Tag: history

Wagner Summarizes Bakhmut

The Marketing Director of the Wagner mercenary company provides an informative summary of its successful operation to take the city of Bakhmut from the occupying Ukro-NATO forces.

  • We fought in Bakhmut against superior forces, destroyed about 50,000 Ukrainian Armed Forces and wounded up to 70,000
  • PMC “Wagner” had 3.2 times fewer dead than the Armed Forces of Ukraine, and about 2 times fewer wounded.
  • The PMC in Artyomovsk had 50,000 people at its best, and the Armed Forces of Ukraine – 82,000, and the ratio for the assault should be 3 to 1 for the attackers.
  • During the operation, I chose 50,000 prisoners, 20% of them died, another 20% were injured.
  • The goal of Artemovsk was not Artemovsk itself, but the Bakhmut Meat Grinder. And in Artemovsk, we destroyed everyone we were supposed to destroy, we completed the task.

From this, we can glean a few useful observations. First, the Russians aren’t even using their military to accomplish their goals. Except for the initial attempt on Kiev, it appears their regular Army hasn’t suffered any significant losses at all. To date, they’ve primarily utilized convicts, Chechens, and ex-Ukrainian militia, and that has sufficed to devastate the Ukro-NATO forces.

Second, the Ukro-NATO military has been severely degraded. There is no way an outnumbered attacker should be able to drive a first-class military from prepared defenses, let alone in an urban environment. Wagner had one-fifth the number of troops the military textbooks say it required to take the city. Since it is not credible to suggest that a mercenary company consisting of convicts is a first-class organization, this suggests that the UFA forces are operating at a level more or less comparable to the Arab armies of the 1960s. This is not surprising, as conscript armies tend to be low-performance and low-morale.

Third, the Russian focus is on the enemy forces, not on the terrain. This is consistent with what Marshal Zhukov records in his memoirs of the Russian civil war and World War II. Consider the way in which Zhukov didn’t hesitate to advocate the early abandonment of Kiev in order to preserve its defenders, whereas Zaluzhnyi, like Hitler, refused to countenance the retreat from even a small, strategically meaningless city in order to conserve tens of thousands of soldiers.

Fourth, the real war hasn’t even started yet. The battle for the Donbass is little more than the opening skirmish in a much larger war between Clown World and the sovereign nations.

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The Failure of Modern Science

Peer review was supposed to be the gold standard of science. Instead, it turned out to be a fraud that polluted the knowledge base, corrupted the profession, and destroyed confidence in the method.

For the last 60 years or so, science has been running an experiment on itself. The experimental design wasn’t great; there was no randomization and no control group. Nobody was in charge, exactly, and nobody was really taking consistent measurements. And yet it was the most massive experiment ever run, and it included every scientist on Earth.

Most of those folks didn’t even realize they were in an experiment. Many of them, including me, weren’t born when the experiment started. If we had noticed what was going on, maybe we would have demanded a basic level of scientific rigor. Maybe nobody objected because the hypothesis seemed so obviously true: science will be better off if we have someone check every paper and reject the ones that don’t pass muster. They called it “peer review.”

This was a massive change. From antiquity to modernity, scientists wrote letters and circulated monographs, and the main barriers stopping them from communicating their findings were the cost of paper, postage, or a printing press, or on rare occasions, the cost of a visit from the Catholic Church. Scientific journals appeared in the 1600s, but they operated more like magazines or newsletters, and their processes of picking articles ranged from “we print whatever we get” to “the editor asks his friend what he thinks” to “the whole society votes.” Sometimes journals couldn’t get enough papers to publish, so editors had to go around begging their friends to submit manuscripts, or fill the space themselves. Scientific publishing remained a hodgepodge for centuries.

(Only one of Einstein’s papers was ever peer-reviewed, by the way, and he was so surprised and upset that he published his paper in a different journal instead.)

That all changed after World War II. Governments poured funding into research, and they convened “peer reviewers” to ensure they weren’t wasting their money on foolish proposals. That funding turned into a deluge of papers, and journals that previously struggled to fill their pages now struggled to pick which articles to print. Reviewing papers before publication, which was “quite rare” until the 1960s, became much more common. Then it became universal.

