Tag: war

The USA is going to lose its next war, and in a manner that will not permit apologists to claim “well, we didn’t really try” or “the politicians sold us out” as they have with Vietnam and Korea. The reason is that the cognitive capability of the officer class is collapsing.

On paper, the US still has by far the world’s strongest military. This is the case whether or not you measure it by military spending, by various indices of military power (e.g. MEU, CAP, or the CMP developed on this blog), or as pertains to the narrower if arguably more relevant naval sphere, by naval megatonnage (even if the gap with China rapidly shrinks as the PLAN adds the equivalent of a major European Great Power navy every single year).

However, there are increasing reasons to think that large parts of this superiority could be becoming illusory – a dangerous state of affairs, given the recovery of bipartisan support for US military intervention and American elites’ oft-stated confidence in their military supremacy.

Some of these reasons are well covered in the military/strategy sphere, such as those relating to issues of the technological convergence of Chinese and other potential adversaries’ weapons systems. The most hyped example are Russian/Chinese hypersonic weapons, though there are many more prosaic examples, ranging from progressive improvements in Chinese fighter engines to the unexpected precision of Iranian ballistic missiles. This is accompanied by US procurement failures, with the F-35 program being the most high-profile example. However, what has not been written as much about is the rapid degradation of the human capital component in the US military – a factor that is no less important than military capital or technological prowess.

Fundamentally, you need your military forces to be staffed with high IQ and well trained men with high morale and commitment to its cause. High IQ is especially important in commanding positions and in the more “g loaded” services. According to a 2015 paper by M.F. Cancian and M.W. Klein, it seems to have been going rapidly down even before the diversity drives of the 2010s. The cognitive performance of US Marine officers has seen a 10 IQ point decline between the 1980s and 2010.

A ten-point decline is even worse than my calculations of the decline in average intelligence of the US population since 1960. My suspicion is that feminism has exacerbated the problem, as the most intelligent women from the most intelligent ethnic groups are failing to marry or have children, thereby multiplying the negative effects of non-European immigration.

By multiplying the average measured IQs for the four major ethnic groups in the United States with their changing demographic ratios, we can calculate how the demographic changes have affected the national intelligence over time. In 1960, we calculate the national IQ average to have been 100.3. By 2010, the average national IQ had fallen four points, to 96. By 2030, if the current population estimates are correct, it will fall another point, to 95. Lest you think that average national intelligence is irrelevant, note that just that four-point difference is essentially equal to the difference between countries such as Austria, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, and countries such as Uruguay and Portugal. There is a strong correlation between societal wealth and average national intelligence as measured in IQ.

Even the left-wing British paper, The Guardian, was recently forced to take note of this phenomenon, as it reported that scientists have determined genes influence academic ability across all subjects, and that as much as 60 percent of the observed differences between various population groups can be explained by genetic factors. So, the mass migration of the last 50 years has been materially dysgenic and has literally made Americans stupider on average. It’s not just you, mass entertainment really has been dumbed down in recent decades in order to appeal to what is an even lower common denominator than before.

Whatever one thinks of these changes, this is one of the fastest demographic transformations of a nation in recorded human history, and it is the direct result of public policy.

The USA is already Portugal with nukes. No wonder Russia and China are increasingly confident of their ability to break free of the post-WWII neoliberal order. A military whose strength is diversity is a military that lacks any actual strengths and will soon be defeated.

It doesn’t appear that the mainstream strategists have figured out an effective approach to attacking antifragile opponents, if this article in Military Strategy Magazine is any guide:

Antifragile adversaries may lose their potential if the strategic performance they face is inappropriate to their capabilities or if they lack the time to adapt. This does not just turn the antifragile adversaries into the resilient ones. The relationships between the specific characters of the adversary forms a triangle rather than a linear hierarchy. Therefore, one-time antifragility does not guarantee a safe landing in the resilient zone. Antifragile adversaries can be rendered fragile without becoming resilient ones. Strategists have several options to make this happen. These include sequential and cumulative strategies, as well as the strategy of annihilation, and the deliberate use of peace.

