… “The power of advanced algorithmic warfare systems is now so great that it equates to having tactical nuclear weapons against an adversary with only conventional ones,” explains Alex Karp, chief executive of Palantir, in an email message. “The general public tends to underestimate this. Our adversaries no longer do.” …

So we’ve tipped our hand in some bulls**t war about tactics that might be used in a real one. Chalk one up for us!

Palantir, which began its corporate life working with the CIA on counterterrorism tools, has many critics. That’s partly because its biggest funder, from the start, has been co-founder Peter Thiel, a successful tech investor who has also been a strong supporter of Donald Trump and other MAGA Republicans. Karp, by contrast, has supported many Democratic candidates and causes.

I’ve never heard anyone give a cogent explanation as to why the CIA gets to have it’s own venture capital firm. Can the Navy open up a chain of hot-dog stands? Can the Department of the Interior run “gentleman’s clubs”?

Thiel, Karp, Republican, Democrat…………………it’s all the same team. And it isn’t our team.

Thiel’s Way of War

Cry havoc! And let slip the fags of war!

Et tu, Peter?

Peter Thiel, a homo siding with Globohomo. Go figure.

Ukraine unanimously passes new law banning discrimination against LGBTQ people 🌈👏🏼🌈 pic.twitter.com/IErI4snYvf

— Adam Zivo (@ZivoAdam) December 15, 2022

It must have taken a lot of honest effort, something the Russians don’t seem to have an abundance of in this century

Well, I recognize that this is an attempt at slander, the format tells me that, but what is the basis of the claim?

Meanwhile, it might be a good thing the Russians haven’t been trying:

Russia launches 7000mph Zircon hypersonic nuke missile

The Post wrote in 2019 that Palantir’s software was used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement to help track undocumented immigrants, which led to protests from some of the company’s employees.

Have they protested the US government support for the meat-grinder war of attrition in Ukraine the way they protested the US government fulfilling one of its most basic roles?

The potemkin eastern world is crumbling, tbe United States is rising.

You can just feel the pride on everybody’s face now. We did it, comrades. Commencing operation American Expansionism, now.

At first, I thought we should send our high-steppin’, tutu wearing, transgender lovin’ Pentagon over there to show them what Uncle Samantha can really do.

But now I wonder if our puppy-fetish division might be the stronger team? Now I know why they call them dog tags!

Col. Donnelly & CPT Tenney both were @JointBasePHH Hawaii in a #AlphaPup & #BetaPup sex relationship, with other partners

A “Pup” kink community

Both officers have 🐶mask pics in uniform & on 🇺🇸 military installations.

Donnelly’s kink was not a secret; his mask seen in office pic.twitter.com/wOwosYzv9I

— NOVA Campaigns (@NoVA_Campaigns) December 9, 2022

Wonder how many concerned tech workers know they wouldn’t have jobs if it wasn’t for the non-welfare state part of government?

why the CIA gets to have it’s own venture capital firm.

Guessing here. Investing in a startup as a venture capitalist gives greater (financial) leverage on the capital. CIA’s 10-million-dollar investment becomes 100 million dollars when other venture capitalists put 90 million dollars. This is better than an outright contract of $100 million if you are not certain the idea may work. In this case CIA would have burnt $10 and not $100 million. When doing blue sky research, why not spread $100 million into 10 $10 million startups so that at least one may work.

As an example, again a pure guess, I think NASA’s dollars being sent to SpaceX and Blue Origin may be working harder than the dollars being sent to Boeing or Lockheed-Martin.

wow but they dont apply IT to Chicago killing fields?????

Could this be another game changer? Asking for a friend.

Sounds like we’ve given Russia a legitimate reason now to take out our satellites.

It must have taken a lot of honest effort, something the Russians don’t seem to have an abundance of in this century

Well, I recognize that this is an attempt at slander, the format tells me that, but what is the basis of the claim?

Meanwhile, it might be a good thing the Russians haven’t been trying:

Russia launches 7000mph Zircon hypersonic nuke missile

It’s evidence free because you are meant to simply accept as fact the MSM narrative about Russia, Ukraine, the progress of the war and relative differences in military technology, no matter how many times this narrative is proven wrong.

For instance, it is a fact, according to the MSM, that Russia is running out of artillery shells, missiles, and drones, and has been on the verge of running out for these munitions since March, ten months ago. Yet the overwhelming Russian superiority in artillery, missile and drone strikes continues unabated. It’s all psychological projection, because it is the West which has trouble mass producing things now, thanks to neoliberalism, and not Russia.

But do not notice that, otherwise you are a Putin shill! The MSM, which lies to us on all other topics, is telling us the truth this time, because reasons.

As for this article, the quoted section it is rather short on practical examples of how this algorithm has “tipped the balance in Ukraine” — they might as well cite of Ghost of Kiev while they’re at it.

Throwing penny packet attacks into the teeth of Russian artillery has gotten over 100,000 Ukrainians killed so far by the West’s own admission, and adding Polish, American, UK and other mercenary volunteers is not going to fix the problem, nor does it seem that perfect real time data systems like this can solve this problem, either. Some problems don’t have a technical solution.

The purpose of these “wonder weapons” is to make the MIC rich, not to actually win wars. How many wars have “we” actually “won” since 1945? At what cost, and towards what practical ends?

One thing that I can’t quite figure out about the Ukraine Russian War is that this article is propaganda, it is aimed squarely at us (Americans), and it is meant to convince us that Ukraine is winning. Who’s interested in convincing Americans of this fact (which may or may not be true) and more importantly, why?

Western reporters who have gone to the front lines have said that the kill ratio is horrifically against the Kievan forces.

And Ukraine is constantly saying that they are running out of weapons, and reports from Western media have indicated that the Hegemon’s allies do not have much more to give.

Of course, the Western media have also been claiming for at least eight months that Russia is running out of missiles, etc.

Except that today I saw another news report in US media about Russia again brutally lobbing missiles into Ukraine.

Russia seems to have been running out of missiles for a very long time… without actually running out of missiles!

Interesting question: which side is playing the ‘Baghdad Bob” role here?

I am afraid we are going to find out: to quote the original Baghdad Bob, “History will tell.”

Mr Mox asked:

Could this be another game changer? Asking for a friend.

Oh, Yankee know-how and perseverance will prevail in Ukraine.

Just as it did in Afghanistan.

And Syria.

And Vietnam.

And at the Bay of Pigs.

Because the US never, ever loses!

Because Americans are a superior breed of human beings.

At least in the movies: have you seen Top Gun: Maverick? Man, are we good at making movies?

Sailer on Russia/Ukraine is about as accurate as on covid/vaccine.

On the subject of Ukraine, this is a fascinating interview with a British volunteer in that war (Not least because it has some interesting tidbits about Ukrainian corruption):

.

What is the loss rate to available resources ratio for the two armies? Put another way, what has each army lost in terms of available resources since July as a percent of total resources?

I can never understand why people pretend to know stuff about things they can’t possibly know anything about.

How do we know Russia doesn’t have similar satellite surveillance tools? Truth be told, Russia uses drones because they are better for real time targeting than satellites. And Russia’s EW resources in Ukraine are vastly superior, which is why their drones dominate the sky. Ukraine admits that Russian EW is causing US supplied drones to fall to earth or fly off in random directions almost as soon as they are launched. So, Steve’s claim about Russia lacking honest effort sounds like a Cold War trope. Moreover, most of Russian cutting-edge defense technology is developed in Russia, not stolen from the US.

Russia does not fight like Western armies, using overwhelming force to push back the enemy with grand manoeuvres. You see, the goal of war is destroying the enemy army. It doesn’t necessarily involve gaining “acres” with no strategic value and at great cost. The Russian way of war is grinding down the enemy while preserving one’s resources. Which so far they are accomplishing.

