Germany the American Satrapy, RAND Urges US Pull Plug on Ukraine War, Serbia Snookered by the West, Remote Work as City Killer, Haitian Voudou in the Diaspora
Talk of Versailles misses the point. The Germans in 1918 believed that they had not been defeated. The German generals concocted the dolchstoßlegende to salvage their reputations. The US General Pershing (a Texan of German ancestry) wanted to march to Berlin to demonstrate the reality of Germany's defeat but he was overruled by the fools in power.
By the time the Russians finish there will be no doubt that the Ukrainians have been defeated. They have lost 150,000 soldiers so far 300,000 or more casualties, half of whom will not return to service.
There are almost certainly secret negotiations under way. Will Russia trust the USA? Probably not.
When the regime crumbles Zelenskyy may very well be killed. His closest political allies today ate quite capable of that. If he lives he would embarrass a lot of people.
The opinions of the Ukrainian masses are irrelevant at this stage. They have no agency. They have no political representatives that any sane neighbouring government will ever tolerate. The moderates and pragmatists in the political elite are all in exile. Their country has been a puppet of NATO since 2014. Most Ukrainian will be relieved by an end to war. Some regions will seek to join the Russian Federation. Moscow will either seek to reconstitute a viable state with a moderate regime (no Banderists) or will create a cordon sanitaire of desolation between themselves and the West. They'd prefer the former. As for Galicia and Volyn, who knows? No one wants a rump state with a capital in Lvov/Lviv and Russia does not want to waste lives capturing those territories. Putin has said publicly that the people there would be better off under Poland.
The big issue at the moment is preventing further escalation, above all a nuclear confrontation, sparing Kharkov, Kiev and Odessa from obliteration and reducing the likelihood of Ukraine collapsing to a degree resembling the Congo during the civil war.
Having friends and champions is not the same thing as agency. The Europeans and Americans are on the side of Ukraine much as a violent pipe-swinging pimp is on the side of his whores.
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So basically RAND wants the US to pull out of the smaller Ukrainian war to focus on the bigger upcoming China war. That makes me feel a lot better. (Not)
They argue that the USA has extracted as much value out of the war in Ukraine as possible and it's time to get out before diminishing returns kick in, as resources are finite and need to be applied elsewhere (China/Taiwan). You're right.
In fairness to us and the line to actually push if you want peace to perhaps have a chance, or at least go on for awhile longer;
1. Atlantic Rim East of 🇺🇸 is secure.
2. PACRIM (China) is chastened and subdued, indirectly by Ukrainian war and sanctions, indirectly by yanking the Chips out from under China masterfully last fall - Do Not underestimate our ruling class - truly humbled China.
(That Idiot Xi and his Ministers announcing plans for World Conquest, and offending and abusing their neighbors, but worst of all boasting on television and the internet about how they bought everyone all over had more to do with setting this all off than is acknowledged). But PACRIM is secured. For the moment. Unlike poor Russia the Chinese bought this all on themselves. The Chinese government treats other nations in public as if they were drunken peasant criminals in suits speaking to prostitutes (which they may be) and this just isn’t done between nations.
3. Domestic dissent is quelled for the moment in America and Europe, as is any idiotic notions FRANCE of “balancing” Russia or China against America MACRON.
England and America not only never announced a plan to dominate the world, they deny it happened, with some unfortunate slips by the Kardashians, er Neocons but that’s what happens when you hire Rosencrantz and Guilderstein, they blow it in public and reliably fail to get Hamlet, or anyone else who matters.
4. CRITICALLY America must re-industrialize to Rearm, the domestic advantages of taking all real fight from MAGA and the Deplorables needn’t be mentioned, oh and as core Deployables are the Deplorables - yes Whites for you foreigners- 🇺🇸 needs its Whi... Deplorabl... er... “Ethnics” for FREEDOM.
5. The natural way of our people is trade and profit first, then law, then and only if no choice force.
To rely on force very long isn’t practical, we are not Romans.
I did say the above course is the correct tack to take for time , for a remote chance for peace, that we get closer to peace by rearming and so re-industrialization is one of the “challenges” of our time.
Like England before us, 🇺🇸 America would like to have peace, and to concentrate on profit. Wouldn’t we all. Like England before us we won’t long tolerate angry, covetous eyes East or West, in England’s case this was The Continent (of Europe) and Ireland (too many Irish, something had to be done, regrettably, and was). In America’s case we faced populist uprisings at home and in Europe, and idiots like Macron talking about alliance with Russia, meanwhile the real culprit and prime mover abroad was China buying up everyone with money on loan from America (all our money but especially our debts are loans, you see) which was acceptable, China giggling in public about world domination isn’t acceptable, never mind the gauche displays of bribery.
Like England, we reluctantly acted in the preferred way of proxies, we have achieved our necessary Strategic goals, and should allow peace to return.
Peace will need time, prosperity, quiet. It is just possible.
The American feudalism at the Federal level can and is working both ways, there’s sane people trying to stop this lunacy, that is what this RAND corporation report means. If they’re saying this in public, behind closed doors there’s considerable pushback. If you haven’t had the personal experience, crazy people aren’t reasoned with, they must be threatened, with nuclear war if nothing else.
Speaking of threats, I believe that several of the cars used by the First Family were torched a while back. Someone must be having trouble taking hints if messages now need to be conveyed like that. Brandon is in decline and the powers that be are no longer invested in his future. No wonder his chief of staff left.
Peace has sucked for me personally, although my job etc is fine, but peace with unfinished business sucks. Peace sucks on its own, let me be candid. Peace sucks down to ring the bell sucks. Its bad.
But-
If peace my duty I can accept it.
I won’t cry if it’s war . This peace we have in America isn’t peace, it’s degrading slavery as the plaything of psychopaths.
So like Macready said, let’s just sit here and see what happens.
The fraudulently justified domestic hostilities of a country whose social peace is fraying would be intensely frustrating for anyone who is familiar with the honesty of explicit enmity with foreigners.
The fact that THE THING springs to your mind says enough, given your situational awareness.
PS I think KR was at his best as Snake Plissken. You can't get any better.
It's not like that isn't an obvious direction for US foreign policy. Everyone sees that coming. The real question is whether the US retains the competence and industrial power to prevail, which is something I'm not especially confident that they do. Then again I'm not terribly well-disposed towards the GAE so there could be an element of wishful thinking there.
Spoken like a true Canadian! I feel the same way. I have long thought that Australia was better governed by the Colonial Office than we have been by Canberra. Whatever competence and integrity our system ever had lasted only as long as British influence and has declined as Americanisation proceeded.
The only way to improve Australia would be to declare war on Singapore and then follow that up with unconditional surrender.
Canada was the true jewel of the British Empire. If they had had any imagination the Victorian or Edwardian Brits should have evacuated most of their people, resettled them in Canada and either left the ancestral home the way the Angles did when they left northern Germany and Denmark or left it as a hunting reserve with a few ports tacked on. Makes more sense than the world wars.
America is rapidly reshoring industrial capacity, our biggest current manufacturing problem is the labor base is too small. Links ala blog length available on request. The wars and Covid are drivers (And I think this is no accident).
I think there are deep structural problems within the US that will prevent it righting itself. My feeling is that you can't fix their current situation by "reshoring industry", not without addressing the reasons industry got off-shored. (There's a cui bono aspect to it, but there's more to it than that, even: the US sold the message that offshoring was something to be proud of, and you now have generations in control who were brought up on and believe that message. These things of course produce a feedback loop that make the problem somewhat untenable using usual politics, IMO.)
But then I think the chinese chip thing is irrelevant; relevant for the space race/resource sink that is the AI chase, relevant for selling phones but irrelevant otherwise, especially as we come upon a more divided world where energy may be becoming more expensive, soon.
You hit the nail on the head. Those in control cannot conceive of doing things all that differently. Onshoring requires a revolution in social and workplace practices for which the managerial classes are ill-prepared.
Yeah, now that I think about it: writers (I believe Niccolo is among them) often go on about how the elites don't have to care about working class Americans. This is true, but it hinges on the working class having no power. If you want to reshore industry you suddenly need the working class again; it necessarily means they gain a share of power, however small. How easily would the managerial/media classes accept this? How easily would Wall Street accept even a slightly unfavorable shift in the labor/capital relation?
I don’t know that jobs means the quite subdued working class has power, and in any case they have no place to put this power, not Dem, not GOP, certainly not the Left , and not “Labor” unions 🤣, who are as infiltrated and controlled as the so called militia and Oath Keepers, and for longer. Trumpka mysteriously did not go to jail for corruption, not so mysteriously endorsed every Prog 💩 statement until his last breathe, see also Pressers and Fitzsimmons, in short the missing Jimmy Hoffa was the last labor leader, cuz he went to jail you see.
Wall Street cares about money and is well aware it’s no longer in Finance, that we need to be manufacturing, that tech has for just a moment stalled, that AI/ML is very promising in terms of potentially gutting White collar and email jobs - but then they default on their debts- so new Alpha is needed. Alpha as in growth.
If my people’s lot is improving then it is improving.
Power? The workers? The workers don’t want power, they want to be Petit Bourgeoisie, they always have- they want money, but a modest amount is fine, and some measure of security. All of this is quite reasonable and within reach.
The workers have learned their lesson with Der Drumpf , this Eloi Elites tremble behind Ur Morlock Executive Protection (listen on EP they’re not just my friends, I got the training as failsafe backup and to be better soldier, I really do know this) and the Eloi Elites are afraid of Red Hatted Morlocks; let them work, in fact we’re getting the Euro Social Insurance plan I warrant, at the expense of the Europeans losing theirs - boo hoo. 😭 -NOT !
