Tag: war

China Bans Exports to Japan

Not all exports, you understand, but all dual-use exports:

China on Tuesday banned exports of goods that could be used for military purposes to Japan, a move that escalates tensions between Beijing and a key U.S. ally as disputes intensify over Taiwan. The Chinese commerce ministry said in a statement that any items that have a dual use — civilian and military — would no longer be exported to Japan.

The government did not offer specifics on which items would be included in the ban. But state-affiliated media said Beijing was considering whether to include rare-earth minerals.

Japanese leaders increasingly have linked Taiwan’s fate to Japan’s own security, with Tokyo’s new Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi warning that a Chinese move against the island could amount to a “survival-threatening situation” for Japan — a legal threshold that could permit military action under Japan’s self-defense laws.

The US Secretary of War cited the Fuck Around and Find Out principle in relation to Venezuala. It appears China is in the process of applying the same principle to Japan and everyone else who attempts to interfere with the Xinroe Doctrine in the South China Sea.

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Saving the Petrodollar

Richard Werner explains the reason for the US attack on Venezuela:

The US coup in Venezuela is also to help the petrodollar system, established by Henry Kissinger’s 1974 deal with Saudi Arabia requiring global oil sales in USD, which creates artificial demand for the currency & funds American hegemony – but which has been in its death throes.

Venezuela, with the world’s largest oil reserves, challenged the $ by selling oil in yuan, euros, rubles, bypassing the $, & building alternative payment channels with China.

Historical precedents include the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq for switching to euros, Muammar Gaddafi in Libya for proposing a gold-backed dinar. The invasion counters accelerating global de-dollarization led by Russia, China, Iran, and BRICS, as nations shift to non-dollar settlements and alternatives to SWIFT.

But it signals desperation, potentially hastening the petrodollar’s decline as the Global South resents US reliance on military force to maintain currency dominance.

Yeah, this move seems assured to transform BRICS and its financial system into a full-blown military alliance. Which might be fine, if the USA is simply attempting to lock down its hemisphere as per the new Donroe Doctrine. But this interpretation does tend to leave the Middle East hanging, which doesn’t seem likely for the so-called “Trump” administration.

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Is Venezuala the Prelude?

Larry Johnson suspects the Venezuala attack is a prelude to a second US-Israeli attack on Iran.

I believe the true objective of the kidnapping operation to remove Maduro is to secure US control of Venezuelan oil in anticipation of a disruption of the flow of oil from the Persian Gulf when Israel, with US-backing, launches a new attack on Iran. I suppose you could say that Trump’s Monday meeting with Netanyahu, which coincided with the eruption of protests in Iran that were likely incited by the MEK — a terrorist group with direct ties to the CIA and Mossad — followed by the kidnapping of Maduro and his wife is just a happy series of coincidences… I don’t believe in coincidence.

There is a LOT of anti-Iran propaganda that exploded on the chans today. It might not mean anything, but we’ll have to see what happens. Personally, I’d assume Mexico would be next, or possibly Greenland.

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Another Year, Another War

And another new set of incoming refugees, this time from Venezuela:

US forces have captured Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife during Washington’s strikes on the nation’s capital, US President Donald Trump has announced, adding that the two have been flown out of the South American country. Venezuelan authorities have long accused the US of attempting to topple the government in Caracas.

In a statement on Saturday on Truth Social, Trump confirmed that the US had “successfully carried out a large scale strike against Venezuela.”

“Its leader, President Nicolas Maduro, who has been, along with his wife, captured and flown out of the Country. This operation was done in conjunction with US Law Enforcement,” he wrote, adding that additional details would be provided at a news conference in his Florida residence in Mar-a-Lago at 11am. Unnamed US officials told CBS that the operation had been carried out by Delta Force, the US Army’s top special mission unit.

I’m sure we can expect the European Union and all the usual suspects to denounce this attack on the head of a sovereign state, right? Vladimir Putin has to be thinking that he could have saved himself a lot of trouble if he’d simply captured Zelensky and his wife back in 2022.

Anyhow, the long list of failed US interventions and occupations provides no reason that this invasion of Venezuela is going to turn out well for Americans anytime soon. Although I suppose Venezuelan-run child care centers can’t be any worse than the Somali-run ones. Because you know that an influx of Venezuelan immigrants is the only reliable consequence of this action.

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Russia Moves On Odessa

It appears the Special Military Operation is about to enter a new phase, if the recent activity in the region of Odessa means what one would reasonably assume it to mean:

The biggest story the past week has been Russia’s strikes on the Odessa and Nikolayev region. These have targeted both energy grid infrastructure as well as—most surprisingly—the transport and rail infrastructure, in what appears to be an attempt to cut Odessa off from logistics from the west.