The first option includes rapidly executed sequential strategies to deny to the adversary the time to get stronger. The theory of victory here relies on a quick sequential campaign, by which the strategist robs the adversary of the time to improve the latter’s military capability. The adversary can counter this by refusing to engage at all, but then he deliberately robs himself of the opportunity to improve his military capabilities through strategic performance. Sequential strategy can, therefore, force the adversary out of his antifragile mode by either denying him the time to adapt or by rendering him unable to engage in the kind of strategic performance that would increase his military capability. The critical requirement for this approach is to have logistics effective enough to support the continual and relentless push into the adversary’s territory. However, this strategy contains a high risk of morphing into attrition. The sequential strategy can be interrupted in any moment by the adversary as well as by friction and chance inherent to strategic practice. Any serious interruption gives the adversary the time to grow stronger and increase the probabilities of turning the strategy into attrition. Still, the rapid sequential strategy may be useful when trying to achieve limited territorial objectives rather than a regime change. This is so because the pursuit of limited objectives contains fewer opportunities for interruption. The suitability of the strategy therefore varies widely with the political objectives of the strategist.

The second option is the strategy of decisive battle which seeks to annihilate the adversary’s force in one engagement. The theory of victory behind this approach resides in the delivery of the overwhelming challenge to the adversary. Such strategic performance destroys the adversary’s military capability and the associated chance to grow stronger. To pull this off, the strategist needs the cooperation of the adversary and sufficient military capabilities of his own. The adversary must accept the time and the place of the decisive battle. The strategist then needs to be able to defeat him. The adversary may decline the battle but by this he again robs himself of the opportunity to become stronger through strategic performance. On the other hand, the failure to annihilate substantial forces of the adversary during the battle may result in the struggle of attrition. The Spartans were often able to force Thebans to accept battle but they failed to annihilate the latter. Consequently, their hopes of annihilation turned into the practice of attrition which benefited the Thebans. Another problem is that contemporary strategic practice seldom allows strategists to annihilate large portion of the adversary’s military capabilities in one engagement. This has to do as much with the size of the armies as with the ways in which these are deployed. Strategists may be able to pull decisive battle off against unskilfully employed smaller-sized armed forces but it is unlikely to happen in wars between superpowers or even mediumly sized armies. The suitability of this strategy therefore varies with the relative size of the adversary’s armed forces and the way in which they are employed.

The third option is to use cumulative strategy of underwhelming attacks to exhaust the adversary. The theory of victory in this case resides in the continual attacks conducted below the level of the adversary’s current capabilities. This approach gives the adversary’s military capability no opportunity to grow, because the latter is already above the level of the attacks. In the ideal case, cumulative strategy of this sort applies violence unilaterally in order to avoid the interaction with the adversary altogether. Terrorist attacks or raids are ideal examples of this approach, but occasional battle may also work. The key difference between this strategy and the search for attrition is that the former purposefully limits the frequency and the intensity of the violent interaction while the latter does the opposite. This strategy is unlikely to destroy the adversary’s military capability. But, by denying the adversary the opportunity to grow stronger, the strategist may be able to exhaust the adversary. The strategy is most likely to succeed if the strategist pursues limited objectives and if the adversary does not value these objectives very much. There are considerable limitations to the effectives of this strategy. The strategist may be unable to do enough damage over time to exhaust the adversary. This may happen because of the intentional weakness of the attacks or because the adversary is able to recover from them. More importantly, even this strategy can turn into detrimental attempts to attrite. The confidence elicited by the successful conduct of repeated attacks may boost the strategist’s confidence as well as increase the effort he is willing to put up with. Once he feels strong enough, he may recklessly escalate his endeavour into the struggle where the search for attrition replaces the more modest aim of exhaustion. The suitability of this strategy then varies with the political objectives of the strategist, with his own capacity to exercise restraint and with the value the adversary ascribes to the objectives.