Now pretty much every journal uses outside experts to vet papers, and papers that don’t please reviewers get rejected. You can still write to your friends about your findings, but hiring committees and grant agencies act as if the only science that exists is the stuff published in peer-reviewed journals. This is the grand experiment we’ve been running for six decades.

The results are in. It failed.

The Rise and Fall of Peer Review, Adam Mastroanni, 13 December 2022

It’s very important to remember that most people neither know or understand anything about science, so the idea that science is not only less than perfectly reliable, but is, in fact, reliably false is extremely foreign to them. They have no idea that reliable science is called “engineering”, and in fact, their grasp of the credibility of the two fields is usually inverted.

But if you are an independent thinker capable of processing information on your own, it should not be too difficult to grasp that science is intrinsically flawed due to several unavoidable factors that boil down to the absence of any controlling factor for the human element.

Peer review was never that missing factor. As I pointed out years ago, peer review doesn’t even rise to the level of editing, much less auditing, it is more akin to slush-file reading by volunteers. The great irony of the primary defense of peer review is that it is a concept based on nothing more than pure logic utilized to justify an activity specifically conceived to replace the use of pure logic.

UPDATE: The retards are never going to learn, no matter how reliably they fail.

It’s already starting in the comments: I don’t think it failed perhaps as much as it stopped working. REAL PEEER REVIEW HAS NOT BEEN TRIED.

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Want Has Nothing to Do With it

A follower on Gab wonders why anyone would want to be part of the SSH:

@SigmaGame Why would anyone want to be an alpha, beta, gamma, OR sigma? There should be a check mark for ‘none of the above’

It’s not about “want”. Everyone has patterns of behavior. You can’t escape them.

And on the subject of the SSH, I recently read an interesting passage about one of the more obvious Sigmas in history, Arthur, Duke of Wellington, recounted by Charles Oman.

“The march of the centre column was accompanied by the curious case of insubordination by three divisional generals (those commanding the 1st, 5th, and 7th Divisions) of which Napier makes such scathing notice. Their orders gave an itinerary involving a march over fords in flooded fields ; they consulted together, judged the route hopeless, and turned off towards the bridge of Castillo de Yeltes, which they found blocked by the Army of Galicia. Wellington, failing to find them on the prescribed path, set out to seek them, and came upon them waiting miserably in the mud. He is said to have given them no more rebuke than a sarcastic ‘You see, gentlemen, I know my own business best’ and allowed them to cross after the Spaniards, many hours late. The insubordination was inexcusable—yet perhaps it would not have been beneath Wellington’s dignity to have prefaced his original order with an explanatory note such as ‘ the main road by Castillo bridge being reserved for the Spanish divisions.’ But this would not have been in his normal style. Like Stonewall Jackson fifty years after, he was not prone to give his reasons to subordinates, even when his orders would appear to them very inexplicable.”

  • History of the Peninsular War Vol. VI, Charles Oman

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The Russians Call Out NASA

For decades, Boomers who believe in the Moon landing narrative more firmly than they believe in God, Family, or Country have argued that the landings couldn’t have been faked or the Russians would have called out NASA. But now the former head of the Russian space agency is doing precisely that.

The former head of Russia’s Roscosmos space agency, Dmitry Rogozin, has expressed doubt that the US Apollo 11 mission really landed on the Moon in 1969, saying he has yet to see conclusive proof.

In a post on his Telegram channel on Sunday, Rogozin said he began his personal quest for the truth “about ten years ago” when he was still working in the Russian government, and that he grew skeptical about whether the Americans had actually set foot on the Moon when he compared how exhausted Soviet cosmonauts looked upon returning from their flights, and how seemingly unaffected the Apollo 11 crew was by contrast.

Rogozin said he sent requests for evidence to Roscosmos at the time. All he received in response was a book featuring Soviet Cosmonaut Aleksey Leonov’s account of how he talked to the American astronauts and how they told him they had been on the Moon.

The former official wrote that he continued with his efforts when he was appointed head of Roscosmos in 2018. However, according to Rogozin, no evidence was presented to him. Instead, several unnamed academics angrily criticized him for undermining the “sacred cooperation with NASA,” he claimed. The former Roscosmos chief also said he had “received an angry phone call from a top-ranking official” who supposedly accused him of complicating international relations.

