Tag: history

The End of Carrier Diplomacy

It is widely believed that the Yemenis damaged the USS Eisenhower sufficiently to force it to retreat from the Red Sea before it was sunk:

According to satellite images published by navigation trackers, the Eisenhower was seen sailing north off the coast of Yanbu, Saudi Arabia, heading to the far north of the Red Sea, more than 1,100 kilometers from Yemen. The Eisenhower had noticeably repositioned over the past two days, moving from off the coast of Qunfudhah in southern Saudi Arabia to off the coast of Jeddah before moving further north.

This retreat coincided with two ballistic and cruise missile attacks and drone strikes launched by Yemeni Armed Forces on the aircraft carrier since Friday, in response to recent American and British assaults that resulted in the deaths and injuries of 58 civilians. This escalation prompted Sana’a to vow a “firm and deterrent” response, according to the Supreme Political Council.

The blatant retreat of Eisenhower has put the United States in an extremely embarrassing position after attempting to cover up the Yemeni attacks on the carrier through silence. Many activists have sparked a wide debate regarding Eisenhower’s status following the attacks, leading Captain Chaudhary Hill to release a video to calm public opinion. However, the video showing a fighter jet taking off from the carrier turned out to be an old clip from March, reinforcing suspicions that Eisenhower might have sustained significant damage from the Yemeni attacks.

I, and many other observers, have long predicted that it would be the sinking of a US aircraft carrier that would definitively mark the end of US global military supremacy. However, I’d always assumed it would probably be a Chinese hypersonic missile, or possibly a Russian hypersonic missile, that would provide the historical coup de grace.

But the fact that it might be a lowly desert people taking down the mighty symbol of one of the most powerful empires to ever dominate the planet would be both fitting and ironic. There is too much disinformation and misinformation to confirm the rumors yet, but the longer the USS Eisenhower stays dark, the more it looks as if the USA has passed its Syracuse Moment.

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Why Russia Took So Long

Scott Ritter asks a question that any halfway-decent military analyst could answer:

Why did it take so long for Moscow to wake up to the need to bring the Donbass into the fold of the Russian nation?

This is the eternal question, one that Russia today struggles to find an adequate answer for.

Russia’s path of redemption ends in Donbass. Here, the sins, errors, and evil which combined to create the current Russian-Ukrainian conflict are manifest. Questions have been asked to which there may be no adequate answer. Today, the situation on the ground increasingly points to a Russian victory over both Ukraine and its supporters in the collective West. But this victory has come at a huge physical and psychological cost. While the dead may be buried and honored, the living will always have to struggle to come to grips over the sacrifices that have been made in support of the cause they were fighting for.

And, in the end, if they believe that the cause was a just one – and it is my firm position that they do, in fact, believe this to be the case – then the answer to the question as to why it took Russia so long to intervene on behalf of Donbass will hang there, unanswerable, if for no other reason than that the pain any honest answer will generate may be too much to bear for those who had been fighting for the liberation of Donbass these past ten years.

It’s a dumb question with an obvious answer. The Russians took so long to intervene because they were afraid to confront the full might of Clown World, both militarily in the form of NATO and economically, on their own. That’s why they’ve pursued such a cautious military strategy and steered well clear of declaring total war on the USA and NATO, while simultaneously securing their economic and military alliances with China and the rest of the BRICSIA countries.

The fact that Russia is now winning so comprehensively on the economic, military, and diplomacy fronts is testimony to the wisdom of the Russian approach, even though it was very hard on the people of the Donbass. And they have the benefit of knowing that their sacrifice was not in vain.

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The Old Guard Sees NATO’s Defeat

When the Special Military Operation began, both Messrs. Lind and van Creveld were inclined to viewing it as a Russian mistake. However, unlike NATO’s military strategists, both of the old lions are still capable of changing their minds on the basis of the facts on the ground, as William S. Lind’s recent commentary on the situation demonstrates:

Kiev’s defeat need not shatter world peace. But NATO’s response to defeat in Ukraine may do so. Panic is already showing its head in Paris, where French President Macron is suggesting NATO might send in troops to fight Russia directly. Berlin says no, but the traffic-light coalition government is weak and can be pushed around. London is in a belligerent mood and Warsaw is always eager to launch a cavalry charge against Russian tanks. The decisive voice will be Washington’s. That is not good news, because the Dead Inca has no idea what he’s doing and his advisors will be terrified of the charge of “losing Ukraine” in an election year. Can NATO just swallow hard and say, “We lost?” If not, the alternative is escalation in a war against nuclear power.

