The Wagner “Coup”

Simplicius reviews a few theories concerning the failed insurrection in Russia by the Wagner mercenary company.

Let’s explore a few possible options for what could actually be going on.

  1. Prigozhin is working with AFU/SBU/CIA to backstab and destroy Russia, coordinating his actions with them.
  2. Prigozhin is secretly working with Putin to remove the stodgily entrenched Russian command. Notice, not in a single one of his rants has Prigozhin accused Putin or so much as even mentioned his name. There’s a possibility that all this is theater to cause a “conciliatory deal” to be made which will result in the ‘stepping aside’ of Shoigu. Putin has previously “laterally promoted” (in actuality demotions) several big name siloviki in the past. For instance, Sergei Ivanov who was deputy prime minister and presidential chief of staff was “moved” to head some ‘ecological’ department. Could we see Shoigu used as a fig leaf to settle the impasse by “laterally” moving him to some other ostensibly ‘important’ (but actually irrelevant) position?
  3. Everything is actually “as is” and whatever we see on the surface of the conflict pretty much represents what’s really happening.

One last thing to mention. There is still the possibility this is all some kind of elaborate psyop. Anything is possible because the situation is simply so ‘out of left field’. The reason it’s out of left field to me in particular is Prigozhin really did not appear to have any substantive justification for any of this. As I said, Russia was crushing the AFU and has recently been in the best position of the entire SMO. Why would something like this happen now, if it were legitimate? It simply defies belief that Prigozhin would be so incensed about all the “failings” of the MOD at the time of the MOD’s singularly greatest glory on the battlefield. The only explanation in that case would be—as I said before—that Prigozhin knew his time was up as the MOD was already planning on canning him, so it was “now or never” for him.

My theory is considerably more simple and is based on “Every Single Time.”

Yevgeny Prigozhin was born in Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) 1 June 1961. His father and stepfather were of Russian-Jewish descent.

In other words, Prigozhin is a sleeper agent for Clown World who was activated as a desperate reaction to the abject failure of the Ukrainian counteroffensive.

I can cite precisely zero evidence supporting this theory, but it’s certainly more coherent and consistent with historical events than the “he just went crazy” or “Russian psyop” theories. I don’t think it’s particularly far-fetched to suggest that the man’s true sympathies lie with his co-ethnics presently ruling over the Ukrainian people, especially in light of the Western response to Prigozhin’s announced “coup”.

The US has postponed a fresh round of economic sanctions on the Wagner private military company after its leader, Evgeny Prigozhin, led a march on Moscow in defiance of the Kremlin, the Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday, citing sources.

UPDATE: Simplicius appears to have come around to my way of thinking.

My other more sinister theory is born: The entire production was in fact an oligarch-funded, perhaps Western-backed coup that was meant to topple Putin. Shoigu and Gerasimov were merely the cover to convince Wagner troops to march on the Kremlin. You see, Shoigu provides a brilliantly convenient target because troops are disgruntled with him. So all Priggy had to do was tell his troops we’re going to take out Shoigu and hand over the reins to Putin and it was easy convincing.

However, this may have always been a performance. You see, once the troops were to have marched to the Kremlin with him, he could position a few thousand of them as a cordon around the Kremlin itself. Then, a much smaller vanguard of his absolute most trustworthy, diehard, and fanatical revolutionaries—Dmitry Utkin surely has these under him—would have walked into the Kremlin with Prigozhin under the guise of “going to arrest Shoigu”.

But the next time the outside Wagner troops would see Prigozhin emerge from the Kremlin would be on the balcony, hailing them with the crown on his head as the new ruler of Russia. Because the idea all along was to use this facade to overthrow Putin and take control for himself.

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A Word to the Fearful

Far too many young men are terrified to get married, but their fears are misplaced. I wrote this eight years ago in response to a piece by Rollo, but it’s every bit as relevant today, as it addresses why men have literally nothing to fear from divorce:

You can only control your own behavior. No one else’s. If your wife is unhappy about the choice she made, if her children and friends and family and fun are her priorities and she wants out, then by all means, let her walk! Show her to the door with a smile!

There is a saying: if you love someone, set them free. You can’t control her actions, much less her desires. You can’t control the legal system. You can’t control your feelings. You can’t control anything except your own actions.

Ironically, the more willing you are to let her go, the less likely she is to actually continue down that road. With what is she actually threatening you anyhow? Doing whatever you want to do all the time instead of what she wants you to do? Being able to follow up on any indications of interest expressed by women who are half her age whenever you’re so inclined? Do you genuinely think you’re going to be able to spend LESS of your future income on things you want if she only gets HALF of it?

Do the math. Whether women control 73 percent or 85 percent of the household spending (depending upon which survey you prefer to credit), keeping only half your income amounts to an effective raise between 46 to 70 percent. Effectively tax-free too!