The last option is to use peace, that is to deliberately abstain from the use of violence. In this scenario, the theory of victory relies on the detrimental consequences of peace on the adversary ‘s military capabilities as well as on the supplemental use of non-violent instruments of power. In general, peace tends to have a negative impact on the cohesion of society as well as on military capabilities in particular. Conflict lines between different segments of society tends to grow and military forces face gradual capability degradation as a consequence of not facing appropriate challenges. Governments seldom prioritize the development of military capabilities to the extent this happens in war. To put it simply, in peace most people care about things other than war. The great demobilisations that followed the Napoleonic wars, the First World War, the Second World War and the 1990s are good examples of this tendency. Furthermore, some non-violent instruments of power tend to be stronger in peace than in the times of war. Propaganda, for example, is more effective in peace than during the war, because it amplifies the already present conflict lines within a society. During war, societies tends to get more homogenous and united when facing a common adversary, leaving little space for the exacerbation of conflict lines.

I will critique these four strategies in my next post on the subject. In the meantime, feel free to discuss their strengths and weaknesses, and guess which of the four I find to be a) so typical and b) amusingly wrong.

It’s always a good idea to keep up on the latest ideas being produced by the system strategists, especially since some of them are likely to be applied to us in due course.

Any useful categorization of adversaries cuts to the essence of strategy, to the utility of violent interaction. Strategy is about the purposeful use made of violent engagements with the adversary. The purpose of strategy is to decrease the adversary’s military capabilities or his will to fight. Strategic performance, in its consequences, determines whether the purpose is achieved. Therefore, the effects produced by strategic performance are what matters the most in strategy. These effects may vary in three directions. They can decrease the adversary’s capability/will to fight, leave these variables unchanged or increase them. A proper categorization of adversaries helps the strategist orient himself in the logic of these three scenarios.

The main goal here is to develop a new typology of adversaries and to zoom in on those who get stronger when engaged in strategic performance. The paper draws upon the concept of antifragility, popularized by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book Anti-fragile: The Things That Gain from Disorder. I argue that depending on their reaction to strategic performance, adversaries can be put on a spectrum from fragile to resilient, to antifragile ones. To keep the scope of the investigation reasonably limited, the paper focuses on the effects of strategic performance on the adversary’s military capabilities rather on his will to fight. The first category describes the adversaries whose military capabilities shrink as a consequence of engaging in strategic performance. The second category is reserved for those adversaries who are able to replenish their military capabilities to the original position after engaging in strategic performance. The last category describes those adversaries whose military capabilities increase as a consequence of taking part in strategic performance. These are, of course, ideal types and their manifestations in strategic practice are less clear-cut.

Antifragile adversaries pose a particular, but not unsolvable, challenge. The challenge resides in the fact that attrition, the most common effect in strategic practice, strengthens these adversaries instead of weakening them. Nonetheless, there are four distinct ways to defeat antifragile adversaries. These include rapid sequential strategies, strategies of decisive battle, cumulative strategies of underwhelming attacks, and the deliberate uses of peace. The secondary argument of this paper is that antifragility in the context of strategy is as much a function of the adversary’s capacity to adapt as of strategist’s own conduct of strategy. Strategist is responsible for the character of the adversary, he shapes it by his own choices and performance. Antifragility is therefore not an inherent nor a stable characteristic but rather a quality which the adversary acquires temporarily and in an interactive relationship.

The things that gain from disorder

Taleb coined the term antifragile in order to describe phenomena that are at the opposite spectrum of the fragile ones. When facing challenges, fragile objects get damaged or collapse completely. A typical example is anything made of regular glass. When thrown against the wall it breaks and is of no use for anyone. Then there are resilient objects, which can sustain challenges with no permanent damage taken. An inflatable ball thrown against the wall may slightly change its shape for a second only to return to the original form in the next moment, with no impact on its utility for the future.

