The Problem with Word Spells

Is that the words were originally created for a coherent and consistent reason. Michael Hudson explains that the purpose of the current US military doesn’t actually have much to do with historical military purposes:

Military, for the United States, is different from what the word ‘military’ meant in every other society from the beginning of time. When you say military, you think of an army fighting. You cannot conquer a country without invading it, and to invade it, you obviously need an army, you need troops. But the Americans can’t mount an army, of enough size, to occupy anybody except Grenada, or Panama, because the Vietnam War stopped the military draft. What America does have, what it calls military, is what you quite rightly linked it to: the military industrial complex. It makes arms. And weapons.

But again, these are a funny kind of weapons. Suppose you had a winery that made wine that was so good, that really wasn’t for drinking. It was for wealthy people to buy, and to trade. And as the years go by, the wine would turn to vinegar. It’s not wine for drinking. It’s wine for making a profit, a capital gain.

Well, you can say the same thing about America’s military arms, as we’re seeing in Ukraine right now — or as President Biden calls it, Iraq. The arms, basically, are there to create a huge profit for Raytheon, and the other companies in the military industrial complex. They’re for buying, and they’re for giving to the Ukrainians, to let Russia blow them up.

But they’re not for fighting. They’re not for winning a war. They’re for being used up, so you have to replace them now, with yet new buying. And so the United States State Department has asked Germany and other European countries, well, you’d promised to pay 2% of your GDP on military arms to enrich our military industrial complex.

But now that we’ve given all these tanks and missiles away – Russia just blew up 12% of all the tanks in just one week – so we only have a few weeks left to go before they’re all wiped out. Because they really don’t work on the battlefield. They’re not for fighting, they’re for being blown up. Now we want you to actually increase your spending to 4%, to replenish all of the stocks, you’ve just depleted, 10 years, maybe 20 years, of your arms stocks. And you have to now replenish them very rapidly, in order to meet the NATO targets, that we and the State Department, have set. So military today isn’t really how you control other countries. America’s found it much easier to do this by financial mechanisms.

You conquer a country financially, you conquer a country by getting it to submit to austerity programs by the International Monetary Fund, again, to impose austerity, to keep its local wages down. So you use finance as a means of imposing post-industrialization and depression, in order to prevent democracy from developing.

So any country that is seeking to promote a democracy by public spending on basic infrastructure, or banking, like China is doing, is called an autocracy. And every autocracy that has imposed a client oligarchy, to fight against labor, and to prevent these policies that would help enrich and industrialize the economy, is called a democracy, not an autocracy.

So we’re back in the Orwellian logic to describe a situation, that probably even the cynical George Orwell, would not have thought could go quite this far.

Much like the famous aphorism about the Holy Roman Empire, the Military-Industrial Complex can’t wage war, has no industrial capacity, and really isn’t difficult to understand.

Redefine a word all you want, but don’t expect the redefined version to perform its original function.

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Devil Mouse Doubles Down

The Dark Herald reports that Disney is extending Bob Iger’s contract through 2026:

Bob Iger is the one that has put Disney in the disastrous position it’s in today. He overpaid drastically for Fox Entertainment by a factor of 100%, he let Kevin Fiege dismantle the machinery that had turned Marvel into a box office juggernaut, he allowed Kathleen Kennedy to continue driving the LucasFilm cart into the ground long after the wheels were sold off on eBay and he fired John Lassetter, replacing him with the utterly hopeless Pete Docter. The parks are empty at the height of the busy season, with the disastrous launch of Indiana Jones V the film division has lost a billion dollars since the collapse of Lightyear, and there are still two more candidates for box office martyrdom waiting in the wings before New Year’s Day. Also, Disney+, the thing that was supposed to spearhead Disney’s drive to complete streaming dominance has lost $1 billion per quarter since it was launched, and it just dropped behind Warner Brother’s Max streaming service.

According to Disney’s own documents they only have $10 billion in cash, that is somewhere between 3 to 6 weeks of operating capital on hand at any given time.

