Tag: decline and fall

There is No Catching Up

Andrei Martyanov explains why it’s not just the loss of US industrial capacity that has hamstrung its once-superlative military infrastructure and rendered the US military incapable of defeating Russia, China, or quite possibly, even Yemen.

In theory the US may build, in the next 10+ years, some facilities to increase production of 155-mm shells or drones. But it will not be able to match industrial capacity of Russia in this respect, even with theoretical addition of future, if any, European capacity. The issue here is not just quantity–the target impossible to reach due to utter destruction of US manufacturing base and an extremely complex supply chains for military production. This all is just the tip of the iceberg. The main body of the iceberg is a complete catastrophe that the US military doctrine, and, as a result, procurement development is.
I spoke about it for years–some gaps, such as in air defense or missilery the US will not be able to close, because as I type this, this gap continues to grow. It is measured not in years but in generations. This is, as an example, the result of misguided and illiterate approach to air defense based on… air power. You have to literally undo the whole thing, and this requires not just building some facilities, but a complete rethinking of America’s defense or, rather, “offense” philosophy which doesn’t work. It never did. This is impossible in the present state of the American geopolitical thought without rethinking the United States as it perceived itself in the last hundred years. The US has no courage, intellect and will to do so because it leads to a destruction of America’s mythology.

So, the US is stuck. So, it is good that John Mearsheimer understands parts of it, but he doesn’t understand the heart of the matter. After the US strategically and operationally “planned” VSU’s “counteroffensive”, the question of the competence of the US military establishment arose and was answered–it is incompetent! It will take a generation or two to even teach those who are currently in the plebe years in US service academies to think properly and within the framework of America’s REAL military and industrial capability. This REAL capability has nothing in common with the US halcyon years of WW II and after and it is not coming back. Russia will not allow the US to unleash the war in Europe while thinking that the US can sit this one out again behind the ocean. Doesn’t work like this anymore, especially with the construction tempo of Russia Navy’s subs such as 3M22 Zircon carriers Yasen-class subs and frigates which already have Zircons deployed. These are technologies the US simply doesn’t have and are nowhere near of getting them. China can rely on them, and much more from Russia in case of the US deciding to commit suicide, the US cannot.

It is grim picture of corruption, financial and, most importantly, intellectual within the US military and foreign policy establishment, and what John Mearsheimer fails to understand–these are not just some pieces of hardware whose utility the US suddenly recognized. Nope, the REAL experience of SMO is way more than technological, it is above all operational and strategic, which made Russia’s General Staff a well-oiled machine which merely uses 404 as a trap and a junkyard for NATO’s military capacity, because Russia fights not Ukraine, she fights NATO.

Having read two of Martyanov’s excellent books on US military and imperial decline, both of which were written and published well before the beginning of the Russian special military operation in Ukraine, it’s clear that he’s identified something that goes well beyond the common level of military analysis in the Western think tanks.

What he’s talking about here is neither the loss of US industry nor the inability of the US to design, build, and procure hypersonic missiles, inexpensive missile platforms, and squad-level drone swarms. It’s not even the demographic changes, and the fact that the USA is now an empire with a foreign elite ruling over a melange of peoples who have no connection to the heritage Americans or even first-wave immigrants who fought its previous wars. What’s he’s talking about is the fundamental failure of the US military strategists to understand the realities of military power and the way that a sea-based naval power accustomed to relatively small expeditionary conflicts well away from home simply doesn’t possess the operational and strategic capability to defeat a massive land-based power that is on a reasonably similar technological level.

Britain couldn’t defeat France. The USA couldn’t defeat Germany. And Athens lost to Sparta in the end.

DISCUSS ON SG

Everyone Watched… and Learned

Thomas Friedman was correct about the battle in Ukraine being massively significant with regards to the future direction of the world, but he had it precisely backwards with regards to what the inevitable conclusions of the various third parties watching the conflict would be.

While the battle on the ground that triggered World War Wired is ostensibly over who should control Ukraine, do not be fooled. This has quickly turned into “the big battle” between the two most dominant political systems in the world today: free-market, “rule-of-law democracy versus authoritarian kleptocracy,” the Swedish expert on the Russian economy Anders Aslund remarked to me.

Though this war is far from over, and Vladimir Putin may still find a way to prevail and come out stronger, if he doesn’t, it could be a watershed in the conflict between democratic and undemocratic systems. It is worth recalling that World War II put an end to fascism, and that the Cold War put an end to orthodox communism, eventually even in China. So, what happens on the streets of Kyiv, Mariupol and the Donbas region could influence political systems far beyond Ukraine and far into the future.