Antifragile objects benefit from facing challenges. Bones have to be challenged regularly in order to get stronger and muscles only grow when repeatedly damaged. In fact, both bones and muscles get weak if unchallenged for longer periods of time. Two key requirements need to be present for the manifestation of the anti-fragile potential. First, the challenges have to be proportionate to the capacities of the object. Jumping from places that are too high may be an overwhelming challenge for bones and lifting stuff that is too heavy may irreversibly damage muscles. At the same time, challenges far below the capacity of the object may result in having no effect at all. A professional bodybuilder lifting weights of one kilogram every-day does not benefit from this exercise. Second, enough time has to pass between individual challenges to grant the object the space for improvement.[v] With no time to grow stronger, both bones and muscles deteriorate under constant pressure. Antifragility is therefore as much a function of the inherent predispositions of the object as it is of the character of the challenges the object faces.

The third ideal type is the antifragile adversary. For this one, strategic performance serves as a stimulus for the growth in his military capabilities. This happens when the adversary with antifragile predispositions faces regular challenges appropriate to his current capabilities. Of course, what is “regular” and “appropriate” is context dependent. Antifragile adversaries are less common in strategic history. This is so because they manifest themselves only in instances when their predispositions match with the favourable character of the strategist’s attacks. One historical example that comes close to the ideal type were the Thebans in their wars against the Spartans (395-362 B.C.). The two polities fought each other regularly during the first half of the fourth century. The continual engagement in strategic performance made Theban forces stronger from one major battle to another. Though first suffering a defeat at Nemea (394 B.C.), Thebans fought Spartans to a standstill at Coronea (394 B.C.), routed them at Tegyra (375 B.C.), and slaughtered them at Leuctra (371 B.C.) and Mantinea (362 B.C.).[vi] Over the course of the wars, Thebans enjoyed gradually increasing morale, explored innovative echelon tactics and developed new kinds of military units. Therefore, by their own efforts as well by the repeated violent interaction with the Spartans, the Thebans fulfilled their anti-fragile potential. Seeing this development in practice, one Spartan sarcastically congratulated his own king that by the repeated attacks against Thebes, he had taught his adversary how to fight. Antifragile adversaries are not an artefact of a distant past. In fact, as David Betz and Hugo Stanford-Tuck argue in their recent piece, even the contemporary West has often pursued a way of war “which through one’s own efforts leaves the enemy stronger at the end than at the beginning.” Antifragile adversaries are universal and so is the unique challenge they pose.

The main challenge in facing antifragile adversaries is that what does not kill them makes them stronger. This is a bit of exaggeration, but in general it does apply. To start with, most strategies seeking to attrite that adversary do not work. Worse, these strategies work for the antifragile adversaries. Actively seeking out the antifragile adversary and trying to attrite his military capabilities by frequent engagements is a reliable receipt for making him stronger. This may not seem like a big deal when the other strategies are available. The problem is, most of the other strategies eventually turn into some sort of attrition contest as well. Strategists too often envision quick and decisive wars of annihilation and get prolonged wars of attrition instead. Others, who start out with terrorist attacks and guerrilla raids, turn to attrition once they develop sufficient military capabilities to have a reasonable chance of success. Not all the strategic options lead to attrition but too many of them do. It follows that most options for dealing with the antifragile adversaries convey high risks of failure. 

The battle of the 72 Bears with Patreon is a classic example of an antifragile adversary vs a resilient adversary. The Bears have antifragility on their side; the LLOE is getting stronger as more lawyers take up the cause and they become better versed in the arbitratry vagaries of arbitration and the California court system. As Sparta did with Thebes, Patreon’s lawyers are literally teaching the LLOE how to defeat them. Patreon, on the other hand, has significant, but finite resources that are being continuously drained at an increasing rate. The eventual outcome is obvious to any strategic observer, since the Bears haven’t even needed to tap into the massive human resources that are available to them while Patreon is conservatively estimated to have already spent more than one-half of its annual revenue on the dispute.

Physicists know the harsh truth: math always wins in the end.