It suddenly doesn’t sound so awful when you put it that way, does it. Remember, most men come out of the divorces that their wives sought happier and better off than they were before. Being around a miserable person who despises you and blames you for their various disappointments in life isn’t a desirable state of being.

Addendom 2023: While it is surely a terrible shock to the system for a man to be informed that his wife has decided to leave him – it’s happened twice in the last year to men with whom I am acquainted – in every single case that I’ve observed over the last 20 years, the abandoned man is a) happier, b) more energized, and c) going on dates with women at least 10 years younger than his ex-wife-to-be within six months of her breaking the news to him.

And let’s face it. In most cases, a woman’s decision to leave her husband is less than a complete surprise to anyone who is paying attention. Angry, unhappy, dissatisfied middle-aged women aren’t exactly famous for their stoicism or keeping their feelings to themselves. It’s not as if the Karen meme appeared on social media ex nihilo.

Divorce is also less common than it was during Peak Boomer. From one-half of ALL marriages, it’s now declined to one-third of ALL marriages, which means that a first marriage now has about a five in six chance of not ending in divorce. Throw in the reduced life expectancy of widespread vaccination, and the odds of staying married until death do you part is probably closer to nine in ten now.

Other than its generally unpleasant nature, the waste of time and money it entails, and the inevitably deleterious effect on the children, divorce really isn’t anything for the average man to fear. So, if you’re a young man who is afraid of marriage due to the perceived dangers of divorce, be aware that you risk missing out on one of the greatest and most important experiences of your life because you’re jumping at shadows.

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Not Meeting Expectations on Any Front

After months of predicted success and weeks of asserted success, the media narrative is finally beginning to accept the obvious fact of a failed Ukrainian offensive:

Ukraine’s ongoing counteroffensive against Russian forces is “not meeting expectations on any front,” Western and US officials told CNN on Thursday. Ukrainian troops and armor are proving “vulnerable” to Russian minefields, missiles, and air power, they added.

“Russian lines of defense have been proving well-fortified, making it difficult for Ukrainian forces to breach them,” CNN reported, paraphrasing the anonymous officials. “In addition, Russian forces have had success bogging down Ukrainian armor with missile attacks and mines and have been deploying air power more effectively.”

According to one official, the Russian defense has proven more “competent” than expected. However, the source insisted that the US is still “optimistic” that Ukraine will turn the failing operation around, and that Washington will re-evaluate the offensive next month.

Ukraine’s counteroffensive began on June 4 with a failed attack on Russian positions near Donetsk, according to the Russian Defense Ministry. Waves of attacks followed along the Donetsk and Zaporozhye sectors of the front line, all of which the entrenched Russian forces have managed to withstand, the ministry claimed.

The attacks have reportedly cost the Ukrainian military dearly. With their dwindling number of air defense systems weakened by Russian drones and missiles, Kiev’s forces have been unable to counter Russian jets and helicopters. Relying on armored thrusts through minefields, Ukraine lost over 13,000 troops and more than 800 tanks and armored vehicles between June 4 and 21, Russian Security Council chief Nikolay Patrushev stated on Thursday.

The US will be “optimistic” right down to the last Ukrainian. But, as Scott Ritter observes, it’s hard to be successful on the real battlefield if you’re going to build false assumptions into your training and simulation models.

Ukraine sent one of its best brigades into combat earlier this month as part of its long-awaited counteroffensive aimed at retaking areas controlled by Russian forces.

Leading the charge near the town of Orekhov, in Zaporozhye Region, was the 47th Mechanized Brigade, armed with NATO equipment and – most importantly – employing it using the US-led bloc’s combined arms doctrine and tactics. Prior to the operation, this brigade spent months at a base in Germany learning “Western know-how” in combined-arms warfare.

Helping them prepare for the fighting to come was KORA, the German-made NATO computer simulation system, designed to allow officers and non-commissioned officers to closely replicate battlefield conditions and, in doing so, better develop ideal courses of action against a designated enemy – in this case, Russia.

If there was ever an example of how a purpose-built Ukrainian NATO proxy force would perform against a Russian enemy, the 47th Brigade was the ideal case study. However, within days of initiating its attack, the group was close to literally decimated, with more than 10% of the over 100 US-made M-2 Bradley infantry fighting vehicles destroyed or abandoned on the field of battle, and hundreds of the brigade’s 2,000-strong complement dead or wounded. German-made Leopard 2 tanks and mine-clearing vehicles joined the Bradleys as wrecks in the fields west of Orekhov, having failed to breach the first line of Russian defenses. The reasons for this defeat can be boiled down to the role played by KORA in creating a false sense of confidence on the part of the officers and men of the 47th Brigade. Unfortunately, as the Ukrainians and their NATO masters found out, what works in a computer simulation does not automatically equate to battlefield success….