The workers are now at the end of history lol, they just want to go back to work. No Revolution, no Unions, no politics, no Populism, no Dem, no GOP, no militia lol.
They just want to go back to prosperity. Most will let them.
It’s enough. The rest of the nonsense and *hopefully* war will fade.
The US may not have the will to make the changes necessary for successful global competition. You need quality mass education on scale. For real progress in the development of science you need more: the highest quality education from scratch for those with the capacity. Just look at the biographies of the great scientists of the 20th c. and focus on their formation. Nothing remotely comparable today and impossible under real world conditions in the US.
Progress needs intact families (above all mothers who prioritise child nurture over all else) and a suitable culture. A Brazilianised TurboAmerica (one with a dual economy) is going to struggle. America will onshore, but competing for a share of the global market in high tech consumer goods is going to be very difficult. Look at the motor industry or Boeing.
RAND wants to spare its masters in the Pentagon profound professional embarrassment. NATO trained 90,000 Ukranian troops to a standard that enabled NATO to formally rate them as fully interoperable. Their weapons and kit were NATO standard (as opposed to the rest of the Ukrainian Army) and the 90,000 were stationed in the Donbass along the Line of Control. When Ukraine restarted the civil war in February 2022 they did so with the benefit of NATO senior officers and senior NCOs on site to help advise on operations and tactics. NATO was gambling that General Zaluzhnyy would win and that Moscow would be deterred from rescuing the Russians in Donetsk and Lugansk. A big gamble to make and NATO lost.
In a nutshell, Russian victory destroys the reputation of NATO in terms of combat reliability, leadership, training and equipment. The inability of NATO to resupply Ukraine reveals the deindustrialised West as a paper tiger that relies upon US nuclear forces alone. NATO's conventional capacity in Europe is a total joke when compared to Russia. And the disclosure of Pentagon financed bioweapons research has made NATO a filthy word for more than a few outside of the Western bubble.
And I have questions about the state of repair of the American nuclear arsenal. Not that this is a bluff anyone wants to call, but given the neglect the rest of the armed forces have suffered, I would not be at all surprised if the nuclear umbrella is getting a bit tattered.
The UK uses superglue to hold the bolts in the cooling pipes of the nuclear reactors on their submarines. I recall that there was also a whistleblower's report that they were failing the results from the safety tests on Trident. And to put it in context: they just discovered that the starboard and portside shafts are misaligned on the HMS Prince of Wales (a £3 billion warship). If comparable engineering failures are happening in the nuclear forces NATO does not need to worry about Putin.
And one should also wonder about who is actually giving the technical advice.
Remember Sam Brinton? He was the deputy assistant secretary of Spent Fuel and Waste Disposition in the Office of Nuclear Energy from June to December 2022 who has been charged with stealing womens' clothes, presumably for his own use.
Brinton holds a Bachelor of Science in nuclear engineering and vocal music and also a dual Master of Science degree in nuclear science and engineering (technology and policy program) from MIT no less.
Even as people return to in-person working, the Tue-Wed-Thurs pattern is a killer for small businesses in commercial districts (coffee and sandwich shops, restaurants, bars)- can they afford to pay rent with only three days a week of revenues? Seems unlikely.
Given the lags built into leases and loan agreements we haven’t yet seen the full impact of these behavioral changes on commercial property values.
Though given your NY stats, if property taxes are only 33 pct of the city budget and commercial property is only 20 pct of property taxes, then commercial property taxes are only 6.6pct of the budget. Should be easy enough to cut NYC’s bloated City worker payrolls and spending by that amount.
I think it is not so much men per se, but a combo of less street/sidewalk traffic generally and also city governments being more tolerant/forgiving of crime and vagrancy. Closed-up shops don’t help, either, as shop owners observe, report and sometimes disciplined adverse sidewalk activity in front of their shops.
Curious that in 2020 two of the most outspoken people sounding the alarm about race riots and election malfeasance in the USA were Serbs (though I'm guessing of a more Yugoslav orientation). Natalia Jovanovic made a video about ethnic conflict that was featured on Glenn Beck's show and Aleksandar Savic made a video about the 2000 anti-Milosevic Tractor rebellion that influenced the Oath Keepers (who have since been convicted of seditious conspiracy).
Apologies for asking about something off topic from today’s roundup, but was curious what your read is on the whole Chinese balloon situation? Although I guess it’s somewhat on topic given the RAND report. My top of mind response to it was China putting a weirdly significant flex on the US for the whole world to see but dunno
Curious fuckery abounds all around it, as is so often the case these days. One interesting thing that came up yesterday, I believe, was Biden saying he ordered the Pentagon to shoot it down on Wednesday. But I think you’re taking the right tack to it, cause it just feels like it’s endless rabbit holes yet again.
By shooting down the balloon the US is now in a position where it cannot complain if China does the same to any US device stationed above China.
The stratosphere and the space above it are not fully or properly regulated by international treaty. Historically, the US liked to have legal room to manoeuvre. China is calling Washington's bluff. And doing a great favour for Putin too.
In the event of a war the satellite belt is the most important battlefield. It is crucial for military and civilian communicatiions, surveillance, signals intelligence and the global economy.
Which is why the US Army Signal Corps is going back to Troposcatter and AM/HF, as it happens getting constantly shorted on Satellite priority has driven a return to basics. As it happens Balloons make excellent airborne repeaters (relays) as well, already in Civilian use.
My take on balloon gate is that it was left inflated to cross the country as a way to gin up animosity towards China.
Especially considering some of the 'Monday morning quarterback' articles out now discussing Chinese balloons also entered our airspace multiple times during Trump's presidency (lot's of criticism came from the right these are just deflection), how "fearful" they were about debris (we landed men on the moon in the 60's and you can't take out a balloon over an empty field?), and the shoot down being televised (only showing the 'win'. Bonus that they did it over the ocean making recovery harder).
Plus it's not a good look to have signed a trillion dollar military budget and one of the largest spying apparatus's in the world, but be susceptible to balloon technology.
No, this was let float over the US heartland by the people that care about territorial integrity only when Russians cross the border.
You make some very good points. There are any number of possibilities. The appearance of the balloon serves the purposes of those who want to disrupt Chimerica. It also helps destabilise the Biden Administration. And it demonstrates the wisdom of Trump's decision to establish a separate branch of the services devoted to space...a decision which was presumably supported, perhaps first floated, by people within the national security and defence sectors.
It will be interesting to see of the balloon become a 'sputnik' moment. When the Soviets got Gagarin into orbit and he made it back safely it helped Washington galvanise support for the space program. So it could have an industrial and R&D angle to it as well.
Destroying the balloon over the sea minimises the risk of debris being collected by the general public, which must be useful for narrative control.
It is worth remembering that the stratosphere and the satellite belt are areas where close liaison between ostensible rivals is routine. And conducted with maximum privacy.
Sputnik is exactly right. With that maximum privacy in mind, what we can conclude for sure is we all saw it because they wanted us to see it in relation to our media and intelligence. (I've seen some other info that this truly may be inadvertent on China's side re: stratospheric balloons, weather and winds this time of year, but they too may be just probing)
So if our media is putting it in front of our eyes, they are leading us to a conclusion. They've been stirring anti-China sentiment with all the Taiwan news lately and U.S. Air Mobility Command Mike Minihan war by 2025 comments last week.
No doubt it'll be used for some form of increased spending on the empire's war machinations.
Germany cannot be saved. TurboAmerica has it under foot. Should the natives get restless the US can always play the race-card and sponsor unrest. If Panem can do this in Minneapolis or Chicago you can bet your last euro that they will do the same, or worse, in Europe.
The migrant and refugee communities are now large enough that they can be played as an insurgent fifth column to destabilise the country at will. The NGO networks and a compliant native ruling class (terrified of their own deplorables) are in place to play their roles.
The GWOT and the Syrian civil war enabled Western and Central Asia to escalate the further ethno-cultural and genomic integration of an Americanised Western Europe into Eurasia. Damascus rid itself of disaffected Sunnis by the millions. The migrant and refugee communities in Germany have the potential to function as the catalyst for instability in much the way that the Palestinians in Lebanon did.
Wangenknecht is not the future. She belongs to the past. The post-war Social Democrats and Christian Democrats relied on highly productive, successful, export industries and the fear of the USSR (which ensured class compromise) to sustain social peace. Nothing like those conditions now exist. Trying to game-plan solutions within the existing system is pointless.
Moscow would cut a deal with Berlin in a heartbeat, but Scholz lacks the assurance to attempt it. In any case, TurboAmerica can veto any Neue Ostpolitik via civil unrest.
"Not least, by adopting Westernism, this kind of new left can for once hope to be not just on the right but also on the winning side, American military power promising them that this time, finally, they may not be fighting for a lost cause."
First time as tragedy, second as farce.
European westernists such as the German Greens strike me as something akin to ideological janissaries, wholly converted to a foreign faith that demands implacable hostility to the interests of their own nation.
The German political class are pretty much interchangeable with their peers across the EU and the UK. The leading Grunissaries were selected for their willingness to conform. It is ultimately about their personal ambitions. It is as banal as that.
In the 20s the Right destabilised the Weimar Republic, which had begun secretly re-arming in defiance of Versailles with the assistance of the Soviets. Today it is the Left which is disrupting co-operation with a socially conservative state-capitalist Russia.