It must have taken a lot of honest effort, something the Russians don’t seem to have an abundance of in this century

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/18906/heres-the-six-super-weapons-putin-unveiled-during-fiery-address

Putin made his remarks at the Manezh Central Exhibition Hall near the Kremlin on March 1, 2018. Some lawmakers smiled and cheered as he detailed the various weapon development programs. These included the cruise missile with a nuclear engine, as well as the publicly known RS-28 Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), the previously unacknowledged nuclear-tipped Avangard hypersonic boost-glide vehicle and Kanyon or Status-6 nuclear-armed unmanned undersea vehicle, a possibly dual-purpose nuclear and conventional air-launched hypersonic cruise missile called Kinzhal, and a short-range directed-energy system visually similar to the U.S. Navy’s own AN/SEQ-3 Laser Weapon System.

Now IMHO Russia hasn’t done enough to counteract US information capabilities, indeed I’m amazed at some of the slackness. For example, there are functional webcams all over the Donbass which are broadcasting in real time and being youtubed live. The tube channels make no attempt at neutrality and announce that any Ukr military won’t be shown, although you might spot the occasional vehicle as I did on the Bakhmut cam. But you can see from shop cameras tanks and Z-marked vehicles pull up outside, on the internal cameras you can see the troops inside buying stuff. And this is in Donetsk, which is under heavy Ukrainian shelling and has been for months!

I wouldn’t be surprised if that “agent on the ground” sending pictures of tanks wasn’t actually something like this.

I think Russia probably had better intelligence in the 50s!

I’d be a lot more willing to side with the Russians if they hadn’t invaded Ukraine.

“Deniable.” “What could be more deniable.” Their teacher was Genghis, he didn’t plan out fields of fire.
—–
Look at this regime propaganda. Is there some party Steve will get invited to by suffering it? Government spying is cool, except for Trumptards and any disrespect to the holy “refugees”?

Right now things are pretty universally and unprecedentedly bad, but chanting “Russia bad” lets some people pretend it’s still an earlier, better time.

“….. something the Russians don’t seem to have an abundance of in this century”.

Western chauvinists can always be counted on to rally round the flag, even if it’s a rainbow flag flying beside a BLM one.

It may be glaringly obvious that we’re grossly misgoverned and we’re in a civilisational death spiral but at least we’re better than the other team, eh?

Who was your teacher, a crackhead? Genghis died long before the invasion of Russia and Mongols used highly skilled cavaory soldiers, who usually suffered minimal casualties despite being outnumbered by their opponents.

Let me see you tell me who was actually Khan when Russia was invaded…

Shouldn’t the same corruption problems be true of the Ukraine?

The two countries are so similar, one would imagine they’d be similar in this way too (It’s these similarities that make the war seem more tragic). Otherwise, if they differ in this, how did Ukraine get the Magic Dirt and Russia the Tragic Dirt?

Also, maybe Putin conceived of a limited strike such as in Ukraine 2014 or Georgia 2008. That possibility is obviously off the table.

Do you take seriously Putin’s claims about the mistreatment of ethnic Russians in the Donbass? In the Georgian example, he displayed himself willing to protect ethnic Russians under attack, if I understand correctly.

… which side is playing the ‘Baghdad Bob” role here?

I saw Volodymyr Zelenskyy on the local (Metro Boston) TV news last night.

His appearance definitely had a “Baghdad Bob” feel.

Unconditionally end all war (conventional and asymmetric) now!!!

NASA doesn’t get stock, it gets a ride on a rocket that puts things in orbit and returns to Earth to be resused again.

Steve Sailer wrote to meh:

Where’s the Russian Air Force? Why hasn’t it achieved air supremacy?

For what purpose? Planes can be shot down and pilots die.

This has become an artillery war of attrition, and, according to Western media reports from the few reporters who have gone near the front, the kill ratio is horrifically against the Kievan forces.

Steve also wrote:

Seriously, Russia has a huge moral problem with corruption that helps explain its embarrassing military performance since mid-July.

As opposed to the well-known absence of corruption in Kiev???

This is a war of attrition.

You win a war by creating a situation in which the other side is either unable or unwilling to continue fighting.

One way to do that is to kill most of their forces.

Another way is to cause them to use up their weapons and ammo.

According to Western media reports from the ground, that is what Russia is doing.

It may be, as yo say, “embarrassing,” but it is how you win a war.

By most accounts, the American Confederacy had much better strategists and tacticians than the North.

But the North just wore them down.

And the North won.

Russia clearly stated its objective was to destroy the Ukrainian military threat, and it is doing that reasonably well. Holding territory is not the primary goal of a successful war – look up, oh, the southern Confederacy – it is rather the result of eliminating the forces that would otherwise be defending it. This war started as a limited police action, not unlike what happened a little further to the north in 1939, but it quickly escalated into a major conflict when world powers perceived the opportunity had arrived again for the long desired regime change war to dismember and plunder a resource-rich economic rival.

Russia’s biggest failure was under estimating the amount of fake money the US was going to throw into the war. When you are the world’s reserve currency with a 31 trillion dollar nation debt there is no limit to what you can give to a sleazy midget con man. Russia also estimated how locked into time some pathetic old boomers are who still think it’s 1979. And then you have the dual citizens who are also getting payback after hundreds of years of being kept out of metaphorical Russian country clubs.

SFG wrote to Anon:

I’d be a lot more willing to side with the Russians if they hadn’t invaded Ukraine.

But in fact it is the illegal puppet regime in Kiev, installed at the instigation of the US Deep State, that invaded the areas of Ukraine that refused to accede to the illegal puppet regime.

The legitimate country of Ukraine was the areas that refused to accede to the illegal puppet regime.

Russia did not invade “Ukraine.” Russia came to the aid of those Ukrainians who were resisting the illegal puppet government in Kiev.

An enormous difference.

Facts matter.

Russia is fighting for people all over the world who do not wish to be slaves to the US Deep State.

If only Americans could remember their own heritage and join the fight against the illegal US Deep State!

“it’s less superweapons you can cheer in Red Square that matter for modern warfare”

Hmm. I think that’s debatable. I didn’t even think you could chuck stuff around in our atmosphere at Mach 20 without it burning up, but a lot of people think you can, and that the plasma field around it will make radar echoing moot. At that speed defence won’t have much time to react.

And HIMARs and artillery with guided shells, much trumpeted by Western media, seem to be affecting the battle in that you can shell a senior Russian’s birthday party in Donetsk. Plenty of people here were cheering superweapons when the Kerch bridge was hit.

But we’ll find out if those weapons will matter for modern warfare, if (perhaps when) this is pushed as far as nuclear conflict. Are we feeling lucky?

“a whole lot of boring systems integration toil”

Stopping webcams broadcasting your troop positions to unfriendly people should be pretty damn simple – the internet is full of people geolocating anonymous hedgerows in the Donbass, so a shop or a street corner in Donetsk should be a few moments work. Longer will be going back through youtube archives to register cameras which may no longer be on youtube, but which may still be being monitored.

I remember thinking China’s Great Firewall was a lousy idea, but now I see its utility)

the U.S. had moved its radar and computers into a 600 mph AWACS command center that could fly around at the edge of the battlefield’s horizon where the Soviets couldn’t get at it.

Just as in Mig Alley they Soviet jets flying on behalf of North Korea did so from sanctuaries across the Yalu River that the US chose not to destroy so as to avoid brining on WW3.

Yes the more pro-Russian side in Ukraine should have stuck to using the ballot box. Oops, they did. They won elections that were overturned via a court ruling (an unconstitutional 3rd round of voting, aka the Orange Revolution) or their guy was driven out in a coup (Euromaidan) despite agreeing to concessions the day before.

Or maybe the Russians should have tried diplomacy to resolve the mess left after the 2014 coup? Oops, they did but it turns out the westerners were just stringing them along in order to buy time to arm Ukraine. Merkel herself admitted as much earlier this month.

I wish this war wasn’t happening but the fact that Russia did invade doesn’t mean “our” side now has its slate wiped clean. Russia invaded Ukraine because we paid diplomats and NGOs to get that country into NATO and to use it as an “anti-Russia” to bring about regime change in Moscow.

Apparently we’re all supposed to chant USA! and think this is 1988. But Russia isn’t threatening me and neither is China in any fundamental sense.

The Usual Suspects hate Russia because it’s a big white country that won’t get with the Diversity program. And then there’s some weird group that thinks if we have Russia as an enemy, that’ll fool the rubes into supporting Uncle Samantha no matter how anti-White she/he/they is.