Indeed, other autocratic leaders, like China’s, are watching Russia carefully. They see its economy being weakened by Western sanctions, thousands of its young technologists fleeing to escape a government denying them access to the internet and credible news and its inept army seemingly unable to gather, share and funnel accurate information to the top. Those leaders have to be asking themselves: “Holy cow — am I that vulnerable? Am I presiding over a similar house of cards?”

Everyone is watching.

Putin Had No Clue How Many of Us Would Be Watching, THE NEW YORK TIMES, 4 August 2022

Directly counter to the Clown World narrative, it is the self-styled “democratic” systems championed by credentialed neoclowns like Friedman that have been exposed as ineffective and fragile frauds. In fact, in his 2018 book entitled Losing Military Supremacy, Andrei Martyanov described as “the strategic folly of the 21st century” something that has already come to pass.

In what can only be described as the strategic folly of the 21st century—the United States missed a historic opportunity to ally with Russia based on equal and mutually beneficial relations. This opportunity today is gone. Pushing Russia, through condescension, blackmail, humiliation and ignorance, away from itself in the 1990s, the United States committed the cardinal sin of Anglo-Saxon and now neo-conservative geopolitical calculus—they pushed Russia and China together, while simultaneously providing China with all the necessary tools, from investment to access to markets, thus making her the largest economy in the world. Today, the United States faces two nuclear and industrial superpowers, one of which fields a world-class armed forces. If the military-political, as opposed to merely economic, alliance between Russia and China, is ever formalized—this will spell the final doom for the United States as a global power. 

Andrei Martyanov LOSING MILITARY SUPREMACY, 2018

That military-politico-economic alliance has already been formalized in the form of BRICS, and exceeds the scope of which Martyanov expected would be necessary to “spell the final doom of the United States as a global power”. WWIII is already as over as WWII was the moment Japan attacked Pearl Harbor; given the combined demographic and industrial power that BRICS can bring to bear, the eventual outcome is not even remotely in doubt. While there are still a lot of questions of what the post-WWIII, post-Clown World world, post-liberal world will look like, and who will be the foremost power, there can be absolutely no doubt about which side is going to win it. And it’s not going to be NATO, the USA, the liberal world order, or Clown World.

History is a reliable guide in this context. All the geostrategic analysis, however excellent, isn’t even necessary. The oldest society and its decadent empire ruled by foreigners, with its massive amount of debt and an aging currency, never wins. It is always eventually challenged, then superseded, by nations with newer and less-corrupted societal organizations.

Clown World and its liberal Enlightenment philosophy has had a successful, though not particularly long historical run. But its fundamental philosophies have proven themselves to be both false, as well as an insufficient foundation for national, or even societal, survival. Its fate is certain and its collapse has begun, although it obviously hasn’t been completed yet.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Failure of the Artificial Nation

An insightful observation by Andrei Martyanov from his 2018 book Losing Military Supremacy : the myopia of American strategic planning:

“The Americans in their intercourse with strangers appear impatient of the smallest censure and insatiable of praise. The most slender eulogium is acceptable to them; the most exalted seldom contents them; they unceasingly harass you to extort praise, and if you resist their entreaties they fall to praising themselves.“

The American vaingloriousness described by Tocqueville has today become a clear and present danger to the world and it is, in the end, a direct threat to what’s left of America’s democratic institutions and processes. It threatens a shaky republic and it is embedded in the very foundation of a now increasingly obvious American decline. Of course, there are many opinions about American decline on the public discussion stage—some opinions reject the whole idea of an American decline out of hand as propaganda; others go to the other extreme by proposing an imminent collapse and disintegration of the United States into several states. What is lost in this contentious debate is the troubling fact of the very real and very dangerous decline of American cognitive faculties, which is also accompanied by what Robert Reilly termed de-Hellenization—a complete loss of sound reasoning across the whole spectrum of national activities from foreign policy, to economics, to war, to culture.

This decline is more than visible, it is omnipresent in the everyday lives of many Americans and even affects people from other nations and continents. This decline has deeper roots than the mere change of some economic paradigm, albeit this too matters a great deal. It portends a total existential crisis of American national mythology—a crisis of the American soul that has nothing to do with the superficial, mass-media driven ideological or party affiliations—rather, it is the decline of a national consensus. This decline reflects the American failure to form a real nation, a process which, as paradoxical as it may sound, was prevented by a sequence of historic events in the 20th century, which turned the tables on American fortunes.