Panic in the Odessa region after the attacks on the bridge over the Dniester near the village of Mayaki. The attacks on the bridge and the bridge in Zatoka have been ongoing for 9 days in a row. The south of the region may be cut off from the last functioning ports, through which gasoline is supplied to the central part of Ukraine and the Odessa region. Local entrepreneurs are already offering to transport people to the other side for 10,000 hryvnias. Panic is spreading on both sides of the bridge, with people buying up fuel and food, and long queues at gas stations in Odessa. Other sources report that the “fever” will last for 1-2 weeks, until logistics are reorganized through Moldova and Romania. By that time, pontoon crossings may appear in Mayaki.

As for the swings and roundabouts, these sorts of small advances and retreats such as Simplicius describes at Kupyansk mean absolutely nothing beyond PR for the media. If the media covered the Paul-Joshua fight the same way they cover the NATO-Russian war, they’d be breathlessly announcing that Paul had turned everything around and was about to knock out Joshua every time he got a punch in.

In war, as in boxing, no one goes unscathed. And the only reason the media believes otherwise is that it still thinks that turkey shoots in the desert with air supremacy are the definition of modern war, and nothing could be further from the truth in the Drone Age.

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Why the EU is Panicking

Hal Turner explains why the EU was holding its failed summit yesterday, at which Ursula van der Leyen failed to convince the member states to declare war on Russia by stealing its frozen funds. The problem is that the EU is going to have to return those funds soon, and they’re already being used to prop up loans that will now have to be written off as complete losses, which is going to cause a lot of financial pain to someone:

The United States has notified the European Union that it wants frozen Russian sovereign assets incorporated into a negotiated settlement of the Ukraine war.

That position immediately exposes a major problem for Brussels.

Europe has already functionally collateralized Russian central bank assets — not through formal seizure, but by pledging windfall profits and future proceeds from those assets to support long-term financing and loan structures for Ukraine.

This has been publicly acknowledged in EU and G7 policy frameworks over the past year.

That financing model was built on a core assumption: Either the war would continue indefinitely, or Russia would be decisively defeated.

A negotiated peace breaks that assumption.

Once the United States asserts that frozen Russian assets must be treated as part of a settlement framework, rather than permanent war financing, several consequences follow. The EU’s legal justification weakens, the collateral underpinning those loans becomes unstable, and the long-standing claim that the asset freeze is “temporary” becomes difficult to sustain.

This is not merely a diplomatic disagreement. It is a forced accounting event — one with potential implications for Euroclear, EU financial institutions, and member-state balance sheets.

This context helps explain recent developments in Brussels. Over the past days and weeks, EU leadership has moved rapidly to bypass vetoes, expand emergency authorities, and escalate rhetoric — including renewed NATO statements about preparing for wider conflict.

The underlying strategy appears straightforward: Treat frozen Russian assets as a de facto war chest.

In practice, that step had already been taken through collateralization, even if formal seizure was avoided.

President Trump is now explicitly challenging that structure.

By calling this out, he undermines the financial logic that sustained the war.

All of the bluster and posturing will not disguise the fact that NATO has already lost its war with Russia. The Russians now know that there is no ceasefire or negotiated peace agreement that can be trusted, which is why I expect them to make demands that none of the Western parties want to accept, even though they should.

Frankly, I’m surprised that the Russians are even willing to talk to anyone, given the way they have been relentlessly lied to by everyone, including formerly neutral parties. If I were Putin, I would simply smile politely and grind on until I had exactly what I wanted, then impose a peace agreement with steel teeth.

UPDATE: EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, announced that Europe had decided they could provide another $90 Billion in assistance to Ukraine, that Europe “will raise from Capital Markets.” So the Europeans are going into hock for Ukraine, to the tune of about $90 Billion.

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The EU Threatens DC

Why does anyone believe these unelected Satanic would-be world rulers are on anyone’s side, or even remotely in line with American national interests. And they desperately need to be feeling the back side of the President’s pimp hand.

The EU’s pro-war, globalist, anti-American leaders are doing everything in their power—including weighing what’s being called a “nuclear option” of deliberately shaking the foundations of the U.S. economy—to block a peace settlement in Ukraine, even as President Trump advances direct negotiations aimed at finally ending the nearly four-year-long inter-Slavic war.

According to reports, the globalist bloc in Europe is threatening to sell-off $2.34 trillion in US Treasury holdings if Trump withdraws support for Ukraine—an action that some analysts claim could  trigger a downturn more severe than the 2008 crash.

