks, and IPv4 to IPv6… it will take many decades to upgrade to 3.0.
However it should be noted that digital has enabled much faster swapouts than analog, and since 2.0 will it include tools like DEX that enable swapouts, and API that make things pluggable… so some of Metcalf will fall to free open-market choice among opensource… continuous transparent adoption of the best whenever it becomes available.
The crypto future is bright 🙂
CTF in your opinion what are the most promising apps and ecosystems to research as a fan of the technology and a speculator or potential app builder? I know it might take 5 years but what is the closest to gen 2.0 that you have seen?
To Jim, what are the most promising DAOs you have seen? Are they public facing projects or more underground? I have grown accustomed to dismissing DAOs.
If you prefer not to give specific names then even hints would be very interesting.
You are right to dismiss DAOs. As they exist at present, any outside investor is going to get burned. You are investing in a business that does not keep books. Or if it does, keeps them under the de-facto CEOs bed and will not show them to outsiders
We are now at a point where lots of people know what needs to be done — I am not a voice crying in the wilderness any more.
Will it get done? Blockstream figured out what needs to be done with lightning long before I did, and they have buckets of funding and a big development team, yet their lightning is no good.
Partly it is that these things take a lot of time and a lot of work, but I feel I am also seeing enemy action — that above ground legally incorporated entities with their corporate officers identified under their true names are going to have strange difficulty in doing what they know needs to be done and will say needs to be done.
My primary interest is as an outside investor but I am also curious to study or at least take note of DAOs that function well even if they are poor investments.
Most DAOs are neither decentralized not autonomous and as far as organization it is pretty much just a group chat with a treasury. Really it’s kind of a legal fiction to avoid securities laws. But the vision of a true DAO is obviously fascinating beyond speculative interest, always eager to hear thoughts on this.
I am rewriting my article on Dao’s and Sovereign Corporations, but in its present state, incoherent.
Like Lightning, DAOs need certain obvious features, which we know how to implement, but I am not seeing anyone implementing them, except in a half assed and crappy way.
Or I could phrase it like this. 99% of projects are scams. When the solid 2.0 projects emerge, or the solid DAOs for that matter, the situation won’t be any different.
What signs will distinguish the good 1% from the 99%? Or I suppose 90% are clear scams, 9% are somewhat well disguised scams. So what will distinguish the good 1% from the plausible but doomed 9%?
It’s an important question because 2.0 is a train we won’t want to miss. How will we know it’s the real thing and not fake hype?
OP linked to a cardano video, which I have always dismissed as a scam but I’m open minded if anyone wants to direct my research there.
That is precisely the problem. That we don’t have the software and the protocols to make the distinction between good and bad Daos visible and reliable to outside investors.
The power to deal with imprisonment, poisoning, or impressment by enemies is a function of organization. And ability to interfere with anyone’s commerce or communications is the killer-app of a degenerating state being able to maintain power all the way to collective suicide, by making everyone else it had power over before even more powerless.
If you can solve the commerce and communication problem – effectively, security of property from banditry – then you’ve solved 90% of the bootstrap organization problem.
As soon as I allowed the obvious shill “Ukraine does not matter” through, because his content was fine, and had no obvious payload, I see a lot more shills, with similar content, but carrying the usual payload in the usual subtle presuppositions.
I am therefore silently deleting all crypto comments by people who are not white listed, without really reading them.
If you have something to say about crypto, and want your comment to appear, read the moderation policy and lead with a thought crime. You will then get white listed and your comments will appear immediately unmolested.
It looks to me that his entirely reasonable comment about crypto was intended to start a discussion that would then drag in the usual shill wagons, with entirely valid evidence and arguments about crypto currency pulling in as unstated presuppositions that everyone supposedly accepts “Bitcoin is a scam, it will go to zero real soon now” “writing to your senator is the way to change public policy” “woke is people freely making their own choices about their lives” “elections matter, they matter a lot, and the 2020 and 2022 elections were fair and free”, “people are choosing to not have children”.
I am amazed at the volume of shills you have to deal with in this blog which arguably as far from power as you get, yet there is an armies of shills backed by government dedicate time and money to derail the conversation in this blog.
We seem to be getting more trolls now. I wonder if it’s an “if you’re taking flak, you’re over the target” thing?
I’m convinced there’s a new category of shill, with a license to thoughtcrime in the service of slipping payload in. Which would support “them” seeing Jim as a threat.
A way I’m wrong is if Jim’s reach is expanding and he’s hitting new readers who are still on baby’s first redpill, and only see a chance to push their own hobbyhorse here. But I still favor my first explanation; some seem too on the nose to be random noise.
Going by what Jim says on the subject, he believes that there are offices somewhere full of people who are being paid to go onto online forums and shill against ideas that the people paying them want to suppress, and those people are working under close supervision.
It sounds fantastical, but that does not make it untrue. Governments or even large companies giving ridiculous makework jobs to large numbers of people is a well known phenomenon.
But I still think that most of the people who get called shills here are probably private individuals acting on their own motivations, not punch-clock villains.
One way to test, maybe, would be if the shill posts all arrive during office hours in North America.