Yes, I am sure. There are minor variations in ideological content but the political classes across the EU are pretty much the same in their conformism, greed and willingness to abase themselves before TurboAmerica.
Neither Meloni or Le Pen are remotely fascist. Mildly, timidly, chauvinistic at the very worst. The pair sit awkwardly within the restricted range of acceptable politics but neither bear even a remote resemblance to Mussolini, Franco or Antonescu.
Years ago the late Peter Gowan predicted in THE GLOBAL GAMBLE that one likely future for Europe would see the return of endemic instability and conflict of the kind that existed in the inter-war period. It looks as if he is going to be proven right.
Violent chaos alternated with violent order. The authorities were not shy about applying violence and people liked it that way. They got the balance about right in the lead up to WW1. Since then we see insane juxtapositions: total war and genocide alternating with the abolition of capital punishment for murder and weird utopian assumptions about everything from child rearing to criminal justice.
I always have trouble keeping a straight face when EU admirers claim that European values are essentially liberal or humane. The very worst soccer hooligans are closer to the European archetype or historical standard than any social worker.
If the Russians are now the new Parthia we may one day see a TurboAmerican president end up like Valerian. A pity it is too late for that to happen to Obama.
They named one of their missiles Sarmat which is close enough for me and I am OK with Parthians just so long as they shoot straight and never tell a lie.
Belgrade is rather close to Beijing. The debris of the US stealth bomber shot down over Serbia is reputed to have been collected and handed over to China as a gift. This was possibly the real reason the US bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade: to stop the Chinese delegation shipping it back home for analysis. According to some the debris was retrieved from its location within the embassy just in time to secure it and the precious wreckage ended up in China after all.
Branko's article begins with: "The current EU ultimatum, delivered three days ago, to Serbia and Kosovo, whose exact content is unpublished (at the request of the EU delegation) is the result of more than 20 years of frustrations in the relations between EU and Serbia (and also between EU and Kosovo)." Secret, unpublished ultimatum!
So much for transparency!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The Serbian government should publish it in its entirety. They have nothing to lose. The West is not acting in good faith. Belgrade is under no obligation to honour a request of this kind. They should honour their duty to their own people ahead of any favour requested by their enemies.
Of course...they are politicians! But they are not fools. If they give in to the ultimatum they will face consequences. The only thing the EU could offer them would be a pile of cash and a visa. A rational traitor would think twice about taking such a deal.
The EU seeks to project power, but they fool only themselves. The reaction to the sabotage of Nordstream exposes the utter impotency of the EU. The heart of the Eurozone is crippled and there are no sanctions against the saboteurs...only embarrassed silence.
Oh ok. It was two Brussels-written papers that nobody took credit for (hence ‘non-paper’) but was a detailed plan to break up Bosnia and also resolve the Kosovo issue:
My attempt at armchair psychology as to how Ukraine doesn't understand that by escalating and relying on US support, they are investing on a rapidly-dwindling margin that can be called in at any time:
Support for Ukraine among the US public is wide but shallow. Ukraine, hubristically enchanted by their own status as media darlings, mistakes this for being wide and deep.
In the US, the political class finds naked statements of American self-interest to be gauche. The political class takes pride in, and genuinely believes in, America's status as the world's protector. When the US political class rises as one to protect Ukraine, it is only behind closed doors that any itemized, strategetic weakening of Russia enters the calculus. Of course Russia's role is well-discussed publicly, but not in terms of weakening a foe; it's in terms of an existential evil boogeyman in the Kremlin who must be destroyed. Russia, then, must be saved from itself when we're talking to the rubes, but in smoke-filled rooms, or at least RAND reports, we can be more strategic.
Ukraine has chosen to take the public declarations as the serious ones, perhaps not noticing that the US' reach for regime decapitation exceeds its grasp. (Yes, yes, Hussein and Gadaffi. Yanukovych if we're feeling feisty. But what about Assad - and indeed Putin? Or Maduro?) Ukraine doesn't realize, or fails to realize, that fever dreams of Crimea are not really supported by the US policy establishment, and are instead temporary rallying cries for the TV audience.
Finally, Ukraine doesn't understand that territorial concerns are not existential to the US, which can profit regardless. For Ukraine, borders are not just pride, but resources - the riches of the Donbass and the sea access of Crimea. People, too, and a tax base. What is a country without territory? Good question. We know the answer, though. The US barely has borders of its own, and its monoculture is paradoxically alienating to its divided people. Has the empire missed a beat as a result? Hardly. Who cares about the actual Americans? What matters to the US is control of global commerce, which through the destruction of NS2 it has demonstrated possession of pretty handily. If the US, having now called Germany and other energy-seekers to heel, now turns its attention to Hormuz and Hainan, Ukraine's (understandable) fixation on its own territory, borders, and language will look parochial and retrograde to an American empire with its eyes on bigger prizes.
And Foggy Bottom operates as cover for various discrete parties whose assets and ops show up in a bewildering number of places. Saw a documentary about globalisation the other night. Chrystia Freeland of Canuckistan figured prominently. There was a scene with her and her young son in Alberta in which she spoke to him in Ukrainian. Instructive for the great-grandson of migrants from an obscure corner of the Dual-Monarchy to be raised to speak the ancestral language. That is serious identity politics. Perhaps the HR people in Washington/Virginia are thinking long-term.
Nuland strikes me as dumb, undereducated, overconfident and always meets expectations. Perfect for her job. Whoever is steering her may be no better (worst case scenario). No doubt everyone in Moscow can join the dots between Nuland's handlers and those of Freeland.
Ukraine was a botched job: Washington thought that it could operate a client state with a military that was interoperable with NATO on Russia's borders and hopefully engineer regime change in Moscow. The chance for plunder all round (for the multinationals, kickbacks for the political class in Washington) played a big role.
The only thing the US military as an institution gets is the chance to make a case for a crap-load of money and the necessity of getting woke out of the equation so they can go back to preparing for war. It would be way too much to imagine that the buffoons who talked up General Zaluzhny get eased out.
De-woking the US military would be an obviously smart thing to do on the eve of a great power conflict with competitors who have achieved parity or near-parity with existing US capabilities. It would also be wise to lay off on the bullying and demoralization of the Southrons who are traditionally the warrior class, and are currently avoiding the military in droves. Surprising no one, Washington is doing none of those things.
Surprising? Has it not occurred to you yet that Cthulhu's servitors share the instinctive endowments of their victims?
Freud on the tension between the life instinct and the death instinct remains relevant. The regime is reckless in part because even those within it are driven to test the limits of the situation. At a conscious level they imagine that they are simply determining the limits of the docility that they can expect from their subjects (very useful knowledge) but they also seek to provoke for the sheer thrill of getting a reaction.
Yet at another, vastly more obscure dimension inaccessible to reason, they long for annihilation itself. You cannot arouse or deploy psychic forces of cruelty and exploitation forever without ultimately destabilising oneself in the process.
Remember the line from APOCALYPSE NOW? "Even the jungle wanted him dead". Kurtz/Brando understood Willard's mission and welcomed it. Something akin to this is at work on at least some parts of the regime. Kurtz/Brando was reading Frazer's THE GOLDEN BOUGH in a ruined temple built by god-kings. Frazer's book kicks off with mention of the replacement of the priest at Nemi by way of murder at the hands of his replacement.
My suggestion is that the regime is subconsciously generating the conditions for its own destruction. Rationality is besides the point. We are dealing with collective affect amongst sociopaths selected for their incompetence and maladjustment.
Philip I just read a very good book on the subject of getting ready for war, “The Ever Shrinking Fighting Force” (2020) by USMC General Arnold Punnaro. Served in Vietnam, fought, spent most of his life as military advisor on the Hill since 1970s. In 2019 he gave SECDEF Esper a list of recommendations for DOD that Esper thought were great. Punnaro then explained that these were identical to the recommendations that a young Dr. Henry Kissinger gave Eisenhower in 1956.
As it happens during the Presidency of Ulysses Grant, his General of the Army and President Grant attempted to reform military readiness for war and the disconnect in the War Department from the Field Army, a long goal of Sherman. They tried and gave up, nothing has changed.
Woke is not really a problem, except that its the official religion and Woke is centered on Whites as Evil incarnate. An unwoke military isn’t possible in a totally woke ruling class. Next possibility- the Hispanics- and if you think whites hate woke, are racist, and for that matter antisemitic (we aren’t, just disgusted with denying it) but ...about the Latinx...
So recruiting and retention is a problem.
Conscription? Only possible because our elites are crazy.
However the industrial base being rebuilt is a good in itself.
Did you see they wouldn’t shoot the 🇨🇳balloon down until it was over the ocean due to “liability” issues? That’s the military.
Seekt's thinking on Westernism recalls Gharbzadegi, a famous book by Jalal Al-e Ahmad, an Iranian frustrated by the effects of Western influence on Iran. Gharbzadegi has been translated as Occidentosis or Westoxification...enchantment by the West. Ahmad did not coin the term but he applied it to his own thinking on political economy and culture. Today the wits in Tehran apparently talk of Sharqzadegi or intoxification by China.
The resemblance exists in the passivity that the enchantment induces. What is even more striking is that Ahmad (a onetime communist if I remember correctly) identified Western technology and industry and the resulting obsolescence of Iranian craft-based manufacturing as a major even defining, aspect of it all.
That Germany, which surpassed both the UK and US in technological achievement during the 20th c, should now exhibit such a thorough lack of capacity is astonishing. It just goes to show how powerful an effect governance can have on incapacitating a nation.