I think it would be beneficial for Karl Denninger and other materialists who sincerely believe that money, and the pursuit of it, is the primary cause of evil in the modern world to revisit their assumptions in light of the observed behavior of the corpocracy and the Western governments over the last two decades.

I assert a review of the available evidence and the application of Ockham’s Razor will inevitably lead to the conclusion that a) spiritual wickedness and b) control over the public are the primary motivating forces for the evil that we see indefatigably at work in the corpocracy today.

How much more money do they collectively have to lose in the pursuit of unprofitable evil for it to become inarguable that the evil is a motivation rather than an unfortunate and happenstantial coincidence?

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The Ink Wall Crumbles

Once more, we learn that /pol/ is always right. The “BBC Presenter” is confirmed to be Huw Edwards, the presenter of BBC News at Ten.

Huw Edwards’ wife Vicky Flind names him as BBC star at centre of ‘£35k sex pics scandal’: Statement issued on presenter’s behalf claims he is in hospital suffering from ‘serious mental health issues’ – as Met Police say ‘no offence has been committed’

It’s just so obnoxious to see how the media doesn’t hesitate to go out of their way to identify people of whom they don’t approve, while fighting like rabid dogs to hide the identities of celebrities and their fellow media figures whenever they are accused of wrongdoing of some kind.

Stars rally round Huw Edwards as John Simpson and ex-BBC stars Dan Walker and Jon Sopel share support for their former colleague.

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The Military Wing of Clown World

The New York Times admits that NATO exists to control the European nations, not defend them:

Many observers expected NATO to close shop after the collapse of its Cold War rival. But in the decade after 1989, the organization truly came into its own. NATO acted as a ratings agency for the European Union in Eastern Europe, declaring countries secure for development and investment. The organization pushed would-be partners to adhere to a liberal, pro-market creed, according to which — as President Bill Clinton’s national security adviser put it — “the pursuit of democratic institutions, the expansion of free markets” and “the promotion of collective security” marched in lock step. European military professionals and reform-minded elites formed a willing constituency, their campaigns boosted by NATO’s information apparatus.

When European populations proved too stubborn, or undesirably swayed by socialist or nationalist sentiments, Atlantic integration proceeded all the same. The Czech Republic was a telling case. Faced with a likely “no” vote in a referendum on joining the alliance in 1997, the secretary general and top NATO officials saw to it that the government in Prague simply dispense with the exercise; the country joined two years later. The new century brought more of the same, with an appropriate shift in emphasis. Coinciding with the global war on terrorism, the “big bang” expansion of 2004 — in which seven countries acceded — saw counterterrorism supersede democracy and human rights in alliance rhetoric. Stress on the need for liberalization and public sector reforms remained a constant.

In the realm of defense, the alliance was not as advertised. For decades, the United States has been the chief provider of weapons, logistics, air bases and battle plans. The war in Ukraine, for all the talk of Europe stepping up, has left that asymmetry essentially untouched. Tellingly, the scale of U.S. military aid — $47 billion over the first year of the conflict — is more than double that offered by European Union countries combined. European spending pledges may also turn out to be less impressive than they appear. More than a year after the German government publicized the creation of a special $110 billion fund for its armed forces, the bulk of the credits remain unused. In the meantime, German military commanders have said that they lack sufficient munitions for more than two days of high-intensity combat.

Whatever the levels of expenditure, it is remarkable how little military capability Europeans get for the outlays involved. Lack of coordination, as much as penny-pinching, hamstrings Europe’s ability to ensure its own security. By forbidding duplication of existing capabilities and prodding allies to accept niche roles, NATO has stymied the emergence of any semiautonomous European force capable of independent action. As for defense procurement, common standards for interoperability, coupled with the sheer size of the U.S. military-industrial sector and bureaucratic impediments in Brussels, favor American firms at the expense of their European competitors. The alliance, paradoxically, appears to have weakened allies’ ability to defend themselves.