“Going by what Jim says on the subject, he believes that there are offices somewhere full of people who are being paid to go onto online forums and shill against ideas that the people paying them want to suppress, and those people are working under close supervision.
It sounds fantastical”
Its so obviously true and does not sound the least bit fantastical furthermore we know that there are actual examples of this. Ie David Brock’s correct the record for the Hillary 2016 campaign.
“One way to test, maybe, would be if the shill posts all arrive during office hours in North America.”
Not a way to test, there are night shift shills and shills who get paid per post.
Fed’s with Master’s degrees in communication have debates, power point presentations, talks, and training on “de escalation”, and “containment of negative thought”. “Actionable counter memes” are war gamed. The talks and training sessions implicitly admit what is explicitly denied — big bureaucratic organisations of shills.
Many of the staff in their shilling organisations suffer psychological disturbance due to cognitive dissonance, and they have a big bureaucratic therapy organisation to treat this problem — which in practice amounts to treating their shills as contaminated and potentially dangerous, despite the rhetoric about therapy and caring.
If you have “actionable counter memes” the action is shilling. If you have training sessions, they are being trained for shilling. If you have a big bureaucratic “therapy” team (in practice an apparatus for detecting double agents and agents that have turned) you have a lot of trained shills.
The shilling organisation is secret, but every big bureaucracy creates echoes in the surrounding big bureaucracies, and we can hear these echoes. We cannot see the shilling organisation directly, but we can see the bureaucratic blather that it generates. All big conspiracies leak, and this is a very big conspiracy, or rather a vast collection of very big conspiracies working somewhat at cross purposes.
This started with private organisations, the infamous Green Card Lawyers. Then a Church, or Churches. The left has been practising real life hostile entryism against organisations that hold physical meetings for centuries. Christianity had this problem in the first century of our Lord. Then, after the scammers and the cults had discovered the internet, the left discovered the internet, and moved their existing state sponsored hostile entryism organisations to the internet. The left was late to the party, and the state was later.
Organised hostile entryism is probably older than bronze. The first cities were created around temples, political power was priestly, and it is natural for one priesthood to use entryism against another priesthood. One priesthood has power and wealth, another priesthood with a different faith wants it, what are they going to do?
To organise on a large scale, you need a synthetic tribe. A synthetic tribe needs a faith, thus needs priests, thus needs a priesthood. Tribes quarrel over the goodies. What is going to happen?
Joing this shilling organisation seems to be a bad career move for an aspiring agent. As soon as he is exposed to thought crimes, his loyalty is suspect. He’ll never be promoted far.
Oversight of shills will be done by people from other departments who were never exposed to these thought crimes.
So what kind of people are working there? Women whithout ambition to rise beyond an entree level position?
I don’t think shills realise the career consequences of shilling until it is far too late, because they go in assuming that all the thought crimes they will be countering are obviously stupid, ignorant, and evil, and if they are detected noticing otherwise, get diagnosed as mentally disturbed by the stress of being exposed to so much evil. And, once the helpful friendly therapist helps one, one is doomed. Its like going to hospital for Covid “Hey, why a ventilator? my oxygen levels are obviously completely normal!”. Lots of people went to hospital for Covid not realising that the hospitals had been directed to get the death rates as high as possible, and that the Covid tests had been rigged to diagnose everything as Covid.
Chilling to realize that so many of the people in the medical field are that sociopathic.
>most of the people who get called shills here are probably private individuals
The contents of their posts are too regular for it to be people wandering in. As jim says, they universally ‘hate jews because they’re so clever, blacks because they are so cool, and women because they’re so wonderful’ — utterly incapable of pointing out the obvious ways these groups have been causing trouble to our civilization. You see waves of people with specific messages they try to get across, that all have this thought filter, and that are incapable of thoughtful response. The regularity of the message implies organization, the waves of activity implies funding.
This is all before you look at how other formerly free and open internet discussion spots have been utterly comprimised and made useless. We have some powerful and well funded people very interested in preventing discussion and planting their own memes.
Lee Khan Yew observed that communists had paid groups that would attend his meetings incognito, and would have a ring leader giving cues on when to applaud. This is exactly the same thing for the digital age.
It is so widespread because it is so effective — most online communities have not yet fully developed healthy immune systems against this sort of thing.
I think I find the actual big-C Communists easier to make sense of. A “synthetic tribe”, in Jim’s terms, organized around a clearly defined set of beliefs and goals, that each and every follower is expected to understand and be able to articulate.
A Communist can sometimes be reasoned with.
I can easily imagine that a group of them could get together and say “Comrades, we are going to infiltrate the Christian seminaries and undermine their faith so that they will be less of an obstacle to The Revolution” – and then actually go and spend the next few decades seriously trying to do that.
Evil as Hell, but lucid evil.
The enemy we have here in the modern West, by contrast? A religion that refuses to recognize itself as such, with no fixed orthodoxy, but only an ever-shifting and subjective one that they themselves cannot define. Small wonder that anyone tasked to defend it suffers burnout.
There is also escalating talk of a 50% fatal bird flue pandemic that US-funded researchers are learning how to spread to humans.