Logic dictates that any responsible use of the KORA simulation system would have predicted the failure of the 47th Brigade’s attack. According to The Washington Post, the officers of the 47th Brigade “planned their assaults and then let the [KORA] program show them the results – how their Russian enemies might respond, where they could make a breakthrough and where they would suffer losses.” The KORA simulation allowed the Ukrainian officers to coordinate their actions “to test how they’d work together on the battlefield.” Given that the Ukrainian force structure was insufficient to accomplish the mission-critical task of suppression, there was no chance for the Ukrainian forces to accomplish the actual assault requirements of a breaching operation – the destruction of enemy forces on the opposite side of the obstacle barrier being breached. The Ukrainians, however, came away from their KORA experience confident that they had crafted a winning plan capable of overcoming the Russian defenses in and around Orekhov.

Simulation models are only useful if they actually reflect the real situation. And if there is one thing we know about globohomo, it is that its servants believe that their imagination creates reality. Speaking as a game designer, one can safely predict that no simulation created by people who believe that a man can be a woman can be even remotely accurate.

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Taking the N Out

N stands for national. As in National Football League and National Basketball Association. Of course, NFL also stands for Not For Long.

In the wake of the effort by the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund to basically take over the PGA Tour, the Qatar Investment Authority could soon have an ownership stake in the NBA’s Washington Wizards.

Via Mike Vorkunov of TheAthletic.com, the group will buy a piece of Monumental Sports and Entertainment, which owns among other things the Wizards.

The reportedly “small stake” values the company at $4 billion. It also requires approval of the NBA’s Board of Governors. Although foreign ownership of an NBA team is unprecedented, the league has opened the door to it.

“In November 2022, the NBA Board of Governors decided to permit passive, non-controlling, minority investments in NBA teams by institutional investors, including university endowments, foreign and domestic pension funds, and sovereign wealth funds, subject to a set of policy guidelines adopted at that time,” an NBA spokesman told TheAthletic.com. “All such investments require league review, NBA Board approval and compliance with the policy.”

The NFL currently allows individual ownership only, but there has been talk of expanding the universe of potential ownership interests to counter the struggles associated with finding individuals having enough cash to buy at least 30 percent of a team from the get-go.

There can be no doubt about it any longer. The money owners, as opposed to the sports owners, are ruining every sport they have invaded. Jerry Jones has proved to be a cancer.

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Those Pesky Mathematics

A physicist proves that black holes cannot exist:

Laura Mersini-Houghton, a physics professor at UNC-Chapel Hill in the College of Arts and Sciences, has proven, mathematically, that black holes can never come into being in the first place.

The work not only forces scientists to reimagine the fabric of space-time, but also rethink the origins of the universe.

“I’m still not over the shock,” said Mersini-Houghton. “We’ve been studying this problem for a more than 50 years and this solution gives us a lot to think about.”

For decades, black holes were thought to form when a massive star collapses under its own gravity to a single point in space – imagine the Earth being squished into a ball the size of a peanut – called a singularity. So the story went, an invisible membrane known as the event horizon surrounds the singularity and crossing this horizon means that you could never cross back. It’s the point where a black hole’s gravitational pull is so strong that nothing can escape it.

The reason black holes are so bizarre is that it pits two fundamental theories of the universe against each other. Einstein’s theory of gravity predicts the formation of black holes but a fundamental law of quantum theory states that no information from the universe can ever disappear.

Efforts to combine these two theories lead to mathematical nonsense, and became known as the information loss paradox.

In 1974, Stephen Hawking used quantum mechanics to show that black holes emit radiation. Since then, scientists have detected fingerprints in the cosmos that are consistent with this radiation, identifying an ever-increasing list of the universe’s black holes.

But now Mersini-Houghton describes an entirely new scenario. She and Hawking both agree that as a star collapses under its own gravity, it produces Hawking radiation. However, in her new work, Mersini-Houghton shows that by giving off this radiation, the star also sheds mass. So much so that as it shrinks it no longer has the density to become a black hole.

Before a black hole can form, the dying star swells one last time and then explodes. A singularity never forms and neither does an event horizon. The take home message of her work is clear: there is no such thing as a black hole.

Assuming that she got the numbers right, it will be interesting to see if astrophysicists accept the math that disproves the existence of black holes any more gracefully than biologists have accepted the math that disproves the existence of evolution by natural selection.

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So Much for the Wunderwaffen

Ukrainian armored troops are less than keen about taking their Leopard tanks into battle:

Ukrainian tank crews have been faking malfunctions on their tanks to justify not going into combat against Russian forces, fellow soldiers operating German Leopards have told Der Spiegel magazine. The revelation was part of a frontline report published by the news outlet.

The magazine spoke to three German-trained Ukrainian troops who were among the crew of two Leopard 2A6 tanks provided to Kiev by the Bundeswehr.