Rather than welcoming diplomacy, EU officials are allegedly weighing economic retaliation if Trump dares to end the war on his own terms. Sources say some governments have floated the idea of dumping portions of their massive holdings of U.S. debt as a form of pressure.

Such a move would be a dramatic escalation—essentially an attempt to destabilize the American economy to keep the Ukraine conflict alive. Analysts note this financial “nuclear option” could send shockwaves through global markets and severely devalue the dollar.

European technocrats appear willing to risk worldwide turmoil to preserve their geopolitical ambitions. Their threat reflects how far the EU has drifted from serving its citizens and how committed it remains to endless confrontation with Russia.

First of all, the economic crisis is going to take place regardless. Second, if I were President Trump, I would inform them that any such action would be perceived as an act of war and that they would no longer have to worry about a Russian invasion of Western Europe because the US troops already there would be seizing the central banks of the EU and every member state that supported the Commission’s action, as well as arresting all of the leaders responsible for it.

Better yet, paraphrase President Chappell:

EU, you have a problem with that? You know what you should do? You should sanction me. Sanction me with your army. Oh, wait a minute, you don’t have an army! I guess that means you need to shut the fuck up. That’s what I would do if I didn’t have no army. I would SHHH… the fuck up. Shut the fuck UP!

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A Little Late for That

The top British military officer is under the misapprehension that anyone in Britain is going to fight for the British government given the way the last few British governments have been actively seeking to destroy the English nation:

British families must be prepared to send their sons and daughters to war against Russia, the head of the military has warned.

In a stark message, Chief of the Defence Staff Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton said ‘more people’ needed to be ready to take up arms to protect the country.

He explained that although the chances of a direct Russian attack on UK soil remain remote, that ‘does not mean the chances are zero’. Sir Richard called for schools to encourage children to take up jobs in the arms industry and said more British families will ‘know what sacrifice for our nation means’.

Well, they won’t be. If there is one lesson, it is this: if your government tries to force you to make the choice, go to war with your government, not the Russian Army.

Your chances of survival are much, much better.

Besides that, we’ve seen that the British military hasn’t been able to stop an unarmed invasion of ten million. They obviously couldn’t stop a nationwide rebellion of British nationalists either.

8,200+ comments. The following are among the top-rated:

  • What is he smoking, if he thinks we going to fight wars for the rich, i’d sooner turn my weapons on them before taking up arms against our russian brothers and sisters.
  • Fight for governments that care little for its citizens instead pander to accommodating non British people and of course politicians grabbing all the wealth they can so no definitely not.
  • No F way are you taking my sons
  • No thanks – I wouldn’t vote for Labour let alone fight for their version of Britain. It’s not worth fighting for now.
  • Fight for a country that won’t even let you raise the flag, no thanks .

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The Logistics of Tolkien

An Unmitigated Pedant defends the military elements of The Lord of the Rings. I read this with particular interest, because the military scenes and battles have tended to be the one area where Arts of Dark and Light have been said to actually exceed the master’s masterpiece. His core thesis is that it is primarily Peter Jackson who is to blame for the perception that Tolkien’s military setups and strategies were suboptimal, although he blames most of Jackson’s shortcomings on the medium in which he was working.

I’m not so sure about that, given Faramir’s cavalry charge against a fortified position being held by missile-armed forces. But never mind that for now.

The army Sauron sends against Minas Tirith is absolutely vast – an army so vast that it cannot fit its entire force in the available frontage, so the army ends up stacking up in front of the city:

The books are vague on the total size of the orcish host (but we’ll come back to this), but interview material for the movies suggests that Peter Jackson’s CGI team assumed around 200,000 orcs. This army has to exit Minas Morgul – apparently as a single group – and then follow the road to the crossing at Osgiliath. Is this operational plan reasonable, from a transit perspective?

In a word: no. It’s not hard to run the math as to why. Looking at the image at the head of the previous section, we can see that the road the orcs are on allows them to march five abreast, meaning there are 40,000 such rows (plus additional space for trolls, etc). Giving each orc four feet of space on the march (a fairly conservative figure), that would mean the army alone stretches 30 miles down a single road. At that length, the tail end of the army would not even be able to leave camp before the front of the army had finished marching for the day. For comparison, an army doing a ‘forced march’ (marching at rapid speed under limited load – and often taking heat or fatigue casualties to do it) might manage 20 to 30 miles per day. Infantry on foot is more likely to average around 10 miles per day on decent roads.