And how effective a toxin TurboAmerican soft power truly is.
Germany has been an American Satrapy since 1945, we just made if Official. If it helps they treat we American Commoners much worse for a long time (since 1965) , you Germans are only now getting the Rust Belt aka Morgenthau Plan. Enjoy the diversity being imported too, our ❤️ of guns and our “racism” should be coming into focus.
Nico et al , have you read “The Dog King” an allegory of German alternative history had Morgenthau been implemented?
(It just takes 🇺🇸 us a long time to get there).
“The Dog King is a 1995 novel by the Austrian writer Christoph Ransmayr. Its original title is Morbus Kitahara. A work of alternative history, it is set in Central Europe after World War II and the implementation of the Morgenthau Plan, which has deindustrialized the region and created a ruthless post-apocalyptic-esque society. The main character is the son of a blacksmith who becomes the bodyguard of the only man in the area who owns a car.”
The man with the car is a Holocaust survivor who establishes dominance over the local postwar feral dog pack by killing the top dog with an Iron Bar, he’s basically the Commissar of the place, not to spoil the ending but the Americans take over the world- by nuking Japan with a H Bomb 20 years after 1945.
Philip would love the book, I read it 20 years ago and found it vaguely disquieting, now it’s Prophetic.
I'll chase it up...it sounds like great value. I read Ransmayr's THE LAST WORLD a very long time ago and if I remember correctly quite liked it.
The Morgenthau plan was unworkable because of the Cold War and the rise of the national security state. Also the ascendant crowd after FDR died only wanted priority over their old friends and partners in I.G.Farben. They did not need to bankrupt them as well and mass pauperisation would have created a constituency for Uncle Joe.
The best bits of Morgenthau probably inspired the Club of Rome, possibly even the thinking behind the current Great Reset/Green technology thing. If Uncle Sam could deindustrialise the UK and sponsor the wreckers of the ANC to do their worst in South Africa, why not Deutschestan too?
Planning is a part and parcel of policy, a lot of it is done to keep people busy and as a training/evaluation exercise. But it enables regimes to warehouse good ideas for later consideration as appropriate.
Now is the perfect time for Morgenthau# 2. The new Cold War does not require German rearmament, but Polish, Rumanian and Ukrainian militarisation. From the perspective of TurboAmerica the Germans are best left crippled and constrained by the rich and vibrant diversity they have (wisely or otherwise) welcomed. The Germans with skills can migrate to North America, the ones with money can go wherever they like so long as they park their cash in US banks or treasury bills. The middle classes can learn to beg and the poor will fight with the Ukrainian toughs for whatever crumbs fall to the ground. The diasporic Germans in discrete corners of South America can curse the Yankee swine but they too will play the game...TurboAmerica is a better master than the alternative: Bolivarian social justice at the hands of the local poor.
Panem should send Kamala Harris to Germany to receive the hommage of the natives. The Berlin Durbar has a nice ring to it.
Americans don't really care enough about Germany to want to cripple it; unlike Europeans Americans don't hold much of a grudge over WW2 as it wasn't that traumatic for the US. Ever since the end of the Cold War in fact the US has consistently been the most supportive of (or at worst indifferent to) the idea of a resurgent Germany. It was the French and British (and more recently Polish) who have been most adamant about keeping Germany weakened (e.g. opposing unification, supporting Russia keeping Konigsberg, demanding disarmament, etc.).
Americans get annoyed when Germany doesn't participate in one of the US's war, but the two biggest impediments to German self-reassertion are, first (by far) its own insurmountable collective neurosis over WW2 and the holocaust, and second the fears of its central and western European neighbors' reaction; the reaction of the US being a mere third.
What Americans in general care about is immaterial. What the American leadership class care about is everything. RHIP. Rank has its privileges. Setting priorities for the state is one of them.
Crippling Germany is not a new idea. It is an escalation of long extant American policy to suppress competition. US corporate regulators invariably impose vastly larger fines on European firms than they do on domestic malefactors for precisely this reason. The USA has explicitly sought to suppress economic competition from key allies pretty openly as a matter of course since the Plaza Accords of the 80s.
Furthermore, the TurboAmerican ruling class fear the example of the European social model, above all the celebrated Rhenish model of capitalism. This feeling is shared by practically the entire private sector American professional and managerial class.
During the Cold War the US had no choice but to accept class compromise at home and abroad (though it was thrilled to see Margaret Thatcher crush the industrialised working class in the UK). Since the end of the Cold War the persistence of any kind of welfare capitalism in the EU sets a dangerous example that appeals to many within the US itself.
TurboAmerica seeks the pauperisation of the German working class via deindustrialisation. It already did this in Ukraine: it was the US that financed Poroshenko's programme of deindustrialisation through the IMF. It was precisely this use of shock economics as a form of ethnic warfare in Ukraine that made the civil war between the Donbass and the regime in Kiev impossible to resolve peacefully. Now the covert economic war is being turned on Germany.
I did. Well-intentioned promises (redolent of the claims made about training and education in the Clinton/Blair era). The calculations about how much (or how little) is needed to maintain the pale livestock in good condition would have been made. There would be plenty of well-meaning people involved at that strata who intend to do things differently, to learn the lessons etc. Those types can be played very easily by their peers and by their masters. The best of them see it and are frustrated but they play along as required.
And the allocation of resources will prioritise the distributive arrangements in a most unsentimental manner. We are merely pivoting from triage shock therapy to triage welfare. The resulting policies will be settled by the imminence of real conflict and danger and the correlation of forces at home and abroad.
I wonder. There's an awful lot of Defense, law enforcement and new tech ala Musk [who's in there] and all things including Boomer scams must come to an end. We don't of course need another FDR or even Reagan, we need a Bismarck.
If Bismarck can do 'socialism' and he did, so can we now.
You really are working from all our lives [I'm Gen-X too] we have been scammed, that it will always go on this way, yet in my lifetime I saw Gen-X was very different than the Boomers already at college, never mind the new kids if they make it [and most do] are very different. I know younger in 20s gay men [in the military] who are quite far more moral and socially conservative [we've all had enough of porn, bankruptcy, racial commissars endlessly stirring the shit pot] that being the 'socially conservative' part, in truth it's 'reactionary' as in REVULSION.
The Boomers are locusts, now as they die they're trying to start a nuclear war and go out the way they came in, we'll see but none follow them except for money.
Talk of Versailles misses the point. The Germans in 1918 believed that they had not been defeated. The German generals concocted the dolchstoßlegende to salvage their reputations. The US General Pershing (a Texan of German ancestry) wanted to march to Berlin to demonstrate the reality of Germany's defeat but he was overruled by the fools in power.
By the time the Russians finish there will be no doubt that the Ukrainians have been defeated. They have lost 150,000 soldiers so far 300,000 or more casualties, half of whom will not return to service.
There are almost certainly secret negotiations under way. Will Russia trust the USA? Probably not.
When the regime crumbles Zelenskyy may very well be killed. His closest political allies today ate quite capable of that. If he lives he would embarrass a lot of people.
The opinions of the Ukrainian masses are irrelevant at this stage. They have no agency. They have no political representatives that any sane neighbouring government will ever tolerate. The moderates and pragmatists in the political elite are all in exile. Their country has been a puppet of NATO since 2014. Most Ukrainian will be relieved by an end to war. Some regions will seek to join the Russian Federation. Moscow will either seek to reconstitute a viable state with a moderate regime (no Banderists) or will create a cordon sanitaire of desolation between themselves and the West. They'd prefer the former. As for Galicia and Volyn, who knows? No one wants a rump state with a capital in Lvov/Lviv and Russia does not want to waste lives capturing those territories. Putin has said publicly that the people there would be better off under Poland.
The big issue at the moment is preventing further escalation, above all a nuclear confrontation, sparing Kharkov, Kiev and Odessa from obliteration and reducing the likelihood of Ukraine collapsing to a degree resembling the Congo during the civil war.
Having friends and champions is not the same thing as agency. The Europeans and Americans are on the side of Ukraine much as a violent pipe-swinging pimp is on the side of his whores.
That is one for the record Niccolo - can I use it - will attribute.
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So basically RAND wants the US to pull out of the smaller Ukrainian war to focus on the bigger upcoming China war. That makes me feel a lot better. (Not)
They argue that the USA has extracted as much value out of the war in Ukraine as possible and it's time to get out before diminishing returns kick in, as resources are finite and need to be applied elsewhere (China/Taiwan). You're right.
west alliance “resources” to prosecute a war in dneipr region do not exist.
usa nor germany have too few supply stocks…
u get hacked?
Wasn't me. A reader alerted me to the posts and I just suspended the account.
Ah the bogus text me ?
In fairness to us and the line to actually push if you want peace to perhaps have a chance, or at least go on for awhile longer;
1. Atlantic Rim East of 🇺🇸 is secure.
2. PACRIM (China) is chastened and subdued, indirectly by Ukrainian war and sanctions, indirectly by yanking the Chips out from under China masterfully last fall - Do Not underestimate our ruling class - truly humbled China.
(That Idiot Xi and his Ministers announcing plans for World Conquest, and offending and abusing their neighbors, but worst of all boasting on television and the internet about how they bought everyone all over had more to do with setting this all off than is acknowledged). But PACRIM is secured. For the moment. Unlike poor Russia the Chinese bought this all on themselves. The Chinese government treats other nations in public as if they were drunken peasant criminals in suits speaking to prostitutes (which they may be) and this just isn’t done between nations.