Yet the paradox is only superficial. In fact, NATO is working exactly as it was designed by postwar U.S. planners, drawing Europe into a dependency on American power that reduces its room for maneuver. Far from a costly charity program, NATO secures American influence in Europe on the cheap.

In related news, Germany has announced that it is sending its last 20,000 155mm artillery shells to Ukraine, along with 25 more Leopard tanks, which along with the 29 Leopards previously provided, represent 24 percent of its total armor. By the current rate of usage in Ukraine, the ammunition will last just under one week.

This is an astonishingly risky decision by the German government, since once Russia wins the war of attrition and completely depletes all NATO stocks, it may find that it has the option of rolling all the way to the English channel without any meaningful opposition even if it previously had no intention of doing so.

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NATO Failed Sun Tzu 101

NATO did not know its enemy in Ukraine.

When I was in officer school, pre-1991, NATO was less dependent on air-superiority than it is today. We also had some good air defense systems. Our artillery was not superior to the Soviet one but was well layered – from short, medium to long ranged systems – and would have created very significant damages. We also had good pioneer equipment that allowed for the crossing rivers and ditches as well as serious mine fields.

All this changed after the 1991 Gulf war in which U.S. air superiority and tank fist destroyed the Iraqi defense forces. That war was misconstrued as a big win when it in fact was simply the effect of a by far superior professional force over a unmotivated conscript army with old and often defunct weapons.

As an effect of the first Gulf war and later operations in Serbia, Afghanistan and again in Iraq the believe in NATO air-land doctrine was reinforced. Air superiority was the holy grail while the strong land force capabilities atrophied. An emphasis on guerilla suppression and on vehicles that could withstand simple improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in Iraq and Afghanistan further unbalanced the force.

It explains why the Ukrainian troops were miss-trained and miss-equipped for a counter-offensive even when the opposing force was a much harder to crack one than some goat herders from Helmand, Afghanistan.

I’m pretty sure NATO would also fail the other half of the equation too. And, at any rate, you don’t need to worry about Sun Tzu when you’ve already failed W. Edwards Deming 101.

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The Non-Diplomacy Dance

It’s rather amusing to watch Clown World attempting to do diplomacy without actually going through the traditional diplomatic exercises in order to maintain its facade of complete control of the situation.

NATO leaders will “send a clear and positive signal” to Kiev regarding Ukraine’s aspiration to join NATO, Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told journalists ahead of a two-day summit in Lithuania. The country will be able to skip one of the normal steps for candidates, he predicted.

The official said he proposed to member states to “remove the requirement for Membership Action Plan (MAP)” for Ukraine. This will change the accession path “from a two-step process to a one step process,” he explained during a conference on Tuesday.

In absolutely-related news, Turkey has unexpectedly dropped its opposition to Sweden’s entry into NATO.

NATO has cleared the way for Sweden to join the Western military alliance by persuading Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to end his opposition to Stockholm’s bid.

Persuading = large cash payments. But hey, whatever works, right?

All of this frantic non-diplomacy diplomacy is meant to “send a message” to Russia, which is completely futile since Russia doesn’t consider NATO or the USA to be “agreement-capable” and the entire world now knows that NATO is ‘victory-incapable”. The idea is to threaten Russia with a full-scale direct confrontation with NATO, and the problem is that the threat is simply not a credible one now that NATO’s ammunition and armor stores have been significantly depleted.

Meanwhile, Russia is growing stronger by the month, as its productive capacity is growing and it is building more tanks and APVs than it is losing. More importantly, the NATO calculation relies upon its own alliance while completely failing to take into account the extent to which Russia’s allies are capable of assisting it, both in terms of supplies and siphoning off NATO resources to other theaters.

I’d always thought that it would be the loss of several aircraft carriers that would signify the end of the US empire. But it increasingly appears that it is the combination of economic and military futility being exposed in Ukraine that will do so instead. And the longer this process continues to play out and methodically weaken the infrastructure of Clown World, the better it will be for the sovereign nations and the American posterity.

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