Rogozin concluded by saying he still cannot believe that the US was able to pull off the feat, but is now unable to, despite the incredible progress in technology since the late 1960s. What he claims to have found out, however, was that Washington has “its people in [the Russian] establishment.”

Translation: NASA faked major elements of the space program and everyone in a place to know better kept quiet for fear of being targeted by Clown World. But now it is becoming increasingly obvious and the official Moon landing narrative is rapidly crumbling.

I very much doubt this will be the only historical hoax to be exposed by the Russians over the next decade.

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Now Wait a Minute

While we’re on the subject of stolen land and all:

Denver City Council member Candi CdeBaca, who is reportedly running for re-election, has suggested that white-owned businesses should be taxed at a higher rate than black-owned businesses, and that this revenue should then be given directly to black-owned businesses. Her apparent justification for this is that white people have built what they have on “stolen land, stolen labor, and stolen resources.”

I’m very curious to know how anyone can seriously broach the subject of reparations for historical crimes and decide that descendants of Africans from Africa, many of whom were never enslaved, should be compensated for land stolen – and yes, for the most part it was stolen, just read the treaties – in North America from the American Indians?

If there are any reparations to be paid to anyone – and I’m not saying there should be – shouldn’t they be paid to the descendants of those who actually owned and lived upon the land that was stolen?

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Past as Prelude

One of the great advantages of being conversant with history is the ability to recognize reoccurring patterns and apply one’s knowledge of the events of the past to observe current events in order to successfully anticipate the events of the future.

The great Soviet marshal Zhukov wrote the following in his autobiography concerning the turning point of WWII on the Eastern Front:

The Wehrmacht’s defeats in the summer and autumn of 1943 destroyed whatever was left of the confidence that the satellites of Nazi Germany had in the Hitler regime. The fascist bloc began falling apart. A still more favourable strategic situation developed for the Soviet Armed Forces. And the Supreme Command exploited it skilfully when preparing the 1944 operations.

No longer did Nazi Germany’s allies and the neutral countries believe that Hitler’s regime could escape total defeat. But the main thing was that the elements in Germany which had brought Hitler to power and had supported him in every way during the years that followed, also lost trust in the Nazi leadership. Most Germans began to see that they had been dangerously deluded by the easy victories of the first period of the war, and that Germany could not stand up to the Soviet Armed Forces and the anti-Hitler coalition.

Marshal of Victory, Georgy Zhukov, 1974

One can easily substitute NATO for “the Wehrmacht”, the USA for “Nazi Germany”, the neoliberal rules-based world order for “Hitler regime”, and the G7 for “the fascist bloc”. The failure of US proxy forces in Ukraine, combined with their failures in Syria and Afghanistan, have caused the majority of the world’s nations to lose trust in the leadership of Clown World.

As with the Germans 80 years ago, most people outside of Clown World now recognize that the seemingly inevitable triumph of the neoliberal world order was a delusion based on nothing more than an easy victory over an inept Iraqi army, neoclown influence in the media, and the false economic ideology of cheap credit, free trade, and mass immigration.

What is truly remarkable is the way that these decisive events of 80 years ago took place in precisely the same geographic region as they are taking place today.

The second blow was struck in the Ukraine to the right of the Dnieper. This was an intricate operation and, in fact, consisted of a series of major offensives which were carried out chiefly in February and March 1944 in the Korsun-Shevchenkovsky area and on the Southern Bug. The German troops were routed and flung across the Dniester, and finally all the Ukraine to the right of the Dnieper was liberated. The Soviet troops reached a favourable line for a subsequent advance into Europe’s south-eastern regions, for an offensive on the Balkans against Romania where the fascist Antonescu was still in the saddle, against Horthy Hungary, and other enemy forces. In April and May 1944, the Red Army delivered its third blow in the region of Odessa and in the Crimea. Odessa, Sebastopol, and the Crimean Peninsula were cleared of the enemy.

ibid.

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U-Stasi in Action

Every now and then, we’re offered a little glimpse of the surveillance society’s efforts to compromise and control various individuals of interest to them.