But it is interesting to note that antifragility has become a serious concern to the system strategists. I’ll analyse the proposed strategy for defeating antifragility in a future post.

If you don’t understand the concept of 5GW, or what the Chinese call Unrestricted Warfare, this expose of the systematic purchase of England’s private schools should help you grasp the basic concept:

Hundreds of independent schools left in dire financial straits by the coronavirus pandemic are being targeted by Chinese investors, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.

Experts anticipate a ‘feeding frenzy’ as firms, including some run by high-ranking members of the ruling Chinese Communist party, seek to expand their influence over Britain’s education system. Seventeen schools are already owned by Chinese companies, but that number is set to rocket.

Amid rising concern about Beijing’s tentacles reaching into British classrooms, an investigation by this newspaper can reveal:

Nine of the 17 schools under Chinese control are owned by firms whose founders or bosses are among China’s most senior Communist Party members; Princess Diana’s preparatory school is owned by a Chinese group that openly trades on her name; Schools are using educational tools for teaching children a ‘whitewashed’ view of China; 

One firm admitted its acquisition of British schools is aimed at supporting China’s controversial Belt And Road strategy, which aims to expand Beijing’s global influence.

This is only one front in the education offensive. Another one is aimed at higher education in the USA:

Since 2004, the Chinese government has sponsored Confucius Institutes on college and university campuses around the world, providing teachers, textbooks, and operating funds. Until recently, an agency of the Chinese Ministry of Education, the Hanban, oversaw Confucius Institutes. In the wake of widespread criticism, the Chinese government has reorganized Confucius Institutes under a new organization, the Chinese International Education Foundation.

In April 2017, the National Association of Scholars released Outsourced to China: Confucius Institutes and Soft Power in American Higher Education, a comprehensive report on the way the Chinese government infiltrates American colleges and universities to enhance its own image. At that time, we counted 103 Confucius Institutes in the United States.

As of February 17, 2021, NAS counts a total of 55 Confucius Institutes in the United States.  

That number will almost certainly begin rising as long as Biden appears to be the President. If it does not, this will definitely count as another post-election anomaly. 

Myanmar is based beyond belief:

As news of the military coup in Myanmar reached the halls of the Bank of Japan, staff raced to gather information about the ongoing developments.

“They have apparently kicked out the central bank governor as well.” The shocking news was passed up the command chain at the head office in Tokyo’s Nihonbashi district.  

On Feb.1, Myanmar’s military took control of the country’s administrative, legislative and judicial branches, detaining de facto leader State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi and several other democratically elected officials.

It is unclear what happened to former central bank chief Kyaw Kyaw Maung, but deputy governor Bo Bo Nge has been detained, according to media reports. Than Nyein, who served as central banker under the previous junta before the first free election in decades in 2015, has been reappointed to the role.

The Bank of Japan, like most central banks around the world, is watching carefully, to see how the military leaders could affect bilateral and regional cooperation on monetary policy and financial stability.

Translation: the central banks are terrified that their century-long free money ride is coming to an end. 

Creepy Joe is not flying on Air Force One:

Biden got aboard the Presidential jet, and it did not change call signs to Air Force One. Previously anons watched callsign 82-8000 come into Andrews, pick up Trump, and change to callsign AF1. Biden had yet to take the big jet, so up until now, some shills claimed the reason his planes had not yet changed callsign to AF1 was because of that, but this removed all rational explanations. 

He is flying, and the military is not giving him the AF1 designation. Something very strange is going on. Add it to the inaugural anomalies, Trump is riding in a government-armored SUV while Bill Clinton is arriving places in a regular vehicle, Marines are not saluting Biden, and DC is ringed in concertina and seven foot tall non-scalable fence and occupied by almost 10,000 armed troops, no explanation for which has been given to anyone of power in our government. Also anons watched the return trip, and again, it was 82-8000, and not AF1.

But it’s just a coincidence, right? They just forgot, right? It was just the sort of oversight that happens all the time, right?