In Gaza, Israel has destroyed itself at the moral level of war, which is what states usually do against non-state opponents. Martin van Creveld’s “power of weakness” is triumphing again. Hamas will emerge from the war physically diminished but not destroyed, while most of the world sees it as “the good guys” because the massacres on October 7 have been overshadowed by Israel’s destruction of Gaza. Hamas will rebuild quickly, and not only in Gaza. Recruits and money will flow to it in a veritable Niagara.

The threat of a wider war lies to Israel’s north, not its south. While Hezbollah’s operations have been restrained, they have nonetheless driven 80,000 Israelis from their homes, along with tens of thousands of Lebanese who have fled Israeli airstrikes. The latter don’t matter strategically, but the former do because Netanyahu needs their votes. As always, he will put himself above his country’s interests. That suggests he is likely to launch a ground invasion of Lebanon, which Hezbollah apparently is anticipating and ready for. Hezbollah is much stronger than Hamas, and recent events suggest Iran will also be forced to get involved directly.

On a philosophical, but not-unrelated note, Martin van Creveld provides some important advice:

– Prepare to change your mind when new evidence arrives. As has been said, too often it is not old opinions that die; it is those who hold them, still clinging to their antiquated views, who do. This is not a fate you want for yourself and for your work.

It’s remarkable that both of these great military historians can still accomplish, in their eighties, what so few of their successors have been able to do.

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D-Day, 80 Years Later

It just lands a lot differently than it did even 20 years ago. What, exactly, are we supposed to be celebrating these days? Clown World didn’t even preserve democracy or the rule of law.

But at least our grandfathers paid the price to bring them freedom…

German police search 70 homes of people who posted hateful comments online.

Never mind.

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A Legacy Destroyed

VDH is naturally inclined to lionize the so-called “Greatest Generation”, but he’s too good a historian to be unaware of their greatest failing, which was being unwilling, or unable, to successfully prepare the Boomers for the mantle of preserving and passing on Western civilization:

Governor Ronald Reagan, in his 1967 inaugural address, famously remarked, “Freedom is a fragile thing and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction.”

Reagan today might have expanded on his theme by declaring that civilization itself is both fragile and can lost by a generation that recklessly spends its inheritance while neither appreciating nor replenishing it—if not ridiculing those who sacrificed so much to provide it. Such is the noxious epitaph of the Baby Boomer generation that is now passing after a half-century of preeminence and whose Jacobin agendas have nearly wrecked the nation they inherited…

Americans did the impossible in less than a year—from the Normandy beaches to well across the Rhine River. That same generation went on to save South Korea, build an anti-totalitarian world order, defeat Soviet communism, and pass on to the Baby Boomer generation the strongest economy, military, and political system in history, or, to paraphrase the poet Horace, “monuments more lasting than bronze.” Or so we, the inheritors, thought.

And what are the now septuagenarian and octogenarian children of the veterans of Omaha Beach and Iwo Jima, leaving as their own legacy?

The self-infatuated and do-your-own-thing generation that gave us the Sixties and the counterculture has left the country $36 trillion in debt, now borrowing $1 trillion nearly every three months. Worse, there is not just no plan to balance budgets, much less to reduce the debt, but also no intention to stop or even worry about the borrowing of some $10 billion a day.

The U.S. military is almost unrecognizable to that of just a few decades ago. It was humiliated in Kabul. In surrealistic fashion, it abandoned some $50 billion in lethal weaponry to the Taliban—along with our NATO allies, American contractors, and loyal Afghans. And our supreme command labeled that rout a brilliant retreat. Meanwhile, the military suffers from depleted inventory of key munitions while being short 45,000 annual recruits.