The CIA introduced King Hussein of Jordan to a Jewish B-list Hollywood actress in 1959 — touching off an affair that produced a dwarf love child who later killed her, reports say. Sensational new details of the king’s relationship with actress Susan Cabot were revealed in a recently declassified government memo, according to USA Today. The CIA was bucking to curry favor with the randy young Mideast leader when it agreed to procure women for him during his visit to Los Angeles in April 1959, the three-page document shows.

Hussein was 24 and had divorced his first wife about two years earlier.

The young king “was especially desirous of female companionship during his Los Angeles visit, and it was requested that appropriate arrangements be made through a controlled source of the [CIA’s] Office [of Security] in order to assure a satisfied visit,” according to the anonymously written memo.

Before she went to the gig, Cabot, 32, was told, “We want you to go to bed with him,’’ according to the memo. “The actress said that she rejected the proposal but finally went to [the] party. She became quite taken with [Hussein] and found him to be most charming,” according to the document.

A few days later, the king asked the CIA to arrange for him and his new girlfriend to get together while he was in New York City. The agency rented a house for them in Long Beach, LI, and also got her a room at the Hotel Barclay in Manhattan “under an assumed name,’’ the memo says.

Still, their relationship was not without a politically worrisome issue. Cabot, whose real name was Harriet Shapiro, was of Jewish heritage, a thorny issue given Hussein was Muslim, according to reports.

It’s apparent that very little of the shenanigans we are witnessing today, from Epstein and Maxwell to the Havana Syndrome, are new in any way, shape, or form. The only difference is that thanks to technological advances, the CIA’s surveillance program has expanded from particular persons of interest to pretty much everyone.

Which is why one should always assume that every email, every comment, every image uploaded, every Internet search, has been logged and catalogued in case it can be used against you. And why one should never place too much trust in women – or men, for that matter – who inexplicably find one to be irresistibly attractive.

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History for Europe

Residents of the European Union can now subscribe to Castalia History using the (EU) subscription. There is also the option for an annual (EU) subscription. You will see there is an additional charge to cover the higher cost of shipping to and within Europe, which is why the separate subscription is necessary, but even with the additional charge the price is favorable in comparison with Easton and Folio. European subscriptions will require one catchup payment to bring them up to date, as will regular History subscriptions begun in May.

While we won’t announce the books until the appropriate three-month period begins, the second, third, and fourth History books have been selected and two of them are already being scanned. We’re hoping our new production methods will help speed things up considerably while continuing to improve the overall quality.

On the general shipping front, please remain patient. We are actively working on providing a reliable alternative for our presently incapacitated partner and we will keep you posted accordingly. Once we get Europe established and the shipping situation resolved, we will turn our attention to Australia and Asia.

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The History of the US Color Revolution

Ron Unz writes a brief, but comprehensive history of the rise of the neocons from a minor anti-Soviet faction of the Democratic Party to the foreign policy establishment. And in doing so, he implicitly explains why 9/11 happened and who was responsible for it.

The complete ideological triumph of the Neocons after the 9/11 attacks was all the more shocking given the crushing recent political defeat they had suffered. During the 2000 presidential campaign, nearly all of the Neocons had aligned themselves with Sen. John McCain, whose battle with Bush for the Republican nomination had eventually turned quite bitter, and as a consequence, they had been almost entirely frozen out of any high-level appointments. Both Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld were then widely regarded as Bush Republicans, lacking any significant Neocon ties, and the same was true for all the other top administration figures such as Colin Powell, Condeleeza Rice, and Paul O’Neil. Indeed, the only Neoconservative offered a Cabinet spot was Linda Chavez, and not only was the Labor Department always regarded as something of a boobie prize in a GOP Administration, but she was ultimately forced to withdraw her nomination due to her “nanny problems.” The highest-ranking Neocon serving under Bush was Rumsfeld Deputy Paul Wolfowitz, whose seemingly inconsequential appointment had passed without any notice.

Most of the Neocons themselves certainly seemed to recognize the catastrophic loss they had suffered in the 2000 election. Back in those days, I was on very friendly terms with Bill Kristol, and when I stopped by his office at the Weekly Standard for a chat in the spring of 2001, he seemed in a remarkably depressed state of mind. I remember that at one point, he took his head in his hands and wondered aloud whether it was time for him to just abandon the political battle, resigning his editorship and taking up a quiet post at a DC thinktank. Yet just eight or ten months later, he and his close allies were on their way to gaining overwhelming influence in our government. In an eerie parallel to the story told in Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Lenin in Zurich, the totally fortuitous 9/11 attacks and the outbreak of war had suddenly allowed a small but determined ideological faction to seize control of a gigantic country.