If you can’t trust the plan, trust the President. The elected President, not the media-anointed figurehead presently playing the role for the cameras. The fact that you don’t know the timeline and you don’t know the reasons for it doesn’t render you incapable of observing the anomalies and the obvious cracks in the media narrative.

I don’t pretend to know what is going on. But I don’t believe for one second that Joe Biden is the President of the United States, de facto or de jure. Notice that he’s not even meeting with foreign heads of state.

President Biden is unlikely to meet in person with a foreign leader for “a couple of months,” press secretary Jen Psaki said on Tuesday. Foreign travel has been curbed by the pandemic dating back to the Trump administration, though then-President Trump did host foreign leaders even amid the health crisis. 

Or ever, for that matter. It will be interesting to see how the media tries to spin it when foreign leaders start showing up for meetings in Mar-a-Lago.

UPDATE: A woman whose husband is stationed in Okinawa reports that when a new President is inaugurated, posters of the new President and flags are put up there to celebrate. Apparently that still has not yet happened. 

Forget the dangers posed by a potential reaction to the Covid “vaccine”. The far more significant danger is that the pseudo-vaccine will provide the next virus with a marker to target. In fact, the “success” of the Covid vaccine program may have already assured that China will win its 5GW wars with both the USA and the Jewish diaspora.

Coronaviruses are notorious for ADE reactions, where antibody presence potentiates the infection instead of protecting against it.  Using that as a bioweapon is stupid because you will score “own goals” on your own people and there is no way to control that.  As a result biological weapons generally are dumb; poison gas and such don’t have this risk since it does not propagate but any disease does.

The poster child for ADE in coronaviruses was an attempted vaccine for a feline coronavirus that often made cats very sick.  The vaccine killed every one of them in the test when they were later exposed, wildly potentiating the infection.

Read that again folks: NOT ONE VACCINATED CAT SURVIVED A CHALLENGE WITH THE ACTUAL VIRUS.

Ordinary vaccines we have lots of experience with, such as measles, the flu shot, mumps and similar do not carry a risk beyond that of natural infection and cannot be weaponized because they produce the exact same antibody response as a natural infection.  If you have had either the measles or the shot you will have antibodies but an antibody test will not tell you which since they’re not distinguishable.

I suspected from the start that due to the way these mRNA shots work — they are not actually a vaccine at all in that they do not “mimic” natural infection but rather cause your cells to produce the spike protein that the virus has and that elicits an immune response — that the antibodies produced by those jabs would be distinct and distinguishable from natural infection.

All of the so-called “experts” who worked to develop these and the firms involved knew damn well this was the case when they started developing them — and did it anyway.

Now we have hard, scientific confirmation of that and it’s very bad. In fact it’s potentially nation-ending bad.

An adversary that develops a virus (e.g. another modified/mutated bat virus, for example) that selectively targets ADE in people with the specific antibodies from vaccination, which are distinct from natural infection, could easily kill every single person who was vaccinated and not harm or only make mildly sick those who either had Covid-19 naturally or who were uninfected and unvaccinated.

The nightmare scenario that has always driven bioweapons research is the push to discover some genetically distinct means of targeting a bioweapon such that it only kills your adversary and leaves everyone else alone.  It’s even worse for your adversary if your side gets and transmits it but doesn’t get sick.  This has never been found despite diligent effort in the past; all attempts to find such a distinct vulnerability have failed, showing reactivity across the board and thus strongly suggesting that if that “thing” was completed and got out it would kill indiscriminately.  That you cannot stop a virus from circulating (even isolated islands eventually got hit by the 1918 pandemic flu!) means that releasing a virus or bacteria that nobody on “your” side has been sensitized to yet doesn’t help because when (not if) the sensitizing agent gets into your population all your people die too.

This has now, for the first time in human history, been changed by the idiotic actions of our governments and pharmaceutical companies in that we are now tagging people for death by the literal millions and they will die if an adversary is able to develop a virus that targets those specific antibodies. 