That vaingloriousness and sense of exceptionalism has proven fatal, as it was exploited ruthlessly by the foreign invaders who played expertly upon the concept of “an idea nation” and “a nation of immigrants”. But contrary to those who would blame the decline of the USA solely on the two Jewish invasions – really three, in light of the Jackson-Vanik Amendment of 1974 – the seeds of the failure of Americans to successfully build a genuine nation were observably present long before the first major wave of immigration from Central Europe peaked in 1850 and the violent transformation of a Republic to an Empire in 1865.

Martyanov’s observations concerning why the USA lost its post-WWII military supremacy are particularly significant now that events in Syria, Ukraine, and the Red Sea have demonstrated to the entire world that the former superpower no longer has the ability to reliably enforce its will outside of its continental region of influence. More importantly, his diagnosis strongly suggests that the situation is not one that is amenable to fixing due to way in which the problems are not political or ideological, but intrinsic and foundational.

An artificial nation cannot, in the long term, be expected to remain cohesive and victorious in the face of a challenge from a genuine nation of similar power. This is an important military lesson, not only for the remnants of heritage America, but also for the would-be builders of a pan-European nation as well as the architects of the unitary Israeli nation, both of whom are twice-dependent upon the concept.

DISCUSS ON SG

Sykes-Picot is Dead

The Sykes–Picot Agreement, officially known as the Asia Minor Agreement, was a secret agreement between the governments of the United Kingdom and France, with the assent of Russia, defining their proposed spheres of influence and control in the Middle East should the Triple Entente succeed in defeating the Ottoman Empire during World War I. The negotiation of the treaty occurred between November 1915 and March 1916. The agreement was concluded on 16 May 1916. The agreement effectively divided the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire outside the Arabian peninsula into areas of future British and French control or influence.

Pepe Escobar describes the geo-strategic significance of the Yemeni-imposed restrictions on Red Sea traffic and how they have proven vastly more effective than the G7 sanctions on Russia:

In chess, there always comes a time when a simple pawn is able to upset the whole chessboard, usually via a move in the back rank whose effect simply cannot be calculated.

Yes, a pawn can impose a seismic checkmate. That’s where we are, geopolitically, right now.

The cascading effects of a single move on the chessboard – Yemen’s Ansarallah stunning and carefully targeted blockade of the Red Sea – reach way beyond global shipping, supply chains, and The War of Economic Corridors. Not to mention the reduction of the much lauded US Navy force projection to irrelevancy.

Yemen’s resistance movement, Ansarallah, has made it very clear that any Israel-affiliated or Israel-destined vessel will be intercepted. While the west bristles at this, and imagines itself a target, the rest of the world fully understands that all other shipping is free to pass. Russian tankers – as well as Chinese, Iranian, and Global South ships – continue to move undisturbed across the Bab al-Mandeb (narrowest point: 33 km) and the Red Sea.

Only the Hegemon is disturbed by this challenge to its ‘rules-based order.’ It is outraged that western vessels delivering energy or goods to law-breaking Israel can be impeded, and that the supply chain has been severed and plunged into deep crisis. The pinpointed target is the Israeli economy, which is already bleeding heavily. A single Yemeni move proves to be more efficient than a torrent of imperial sanctions.

It is the tantalizing possibility of this single move turning into a paradigm shift – with no return – that is adding to the Hegemon’s apoplexy. Especially because imperial humiliation is deeply embedded in the paradigm shift.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, on the record, is now sending an unmistakeable message: Forget the Suez Canal. The way to go is the Northern Sea Route – which the Chinese, in the framework of the Russia-China strategic partnership, call the Arctic Silk Road.

For the dumbfounded Europeans, the Russians have detailed three options: First, sail 15,000 miles around the Cap of Good Hope. Second, use Russia’s cheaper and faster Northern Sea Route. Third, send the cargo via Russian Railways.

Rosatom, which oversees the Northern Sea Route, has emphasized that non-ice-class ships are now able to sail throughout summer and autumn, and year-round navigation will soon be possible with the help of a fleet of nuclear icebreakers.

All that as direct consequences of the single Yemeni move. What next? Yemen entering BRICS+ at the summit in Kazan in late 2024, under the Russian presidency?