3. Domestic dissent is quelled for the moment in America and Europe, as is any idiotic notions FRANCE of “balancing” Russia or China against America MACRON.
England and America not only never announced a plan to dominate the world, they deny it happened, with some unfortunate slips by the Kardashians, er Neocons but that’s what happens when you hire Rosencrantz and Guilderstein, they blow it in public and reliably fail to get Hamlet, or anyone else who matters.
4. CRITICALLY America must re-industrialize to Rearm, the domestic advantages of taking all real fight from MAGA and the Deplorables needn’t be mentioned, oh and as core Deployables are the Deplorables - yes Whites for you foreigners- 🇺🇸 needs its Whi... Deplorabl... er... “Ethnics” for FREEDOM.
5. The natural way of our people is trade and profit first, then law, then and only if no choice force.
To rely on force very long isn’t practical, we are not Romans.
I did say the above course is the correct tack to take for time , for a remote chance for peace, that we get closer to peace by rearming and so re-industrialization is one of the “challenges” of our time.
Like England before us, 🇺🇸 America would like to have peace, and to concentrate on profit. Wouldn’t we all. Like England before us we won’t long tolerate angry, covetous eyes East or West, in England’s case this was The Continent (of Europe) and Ireland (too many Irish, something had to be done, regrettably, and was). In America’s case we faced populist uprisings at home and in Europe, and idiots like Macron talking about alliance with Russia, meanwhile the real culprit and prime mover abroad was China buying up everyone with money on loan from America (all our money but especially our debts are loans, you see) which was acceptable, China giggling in public about world domination isn’t acceptable, never mind the gauche displays of bribery.
Like England, we reluctantly acted in the preferred way of proxies, we have achieved our necessary Strategic goals, and should allow peace to return.
Peace will need time, prosperity, quiet. It is just possible.
So let RAND and the rest do the quiet work.
I’ll add my “take” below.
My take; I am no pacifist, quite the opposite, not that I care for nor think we need or can manage the world, but duty requires restraint. God Bless !
Caveat lector! 😂 Poe's Law is forever watching ya with a keen eye 🤸
[A parody this extreme is prone to be mistaken for the real thing.]
It's just a random schizo obsessed with Glenn Greenwald.
If history has shown us anything, the world is ungovernable: and hubristic psychopaths will keep trying and failing.
The American feudalism at the Federal level can and is working both ways, there’s sane people trying to stop this lunacy, that is what this RAND corporation report means. If they’re saying this in public, behind closed doors there’s considerable pushback. If you haven’t had the personal experience, crazy people aren’t reasoned with, they must be threatened, with nuclear war if nothing else.
Speaking of threats, I believe that several of the cars used by the First Family were torched a while back. Someone must be having trouble taking hints if messages now need to be conveyed like that. Brandon is in decline and the powers that be are no longer invested in his future. No wonder his chief of staff left.
Panem sounds like it is on the verge of frenzy.
🗨 Peace is no virtue if you, the pacifist, are incapable of war. Peace is a virtue if you, the warrior, decide it isn’t necessary 😉
Peace has sucked for me personally, although my job etc is fine, but peace with unfinished business sucks. Peace sucks on its own, let me be candid. Peace sucks down to ring the bell sucks. Its bad.
But-
If peace my duty I can accept it.
I won’t cry if it’s war . This peace we have in America isn’t peace, it’s degrading slavery as the plaything of psychopaths.
So like Macready said, let’s just sit here and see what happens.
The fraudulently justified domestic hostilities of a country whose social peace is fraying would be intensely frustrating for anyone who is familiar with the honesty of explicit enmity with foreigners.
The fact that THE THING springs to your mind says enough, given your situational awareness.
PS I think KR was at his best as Snake Plissken. You can't get any better.
It's not like that isn't an obvious direction for US foreign policy. Everyone sees that coming. The real question is whether the US retains the competence and industrial power to prevail, which is something I'm not especially confident that they do. Then again I'm not terribly well-disposed towards the GAE so there could be an element of wishful thinking there.
There will always be a GXE, I could probably live with the A version if the values they transmit weren't so pants on head ridiculous.
Precisely so. I'm not against imperialism per se. I'm against THIS empire quite specifically.
Spoken like a true Canadian! I feel the same way. I have long thought that Australia was better governed by the Colonial Office than we have been by Canberra. Whatever competence and integrity our system ever had lasted only as long as British influence and has declined as Americanisation proceeded.
The only way to improve Australia would be to declare war on Singapore and then follow that up with unconditional surrender.
Canada's problem is precisely that we don't have a proper empire to be united loyalists of.
Canada was the true jewel of the British Empire. If they had had any imagination the Victorian or Edwardian Brits should have evacuated most of their people, resettled them in Canada and either left the ancestral home the way the Angles did when they left northern Germany and Denmark or left it as a hunting reserve with a few ports tacked on. Makes more sense than the world wars.
America is rapidly reshoring industrial capacity, our biggest current manufacturing problem is the labor base is too small. Links ala blog length available on request. The wars and Covid are drivers (And I think this is no accident).
I'd take those links.
I think there are deep structural problems within the US that will prevent it righting itself. My feeling is that you can't fix their current situation by "reshoring industry", not without addressing the reasons industry got off-shored. (There's a cui bono aspect to it, but there's more to it than that, even: the US sold the message that offshoring was something to be proud of, and you now have generations in control who were brought up on and believe that message. These things of course produce a feedback loop that make the problem somewhat untenable using usual politics, IMO.)
But then I think the chinese chip thing is irrelevant; relevant for the space race/resource sink that is the AI chase, relevant for selling phones but irrelevant otherwise, especially as we come upon a more divided world where energy may be becoming more expensive, soon.
You hit the nail on the head. Those in control cannot conceive of doing things all that differently. Onshoring requires a revolution in social and workplace practices for which the managerial classes are ill-prepared.
Yeah, now that I think about it: writers (I believe Niccolo is among them) often go on about how the elites don't have to care about working class Americans. This is true, but it hinges on the working class having no power. If you want to reshore industry you suddenly need the working class again; it necessarily means they gain a share of power, however small. How easily would the managerial/media classes accept this? How easily would Wall Street accept even a slightly unfavorable shift in the labor/capital relation?
Links
50 White pills
Take these 50 Whitepills and see the elites defecting to 🇺🇸 and sanity. It’s real.
https://a16z.com/american-dynamism-50/?mkt_tok=MzgyLUpaQi03OTgAAAGItX0ntb3rdfKiQDJ4ZdjV9yiKe6fM0lgx3EwUAIQAMX_0Z53sTByIjLT5p0DMpctPjgyaebwoM0WwSryxDEW2yZfie-tNEkhjHhcYM7QvzIjuPg
Moar links
Its real , elites had enough
https://a16z.com/american-dynamism-50/?mkt_tok=MzgyLUpaQi03OTgAAAGItX0ntb3rdfKiQDJ4ZdjV9yiKe6fM0lgx3EwUAIQAMX_0Z53sTByIjLT5p0DMpctPjgyaebwoM0WwSryxDEW2yZfie-tNEkhjHhcYM7QvzIjuPg
Reshoring under way, actually biggest American manufacturing problem is anemic labor base projected to grow at 0.31%, we need that 2< spaces left
https://reshorenow.org
Some of us helping modestly (I carry this site gratis, he gets eyeballs, I get to help Rust Belt )
https://jacketmediaco.com/podcasts/manufacturing-talk-radio/
Mind you I live area below
34 jobs
https://jobsearch.alstom.com/search/?createNewAlert=false&q=&locationsearch=Hornell+&optionsFacetsDD_country=&optionsFacetsDD_department=&optionsFacetsDD_shifttype=
Chip Fab Rust Belt WNY
You are wrong on chips, chips oil and steel combined
https://www.syracuse.com/business/2022/10/micron-picks-syracuse-suburb-for-huge-computer-chip-plant-that-would-bring-up-to-9000-jobs.html
Hardinge CNC machine tools die plant moved from Taiwan to Elmira NY, already running since 21
https://www.hardinge.com/press-releases/hardinges-made-in-the-usa-reshoring-initiative-going-strong/?1675875870697
I don’t know that jobs means the quite subdued working class has power, and in any case they have no place to put this power, not Dem, not GOP, certainly not the Left , and not “Labor” unions 🤣, who are as infiltrated and controlled as the so called militia and Oath Keepers, and for longer. Trumpka mysteriously did not go to jail for corruption, not so mysteriously endorsed every Prog 💩 statement until his last breathe, see also Pressers and Fitzsimmons, in short the missing Jimmy Hoffa was the last labor leader, cuz he went to jail you see.
Wall Street cares about money and is well aware it’s no longer in Finance, that we need to be manufacturing, that tech has for just a moment stalled, that AI/ML is very promising in terms of potentially gutting White collar and email jobs - but then they default on their debts- so new Alpha is needed. Alpha as in growth.
If my people’s lot is improving then it is improving.
Power? The workers? The workers don’t want power, they want to be Petit Bourgeoisie, they always have- they want money, but a modest amount is fine, and some measure of security. All of this is quite reasonable and within reach.
The workers have learned their lesson with Der Drumpf , this Eloi Elites tremble behind Ur Morlock Executive Protection (listen on EP they’re not just my friends, I got the training as failsafe backup and to be better soldier, I really do know this) and the Eloi Elites are afraid of Red Hatted Morlocks; let them work, in fact we’re getting the Euro Social Insurance plan I warrant, at the expense of the Europeans losing theirs - boo hoo. 😭 -NOT !