I agree with your sentiments generally but let’s admit Russia has invaded Ukraine and is now fighting Ukrainian nationalists. Even the Russians concede there are militantly anti-Russian Ukrainians in Galicia who they don’t want to share a country with.

Steve Sailer wrote to Batman:

The last important Russian advance was around the 4th of July. For nearly the last 6 months, Russian acquisitions of land might be measured in, what, hundreds of acres? Russian losses have probably been two orders of magnitude greater.

Are you simply ignorant of these facts?

Steve, we all love you, man, but are you completely ignorant of the military history of the last two centuries?

Look just at the two World Wars:

At the end of WW I, Germany still occupied a significant amount of Allied territory: the Allies did not control one square inch of German territory.

But Germany lost.

In WW II, Germany for a time occupied an enormous amount of Russian territory. But Germany still lost.

You do not, you cannot, win a war simply and only by seizing territory.

You win a war, you only can win a war, by creating a situation in which the other side is either unable or unwilling to continue fighting.

You occupy territory, you cede territory, you advance, you retreat — solely with the purpose of advancing towards that one single goal.

And if you achieve that goal, even if the enemy occupies a huge amount of your territory, you win, and then you take whatever the hell you want.

As WW I proved so nicely.

This basic fact of warfare may be confusing to people who prefer to pore over maps and follow the ebb and flow of battle lines.

But this is not Stratego or Risk. This is a real war fought in the real world.

And this is the reality of warfare in the real world for more than two centuries.

You don’t win modern wars by controlling dirt. You win them by outlasting your opponents. The United States learned this in Afghanistan. Russia’s occupations of Georgia and Moldova taught them this lesson as well.

That’s why propaganda to demoralize Russian citizens (we’ve seen plenty of this–remember the blitz of stories about Russian males breaking their legs to get out of the draft) and to give confidence to the Ukrainians makes sense.

But why aim propaganda at us? How does American popular opinion about this war help the Ukrainian cause? The superficial answer is to keep the aid flowing to Ukraine, but they don’t need this kind of propaganda blitz to make that happen. The American public does not care about the national debt. And we give considerably more money to Israel without flinching.

Resources mean not only men. But vehicles, ammunition, missiles, fuel, artillery pieces, etc. In one word, everything considered, it’s best to preserve your forces.

Hmm – if you see some of the videos on Telegram showing how Russia takes out Ukrainians, you’d realise that the real spy in the sky are observation drones that show pictures of not just tanks or vehicles, but individuals walking around, and tanks hidden amongst bushes.
It is drones not satellites that are winning this war. (As ever you’d see the Ukrainian videos if they had them….)

Plus never trust anything that explains what is NOT actually happening. Russia is killing Ukrainians at a rate of 10:1. The only reason the front line is stable is that Ukraine keeps pushing thousands and thousands of fresh recruits forward and Russia is quite happy to wipe them out and wait for more.
Perhaps Ukraine wants to lose the war as quick as possible rather than drop back, and have Russians expose themselves in areas less pro-Russian.

The real technical advantage was in the 1980s and 90s when the US has fantastic access to micro-chip tech. That advantage has been over for 25 years.

Thiel’s strategy for modern data-based warfare doesn’t sound that esoteric, but it does seem like it must have taken a lot of honest effort, something the Russians don’t seem to have an abundance of in this century.

So in 2018 Putin presented some half a dozen conventional weapons, mostly manoeuvrable hypersonic missiles that were already or soon to be in service. They wipe the floor with western equivalents and importantly turn air craft carriers from a threat into a vulnerability.

Since 2018 the MIC has been on total PR war to defend their own credibility. Not only has Russia overtaken them, China has too, while the US has been stumbling over the disastrous Littoral ships and the F35, the flying lemon. Most US aircraft do not meet the minimum availability standards set for them. The Patriot system failed when Yemen attacked Saudi with missiles of ancient design. A billion dollar system with $1million missiles is going to be sent to Ukraine to defend against $10k drone attacks. That isn’t going to win any fresh orders.

I’m sure readers of isteve will recognise the pattern here. The media writes up any kind of US success in a technology war with extra hype because it is losing. Just as it writes up any Ukrainian battle win as huge and trend setting in a war where Ukraine is getting slaughtered.

Speaking of Modern Media – have you commented on the Twitter Files yet?
Here in UK I can’t find a single person that has even heard of them.

I’d be a lot more willing to side with the Ukrainians if:

1. American neocons hadn’t installed a hostile regime that openly demanded to join a military alliance aimed squarely at Russia.

America demands an entire hemisphere as a buffer zone. The least we can do is allow Russia a buffer state.

2. America’s neocon-installed regime didn’t attack the ethnically Russian parts of Ukraine.

3. The United States hadn’t spit in the eye of Russia when it asked for assurances that Ukraine would remain neutral.

Very strangely you seem to have completely bought the media myths.
A very small Russian force has overwhelmed a very large nato trained army.
The massive “Ukraine is winning” PR is simply because the truth is genuinely awful for western militaries (and their MIC) to face.
The big story is US becoming No2 nation in the world to China. That is the real way to understand what gets written.

Take your Midol, Steve

Yep, I’ll let this war play out and see what happens. I have no idea why Steve has gone crazy about all of this.

All of the sudden, he completely believes the MSM that he mocks for a living. It’s bizarre.

Maybe Russia really is losing the war, maybe not. What I do know is that our media lies constantly and is the PR wing for the establishment.

So what happens if Russia loses? State mandated homosexuality? Whites to the camps?

100% agree.
The last thing Russia wants is a retreat by Ukraine behind the Dnieper and Russia chasing Nazis in Pro-Ukraine lands leading to large Russian and civilian deaths. Ukraine marching newly enlisted kids and old men to Bakhmut to die is perfect for Russia.

America after declaring victory in Afghanistan was forced into ignominious and final retreat. Maybe, perhaps, doing victory laps is premature for anyone?

So the plan is Russia to just take it while we wage war against them? This is really dangerous.

The one thing the West cannot give Ukraine is troops, and so the Russians will be wise to avoid making this a fast moving basketball-like war of dramatic offensive maneuver, because in that the Russian troops would be up omnipresent US surveillance aided by Theil and Musks machine AI.

It is counter intuitive that Russia does not try to weaken Ukraine’s East of the river Dnipro forces by blowing up the bridge links of the supply line to Donbass. I conclude the Russian army in Ukraine’s supreme military commander, Surovikin, thinks the flow of Ukraine’s best equipped and most determined units into Bakhmut is bringing them to where Russia can most easily attrite them. Surovikin’s strategy is to make this the Eton Wall Game (” the remorseless application of pressure and leverage as one advances inch by inch”).

Wagner Group’s operations consist of very small bands of fighters with a tablet that shows where each individuals place at in the formation at every stage of the route for the assault, this is superimposed on commercial satellite imagery. No deviation is permitted on pain of being instantly shot (drones are reportedly used for this). When the Ukrainians to prevent their lines being infiltrated / breeched open fire on the band of Wagner fighters, the drones that are always overhead of Wagner assault groups, can locate Ukrainian concealed and fortified trenches, bunker and even their heavy mortars and artillery well behind the front line. The Wagner soldiers usually get killed, but the officers (who don’t advance with the convict -soldiers) just get new convicts from the 20,000 recruited by Wagner Of the 20000 convicts recruited by Wagner, 5% are dead already in what are in effect constant ‘reconnaissance in force’ missions without and real territorial objective.

The Russian artillery fire in Bakhmut is of lesser intensity than several months ago but that is at least partly due to it being more precisely targeted by drones picking up the Ukrainian artillery firing on Wagner groups. A giveaway of what the real purpose of Wagner tactics are is the missions are always during the daytime which is when drone locating of where the Ukrainian artillery blasting the hapless Wagner troops can be easiest done. Following these ‘failed’ attacks the artillery fire is much heavier that when it was ostensibly supporting the ill-starred Wagnerites. Presumably, the fires are alson much more accurate and when one taken into account that Russia has an undisputedly very large artillery firepower advantage in Ukraine, it perhaps becomes believable that Ukraine is losing a battalion a day in Bakhmut, as Russian sources are claiming.