The Pentagon is torn by internal dissension over DEI, woke, anti-meritocratic promotions, and a politicized officer class—well, apart from now also being outmanned and outgunned by the Chinese. Many of the world’s key maritime corridors—the Red Sea, the Straits of Hormuz, the Black Sea, and the South China sea—are apparently beyond our navy’s ability to ensure the world safe transit.

For perceived cheap political advantage, the Baby Boomers destroyed the southern border, most recently allowing in nearly 10 million unaudited illegal aliens. With the disappearance of our national sovereignty, so too was lost the once-cherished idea of a melting pot of legal immigrants arriving in America longing to assimilate, to integrate in self-reliant fashion, and to show gratitude for the chance of something far better than what they left.

The nation isn’t “nearly wrecked”. It is defeated and subjugated. The Melting Pot idea, however cherished it might have been, was always a self-serving foreign lie and it never happened anyhow. But the fact that people now recognize that it’s not happening now is a step forward, as is the acknowledgment that the Boomers were so awful that their predecessors are being blamed for not preventing them from destroying their legacy.

If elderly historians are already condemning the Boomers, imagine what the historians of the future will say of them!

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Countdown to 2033

In the aftermath of the fake Trump trial, Martin Armstrong’s computer system predicts the fall of the USA in 8.6 years:

Our legal system is so corrupt and biased that the entire system should be scrapped and all judges simply fired. History is littered with corrupt judges like Merchan who always assume they are above the law like this ACTING judge and former prosecutor. In China, the historian Sima Qian provides us with a look at one of the most harsh bureaucrats of the Wudi reign, Du Zhou (? – 95BC), who argued that the old laws were then irrelevant and could be changed at the pleasure of the emperor. Zang Tang (? – 116BC) A judicial bureaucrat named Wno drafted the laws under Wudi regime and made treasonous thoughts (CONSPIRACY) punishable by death. When the regimes changed, he was eventually compelled to commit suicide as his view of the law led him to be the most hated among all of the ministers under Wudi regime.

Yet Merchan is perhaps closer to the minister Chao Cuo (? – 154BC) who was under the previous emperor Ching-ti (Liu Ch’i)(157-141BC), Chao Cuo earned the hatred of other ministers after he introduced 30 new laws. The outrage was so intense, he was dragged out and executed in his judicial robes in the town marketplace. There was far greater resistance toward changing the laws in China than what we see in NYC today. These incidents of publicly executing ministers who tried to make the laws even harsher, were not unique, but became far more common in China compared to the West.

Merchan has set in motion the decline and fall of the United States and curiously, it will be about 8.6 years from this even until we reach 2032. That was the time of judicial upheaval in China and it was just 8.6 years for the collapse of the Roman Monetary system from 260-268AD.

What they have set in motion is the decline and fall of the United States. There will not be enough police in New York City to protect it from collapse. Institutions are selling New York state and city debt. It will never be paid.

This may be another reason why the neocons have been successful in convincing the less-bloodthirsty clowns to pursue an unwinnable war against both Russia and China, while simultaneously supporting an Israeli war in the Middle East. In addition to time running out on the neocons’ ability to utilize a powerful foreign army for their own purposes, there is no way that the current US government can avoid the collapse of the global financial system it inherited from Great Britain and for which it provides the muscle required to keep the nations inside it.

War has long been a way of erasing debts and those to whom the debts are owed. And as Armstrong observes, cities, states, and the Federal government itself are far too deep underwater to ever recover.

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None of the Above

None of the above, noobs. None of the above!

In fact, neither of my first THREE controllers are even on the list.

  • Mattel Intellivision gold disc
    • Apple //e joystick
    • Analog Plus Apple //e joystick

    I still love the Intellivision approach, especially with the overlays that allowed for much more detailed inputs and probably inspired the Warmouse design. Its only real flaw were that the side buttons were too hard to press, so the controller had to be gripped firmly in order to prevent it from being pushed to the side when the side buttons, which were usually used for firing, were pressed.

    But I think it’s worth noting that all of the subsequent controllers were fundamentally based on the Intellivision’s thumb-based controller, and most of them were both technically and practically inferior, having as few as four directions in the place of the Intellivision’s 16. To this day, I’ve never understood why Nintendo and Sega put the thumbpad on the LEFT side, when right-handed people have better fine motor control with their RIGHT thumb.