It could be Seven Kill Tiger-level horrific. But the silver lining in the dark cloud is that the surviving population will be far more intelligent and K-oriented than those who voluntarily accepted the death-mark. Nevertheless, Karl Denninger is absolutely right.

The use of any “vaccine” that does not produce an identical antibody to natural infection must be halted immediately and never done again.

The Burmese military deals forthrightly with election fraud in Myanmar:

The leaders of the Southeast Asian country of Myanmar have been arrested by the nation’s military for allegedly committing massive vote fraud during the November 2020 elections. Myanmar’s State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi and President Win Myint were both arrested in morning raids on Monday by the nation’s armed forces, after widespread allegations that they had committed election fraud.

The official results of the November election in Myanmar, also known as Burma, showed a victory for the liberal National League for Democracy (NLD), which is led by Aung San Suu Kyi. The conservative nationalist Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), which is supported by many members of the country’s military, lost several seats.

However, it soon became apparent, according to the military, that massive vote fraud had taken place. On January 15, the USDP released 94,242 cases of election fraud in six townships, and subsequently called for a new, fair election supervised by the military and the country’s election commission.

The weak-willed election commission, which was appointed by the NLD, declined to acknowledge the evidence. “Weaknesses and errors in voters lists cannot cause voting fraud,” the election commission said in their response.

Ultimately, the military issued an ultimatum to the NLD government for failing to “respect and abide by” the Constitution of Myanmar. General Min Aung Hlaing, the commander-in-chief of Myanmar’s armed forces suggested that the role of the military was to stop governments abusing the law.

It’s informative to observe that the Burmese military is more conscientious about its duty to the Burmese constitution than the U.S. military is to its supposed duty to the U.S. constitution. At this point, no one around the world can possibly take the whole “land of the free and home of the brave” act seriously any more. Not when China is observably more serious about punishing official corruption and Myanmar is observably more serious about preventing voter fraud.

I’ve said for two decades that Italy is less corrupt than the United States, because in the USA, the system isn’t corrupted, it’s the corruption that is the system.

It appears the Burmese military understands very well who their real enemies are.

Military leaders, who claim the vote was fraudulent, have now declared a year-long state of emergency, transferred all power to Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, appointed Vice President Myint Swe – a former general – as acting president, and closed all banks until further notice.

 And if you think events appear to indicate otherwise, well, you’re just huffing the hopium and snorting the copium.

Some 5,000 National Guard troops will reportedly remain deployed in Washington, DC throughout former President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial, staying in the capital until mid-March. However, discontent is brewing in the ranks.

According to an anonymously sourced Politico report on Sunday, a contingency force of 7,000 National Guard troops will stay in DC until Trump’s trial begins in February, after which 5,000 will stay put until the trial concludes, likely in the middle of March.

Politico’s sources said the deployment was necessary due to “impeachment security concerns,” yet the troops say they’ve been given little information about their mission, which one guardsman said is “very unusual for any military mission.”

They’re there for the angry MAGA hordes! Or Antifa! BLM?

China is obviously encouraged by the news of the Biden administration:

Taiwan recorded no fewer than 13 incursions by Chinese military planes into its air defense identification zone (ADIZ) in a single day Saturday (Jan. 23), the most of any such incidents within one day so far this year.

According to CNA, one Y-8 anti-submarine aircraft, four J-16 fighter jets and eight H-6K bombers ventured into Taiwan’s ADIZ during the day.

Earlier, the Liberty Times reported that Taiwan’s Air Force scrambled a total of 26 jets between 10 a.m. and 12:30 p.m. to counter seven incursions, which all occurred in the southwest corner of the ADIZ, the Liberty Times reported.

My impression is that China is simply waiting for the US military to be committed to war with Iran before it strikes. Although I expect if there is another eight years of institutional rot, as there was under Obama, that might be sufficient so that a distraction is not even necessary. 

Don’t forget that Taiwan now has its first female president, Tsai Ing-wen.