In the aftermath of the 9/11 Attacks, the Neocons had solidified their control of nearly all existing conservative media outlets, prompting Pat Buchanan and a couple of partners to found The American Conservative in 2002. The following year, he used that platform for a blistering attack on Bush’s Iraq War foreign policy, which he denounced as a Neocon project. David Frum, a former Bush speechwriter and one of his targets, launched a near-simultaneous broadside in National Review against Buchanan and other critics, whom he condemned as “unpatriotic conservatives.” Taken together, the two lengthy pieces provide a good overview of the key figures on both sides of that bitter ideological battle.

Many moderates and liberals were equally appalled by the Iraq War as it unfolded, but unlike Buchanan they were often quite gun-shy in highlighting the obvious pro-Israel roots and motives of the leading Neocon backers…

Despite the unprecedented strategic disaster of the Iraq War, the Neocons fully retained their hold on the Republican Party’s foreign policy, while their Democratic counterparts achieved the same success across the political aisle. Thus, when the manifest failures of the Bush Administration led to the overwhelming victory of Barack Obama in 2008, Bush Neocons were merely replaced by Obama Neocons. Donald Trump’s unexpected triumph in 2016 brought to power the Trump Neocons such as Mike Pompeo and John Bolton, who were then succeeded in 2020 by Biden Neocons Antony Blinken and Victoria Nuland.

As I recently explained:

One difficulty is that the very term “Neocon” used here has actually become much less meaningful than it once was. After having controlled American foreign policy for more than three decades, promoting their allies and protégés and purging their opponents, the adherents of that world view now constitute nearly the entire political establishment, including control of the leading thinktanks and publications. By now, I doubt there are many prominent figures in either party who follow a sharply different line. Furthermore, over the last two decades, the national security-focused Neocons have largely merged with the economically-focused neoliberals, forming a unified ideological block that represents the political worldview of the elites running both American parties.

Our nation’s two most recent Secretaries of State have been Mike Pompeo and Antony Blinken, and I’m not whether either of them even considers himself a Neocon, given that their foreign policy views are almost universal within their political circle. Do fish think that water is wet?

But consider the reality of today’s American foreign policy. In 1992 Neocon Paul Wolfowitz had drafted a Defense document advocating measures to ensure our permanent global military dominance but when it leaked the proposal was immediately repudiated by our Republican President and top military leaders, let alone the Democrats; however a decade later this “Wolfowitz Doctrine” had became our policy under Bush and today it enjoys complete bipartisan support.

Or consider the 28 standing ovations received by the Israeli prime minister when he spoke before a joint session of Congress in 2015, including the Stalinesque touch that some of our elected officials were denounced for applauding with insufficient enthusiasm. Given such a political environment, the strong pressure once exerted upon the Jewish State by such varied American Presidents as Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton would be unthinkable today.

From the moment the Ukraine war began, our entire media and political establishments have been in absolute lock-step, with scarcely a trace of doubt or dissent. There has been no willingness to recognize the role of NATO expansion in provoking the conflict nor to ask questions about a possible American role in the explosions that destroyed Europe’s Nord Stream energy pipelines.

The Neocons and Their Rise to Power, Ron Unz, 1 May 2023

Totally fortuitous indeed. There are a lot of “fortuitous” things that seem to happen around the world whenever the neoclowns are involved in some way, shape, or form. But as Robert Kagan’s last three books have chronicled, events are no longer trending in their favor because their fundamental axioms are false, thereby ensuring their ultimate failure even in areas – especially in areas – where they have been successful in the past.

It’s an excellent primer on neoconnery, although I reject the claim that the neoclowns are not Trotskyite world revolutionaries, which should be painfully obvious given the number of color revolutions they have attempted to launch around the world since the turn of the century. I highly recommend reading the whole thing because one cannot even begin to understand Clown World without knowing who the neoclowns are, from whence they came, and what their global imperialist objectives are.

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