The US-led Armada put together for Operation Genocide Protection, which collapsed even before birth, may have been set up to “warn Iran,” apart from giving Ansarallah a scare. Just as the Houthis, Tehran is hardly intimidated because, as West Asia analyst ace Alastair Crooke succinctly put it: “Sykes-Picot is dead.”

This is a quantum shift on the chessboard. It means West Asian powers will frame the new regional architecture from now on, not US Navy “projection.”

That carries an ineffable corollary: those eleven US aircraft carrier task forces, for all practical purposes, are essentially worthless.

How Yemen changed everything, PEPE ESCOBAR, 28 December 2023

I find this move by the Yemenis, presumably made in coordination with China, Russia, and several of the Arab nations, to be utterly fascinating, and more importantly, indicative of how far ahead of Clown World the BRICS strategists appear to be thinking. While I was certain that the impotence of the US Navy was a) going to be demonstrated before 2030 and b) that demonstration would have a significant effect on the way in which the nations regarded Clown World going forward, I assumed that it would be necessary for someone to sink a carrier or three in order to demonstrate that impotence.

But this is a much more elegant approach, as the observable reluctance of the US Navy to risk any direct engagement with what is, on the international scale, a sixth-rate power, demonstrates that impotence even more clearly than the loss of an entire carrier task force in the South China Sea could. After all, only Russia possesses the striking power of the Chinese military, but most of the nations in the world have resources that exceed that of Yemen; even the military capabilities of Croatia and The Democratic Republic of the Congo are rated ahead of Yemen in the 2023 Global Firepower rankings.

It’s one thing for Russia to prove that the Empire can’t push it around, it’s another thing for the nation ranked 74th in the world to do so.

If it is not yet clear to everyone that the US empire is in rapid decline, we can be confident that it is entirely apparent to everyone whose opinion matters.

UPDATE: Meanwhile, the US government continues to demonstrate that it has not yet learned anything from the consequences of its recent attempts to poke the bear.

The United States has called for working groups from the Group of Seven (G7) countries to explore ways to confiscate hundreds of billions of dollars in frozen Russian assets, the Financial Times reported this week. The United States, backed by the UK, Japan and Canada, has proposed setting up preparatory work for expropriating over $300 billion in Russian foreign exchange reserves that were immobilized by Western nations after the start of the Ukraine conflict.

The EU, where most of the assets are blocked, is more wary of a direct confiscation, fearing possible retaliation from Moscow if the money is taken. Currently, €210 billion ($230 billion) of Russia’s reserves are held in the bloc’s financial institutions, with €191 billion in Belgium, €19 billion in France, and €7.8 billion in non-member Switzerland.

Stealing Russian assets is not the greatest plan in the world when Russia is going to be in a position to simply march some of its 1.5 million mobilized troops into some of those nations and take whatever it wants from whomever it wants within the next two years. Notice that the G7 countries which are within marching distance don’t appear to be quite as enthusiastic about offering Moscow yet another casus belli.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Consequences of Rejecting Truth

Vagrant of Rhodes observes the obvious and inescapable consequences of intentionally choosing to believe lies over the historical and observable truth:

“Migrant” parasites bragging openly about ethnically cleansing their host nations, while the rulers of those very host nations proclaim it isn’t happening, pretty much sums up what’s going on. We are witnessing the purposeful extinction of entire civilizations and barely anyone seems to even care enough to comment on the problem. In fact, every ounce of institutional power in those very host nations seems to be focused solely on bringing this extinction to fruition.

The sad part about this is that the “migrants” parasites are actually correct. In a generation, nations like Denmark, Sweden, or Germany simply will cease to exist because they’ve been replaced and genocided from the face of the earth. What’s so bizarre is that many of these places seem content to simply evaporate themselves and fork their entire heritage over to foreign conquerors, happily committing cultural suicide to maintain the so-called “principles” that led them to their own extinction.

Historians will struggle to understand this period in history, but it simply comes down to one thing: pride. Westerners view themselves with such pride and arrogance that they believe such actions are well worth the consequences. This is because they do not believe in higher power, in human nature, in truth, or in God’s justice. They see only themselves, and how to make themselves feel better, superior, or gratified in the moment. They see their own children murdered in the street, their own churches burned, their own homes stolen, and they say “I don’t want to be racist” to make themselves feel superior instead of fighting back for what’s just and righteous. They think that in order to further liberal values, they must give up everything they are or ever were to assimilate into the globo-borg and it’s false promise of eternal pleasure.