The workers are now at the end of history lol, they just want to go back to work. No Revolution, no Unions, no politics, no Populism, no Dem, no GOP, no militia lol.
They just want to go back to prosperity. Most will let them.
It’s enough. The rest of the nonsense and *hopefully* war will fade.
If not , see EP or PMC (
The US may not have the will to make the changes necessary for successful global competition. You need quality mass education on scale. For real progress in the development of science you need more: the highest quality education from scratch for those with the capacity. Just look at the biographies of the great scientists of the 20th c. and focus on their formation. Nothing remotely comparable today and impossible under real world conditions in the US.
Progress needs intact families (above all mothers who prioritise child nurture over all else) and a suitable culture. A Brazilianised TurboAmerica (one with a dual economy) is going to struggle. America will onshore, but competing for a share of the global market in high tech consumer goods is going to be very difficult. Look at the motor industry or Boeing.
RAND wants to spare its masters in the Pentagon profound professional embarrassment. NATO trained 90,000 Ukranian troops to a standard that enabled NATO to formally rate them as fully interoperable. Their weapons and kit were NATO standard (as opposed to the rest of the Ukrainian Army) and the 90,000 were stationed in the Donbass along the Line of Control. When Ukraine restarted the civil war in February 2022 they did so with the benefit of NATO senior officers and senior NCOs on site to help advise on operations and tactics. NATO was gambling that General Zaluzhnyy would win and that Moscow would be deterred from rescuing the Russians in Donetsk and Lugansk. A big gamble to make and NATO lost.
In a nutshell, Russian victory destroys the reputation of NATO in terms of combat reliability, leadership, training and equipment. The inability of NATO to resupply Ukraine reveals the deindustrialised West as a paper tiger that relies upon US nuclear forces alone. NATO's conventional capacity in Europe is a total joke when compared to Russia. And the disclosure of Pentagon financed bioweapons research has made NATO a filthy word for more than a few outside of the Western bubble.
RAND is doing its bit to misdirect attention.
Yep.
And I have questions about the state of repair of the American nuclear arsenal. Not that this is a bluff anyone wants to call, but given the neglect the rest of the armed forces have suffered, I would not be at all surprised if the nuclear umbrella is getting a bit tattered.
The UK uses superglue to hold the bolts in the cooling pipes of the nuclear reactors on their submarines. I recall that there was also a whistleblower's report that they were failing the results from the safety tests on Trident. And to put it in context: they just discovered that the starboard and portside shafts are misaligned on the HMS Prince of Wales (a £3 billion warship). If comparable engineering failures are happening in the nuclear forces NATO does not need to worry about Putin.
Affirmative action policies are having their expected corrosive effect at every level.
In the UK the problem is compounded by the hollowing out of the old order by Americanisation (including Thatcherism) and the extraordinary corruption.
And one should also wonder about who is actually giving the technical advice.
Remember Sam Brinton? He was the deputy assistant secretary of Spent Fuel and Waste Disposition in the Office of Nuclear Energy from June to December 2022 who has been charged with stealing womens' clothes, presumably for his own use.
Brinton holds a Bachelor of Science in nuclear engineering and vocal music and also a dual Master of Science degree in nuclear science and engineering (technology and policy program) from MIT no less.
Putting a high priest of Slaanesh in charge of nuclear waste disposal always struck me as a bad idea.
If he is the public face of the senior technocracy what are the rest like?
Thanks for that, I didn't have enough nightmare fuel for tonight.
Even as people return to in-person working, the Tue-Wed-Thurs pattern is a killer for small businesses in commercial districts (coffee and sandwich shops, restaurants, bars)- can they afford to pay rent with only three days a week of revenues? Seems unlikely.
Given the lags built into leases and loan agreements we haven’t yet seen the full impact of these behavioral changes on commercial property values.
Though given your NY stats, if property taxes are only 33 pct of the city budget and commercial property is only 20 pct of property taxes, then commercial property taxes are only 6.6pct of the budget. Should be easy enough to cut NYC’s bloated City worker payrolls and spending by that amount.
Steve Sailer and Michael Brendan Dougherty have also pointed out that with fewer working men around the criminal element is more empowered.
I think it is not so much men per se, but a combo of less street/sidewalk traffic generally and also city governments being more tolerant/forgiving of crime and vagrancy. Closed-up shops don’t help, either, as shop owners observe, report and sometimes disciplined adverse sidewalk activity in front of their shops.
Easy? 🤣
Well, for any sane human- yes. For any pol New Yorkers of today would vote for? Impossible!
Curious that in 2020 two of the most outspoken people sounding the alarm about race riots and election malfeasance in the USA were Serbs (though I'm guessing of a more Yugoslav orientation). Natalia Jovanovic made a video about ethnic conflict that was featured on Glenn Beck's show and Aleksandar Savic made a video about the 2000 anti-Milosevic Tractor rebellion that influenced the Oath Keepers (who have since been convicted of seditious conspiracy).
EDIT: Katarina Jovanovic, not Natalia
Apologies for asking about something off topic from today’s roundup, but was curious what your read is on the whole Chinese balloon situation? Although I guess it’s somewhat on topic given the RAND report. My top of mind response to it was China putting a weirdly significant flex on the US for the whole world to see but dunno
My first instinct was "stunt to get back at USA for Pelosi visit to Taiwan". Beyond that, I haven't thought much about it.
Curious fuckery abounds all around it, as is so often the case these days. One interesting thing that came up yesterday, I believe, was Biden saying he ordered the Pentagon to shoot it down on Wednesday. But I think you’re taking the right tack to it, cause it just feels like it’s endless rabbit holes yet again.
By shooting down the balloon the US is now in a position where it cannot complain if China does the same to any US device stationed above China.
The stratosphere and the space above it are not fully or properly regulated by international treaty. Historically, the US liked to have legal room to manoeuvre. China is calling Washington's bluff. And doing a great favour for Putin too.
In the event of a war the satellite belt is the most important battlefield. It is crucial for military and civilian communicatiions, surveillance, signals intelligence and the global economy.
Which is why the US Army Signal Corps is going back to Troposcatter and AM/HF, as it happens getting constantly shorted on Satellite priority has driven a return to basics. As it happens Balloons make excellent airborne repeaters (relays) as well, already in Civilian use.
My take on balloon gate is that it was left inflated to cross the country as a way to gin up animosity towards China.
Especially considering some of the 'Monday morning quarterback' articles out now discussing Chinese balloons also entered our airspace multiple times during Trump's presidency (lot's of criticism came from the right these are just deflection), how "fearful" they were about debris (we landed men on the moon in the 60's and you can't take out a balloon over an empty field?), and the shoot down being televised (only showing the 'win'. Bonus that they did it over the ocean making recovery harder).
Plus it's not a good look to have signed a trillion dollar military budget and one of the largest spying apparatus's in the world, but be susceptible to balloon technology.
No, this was let float over the US heartland by the people that care about territorial integrity only when Russians cross the border.
You make some very good points. There are any number of possibilities. The appearance of the balloon serves the purposes of those who want to disrupt Chimerica. It also helps destabilise the Biden Administration. And it demonstrates the wisdom of Trump's decision to establish a separate branch of the services devoted to space...a decision which was presumably supported, perhaps first floated, by people within the national security and defence sectors.
It will be interesting to see of the balloon become a 'sputnik' moment. When the Soviets got Gagarin into orbit and he made it back safely it helped Washington galvanise support for the space program. So it could have an industrial and R&D angle to it as well.
Destroying the balloon over the sea minimises the risk of debris being collected by the general public, which must be useful for narrative control.
It is worth remembering that the stratosphere and the satellite belt are areas where close liaison between ostensible rivals is routine. And conducted with maximum privacy.
Sputnik is exactly right. With that maximum privacy in mind, what we can conclude for sure is we all saw it because they wanted us to see it in relation to our media and intelligence. (I've seen some other info that this truly may be inadvertent on China's side re: stratospheric balloons, weather and winds this time of year, but they too may be just probing)
So if our media is putting it in front of our eyes, they are leading us to a conclusion. They've been stirring anti-China sentiment with all the Taiwan news lately and U.S. Air Mobility Command Mike Minihan war by 2025 comments last week.
No doubt it'll be used for some form of increased spending on the empire's war machinations.
Germany cannot be saved. TurboAmerica has it under foot. Should the natives get restless the US can always play the race-card and sponsor unrest. If Panem can do this in Minneapolis or Chicago you can bet your last euro that they will do the same, or worse, in Europe.
The migrant and refugee communities are now large enough that they can be played as an insurgent fifth column to destabilise the country at will. The NGO networks and a compliant native ruling class (terrified of their own deplorables) are in place to play their roles.
The GWOT and the Syrian civil war enabled Western and Central Asia to escalate the further ethno-cultural and genomic integration of an Americanised Western Europe into Eurasia. Damascus rid itself of disaffected Sunnis by the millions. The migrant and refugee communities in Germany have the potential to function as the catalyst for instability in much the way that the Palestinians in Lebanon did.
Wangenknecht is not the future. She belongs to the past. The post-war Social Democrats and Christian Democrats relied on highly productive, successful, export industries and the fear of the USSR (which ensured class compromise) to sustain social peace. Nothing like those conditions now exist. Trying to game-plan solutions within the existing system is pointless.
Moscow would cut a deal with Berlin in a heartbeat, but Scholz lacks the assurance to attempt it. In any case, TurboAmerica can veto any Neue Ostpolitik via civil unrest.
Nordstream.
I think you misspelled TurboHomoAmerica
Uncle Samantha is transitioning right now so it's hard to get the names exactly right.