Reply – NO they did not get driven back behind the Dnieper River.
If you are talking Kherson, they withdrew from Kherson city – the only part of Kherson Oblast that is the Ukrainian side.
And they were not driven back – Ukraine attacked it for months and eventually Russia advised all civilians to leave and a month later pulled their own men out safely. Ukraine only entered after Russia left having spent well over 10k lives attacking Kherson city.
There was no strategic defeat and no advance across the Dnieper.
Meanwhile Ukraine lost a lot of lives, and in terms of army vs army ended up much weaker.

PR victory, practical defeat.

Russia has a problem with corruption? In the context of Ukraine or the context of USA?

All the Putin fan boys who keep claiming that Ukrainians are dying vastly more than Russians — ask yourself why, by your own testimony, the Ukrainians are fighting more bravely than the Russians? Could it be because they are defending their country while the Russians are sent to conquer somebody else’s country?

Mostly because the Ukrainians are untrained, this is an artillery war where Ukraine is vastly underarmed, and because Ukraine needs propaganda victories to keep the “aid” flowing.

The real question is why Ukraine is sending 10s of thousands of poorly prepared troops into places like Kherson or Bakhmut to die facing hundreds of Russian soldiers (but thousands of Russian missiles).
It is a terrible slaughter – backed by your US and my UK with (at HQs) full knowledge of the carnage.
It is one of the major sins of the 21st century AND in Europe.

As you probably know, Ukraine force their soldier into battle at the threat of a gun. The more experienced Poles shoot back. There are dozens of videos of Ukrainian Units appealing to Kiev about their orders to march unprotected into losing battles.

I am not sure many people are actually following the war with a mind to accuracy in the death tolls. It seems like this war is a lot like the Spanish Civil War, a real bloody struggle for the men in action but something of a projection screen for the ideologies of the observers overseas (except of course for the MIC).
I suppose in the SCW, the observers could articulate their worldview more clearly than now (communism vs falangism is clearer to me than “NATO oughtn’t to expand gay marriage-womens rights-trannies” vs “Putler is evil Nazi”).
I admire the consistency of your worldview, Steve, summed up as “Don’t invade other countries”. It’s just that history is not sure it’s workable in the long-term.
But all that aside, do you believe Putin’s claim that the war was precipitated in part by atrocities against Russian ethnics in Donbass?
I remember reading you on the Georgian conflict, and you seemed more open to Russian points of view, iirc.

[The front line is not stable.] The Russians got driven back across the Dnieper River, a huge strategic defeat.

Not sure what got in your Wheaties this morning but you’re pointing out some inconvenient truths. Here we have a corollary to your observation about “preserv[ing] the lives of Russian soldiers as the highest priority?” When the Russian retreated, even when in good order, they left behind a lot of Ukrainians who were then subject to brutal and very well documented and per some credible accounts lethal “filtration.”

This is also a huge strategic mistake, having the locals either on your side or at least semi-neutral makes all sorts of critical differences. We’re not talking about the ones in the Donbas who’ve been shelled for eight years (or not many of them??), and if not previously skeptical or against becoming a de facto part of the Russian Federation they now know how utterly unimportant they are to Putin et. al.

“This has become an artillery war of attrition, and, according to Western media reports from the few reporters who have gone near the front, the kill ratio is horrifically against the Kievan forces.”

Sources for this? Must be reporters who’s provably gone to the front and also pro-Western according to your own standards.

The war may be morally unjustified, but it was most certainly not unprovoked. Ukraine was warned by Russia many, many times over several years about getting close to the West. Russia was ignored.

Nor should it have come as a surprise to US and Ukrainian intel, but it did. They thought attacking Ukraine would be too costly for Russia in all sorts of ways.

Objectively they may be right, but Russia got a vote, and Russians thought and still seem to think it is worth it.

All of the sudden, he completely believes the MSM that he mocks for a living. It’s bizarre.

That’s not the correct way to approach this subject.

Whenever Steve goes off the rails about something, which he routinely does about Covid and Ukraine, there arises a vocal minority in the comments section that accuses him of “believing the mainstream media,” as if that was a capital sin to be avoided at all costs. It isn’t that simple. You can’t find a shortcut to the truth just by inverting whatever the mainstream media says. And in any case, when you start speculating about what Steve believes about what the mainstream media says, you’ve prescinded very far from the topic at hand.

Let’s look at Steve’s reaction to Covid as a case a point. From the very beginning of the pandemic, there was more than enough information in the mainstream media for people to draw the correct conclusions. There was, notably, the Diamond Princess data, which should have demonstrated to all and sundry that Covid 19 was not a dangerous disease and did not warrant any special containment protocols. The quite influenza-like (and safely low) Total Case Fatality Rate of 0.23% was early calculated from data readily available in the mainstream media, and that figure was itself recycled many times through the mainstream media. The lack of clinical data regarding vaccine efficacy, the dangers of vaccine side effects, the risk of myocarditis, various European governments cancelling their vaccine recommendations for young people—all of this was published in close to real time in the mainstream media.

None of it mattered. The Kovid Karens, which happen to include Steve Sailer, were determined to have their pandemic party come hell or high water. They did this not because they innocently believed a pack of lies told them by the Evil MSM, but because the mood had already descended upon them for other reasons. We can talk about what those reasons were later, but the point at present is to dispel the notion that it all originated with the media.

Now, this is not to say that people like Steve didn’t selectively use MSM reports to support their fantastical version of events. This is not to say that chief pandemicists like Fauci did not actively try to shape the message through their media appearances and their influence over media outlets. This is not to say that most people working in the MSM were not Kovid Karens themselves who put out deliberately misleading information. All of this did happen, but the truth still leaked out, as it always does. The truth was never really that hard to find. Steve was not misled; he believes what he believes because he wants to.

When it comes to Ukraine, there is likewise plenty of mainstream information out there from which truth can be inferred. Russia clearly cannot be “running out of weapons” when she still hasn’t even finished burning through her backlog of 40-year-old artillery shells yet. The Russian military cannot be “embarrassing itself in Ukraine” when, by and large, the Russian military hasn’t even entered Ukraine yet. All the fighting has been done by the Donbass militias and Wagner group, which have so far successfully destroyed more than 50% of the Ukrainian military. Once again, Steve believes what he believes because he wants to.

And as we can see from the peevish tone of his replies in this thread, those beliefs are both very personal and very much under assault from the facts.

Amen.

“If you are talking Kherson, they withdrew from Kherson city – the only part of Kherson Oblast that is the Ukrainian side.”

Wildly inaccurate on your part. There are many parts of Kherson Oblast that is on the Ukranian side apart from Kherson City. Here, I’ll list all the parts of Kherson Oblast on the Ukranian side that aren’t Kherson City: Bilozerka Raion which has 64,790 people, Beryslav Raion which has 95,967 people, old Velyka Oleksandrivka Raion, Stanislav, Ivanivka, Mylove, Dudchavny, etc.

There are literally hundreds of villages and cities in Kherson Oblast complete seperate from Kherson City that Ukraine has retaken from Russia. Clearly you know almost nothing at all about this war, Kherson Oblast, or Ukraine.

At this point, I think I’d rather be governed by someone who’s pro-BLM, pro-reparations and anti-Ukraine proxy war than a race realist who’s all in on dumping billions into that sinkhole.

All the race stuff in this blog is like sweet candy for type 1 diabetics. Now we see the curtain pulled back, and what we have is Max Boot telling us to get on the team and come in for the big win.

That was a good interview. He was part of a UK/Aus trio of guys at the start and one of them was killed in action. They experienced constant mortar and artillery shelling from Russia and got casualty evacuation after 1-2 hours. “If the rifle accounts for 1% of the dead in this war, I’d be surprised.”

You make a good point. But if you really are that concerned about corruption, and how Thiel’s strategy for modern data-based warfare is also being applied to American politics and society, then some NOTICING is in order.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/07/who-is-peter-thiel-rnc-2016-trump/492380/

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/04/inside-the-new-right-where-peter-thiel-is-placing-his-biggest-bets

Critics have argued that Palantir’s powerful software has been misused by government agencies, [for example] to help track undocumented immigrants

Oh heaven forfend! We can’t have government agencies actually doing their job!