This is the poison pill in Western society: it tells you that your people and your history are meaningless, that you are simply an economic pawn in a machine of consumerism, that you are untethered from reality and should live only to indulge yourself. This insidious lie is coated in the honey of false proclamations of “peace”, “democracy”, “individualism”, “cosmopolitanism”, “diversity”, etc. All of these so-called liberal values simply lull the population into accepting the ultimate result of this system – extinction – by giving them a reason to temporarily feel better about themselves.

MPAI is a lamentable, but absolute fact. And the smug, self-centered idiots of the West have foolishly chosen to believe the lies of the children of the devil, from the lie that a nation can be an idea to the lie that a man can be a woman. The average individual of the West is such a herd animal that he would literally rather see his line, his nation, and his faith exterminated than be ostracized for violating the Narrative by speaking the historical and observable truth.

But those who deny the truth will, sooner or later, be run over by the train called Reality.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Collapse of the Coalition

Even Clown World’s European satrapies are beginning to refuse to go along with the USA’s desperate attempts to shore up the edges of empire:

Australia is the latest country to reject a request from the United States to send warships to the Red Sea under the command of the Pentagon’s Operation Prosperity Guardian to protect commercial vessels along the critical maritime trade route from Iran-backed Houthi.

Defense Minister Richard Marles told Sky News that Australia’s military would not send a “ship or a plane” to the Red Sea but would triple the number of troops for the US-led maritime force. “We need to be really clear around our strategic focus and our strategic focus is our region,” Marles said.

The Pentagon’s formation of Operation Prosperity Guardian, a new task force to protect shipping from Houthi drone and missile attacks in the Bab Al-Mandeb Strait and the Red Sea, requires increased warship patrols by the US and allies. This will create a security umbrella over commercial vessels to defend from attacks.

Reuters said about twenty countries have signed up for the Pentagon’s new operation. However, several countries, including Australia, Spain, Italy, and France, have rejected the Pentagon’s request to participate in the operation.

These coalitions usually aren’t more than diplomatic cover for US troops, but in this case, the involvement of the lesser navies is actually necessary in the hopes of preventing the Houthis from sinking a US warship and thereby revealing the naked state of the US military. These hopes were always futile, however, since it’s pretty obvious that while Hezbollah, Iran, Russia, and China are all being cautious about directly attacking US military assets without the benefit of US camouflage – such as the Rangers and Patriot missile teams in Ukraine, for example – the Houthis appear to be very nearly ready to take on all comers as the Taliban.

None of this is happening by accident. The unrestricted and asymmetrical nature of the conflicts popping up one by one around the world, combined with China’s apparent quiescence, is very much in keeping with the geopolitical strategy laid out 24 years ago by the Chinese military. The fact that the neoclown strategists are keeping at least one very wary eye on China, despite its seeming lack of involvement in any of these conflicts and close calls from Gaza to Georgia, tends to suggest that the imperial advisers are well aware of this.

It may be another decade of this death-by-one-thousand-cuts warfare before China bestirs itself to openly challenge the Empire. Or it may only be a few more months before one or another of the various fronts that have been opened collapses. But regardless, it is eminently clear that we are witnessing the fall of an empire that has been in decline since 1973.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Empire Enters the Doom Loop

Ahnaf Habib, writing at The Tree of Woe, implicitly contends that that my decades-old prediction of the collapse of the USA as a singular political entity in 2033 is too optimistic:

This is a Doom Loop. All signs presently indicate that The US has entered said Loop. The gravity of the moment we are in cannot be merely dismissed on a whim of ‘hope’.

There was a time when the United States and its peoples could safely hide behind two Oceans, a robust economy, a homogenous society (ethnic, cultural and religious), technological prowess, etc. However, none of those are extant today.

America had its chance. It had an opportunity to pursue Empire in some “benevolent” capacity. It had its shot at leading the rest of world in a manner that could have been dignified, measured and temperate. It had all of that and much more.

But that is all in the past. What remains today is nothing more than “inertia”.

Men; men more clever, wise, and capable than any of the sorry lot of soy-drinking fools who claim to be “men” today in CONUS and the European satrapies; such men have long passed on. With their passing, what they built can only endure for a bit more at most.

Make no mistake: The Empire of Lies will not go down without a fight.