Ideally, the solution to this problem is to split the army up. By moving in multiple columns and converging on the battlespace, you split one impossibly long column of troops into several more manageable ones. There is a danger here – the enemy might try to overwhelm each smaller army in turn – but Faramir has had to pull his troops back out of Ithilien, so there is little risk of defeat in detail for the Army of Mordor. The larger problem is terrain – we’ve seen Ithilien in this film and the previous one: it is heavily forested, with few roads. What roads exist are overgrown and difficult to use. Worse yet, the primary route through the area is not an east-west road, but the North-South route up from Near Harad to the Black Gate. The infrastructure here to split the army effectively simply doesn’t exist.

A map from regular Earth, rather than Middle Earth. This is Napoleon’s Ulm Campaign (1805) – note how Napoleon’s armies (the blue lines) are so large they have to move in multiple columns, which converge on the Austrian army (the red box labeled “FERDINAND”). This coordinated movement is the heart of operations: how do you get your entire army all to the battlefield intact and at the same time?
This actually understates the problem, because the army of Morder also needs supplies in order to conduct the siege. Orcs seem to be able to make do with very poor water supplies (Frodo and Sam comment on the foulness of Mordor water), so we can assume they use local water along the march, but that still leaves food. Ithilien (the territory they are marching through), as we have seen in the film, is unpopulated – the army can expect no fresh supplies here (or in the Pelennor beyond, for reasons we’ll discuss shortly). That is going to mean a baggage train to carry additional supplies, as well as materials for the construction of all of the fancy siege equipment (we, in fact, later see them bringing the towers pre-built – we’ll get to it). This would lengthen the army train even more.

All of that raises a second point – from a supply perspective, can this operation work? Here, the answer is, perhaps surprisingly, yes. Minas Morgul is 20 leagues (around 60 miles) from Minas Tirith. An infantryman might carry around (very roughly) 10 days or so of rations on his person, which is enough to move around 120 miles (these figures derive from K. Chase, Firearms: A Global History to 1700 (2003) – well worth a read! – but are broadly applicable to almost any army before the invention of the railroad). The army is bound to be held up a bit along the way, so the Witch King would want to bring some wagons with additional supplies, but as a matter of supply, this works. The problem is transit.

As a side note, the supply issue neatly explains the aggressive tactics the Witch king employs when he arrives at Minas Tirith, moving immediately for an assault rather than a siege. Because the pack animals which pull wagons full of food eat food themselves, there is literally no amount of wagons which would enable an army of this size to sustain itself indefinitely in a long siege. The Witch King is thus constrained by his operational plan: the raw size of his army means he must either take the city in an assault quickly enough to march most of his army back, or fail. He proceeds with the appropriate sense of urgency.

That said, the distances here are short: 60 miles is a believable distance for an army to make an unsupported ‘lunge’ out of its logistics network. One cannot help but notice the Stark (hah!) contrast with the multi-hundred-mile supply-free lunges in the TV version of Game of Thrones, which are far less plausible.

Great, now I have to re-read The Lord of the Rings from a strategic and logistics perspective. Hmmm, this might actually make for an interesting Darkstream series. Would that be of interest to anyone else or is this just another AI music sort of thing?

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The Time is Now

A comical “warning” of war from the current NATO head:

NATO chief Mark Rutte has warned that war with Russia ‘is at our door’ as he urged European allies to prepare for action now or risk facing a conflict on the scale ‘our grandparents and great-grandparents endured’.

Speaking in Berlin on Thursday, Rutte said too many NATO members remained ‘quietly complacent’ about the threat posed by Moscow and insisted Europe must urgently ramp up defence spending and weapons production to deter Vladimir Putin.

‘We are Russia’s next target,’ he said. I fear that too many are quietly complacent. Too many don’t feel the urgency. And too many believe that time is on our side. It is not. The time for action is now.’

The only reason “the time for action is now” is because in five years, the USA isn’t going to be a member of NATO. NATO may or may not still exist as a rudimentary parody of a transnational military force, but regardless, time is not on the side of either NATO or the EU because in five years, both China and Russia are going to be stronger in both economic and military terms, the USA will be trying to survive its self-inflicted demographic shocks and maintaining its preeminence in the Western hemisphere, and the European militaries won’t even be able to control their own populations.

So NATO can lose now or lose later. It makes zero difference. The smartest thing these Clown World puppets could do is surrender preemptively to Russia and stop constantly poking both the Bear and the Dragon. Doing so is in the interest of them and the European nations alike. But they won’t be permitted to do so, which is why we’re going to have to endure this charade for another few years.

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