The only name misspelled is *Wagenknecht 😝
"Not least, by adopting Westernism, this kind of new left can for once hope to be not just on the right but also on the winning side, American military power promising them that this time, finally, they may not be fighting for a lost cause."
First time as tragedy, second as farce.
European westernists such as the German Greens strike me as something akin to ideological janissaries, wholly converted to a foreign faith that demands implacable hostility to the interests of their own nation.
The German political class are pretty much interchangeable with their peers across the EU and the UK. The leading Grunissaries were selected for their willingness to conform. It is ultimately about their personal ambitions. It is as banal as that.
In the 20s the Right destabilised the Weimar Republic, which had begun secretly re-arming in defiance of Versailles with the assistance of the Soviets. Today it is the Left which is disrupting co-operation with a socially conservative state-capitalist Russia.
Yes, I am sure. There are minor variations in ideological content but the political classes across the EU are pretty much the same in their conformism, greed and willingness to abase themselves before TurboAmerica.
Neither Meloni or Le Pen are remotely fascist. Mildly, timidly, chauvinistic at the very worst. The pair sit awkwardly within the restricted range of acceptable politics but neither bear even a remote resemblance to Mussolini, Franco or Antonescu.
Uh, this may not only not be the farce, it may be an entire fresh round of tragedy.
Years ago the late Peter Gowan predicted in THE GLOBAL GAMBLE that one likely future for Europe would see the return of endemic instability and conflict of the kind that existed in the inter-war period. It looks as if he is going to be proven right.
Violent chaos is the historically typical condition of Europe, so that was a safe bet.
Violent chaos alternated with violent order. The authorities were not shy about applying violence and people liked it that way. They got the balance about right in the lead up to WW1. Since then we see insane juxtapositions: total war and genocide alternating with the abolition of capital punishment for murder and weird utopian assumptions about everything from child rearing to criminal justice.
I always have trouble keeping a straight face when EU admirers claim that European values are essentially liberal or humane. The very worst soccer hooligans are closer to the European archetype or historical standard than any social worker.
As Satrapies of the new Rome on the Borders of the new Parthia (Russia)
If the Russians are now the new Parthia we may one day see a TurboAmerican president end up like Valerian. A pity it is too late for that to happen to Obama.
They named one of their missiles Sarmat which is close enough for me and I am OK with Parthians just so long as they shoot straight and never tell a lie.
The Serbs should just bring in the Chinese. Invite the army.
Belgrade is rather close to Beijing. The debris of the US stealth bomber shot down over Serbia is reputed to have been collected and handed over to China as a gift. This was possibly the real reason the US bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade: to stop the Chinese delegation shipping it back home for analysis. According to some the debris was retrieved from its location within the embassy just in time to secure it and the precious wreckage ended up in China after all.
You overestimate the Chinese, indeed miss them completely.
How much money does Belgrade have?
Branko's article begins with: "The current EU ultimatum, delivered three days ago, to Serbia and Kosovo, whose exact content is unpublished (at the request of the EU delegation) is the result of more than 20 years of frustrations in the relations between EU and Serbia (and also between EU and Kosovo)." Secret, unpublished ultimatum!
So much for transparency!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The Serbian government should publish it in its entirety. They have nothing to lose. The West is not acting in good faith. Belgrade is under no obligation to honour a request of this kind. They should honour their duty to their own people ahead of any favour requested by their enemies.
Within the Serbian government, there are traitors.
Of course...they are politicians! But they are not fools. If they give in to the ultimatum they will face consequences. The only thing the EU could offer them would be a pile of cash and a visa. A rational traitor would think twice about taking such a deal.
The main pillars of the EU are:
1) Democracy. They love referenda, so much so that they'll run them again and again until they get the perfect result.
2) Transparency. They are very open about the fact that they govern in secret.
3) Accountability. If there is a failure in Brussels, the people of Europe are accountable for it.
That’s actually hilarious adblock. I’m stealing.
You can quite say the same about DC, or Sacramento, or Trenton, or Albany, or Illinois, or NJ, or...
Such ultimatums are common nowadays, it is part of the EU's informal way of projecting power. Remember the "balkan non-paper" fiasco in summer 2021?
No, I do not recall it.
The EU seeks to project power, but they fool only themselves. The reaction to the sabotage of Nordstream exposes the utter impotency of the EU. The heart of the Eurozone is crippled and there are no sanctions against the saboteurs...only embarrassed silence.
Oh ok. It was two Brussels-written papers that nobody took credit for (hence ‘non-paper’) but was a detailed plan to break up Bosnia and also resolve the Kosovo issue:
https://www.rferl.org/amp/non-papers-phantom-brussels-kosovo-serbia-bosnia-slovenia/31229431.html
My attempt at armchair psychology as to how Ukraine doesn't understand that by escalating and relying on US support, they are investing on a rapidly-dwindling margin that can be called in at any time:
Support for Ukraine among the US public is wide but shallow. Ukraine, hubristically enchanted by their own status as media darlings, mistakes this for being wide and deep.
In the US, the political class finds naked statements of American self-interest to be gauche. The political class takes pride in, and genuinely believes in, America's status as the world's protector. When the US political class rises as one to protect Ukraine, it is only behind closed doors that any itemized, strategetic weakening of Russia enters the calculus. Of course Russia's role is well-discussed publicly, but not in terms of weakening a foe; it's in terms of an existential evil boogeyman in the Kremlin who must be destroyed. Russia, then, must be saved from itself when we're talking to the rubes, but in smoke-filled rooms, or at least RAND reports, we can be more strategic.
Ukraine has chosen to take the public declarations as the serious ones, perhaps not noticing that the US' reach for regime decapitation exceeds its grasp. (Yes, yes, Hussein and Gadaffi. Yanukovych if we're feeling feisty. But what about Assad - and indeed Putin? Or Maduro?) Ukraine doesn't realize, or fails to realize, that fever dreams of Crimea are not really supported by the US policy establishment, and are instead temporary rallying cries for the TV audience.
Finally, Ukraine doesn't understand that territorial concerns are not existential to the US, which can profit regardless. For Ukraine, borders are not just pride, but resources - the riches of the Donbass and the sea access of Crimea. People, too, and a tax base. What is a country without territory? Good question. We know the answer, though. The US barely has borders of its own, and its monoculture is paradoxically alienating to its divided people. Has the empire missed a beat as a result? Hardly. Who cares about the actual Americans? What matters to the US is control of global commerce, which through the destruction of NS2 it has demonstrated possession of pretty handily. If the US, having now called Germany and other energy-seekers to heel, now turns its attention to Hormuz and Hainan, Ukraine's (understandable) fixation on its own territory, borders, and language will look parochial and retrograde to an American empire with its eyes on bigger prizes.
Ukraine is not governed by Ukrainians.
Surely depends on what you mean by govern. Obviously they don't call the shots militarily - but for civilian affairs?
Good Lord Sir, the Ukrainians are gangsters.
By the standards of the US, absolutely. By the standards of most of the world? Good kids, just a bit mixed up.
Ukraine is ruled from Foggy Bottom, and Victoria Nuland has the account.
And Foggy Bottom operates as cover for various discrete parties whose assets and ops show up in a bewildering number of places. Saw a documentary about globalisation the other night. Chrystia Freeland of Canuckistan figured prominently. There was a scene with her and her young son in Alberta in which she spoke to him in Ukrainian. Instructive for the great-grandson of migrants from an obscure corner of the Dual-Monarchy to be raised to speak the ancestral language. That is serious identity politics. Perhaps the HR people in Washington/Virginia are thinking long-term.
Nuland strikes me as dumb, undereducated, overconfident and always meets expectations. Perfect for her job. Whoever is steering her may be no better (worst case scenario). No doubt everyone in Moscow can join the dots between Nuland's handlers and those of Freeland.
Agree Ad block, although frankly I see Ukraine on Strategic map as Reconnaissance in Force, a throwaway.
Ukraine was a botched job: Washington thought that it could operate a client state with a military that was interoperable with NATO on Russia's borders and hopefully engineer regime change in Moscow. The chance for plunder all round (for the multinationals, kickbacks for the political class in Washington) played a big role.
The only thing the US military as an institution gets is the chance to make a case for a crap-load of money and the necessity of getting woke out of the equation so they can go back to preparing for war. It would be way too much to imagine that the buffoons who talked up General Zaluzhny get eased out.
De-woking the US military would be an obviously smart thing to do on the eve of a great power conflict with competitors who have achieved parity or near-parity with existing US capabilities. It would also be wise to lay off on the bullying and demoralization of the Southrons who are traditionally the warrior class, and are currently avoiding the military in droves. Surprising no one, Washington is doing none of those things.
But America is reshoring industry
Surprising? Has it not occurred to you yet that Cthulhu's servitors share the instinctive endowments of their victims?
Freud on the tension between the life instinct and the death instinct remains relevant. The regime is reckless in part because even those within it are driven to test the limits of the situation. At a conscious level they imagine that they are simply determining the limits of the docility that they can expect from their subjects (very useful knowledge) but they also seek to provoke for the sheer thrill of getting a reaction.
Yet at another, vastly more obscure dimension inaccessible to reason, they long for annihilation itself. You cannot arouse or deploy psychic forces of cruelty and exploitation forever without ultimately destabilising oneself in the process.