If the Russian retreats in Ukraine were orderly, discretionary and involved relatively low losses, then they were evidently part of a larger plan. If they were forced on them by the enemy, then they weren’t. Considering how much geography the Russians have, it would make sense if they developed a military doctrine that was comfortable with giving and taking lots of territory. Obviously any retreats would be part of a Plan B, rather than some 3D chess game.

Unfortunately we can’t get a sense of how orderly and low-cost these Russian retreats were by reading the western media. They simply lie too much and have too much of an emotional investment in this war. We can dive into alternate sources or we can live with it as a “known unknown”. I choose the latter because it’s far better than falling for the Narrative one more time.

“And as we can see from the peevish tone of his replies in this thread, those beliefs are both very personal and very much under assault from the fact”

Remember, he hates to be wrong.

“Now, this is not to say that people like Steve didn’t selectively use MSM reports to support their fantastical version of events”

One of the biggest lies perpetuated is that…the media lies all or even most the time and thus it cannot be trusted. That is intellectually sterility at its finest. Certainly media outlets have a bias. But people have to prove or disprove the contents from different sources. Read carefully the advice of Ron Unz.

—I apply the same historical methods I did in my academic journal articles back in the 1980s. You analyze the likely reliability of the raw information presented, look for confirming or refuting evidence, and then draw your own plausible conclusions…On a more serious note, many of my articles very heavily cite various MSM sources, so why would I do that if I believed they were always lying?”—

Aren’t the DPR and LPR forces, who declared independence from Ukraine in 2014, brave Ukrainians defending their country?

“all the Putin fan boys”

LOL. Happy Christmas and a joyful New Year to you all!

“The commenters outside looked from Steve to Jack D, and from Jack to Steve, and from Steve to Jack again; but already it was impossible to say which was which” 😉

“Ukraine was warned by Russia many, many times over several years about getting close to the West”.

And at least half of Ukraine wasn’t very interested in turning their back on Russia. Ukraine was a deeply divided and dysfunctional country before 2014 but all that seems to have been dismissed by the West as excuse-making.

The usual suspects are working hard to prevent the cops fram using Shot Spotter.

That would be good, except the US government is insanely anti-white and no white person should be supporting it.

I wonder if the Russians could get better military tech from China or even Iran?

Putin is smart enough to let his military staff decide on strategy, while general Surovikin, who led the successful campaign in Syria, has supreme command.

By most accounts, the American Confederacy had much better strategists and tacticians than the North.

The gaps between Northern and Southern officers and between Northern and Southern enlisted soldiers are often exaggerated. The Anaconda Plan was brilliant. The Union was successful west of the Appalachians almost from the start. Virginia was a different story, but even there look what happened when the Confederacy went on the offensive. Many of the Northern urban soldiers were immigrants who had lived in the countryside in their home countries. Both sides had trouble with cowardly, indecisive commanders. The bad Northern Generals tended to be cashiereed as the War went on.

“There was, notably, the Diamond Princess data, which should have demonstrated to all and sundry that Covid 19 was not a dangerous disease and did not warrant any special containment protocols. ”

For me, the fact that a boatload of old geezers in a packed cruise ship had had such low mortality rate even poorly treated closed the case. Ioannidis concurred. But then, contrary to evidence, both Steve and Greg Cochran went on full-panic mode and fell for the totalitarian technocratic scam.

Speaking of Modern Media – have you commented on the Twitter Files yet?
Here in UK I can’t find a single person that has even heard of them.

OT:
Musk is apparently committing one of the gravest secular sins: he’s failing to pander to his best customers:

I’m just spitballing here, are your tweets demographically not compatible, with your business model? They cater to the MAGA crazies! They don’t drive electric cars & are already in OUTERSPACE! Your tweets outrage the liberals! which are exactly your business target audience? Ciao pic.twitter.com/Yi6GcQgsJs

— Frank D'Angelo What's Life without a Dream? (@FrankDangelo23) December 27, 2022

The power of advanced algorithmic warfare systems is now so great that it equates to having tactical nuclear weapons against an adversary with only conventional ones,” explains Alex Karp, chief executive of Palantir, in an email message.

I don’t know why Steve can’t recognize a bunch of garbage techno-babble sales talk from a defense contractor when he sees it. Palantir has invented a device that downloads information from a wireless connection — it’s called a laptop. But they use words like “algorithmic” so they can charge the Pentagon a couple billion. Meanwhile, our genius army forgot to have artillery pieces or the ability to produce ammunition in mass volume during an active war.

Steve shares the hubris of our Pentagon that their high-priced high-tech makes them invincible and that Russians are inept. In reality, Ukraine lost the war months ago because the West simply can’t produce war material fast and at scale.

This is actually apparent to the whole world that isn’t inside the West’s propaganda bubble. NATO is a bit of a paper tiger when it comes to fighting a real land army.

Back in 2008, the U.S. bet heavily on Mikheil Saakashvili, hipster president of Georgia, against Vladimir Putin. In the spring of 2008, the U.S. promised Georgia eventual NATO membership despite the objections of NATO members actually in Europe.

–Sailer

You used to acknowledge political realities, clandestine activities, and the like. But now it’s all very black and white: a matter of who crossed the border! That goddamn sacred 30-year old border!!!!

And an invasion… the US would never . By God, that’s a line in the sand that shall not be tolerated by polite society! Requires stiff rebuke, up to and including war. (What’s our own count since the 90s?).

>Putin budgeted a lot of money to win hearts and minds in Ukraine, but infinity pools in Bel-Air aren’t cheap.

Wait, now who’s buying who? Granted, who can forget how Putin and his cronies paid cold hard cash to set-up the Boston Marathon Bomber family in the US.

(I hope these lame, disingenuous arguments you’ve been making are your way of signalling to longtime readers that, yes, due to finances you have opted for a lump sum payment of dark money)

Putin fans can never admit that Russia has a moral problem with corruption

America fans keep asking, what difference does it make to us if Russia has a moral problem, or if it takes Ukraine or doesn’t? If Russia loses, how does that protect our own border?
Our problem is our own bad government, not Russia. And the fact is that a Russian loss will strengthen our bad government thereby making our own border less secure.
The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend, but whatever erodes Washington’s power is good for me.
I hope Russia wins, as a Russian victory might shorten by even one day the rule of the Democrat/Republican evil axis over my own country. Whether that is good or not for Russians or Ukrainians is not my concern.

“…but it does seem like it must have taken a lot of honest effort, something the Russians don’t seem to have an abundance of in this century.”

What a stupid and ignorant thing to say. Only an idiot could have written that.

Steve shares the hubris of our Pentagon that their high-priced high-tech makes them invincible and that Russians are inept. In reality, Ukraine lost the war months ago […]

To be fair, it’s too soon to say this. When Russia has taken Novorossiya and is ready to talk to Kiev, then we can say it has won and the Kremlin got what it wanted.

If fighting against the US Deep State requires the murder, rape, and mutilation of civilians, the destruction of civilian infrastructure, and the conversion of Russia itself back into a poverty-stricken tyranny, I’m definitely on the side of the US Deep State.

“Unfortunately we can’t get a sense of how orderly and low-cost these Russian retreats were by reading the western media. They simply lie too much and have too much of an emotional investment in this war. We can dive into alternate sources or we can live with it as a “known unknown”. I choose the latter because it’s far better than falling for the Narrative one more time.”

Absolutely. Though I think the right is with the DPR/LPR and that Russia are right to help them, getting real info is very hard. For all I know, even the reported vast new Ukrainian war cemeteries are propaganda – it’s not hard to stick a few hundred flags and bunches of flowers in a graveyard.

That EU honchette said* a week or two back that “100,000 officers” of Ukraine had died, which seems unlikely, although 100,000 soldiers is I guess possible. But generally the attacking side loses most in war.

On one side you have the US PR version – that the Russian soldiers have low morale and even lower supplies, because “we intercepted their phone calls”, on the other side similar tales of woe in Ukrainian ranks.