This reads to me less like an attempt to provide a fake pretext for more lockdowns and more like a sincere attempt to murder everyone.
If you are trying to create a disease to kill mosquitoes, you get regulated to hell by ignorant superstitious morons because it might harm the ecology. Which it might (getting rid of one species often has surprising and unforeseen effects). But if you are preparing a disease to kill humans, no problem.
Whatever is bad for islam is good for humanity. That’s the general rule we can follow.
The Russian MOD daily stats for yesterday claims Ukrainian losses as 1620 dead/severely wounded and 35 prisoners.
That’s a shocking imbalance as usually it is around 3 to 1. What it signifies is anyone’s guess, but it doesn’t bode well for future Ukrainian bloodlines continuing.
It means Russian was overrunning the Grey Zone and blasting Ukrainians who lack fortifications with overwhelming firepower with the rest running for the lives.
Predictions… Russia can open up more fronts so it’s a question of if the Russians have enough men and firepower to cause a front collapse or if the Ukrainians can plug it with drones. It looks like Ukraine is fucked- slow withdraw to another line of defense only works if there is another line of defense; pretty sure the money for it was embezzled.
[*deleted*] so NATO will not allow [*deleted*]
The question this war is ultimately being fought over is whether NATO decides what is allowed.
Depends on if Putin or Biden’s handlers blink first before things escalate to the nuclear level, imo.
The current strategy is to have a low level forever war at a level such that Nato can afford the logistics. The problem with that strategy is that it takes two to play. If Russia persists in responding to low level war with high level war, what does Nato do? Threaten further escalation. But further conventional escalation is impossible when you are running out of ammo.
The plan being floated is to use conventional Nato forces directly against Russia — for example F16s flying from Nato airports, and Nato troops crossing borders in Nato uniform. Because Russia would never dare attack Nato countries bombing them or cross the borders of Nato countries that are crossing its borders, therefore Nato can attack forever within the limits of is ammo supply, and have its low level forever war🙃 Because Russia cannot possibly respond to low level war by high level war when being attacked directly by Nato🙃
Yes. Either Biden’s handlers blink (unlikely, because they are mad) or Putin does (unlikely, because he is not), or things just keep escalating until someone tries for the big one.
The line is the Dnieper.
Whoever respects that lives.
All die should any not.
If Russia stops at the Dnieper, low level shelling and rocket attacks will continue from across the Dnieper. To which Russia will respond with invasion. Nato loves its low level forever wars.
The solution is neutral buffer states along Russian boundaries. If a hostile state that is part of the Global American Empire, there will be war. You may recall the Cuban missile crisis. Russia has said that Nato forces in the Ukraine are a red line. Thinly disguised Nato forces have been shelling Russians since 2014, and the invasion was a response to escalation of the shelling.
After all this shelling, Russia is not going to accept Nato forces, whether thinly disguised or wearing uniforms, across the Dneiper.
How could a “neutral” state exist between Russia and the GAE? The GAE recognizes no such thing as neutrality, and so would necessarily require Russian protection, and become a Russian client.
That depends on Russia’s imperial propensities. What Russia is selling is “We will not make you into clients, unlike the Global American Empire”. Is that true? Maybe. It is not obviously false.
The Global American Empire is imposing democracy everywhere, which democracy has the strange outcome that a member of a hostile minority gets elected and implements highly unpopular policies.
This was very noticeable in the recent run of anti democratic African coups, which happened because the democratically elected government was transparently hostile to the nation and to those deplorable rubes who were of the majority faith and ethnicity.
NATO probably does have enough aircraft to defeat Russia’s conventional forces. However, such an attempt might spend NATO’s forces permanently, even if it doesn’t provoke a nuclear war.
You cannot defeat a peer adversary from the air. Stuff flying over enemy territory gets shot down fast.
All Nato’s weapons that actually useful in a war have been sent to the Ukraine. The latest batch of stuff is whatever could be scraped up, and we are seeing vehement complaints from the Ukrainians that it is not what they need, it is whatever Nato had left lying around. Russia has disarmed Nato.
The percentages of cruise missiles and ballistic missiles that Russia shoots down gives you an idea of the hypothetical loss rates of NATO air force sorties. 10% loss per sortie would result in the cancellation of air missions by the second week – the 70-90% losses suggested by actual current missile interceptions are a complete non-starter. If mighty NATO air power could wipe out Russia’s conventional forces, they would’ve declared a no-fly zone over Ukraine before this war even began.
At least that’s what it looks like from here.
We have yet to see properly weaponized satellites, and it seems like only one man’s organization is currently capable of putting them in LEO at scale. That man does not seem particularly keen on escalating, but plenty of other’s are, and they may give him an ultimatum: weaponize your satellites or have your organization stolen while you get Epsteined in prison.
@Epimetheus: NATO would lose a hell of a lot of planes very quickly. However, Russia would probably run out of SAMs before NATO ran out of planes. The question is, would NATO ever recover from such losses, a question they are asking themselves. Especially as they contemplate aero-naval war with China, and the smarter among them realize this is more important problem than Russia.