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    Thailand Sides with BRICS

    Another nation breaks free of Clown World:

    Thailand will apply to become a member of the BRICS economic bloc, the government of the Southeast Asian country announced on Tuesday. The cabinet in Bangkok has approved the text of the official letter expressing Thailand’s intent to join the group, government spokesman Chai Wacharonke said in a statement quoted by local media. According to Chai, the letter declares that Thailand understands the importance of multipolarity and the increasing role of developing countries in international affairs.

    We are witnessing the biggest global transformation since WWII. It’s got to be killing Francis Fukuyama, who obviously forgot that history never proceeds in a linear manner for long.

    UPDATE: In another blow for Clown World, there will be no more color revolutions in Georgia.

    The Georgian parliament has pushed through the divisive ‘foreign agents’ legislation, overriding a veto of the new law by the nation’s president Salome Zourabichvili, local media reported on Tuesday. A total of 84 MPs out of 150 voted for the president’s veto to be repealed and the bill to be passed without any changes, while only four supported the president’s stance, the reports said. Under Georgian law, a presidential veto may be overridden with a simple parliamentary majority, which would require 76 votes.

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    The Intellectual Father of Clown World

    Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher and one of the central Enlightenment thinkers. Born in Königsberg, Kant’s comprehensive and systematic works in epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics have made him one of the most influential and controversial figures in modern Western philosophy, being called the “father of modern ethics”, the “father of modern aesthetics”, and for bringing together rationalism and empiricism earned the title of “father of modern philosophy”.

    In last night’s Darkstream, I examined what is described as one of Kant’s “major works”, “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” And, as I think everyone who watched it will confirm, I very easily exposed this highly-regarded historical intellectual as a verbose charlatan who substitutes rhetoric for dialectic, dubious enthymemes for valid logical syllogisms, makes wildly improbable assumptions, and gets basic observations about human nature completely and verifiably wrong.

    One particularly cruel viewer even commented that Kant’s arguments sound a bit like Petersonian bafflegarble, which frankly I think is going much too far and is unfair to the Enlightenment philosopher, but while I don’t condone the observation, I can understand it.

    It’s also worth noting that Kant cribbed from Aristotle without correctly attributing the concept, while changing the terms he utilized in order to make his justification of elite despotism appear to be more palatable to the public that will be enslaved, not because they are “natural slaves” per Aristotle, but cowards in a state of “self-incurred minority”. Below is just one of the several obvious flaws in what is nothing more than a rhetorical argument:

    I have put the main point of enlightenment, of people’s emergence from their self-incurred minority, chiefly in matters of religion because our rulers have no interest in playing guardian over their subjects with respect to the arts and sciences and also because that minority being the most harmful, is also the most disgraceful of all.

    This assertion is not only false, but downright risible, particularly in light of the way in which the rulers of Clown World are deeply and observably interested in “playing guardian over their subjects with respect to the arts and sciences” and have done so for decades in a considerably more aggressive, totalitarian, and harmful manner than any religious authority has for centuries.

    Kant asserts the inevitability of the impossible, while simultaneously denying the indisputable. As with so many other intellectuals revered by Clown World, a critical reading of Kant quickly reveals him to be more of a useful fraud than a legitimately great thinker.

    Kant’s Enlightenment philosophy, like free trade, evolution by natural selection, and free speech, simply has not withstood the test of time. As with those similarly outdated concepts, the more one digs into his work, the more flaws, both in theory and in practice, reveal themselves to the conscientious reader.

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    History is Incomplete

    The conventional historical narrative leaves more than a few significant gaps in the record that are regularly exposed in a glaring manner by archeology. For example, what culture 2,000 years ago had the ability to surgically repair a fractured skull and successfully install a metal reinforcement? And what culture featured people with skulls shaped like these?

    The world is a lot stranger than we’re supposed to believe. Of this, you can be very, very confident. And, of course, the more genetically complicated things get, the more the genetic ranges expand, the more powerful the evidence for MITTENS becomes.

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