It’ll all come out in the wash, what worries me a little is that Joe Public is convinced that Nuland Ukraine are the good guys and that they are winning comfortably.

What happens when they are seen to be losing? This is “shit or bust” for Russia (and China too), not so for the US.

* then had it edited out Stalin style

The alternate-view estimate of Ukrainian battlefield deaths, deaths of Ukrainian soldiers, is that about 150,000 men have been killed, along with perhaps 250,000 casualties. That’s why Hero of the West Zelenskyy is reportedly conscripting young boys and old men to go fight in Bakhmut.

If this alternate view is correct, the Ukrainians have pretty much used up their best troops fighting Russia’s worst trained soldiers using the oldest equipment in Russia’s armory. I’m not saying this was a Putin master plan, but I did think of it at the very outset of the war, that the effects of new technology like cheap little drones versus tanks was not known (I hadn’t thought about Palantir), and that Putin might want to find things out before he sent in his best stuff.

The slaughter and destruction in Ukraine, on a scale not seen in Europe since WWII, are due entirely to Western machinations, forcing Russia into a war of decision. The real goals? Depose Putin? Destabilize Russia? Test Palantir and our other technology? Launder American tax dollars into political contributions from defense contractors?

Well, Putin is still standing, and more popular than ever. Russia’s economy is doing better than that of many European countries, and we’ve provided them with new allies willing to buy gas with rubles, like China and India (one-third of the world’s population). Palantir seems to work really well – but our main enemy has now learned all about it, and is working out how to circumvent it.

And using the suffering of people around the world to fund your political party – that’s just too odious to even comment on.

Playing along with permanent Washington is just good business. Thiel is currently getting the carrot and Musk may be about to get the stick:

Remind me again the current and projected future US government reliance on SpaceX for launch capacity? https://t.co/JAGyQwpvUy

— Pete Strzok (@petestrzok) December 27, 2022

We can talk about what those reasons were later, but the point at present is to dispel the notion that it all originated with the media.

You make a good point that if you read the MSM like an intelligence analyst you can pick out nuggets of truthful data. But 99% of people dont have the energy or ability to do that. The real weight of the MSM on society comes just from its relentless, repetitious spin, and the casual assumption that “everyone” already accepts certain things as true.

War is Hell,

and Meat is Murder.

Russian sausage tycoon who criticized Ukraine war dies in fall

https://nypost.com/2022/12/27/pavel-antov-russian-sausage-tycoon-who-criticized-ukraine-war-dies-in-fall/

“I choose the latter because it’s far better than falling for the Narrative one more time.“

It’s called willful ignorance and confirmation bias on your part. In that way, you don’t have to engage in critical thinking.

For example, The Post wrote in 2019 that Palantir’s software was used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement to help track undocumented immigrants, which led to protests from some of the company’s employees.

Why would anyone worry about that these days? Being an undocumented immigrant gives one high status in today’s America. It’s a state of sanctifying grace.

“But 99% of people dont have the energy or ability to do that.”

That’s a patently anti-white statement. We whites have the IQ and resolve to scrutinize data, to parse out information, and to draw conclusions. How dare you impugn European white Americans and their civilization building thought processes. You have no shame. Are you also implying YOU are part of the one percent elite who does have this “energy”?

“The real weight of the MSM on society comes just from its relentless, repetitious spin, and the casual assumption that “everyone” already accepts certain things as true”

And this is where your “argument” comes crashing down—I apply the same historical methods I did in my academic journal articles back in the 1980s. You analyze the likely reliability of the raw information presented, look for confirming or refuting evidence, and then draw your own plausible conclusions…On a more serious note, many of my articles very heavily cite various MSM sources, so why would I do that if I believed they were always lying.

The Donbas was and is ethnically Russian, and the people there seem to be fighting pretty hard for their independence from Ukraine.

Why don’t the people of the Donbas elicit the same feelings from you? Is it because of a border that drawn on a map decades ago by men just as amoral and ruthless as Putin, Zelensky and the neocons.

“And it’s not wholly coincidental that the Soviet Union itself collapsed eight months later.”

The collapse of the USSR had more to do with its genesis as a bad idea than outmoded weapons systems. The United States began with a great idea but its inheritors, equipped with fabulous technology, lost the plot. They began worshipping the idols of a decadent establishment — expertism, scientism, elitism. Most wander the landscape in a media-induced illusion while the great idea crumbles around them. Not even the shadow ministers, who desire to impose a totalitarian biosurveillance system, will be able to manage the collapse of the Western standard-bearer. But I remain bullish on Oregon and its cranberry bogs.

Dying isn’t necessarily brave. It’s just a thing that happens when you are sitting in your trench and a shell hits you. As Patton said, “no one ever won a war by dying for his country . . .”

No, Steve’s position isn’t that it’s wrong to invade other countries. It’s that it’s wrong to invade other countries now.

For some reason, Steve thinks the current world borders are perfect and should never be changed. Steve obviously doesn’t believe that the US should give back California to Mexico.

The civil war that split up Yugoslavia was horribly brutal, but you could argue that the various peoples of that region are better off with their own countries. Sometimes, the borders of a region need to be shaken up to represent the reality on the ground.

Maybe Steve is worried that the US is heading that way.

God you’re a faggot

And where is the Ukrainian airforce?

Perhaps the airforces are no longer the forces they once were?

Where is the Russian cavalry, where are the Ukrainian siege engines, where are the Russian chariots, where are the Ukrainian elephants?

But then you end up being wrong about most things anyway.

Guessing here. Investing in a startup as a venture capitalist gives greater (financial) leverage on the capital.

What you say is true, and completely beside the point. The CIA is a government agency. How is it that they are allowed to invest money and profit from it? That would seem to be straight up illegal under Federal Acquisition Regulations. And illegal or not, it is is certainly improper and not the function of the limited government of a democratic republic (neither of which we have, I know, but we like to still pretend we do).

See also Louis Renault’s comment.

“It’s called willful ignorance and confirmation bias on your part.”

On all of our parts. You should know every human being relies on these mental mechanisms that serve as palliatives to soften the difficult truths of existence. You should know this but your parts have been numbed from the marathon love-making sessions with Daria Albinger.

Steve Sailer,

I wonder if a Hans Blix-like inspection regime could placate Putin? Perhaps a 25-year agreement of such?
If he would accept this, the people in Ukraine who want to live as Russians could migrate to Russia in an orderly way, and the pre-war borders be put back in place, a wall could be built, and Ukraine could be inspected like the Iranians constantly so that no big weapons were placed east of Kiev.

The whole thing is dog-awful. These countries could have been allies with different accents instead of embittered enemies.

Your questions about the Russian air force is something I’ve asked myself. I would not want to parachute behind enemy lines in this conflict in particular. Hopefully some agreement will be reached, and in a generation these two peoples can put it behind them like the English and French have in the past.

…….about Putin fan boys: many of us are so mad at our Deep State fixers, fraudsters, slanderers, and hoaxers, that we reflexively back anybody that irritates our Establishment Powers. I personally will never forgive them for 2019-2020, and for not calling our military to protect us from Antifa and BLM during the burning Riots. The facial recognition tools, GPS data, and starlink wonder tools could have been used to prosecute there but weren’t, just ask the January 6th prisoners, whom were hunted down months later.

The real weight of the MSM on society comes just from its relentless, repetitious spin, and the casual assumption that “everyone” already accepts certain things as true.

Perhaps I should just post agree. I should add though that you can also say this about a lot of the alternative media. There is a good recent post by Astral Codex that expands on this. In the intro he says:

The point is: the media rarely lies explicitly and directly. Reporters rarely say specific things they know to be false. When the media misinforms people, it does so by misinterpreting things, excluding context, or signal-boosting some events while ignoring others, not by participating in some bright-line category called “misinformation”.

Let me give a few examples from both the alternative and establishment medias.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-media-very-rarely-lies

True; but they get a cheaper ride than a contract with Boeing or Lockheed-Martin would have cost. United Launch Alliance is still polishing their blueprints for Vulcan Centaur while SpaceX is testing their Starship.