There are however, too many “small brushfires” worldwide to extinguish. Ergo, “Death by a Thousand Cuts” is the name of the game. Defeat is only a matter of time.

Doubts have already arisen in the Empire’s ability to secure World Trade.

This is magnified by a loss of deterrence in West Asia, in spite of the multiple carrier battle groups sent to the region to dissuade regional players.

The de facto blockade of the Bab-el-Mandeb strait by Yemen’s Ansarallah is shaping up to be the “Suez Moment” of American Empire: If the Hegemon cannot lift said blockade and guarantee the safety of global shipping, it is no longer a “Superpower.”

The fate of America was sealed by two things. First, the Civil War that established the empire. Second, the notorious 1883 poem of Emma Lazarus, “The New Colossus”, that to all intents and purposes replaced the Constitution of the United States.

The Republic belonged to Americans. The Empire belonged to those who adopted the foreign “Melting Pot” ideology that was introduced to denationalize the new empire and sever it from its British roots. Everything that has happened since, including the largest invasion in human history and the concomitant takeover by the same ethnic elite that ruled the Soviet Union, was a direct result of those two fatal events.

This latest iteration of The Empire That Never Ended appears to be approaching its end. There is, I think, some comfort in the knowledge that there was essentially nothing that anyone living today could have done about the historical trajectory of the United States. But all empires inevitably come to an end, and it is eminently clear that the bells are tolling for the imperial USA. And while it may not seem to be the case, the collapse of the imperial USA may well turn out to be the best thing to happen for the American nation in decades, if not quite centuries.

DISCUSS ON SG

Gunning for the Dollar

Russia is openly advocating for other nations to follow the lead of itself and China in abandoning the dollar standard for international trade:

Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said in a statement, that it is very important for all the BRICS member states that they develop sustainable financial relations and settlements within the organization. He made the statement while speaking on Monday at the Russia-China Financial Dialog in Beijing, where he was conducting meetings with Lan Foan, his Chinese counterpart.

The BRICS alliance of developing nations, made up currently of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, has been hashing out ways for member countries to make payments in local currencies. The bloc wants to accelerate its growth by reducing its reliance on the US dollar and the euro.

Siluanov said, “We need to further develop financial cooperation within the BRICS countries. Here we see opportunities … to develop a payments system that would be independent of the infrastructure, which does not always fully fulfill the goals of individual countries. Therefore, the sustainable development of financial relations and settlements on the BRICS platform is important for us, and we believe that it is necessary to work out such issues, and today we will consider a number of them.”

We have the rare historical privilege to witness the decline and fall of an empire. While we tend to think of such things as being sudden and catastrophic events, they actually tend to take place over such an extended period of time that most of the empire’s inhabitants don’t even realize anything is changing until well after the changes have taken place and they have become accustomed to the consequences.

The events of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire take place over century. The decline of the US empire is only measured in decades at this point, but even at this accelerated rate, it is taking place too slowly for the average individual to comprehend, even if he is sufficiently acute to notice some of the changes.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Geostrategic Initiative is Gone

The unholy alliance of the Biden administration with the Republican neocons is in a sudden state of alarm and is inexplicably attempting to stir up the US citizenry for war with Russia.

You’ll recall in the last report I emphasized how the tone was now shifting to: “Russia will invade Europe next!” But even I didn’t expect them to run with that new narrative in such a provocative and alarmist way.

Now a new raft of reports and statements from the usual suspects gives us insight into how desperate the establishment warhawks representing MIC interests have really become.

First, these two videos. Biden openly says that American troops will have to fight Russian troops if Ukraine is not shored up immediately.

Kirby and Blinken stepped up the fearmongering as well, evoking spilled “American blood”:

They’re dialing up the fearporn to a hysteric level like never before:

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin warned Congress on Tuesday during a private briefing that if they do not pass more aid to Ukraine, it would “very likely” lead to U.S. troops fighting a war in Europe.

“If [Vladimir] Putin takes over Ukraine, he’ll get Moldova, Georgia, then maybe the Baltics,” House Foreign Affairs Chairman Michael McCaul (R-TX) told The Messenger, after Austin and other senior Biden administration officials briefed House lawmakers on their request for more aid for Ukraine.

“And then the idea that we’ll have to put troops on the ground in Secretary Austin’s word was very likely,” McCaul added. “That’s what we’re trying to avoid.”