Remember the line from APOCALYPSE NOW? "Even the jungle wanted him dead". Kurtz/Brando understood Willard's mission and welcomed it. Something akin to this is at work on at least some parts of the regime. Kurtz/Brando was reading Frazer's THE GOLDEN BOUGH in a ruined temple built by god-kings. Frazer's book kicks off with mention of the replacement of the priest at Nemi by way of murder at the hands of his replacement.
My suggestion is that the regime is subconsciously generating the conditions for its own destruction. Rationality is besides the point. We are dealing with collective affect amongst sociopaths selected for their incompetence and maladjustment.
Or I might be full of shit.
That's why I said 'surprising no one' ;)
Philip I just read a very good book on the subject of getting ready for war, “The Ever Shrinking Fighting Force” (2020) by USMC General Arnold Punnaro. Served in Vietnam, fought, spent most of his life as military advisor on the Hill since 1970s. In 2019 he gave SECDEF Esper a list of recommendations for DOD that Esper thought were great. Punnaro then explained that these were identical to the recommendations that a young Dr. Henry Kissinger gave Eisenhower in 1956.
As it happens during the Presidency of Ulysses Grant, his General of the Army and President Grant attempted to reform military readiness for war and the disconnect in the War Department from the Field Army, a long goal of Sherman. They tried and gave up, nothing has changed.
Woke is not really a problem, except that its the official religion and Woke is centered on Whites as Evil incarnate. An unwoke military isn’t possible in a totally woke ruling class. Next possibility- the Hispanics- and if you think whites hate woke, are racist, and for that matter antisemitic (we aren’t, just disgusted with denying it) but ...about the Latinx...
So recruiting and retention is a problem.
Conscription? Only possible because our elites are crazy.
However the industrial base being rebuilt is a good in itself.
Did you see they wouldn’t shoot the 🇨🇳balloon down until it was over the ocean due to “liability” issues? That’s the military.
Woke is nothing, JAG has already defeated us.
Seekt's thinking on Westernism recalls Gharbzadegi, a famous book by Jalal Al-e Ahmad, an Iranian frustrated by the effects of Western influence on Iran. Gharbzadegi has been translated as Occidentosis or Westoxification...enchantment by the West. Ahmad did not coin the term but he applied it to his own thinking on political economy and culture. Today the wits in Tehran apparently talk of Sharqzadegi or intoxification by China.
The resemblance exists in the passivity that the enchantment induces. What is even more striking is that Ahmad (a onetime communist if I remember correctly) identified Western technology and industry and the resulting obsolescence of Iranian craft-based manufacturing as a major even defining, aspect of it all.
That Germany, which surpassed both the UK and US in technological achievement during the 20th c, should now exhibit such a thorough lack of capacity is astonishing. It just goes to show how powerful an effect governance can have on incapacitating a nation.
And how effective a toxin TurboAmerican soft power truly is.
Germany has been an American Satrapy since 1945, we just made if Official. If it helps they treat we American Commoners much worse for a long time (since 1965) , you Germans are only now getting the Rust Belt aka Morgenthau Plan. Enjoy the diversity being imported too, our ❤️ of guns and our “racism” should be coming into focus.
Sorry, if that means anything.
If Germany is, we all are🇨🇮🇪🇺
Yes, sorry 😞
Serbia's problem is that giving in to blackmail invites more blackmail.
"That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld/You never get rid of the Dane"
Nico et al , have you read “The Dog King” an allegory of German alternative history had Morgenthau been implemented?
(It just takes 🇺🇸 us a long time to get there).
“The Dog King is a 1995 novel by the Austrian writer Christoph Ransmayr. Its original title is Morbus Kitahara. A work of alternative history, it is set in Central Europe after World War II and the implementation of the Morgenthau Plan, which has deindustrialized the region and created a ruthless post-apocalyptic-esque society. The main character is the son of a blacksmith who becomes the bodyguard of the only man in the area who owns a car.”
The man with the car is a Holocaust survivor who establishes dominance over the local postwar feral dog pack by killing the top dog with an Iron Bar, he’s basically the Commissar of the place, not to spoil the ending but the Americans take over the world- by nuking Japan with a H Bomb 20 years after 1945.
Philip would love the book, I read it 20 years ago and found it vaguely disquieting, now it’s Prophetic.
I'll chase it up...it sounds like great value. I read Ransmayr's THE LAST WORLD a very long time ago and if I remember correctly quite liked it.
The Morgenthau plan was unworkable because of the Cold War and the rise of the national security state. Also the ascendant crowd after FDR died only wanted priority over their old friends and partners in I.G.Farben. They did not need to bankrupt them as well and mass pauperisation would have created a constituency for Uncle Joe.
The best bits of Morgenthau probably inspired the Club of Rome, possibly even the thinking behind the current Great Reset/Green technology thing. If Uncle Sam could deindustrialise the UK and sponsor the wreckers of the ANC to do their worst in South Africa, why not Deutschestan too?
Planning is a part and parcel of policy, a lot of it is done to keep people busy and as a training/evaluation exercise. But it enables regimes to warehouse good ideas for later consideration as appropriate.
Now is the perfect time for Morgenthau# 2. The new Cold War does not require German rearmament, but Polish, Rumanian and Ukrainian militarisation. From the perspective of TurboAmerica the Germans are best left crippled and constrained by the rich and vibrant diversity they have (wisely or otherwise) welcomed. The Germans with skills can migrate to North America, the ones with money can go wherever they like so long as they park their cash in US banks or treasury bills. The middle classes can learn to beg and the poor will fight with the Ukrainian toughs for whatever crumbs fall to the ground. The diasporic Germans in discrete corners of South America can curse the Yankee swine but they too will play the game...TurboAmerica is a better master than the alternative: Bolivarian social justice at the hands of the local poor.
Panem should send Kamala Harris to Germany to receive the hommage of the natives. The Berlin Durbar has a nice ring to it.
Do understand that the Rust Belt in America was essentially Morgenthau (they hate us).
Now we’re coming back.
Rust Belt was not motivated by hate, but opportunism and complacency. The hatred came later.
Americans don't really care enough about Germany to want to cripple it; unlike Europeans Americans don't hold much of a grudge over WW2 as it wasn't that traumatic for the US. Ever since the end of the Cold War in fact the US has consistently been the most supportive of (or at worst indifferent to) the idea of a resurgent Germany. It was the French and British (and more recently Polish) who have been most adamant about keeping Germany weakened (e.g. opposing unification, supporting Russia keeping Konigsberg, demanding disarmament, etc.).
Americans get annoyed when Germany doesn't participate in one of the US's war, but the two biggest impediments to German self-reassertion are, first (by far) its own insurmountable collective neurosis over WW2 and the holocaust, and second the fears of its central and western European neighbors' reaction; the reaction of the US being a mere third.
What Americans in general care about is immaterial. What the American leadership class care about is everything. RHIP. Rank has its privileges. Setting priorities for the state is one of them.
Crippling Germany is not a new idea. It is an escalation of long extant American policy to suppress competition. US corporate regulators invariably impose vastly larger fines on European firms than they do on domestic malefactors for precisely this reason. The USA has explicitly sought to suppress economic competition from key allies pretty openly as a matter of course since the Plaza Accords of the 80s.
Furthermore, the TurboAmerican ruling class fear the example of the European social model, above all the celebrated Rhenish model of capitalism. This feeling is shared by practically the entire private sector American professional and managerial class.
During the Cold War the US had no choice but to accept class compromise at home and abroad (though it was thrilled to see Margaret Thatcher crush the industrialised working class in the UK). Since the end of the Cold War the persistence of any kind of welfare capitalism in the EU sets a dangerous example that appeals to many within the US itself.
TurboAmerica seeks the pauperisation of the German working class via deindustrialisation. It already did this in Ukraine: it was the US that financed Poroshenko's programme of deindustrialisation through the IMF. It was precisely this use of shock economics as a form of ethnic warfare in Ukraine that made the civil war between the Donbass and the regime in Kiev impossible to resolve peacefully. Now the covert economic war is being turned on Germany.
If you look at the American Dynamism links - they won’t say Rhenish Capitalism, but the social safety net and healthcare are in there-
I did. Well-intentioned promises (redolent of the claims made about training and education in the Clinton/Blair era). The calculations about how much (or how little) is needed to maintain the pale livestock in good condition would have been made. There would be plenty of well-meaning people involved at that strata who intend to do things differently, to learn the lessons etc. Those types can be played very easily by their peers and by their masters. The best of them see it and are frustrated but they play along as required.
And the allocation of resources will prioritise the distributive arrangements in a most unsentimental manner. We are merely pivoting from triage shock therapy to triage welfare. The resulting policies will be settled by the imminence of real conflict and danger and the correlation of forces at home and abroad.
I wonder. There's an awful lot of Defense, law enforcement and new tech ala Musk [who's in there] and all things including Boomer scams must come to an end. We don't of course need another FDR or even Reagan, we need a Bismarck.
If Bismarck can do 'socialism' and he did, so can we now.
You really are working from all our lives [I'm Gen-X too] we have been scammed, that it will always go on this way, yet in my lifetime I saw Gen-X was very different than the Boomers already at college, never mind the new kids if they make it [and most do] are very different. I know younger in 20s gay men [in the military] who are quite far more moral and socially conservative [we've all had enough of porn, bankruptcy, racial commissars endlessly stirring the shit pot] that being the 'socially conservative' part, in truth it's 'reactionary' as in REVULSION.
The Boomers are locusts, now as they die they're trying to start a nuclear war and go out the way they came in, we'll see but none follow them except for money.
2015; “Why do so many people take an instant dislike to Ted Cruz?”
“It just saves time.”