I remain bullish on Elon despite the shadows clinging to his rise as an industrialist. Find me a dude who doesn’t like Elon and I’ll point out his gayness. Or the dude’s smaller than average member. Or that dude might just be Peter Strzok — a son of CIA agent who’s living a comfortable existence in Mordor. I’m pretty sure Elon has his own intelligence capacity; he’d better. Because the denizens of Mordor have designed a Howard Hughes end for him.

There’s a definite non-sequitur.

‘…The critics have argued that Palantir’s powerful software has been misused by government agencies to violate privacy or serve questionable ends. For example, The Post wrote in 2019 that Palantir’s software was used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement to help track undocumented immigrants…’

Would it help to point it out to the author?

‘…In 1982, the Israelis angered the Reagan Administration by revealing to the world by taking out Syrian air defenses in Lebanon the new American strategy worked out in the 1970s for targeting Soviet ground-based radar with homing missiles…’

You mean our closest allies harmed us?

I suppose next you’ll be claiming that the Israelis sold Jonathan Pollard’s espionage to the Russians, or that they deliberately attacked the Liberty.

Sniff, sniff…antisemitism? What did you do for Hanukkah, actually? Got a copy of Anne Frank in the house?

Ukraine is winning the war!

Covid vaccines are safe and effective!

Our elections are secure and there is no vote fraud!

Anyone believing any of the above marks themselves as a complete tool and an ignoramous.

“But 99% of people dont have the energy or ability to do that.”

That’s a patently anti-white statement. We whites have the IQ and resolve to scrutinize data, to parse out information, and to draw conclusions. How dare you impugn European white Americans and their civilization building thought processes. You have no shame. Are you also implying YOU are part of the one percent elite who does have this “energy”?

You are being facetious but he is correct and it’s not a simple matter of intelligence.

The smartest White man I know watches Fox all the time and completely buys into it. He really believes that Pelosi is a full fledged Communist and schemes with Biden to destroy capitalism. Here in reality both Pelosi and Biden are multi-millionaires and live very lavish lifestyles. Biden in fact has not gone after top tax rates on the wealthy and only partially moved back corporate income tax rates from the Trump era. He also hasn’t gone after the capital gains loophole nor has he gone after individual offshoring scams. Yea a real Communist.

White people can be intelligent but they are also prone to modernism and believing what they want to be true.

It was pointed out in the 1920s that the flaw of Whites was their desire to appear metropolitan. They want to appear to have the answers more than they actually want to understand a problem.

Fox News watchers *want to believe* that the government is the problem and CNN watchers are convinced that fewer Whites are the solution. Most Whites pick a side and that includes most intelligent Whites. That is the reality and I remember a psych study that suggested only around 1% of Americans can sift through what they see in political media. Purely from experience I would guess around 2-3%. Definitely not 5% or greater.

Interestingly the CIA determined that only around 1% of the population has the potential to become political leaders. They used that information when trying to undermine Communist revolutions.

‘…I hope Russia wins, as a Russian victory might shorten by even one day the rule of the Democrat/Republican evil axis over my own country. Whether that is good or not for Russians or Ukrainians is not my concern.’

Then too, just to revert to the internationalist perspective, a victorious Russia is a stable Russia.

From that point of view, the course of the war to date could prove ideal. Russia goes on to win — but it wasn’t fun. Let’s not do this again.

…ad Russia really does need to win. It’s better for everyone, in the long run. Putin isn’t a Hitler — but a defeated Russia could produce one.

Being a friend of Putin, or a former friend of Putin, or a not sufficiently enthusiastic friend of Putin, seems to be a leading indicator for mortality in Russia nowadays. Leading cause of death…………….standing next to a window.

I’m still wondering why – given that Putin is the current year Hitler, and you can’t possibly say anything about him that’s too damning – why haven’t the Apartment Bombings of 1999 been brought up by the media and their military and intelligence commentators? Why hasn’t that been added to the charge list against him?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_apartment_bombings

Just kidding………….I know why that hasn’t been done.

“ the kill ratio is horrifically against the Kievan forces”

There no credible source for this Putinist cope.

Why don’t you embed a vlog with your pedophile friend Scott Ritter?

This basic fact of warfare may be confusing to people who prefer to pore over maps and follow the ebb and flow of battle lines.

Likely the same folks who think elections are all about “horseraces”. Who’s leading this hour!

“misbegotten war”. Thank you. Misbegotten by Russia, and misbegotten by America. What can America possibly gain from all the cash and hardware it has thrown into this shabby pit?

The Ukrainians were asses to allow the West to goad Putin into an invasion. No matter how well they do, they have lost.

There has been a shameful lack of mature diplomacy from the get go, and the rah-rah for Zelinsky shows nothing has been learned, or will be learned.

On a side note, I attended Christmas mass with a liberal couple – friends of Mrs. Prude. After mass we got to talking in the foyer, and the husband started snarling how we needed to shoot missiles and bombs at Moscow to kill, kill, kill Putin. Good grief. Television is strong with this one.

I mumbled something about how it was a shame that serious diplomacy wasn’t tried before the war. That got no purchase with the liberal warrior. So, the killing goes on.

‘…But, in this case, the obvious difference is that the Ukrainians are defending their country and the Russians are just screwing around in somebody else’s country…’

That’s actually not so obvious. Deciding the Ukraine is one country and Russia another is oversimplifying matters — to put it mildly.

Solzhenitsyn is usually thought of as Russian — and certainly he thought of himself as Russian. In point of fact, his mother was from the Ukraine, his father was of Cossack extraction, and he himself was raised in Rostov.

There’s no evidence I’m aware of that he ever saw any of this as demonstrating he wasn’t Russian.

Peter Thiel, a homo siding with Globohomo. Go figure.

How very white of him.

There are currently 32 countries where same-sex marriage is legal: Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Denmark, Ecuador, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Luxembourg, Malta, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, the United States of America and Uruguay.

The US should show the same color as Mexico– Indian reservations are still free to set their own standards.

More than two dozen countries have marriage equality, and more than half of these are in Western Europe…

The expansion of LGBTQ+ rights around the globe has been uneven, with bans on same-sex relationships still in place in many countries.

Marriage Equality: Global Comparisons (–CFR… remember them?)

Taiwan is captive to Western markets, and in South Africa, as in Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Austria, the US, and eight Canadian provinces, it was imposed by a high court ruling authored by a white judge. (Oh, and a court imposed it in Taiwan, too, though one assumes the judge wasn’t white.)

What you need to know about LGBT rights in 11 maps

White people are sick. Civilization itself is built on marriage; it wouldn’t exist otherwise. We’ve trivialized a critical pillar.

Meanwhile, our genius army forgot to have artillery pieces or the ability to produce ammunition in mass volume during an active war.

No problem! Weapons and ammunition can easily be produced by Working From Home. Only poor backwards countries, like Russia, relies on national factories for their hardware.

Zing!

I wonder how many of these people believe Putin stole the 2016 election from their Hillary?

It certainly seems as manned aircrafts are going the way of the Dodo. Probably too many AD systems and manpads on the battlefield nowadays. All the talk at the start of the war about NATO maintaining a no-fly zone over Ukraine quickly died off; having a couple of f-16 0r F-35 taken out daily would be bad PR.

Both sides air forces seem to have learned from the harsh realities but at a steep price.

‘The Russians recognized Ukraine in 1994 and everybody else has too. You don’t get too change your mind and invade another country 28 years later without other countries looking askance.’

This overlooks the detail that Russia didn’t change her mind so much as we changed it for her — and for the sake of trivial and transitory domestic political gain. Thousands have died so that Biden would have something to talk about in his 2022 State of the Union Address.

For thirty years, everyone from Henry Kissinger on down warned ‘don’t invite the Ukraine to join NATO; Russia won’t tolerate that.’ Putin repeated that warning in December 2021; ‘don’t invite the Ukraine to join NATO; I won’t tolerate it.’

So what do we do? The very next month, we invite the Ukraine to join NATO: first Kamala Harris, then Tony Blinken. Just to make sure Russia realizes this is really going to happen.

aaand…. Russia invades the Ukraine? Who’da thought?