Recall in the last report I cited Moldova as precisely the next vector, given the sensitivity of the PMR pressure point for Russia. Most notable is his express use of the qualifier “very likely” to describe U.S. troops fighting on the ground. In fact, the U.S. has been preparing for this grand European war for a while now.

Establishment Alarmism in Overdrive, 8 December 2023

The political situation of the Kiev regime must be crumbling rapidly in Ukraine, and the hysteric tone of the rhetoric suggests that Russia has rebuffed the various settlement overtures that have been made to it. Recall that it wasn’t long ago that Kagan and the other leading neocons were calling for an end to hostilities on the Russian front in order to make a turn to the Chinese front possible. Then, Hamas and Israel opened up the Middle Eastern front.

So, how is it possible that fighting a three-front war is suddenly deemed better than fighting one on two fronts?

The logical answer is that the US no longer has the luxury of deciding upon how many fronts it is going to fight. It has entirely lost the geostrategic initiative due to the failure of its proxy in Ukraine, the weakness of its Greatest Ally in the Middle East, and the observable reluctance of its satrapies in Europe and Asia. On every front, it is the nationalist rebels against Clown World’s global empire who now are in control of what happens next.

And that is not a state to which the self-styled masters of the world have been accustomed for a very long time.

UPDATE: It should not be surprising that the strategists and politicians of Clown World do not recognize the limitations of the US military, given that the US military itself does not yet recognize them.

“You look at what is required to support Ukraine, look at what might be required to support our partner in Israel, and then, of course, you put Taiwan on top of that—we have the construct that we do with combatant commanders and the rest that should allow us to command and control those three things all at one time.”
—Admiral Christopher Grady, Vice Chairman, the Joint Chiefs of Staff

However, notice that the admiral used the term “command and control”. That means they do not have the men, the ships, the planes, or the missiles. They think they’re going to be able to fight two more proxy wars of the kind they have already lost in Ukraine.

I also think it’s a mistake to assume that the Sino-Russian alliance is incapable of opening more than the three obvious fronts. See: Niger, Venezuela.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Death Spiral of Journalism

Peter King, an excellent and very liberal sportswriter, pointedly refuses an invitation to defend his former publication, Sports Illustrated:

On Sports Illustrated and AI. From Nick Colletti, of Grapevine, Texas: “Given your expressed disgust with the recent Charissa Thompson episode, I’d like to get your thoughts on your former employer, Sports Illustrated, being accused of publishing AI-generated stories by non-existent writers. If true, this confirms the death spiral of journalism.”

It’s a sham. It’s a shame. It’s also not surprising that a company that bought a grand brand in the sports media space (but heading downhill fast) would do what so many companies that are money-first, -second and -third would do—try to make money off the great name of Sports Illustrated instead of trying to revive it and make it great again. In the business of journalism, we face a major challenge from companies that cut costs further than down to the bone—but actually into the bone marrow. That resulted in a story by the site Futurism that reported that SI.com posted stories or reviews that were generated by Artificial Intelligence writers, with bylines of invented writers. When Futurism contacted the company for comment on using fake people to write fake stories passed off as content from venerable Sports Illustrated, the stories and the bios of the “writers” disappeared from the site. What the owners of the company are doing now is using the Sports Illustrated name to make money on other things that have nothing to do with journalism.

It’s fascinating to see how even those who are completely blind to the intrinsic degradation of Clown World are capable of seeing the fundamental evil of the corpocracy when it touches their own area of expertise. But there is no reason to mourn the loss of something that was always dyscivilizational, to the contrary, it’s a reminder of how it is wise and proper to focus on building our own platforms and institutions instead of attempting to take the easy path to what supposedly passes for success.

Michael Crichton was right, he was just three decades too early.

In 1993, novelist Michael Crichton riled the news business with a Wired magazine essay titled “Mediasaurus,” in which he prophesied the death of the mass media—specifically the New York Times and the commercial networks. “Vanished, without a trace,” he wrote.

The mediasaurs had about a decade to live, he wrote, before technological advances—”artificial intelligence agents roaming the databases, downloading stuff I am interested in, and assembling for me a front page”—swept them under. Shedding no tears, Crichton wrote that the shoddy mass media deserved its deadly fate.

“[T]he American media produce a product of very poor quality,” he lectured. “Its information is not reliable, it has too much chrome and glitz, its doors rattle, it breaks down almost immediately, and it’s sold without warranty. It’s flashy but it’s basically junk.”

It’s pretty obvious that he will have been proven right by 2033… and there’s that number again.

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