The report cites a loader nicknamed Gutsik, who claimed that some crews fake technical malfunctions to avoid being sent to the frontline. He reportedly told the magazine that dodging an engagement altogether was better than entering combat only to pull out after the first shot.

Another said he didn’t blame those who are refusing.

“If they hit the turret, you’re a heap of ashes,” a man identified as Misha told Spiegel.

Remember, this is not a Russian report. It’s a German one directly quoting Ukrainian soldiers. So it’s not propaganda. I expect that NATO pilots, of every state including the USA, are even more determined to avoid flying in the teeth of Russia’s air defenses. What are F-16s supposed to do against air defense systems designed to shoot down planes two generations newer?

It would be like flying Sopwith Camels against Yakovlev Yak-9Us.

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Wednesday Arktoons

ALT★HERO Episode 77: Battle Plan

THE LOST ERA TRANSCRIPTS Episode 2: First Story

FAIRY DOOR Episode 26: Vi’s Price

A MIND PROGRAMMED Episode 24: Medical Emergency

THE TUNNELS OF WOE Episode 1: Chapter 1: The Nameless Thing

CHATEAU GRIEF Episode 257: Details Are Sketchy

We’re pleased to welcome two new series, THE TUNNELS OF WOE and THE LOST ERA TRANSCRIPTS. The TRANSCRIPTS are not a comic, but rather, a graphic record of the world we have lost, as explained in the Introduction.

Pete Hampton was a wildly eccentric, some would say ‘mad’ genius. He was a painter, naturalist, and showman. His paintings and stories told of his adventures in the Puente Hills in Whittier, and La Habra Heights, California.

As a child, Pete displayed a passionate love of nature, and a tremendous talent for depicting the world around him. In his youth he saw this pastoral corner of Southern California give way to the post WWII housing boom. Miles of grove land, and the beautiful hillsides fell to housing tracts, and shopping malls. Pete’s life became a mission. He was determined to save the remaining hills from development.

To accomplish this mission he painted thousands of pictures of the life and countryside he grew up in. He created slide shows of his paintings in the hope that people would see his shows, and be inspired to join him in his crusade.

The Lost Era slide show was begun in 1961, but never completed. In the archives of Pete’s work I discovered the hand written note books and fragments of the narration for the show, along with hundreds of paintings that accompanied the narrative. I have re-created the slide show here in book form in The Lost Era Transcripts.

Through Pete Hampton’s art you will view one of the untouched pastoral corners still remaining in mid-century Southern California.

You’ll get an intimate look into the strange world of this most eccentric genius, a world of transcendent beauty, and breath taking terror.

https://www.arkhaven.com/comics/historical/the-lost-era-transcripts
THE LOST ERA TRANSCRIPTS

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Why “Posterity” Matters

Six years ago, I debated Col. Tom Kratman on the topic of what the word “posterity” means in the context of the U.S. Constitution, specifically, the preamble which declares to whom the Constitution and the Bill of Rights applies.

I was correct, of course, to point out that posterity meant only the American Revolutionaries and their descendants, which is why the rights protected by the U.S. Constitution do not apply to many U.S. residents and even citizens. If you are not a direct descendant of an American Revolutionary, then the Constitution does not apply to you, no matter what the U.S. Supreme Court might claim.

The importance of correct interpretation of historical legal terms can be seen in the recent protest by the Global Times against sovereign U.S. States passing laws against foreign entities buying up their land.

CNN reported on Monday that “a growing number of states are considering or have passed measures this legislative term to ban ‘foreign adversaries’ and foreign entities – specifically China – from buying farmland.” These bills could violate the US Constitution, and also fuel an atmosphere of racism and anti-China sentiment.

Against the backdrop of increasingly strong anti-China sentiment in the US, it seems the “land purchase ban” is an inevitable product. Regarding the “land purchase ban,” several US-China relations experts interviewed by CNN warned against knee-jerk responses and called for lawmakers to act on evidence, not suspicion. There are certainly some rational people in the US who can see that this approach violates the US Constitution. However, in the current political atmosphere in the US, all anti-China actions are politically correct domestically, those who are willing to come out and speak up are the minority and their voices are often ignored.

The Posterity for whom the Constitution is intended to defend the Blessings of Liberty consists solely of the genetic descendants of the People of the several and united States. Posterity does not include immigrants, descendants of immigrants, invaders, conquerors, tourists, students, Americans born in Portugal, or anyone else who happens to subsequently reside in the same geographic location, or share the same civic ideals, as the original We the People.

Nor does it include sovereign foreign governments.

But as you can see, once the definition of “posterity” is expanded past its true and proper meaning, there is no reason it cannot be further expanded into a universal principle. Which, of course, is complete nonsense, and thereby demonstrates the practical impossibility of every other interpretation.

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