I wonder if they made up all those lapel pins ahead of time or waited for Russia to actually follow through?

You don’t need to decide Russia’s the good guy here to realize what occurred. Think of Putin as that pit bull your neighbor has. Everyone can see he’s a vicious beast; he says he’s a vicious beast.

So…because you want to demonstrate it for some trivial reason, you get your five-year old to go into the yard and poke the pit bull in the eye with a stick.

Sure enough: the pit bull mauls the five year old.

Fine. The pit bull’s a vicious beast. Just please, please don’t tell us you were the good guy here.

I notice that you haven’t been quite so concerned over the years about Israel invading its neighbors.

Re: “a Third Defenestration of Prague in 1948”

Mr. Sailer: Have you read Claire Sterling’s “The Masaryk Case,” written in 1968? Of course, everyone thought it highly unlikely that Masaryk had jumped, and she proved pretty conclusively that he had been pushed.

It’s worth remembering that none of us have any power to change things so yelling at Steve Sailer makes little sense. In any case, the position he’s taking on this is far from unusual. Douglas Murray is a fellow-traveller of Mr. Sailer but Glenn Greenwald is not. Greenwald and Murray are homosexuals but Sailer is not. Further proof that being gay and being a faggot are two different things.

Lol. China is collapsing.

LOL. I’d say Putin has jumped the shark on this, and I don’t even support our participation in that war.

Steve is Americans First. Your questions should have that orientation, and you should wonder which Americans. I honestly don’t know the answers, but I do know he’s better than Tucker Carlson — and that there is no one better.

Frankly, Israel and Palestine are not our concerns.

You win a war, or anything else now, by seizing public opinion. This is a Hollywood, show biz war as operated from this side. We here are stuck sitting in the dark in a movie theater watching a leading man who is costumed in a green shirt.

Thiel’s way of war, but there is no internet there without his old partner Musk’s way of Starlink.

So I take it Steve, that you support Ukraine taking back Crimea and Donbas as well? Because that is what Zelenskyy and Biden have stated they will do. In your worldview, those were part of Ukraine in 1994, and should go back to them now, correct? If so, then what has changed now that was different in 2014?

The Germans British Turks and French all took a bite at the Crimean apple in the last 175 years.

Its not invading Crimea, its holding Crimea.

What does “American” even mean anymore?

What the white Yankee in Maine have in common with the Mexican lawn guy in LA. We are separated by race, ethnicity, culture, religion, politics and, at times, language.

American no longer stands for a people. At best, we’re fellow consumers ruled over by a small managerial class that itself is ruled over by a small ethnic group.

As to Israel, Palestine and Ukraine, the American consumers have no interest in them, but our rulers do, so we must as well.

The question is why does Steve, who presumably isn’t a part of the ruling tribe, care so much about Ukraine’s border but not so much Israel’s neighbors.

Where’s the Russian Air Force?

It’s there.

Russia’s Ministry of Defense keeps posting videos of their Su-25 attack planes firing rockets in which you never what, if anything, those rockets hit. pic.twitter.com/4etDAqfr1k

— David Pinsen (@dpinsen) October 7, 2022

Why hasn’t it achieved air supremacy?

Two reasons, I suspect:

1) Too many effective anti-aircraft weapons, most of them Russian-built, plus Western MANPADS.

2) Fear of Russian pilots getting tortured to death if they survive getting shot down.

Anatoly Karlin has been advising that for a while but it looks like Russia is too cautious.

After months in Ukraine training soldiers, Ret Col Andrew Milburn of @TheMozartGroup mercenary firm gets sauced on camera & spills the beans:

Ukraine is a "corrupt, fucked-up society" run by "fucked-up people"

Ukrainian soldiers "kill dudes who surrendered," commit "atrocities" pic.twitter.com/MhKljQwQpq

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) December 26, 2022

Steve Sailer;

“Similarly, Thiel’s strategy for modern data-based warfare doesn’t sound that esoteric, but it does seem like it must have taken a lot of honest effort, something the Russians don’t seem to have an abundance of in this century.”

Steve Sailer, Russia’s accomplishments are outstanding for what they have to work with. The Russian economy is around 7 X smaller than that of the U.S, but they still have the technical wherewithal to not only match but in many cases surpass the best that the American Industrial-military Complex can come up with – atter stealing trillions of Dollars from American taxpayers.

Might I remind you that Russia(technically the U.S.S.R, I know) beat America at putting a man in space. If this is not impressive to you, consider the following: Russia was the country that suffered the most infra-structure and economic destruction from WW2. They also were a country that had been industrialized for only about 50 years at that point, compared to 150 years for U.S.A. On top of that, the cream of the crop of the German rocket scientists were brought to America under Project Paperclip. Russia got only the second-tier German rocket scientists. And yet, despite all thyese handicaps, *Russia beat America at putting a man in space* .Americans will say that they “won” the space race by putting a man on the Moon, but Russia never had the economic and industrial resources to undergo such a massive project.

Russians do these things out of a heroic sense of being David Vs Golliath. During WW2, they took on arguably the best militsry that the World has ever seen and, even though they were a borderline Third World country, beat them. It’s hard to estimate the numer of total Russian casualties during that war. Some put it as “little” as 11 million and others as high as 40 million. The most accurate fiigure is around 27 million between civilians and military. That is almost two oders of magnitude more people than America lost at that same war.

When they see themselves as superpower, Russians become apathetic. Their attitude towards Ukraine is that it is a much smaller and weaker country, so the Ukranians should be reasonable and surrender. After all, the Russians have made it clear to the Ukranians that they see them as more-or-less the same people, and have no desire to do them harm. This is unlike the situation in WW2, where Germans made it clear that they saw slavs like Russians as an inferior race only good enough to be ethnically clensed. So the Russians don’t understand why the Ukranians are not reasonable and surrender. Russia has not even used 1% of it’s military might in this war. They still treat it as a “special military operation”.

The biggest danger of this war is that the Russians will finally see that they are the underdogs, because they are not fighting just the Ukraine, but the combined might of 30 countries in the form of NATO.

The moment that the Russians realize that losing this war will mean being reduced to a sattellite state of the U.S in the form of NATO, they will actually declare war not only to Ukraine but to all the countries aiding the Ukraine.

What will Americans do when Russians actually bomb a NATO base killing thousands of American boys? What will America do when Russia uses it’s legendary long-range heavy artillary, the mightiest that the World has ever seen, to shell eastern European nations that joined NATO and bomb American bases as well?

Nukes are out of the question for obvious reasons….you don’t want to pull a Nagasaki or Hiroshima against the country that has the World’s largest stockpile of I.C.B.Ms armed with multi-megaton nukes.

So Amerrica will be forced into a ground war against Russia. There is a joke that military men throughout the World say:

“The first rule of war is: whatever you do, don’t get into a land war with Russia.”

America cannot even pacify a few barbarics in Afghanistan. How exactly will America win a land war against the mightiest nation that the World has ever seen when it comes to land warfare? How will an army of trannies and feminists beat the terrifying will of enraged Russian men?

Your gloating about Russia’s “defeat” in this war is not only premature, but also reveals a completely idiotic level of hubris. You do not want to coner Russians. Ask Napoleon or Hitler what Russians will do to you when they finally decide that play time is over.

Did Steve outsource his SMO comments to Mister Hak?

Why is it embarrassing if Russia is up against NATO’s weaponry, intelligence, and funding? The only advantage over Ukraine would be population size but of course, the defender is will be able to mobilize a much greater percentage of its able-bodied men. In fact, Ukraine has more soldiers in the field.
A quagmire should be expected.

Seriously, Russia has a huge moral problem with corruption that helps explain its embarrassing military performance since mid-July.

The Ukraine, which never had a Putin figure to rein in its oligarchs, is far more corrupt than Russia, and that didn’t seem to impede the Ukraine’s advances this fall. A bigger issue for Russia has probably been its paucity of military spending in recent years:

Not really what you’d expect to see from a dictator determined to reconstitute the USSR, as some American pundits tell us.

Anon[360] wrote to me:[

Dave] “This has become an artillery war of attrition, and, according to Western media reports from the few reporters who have gone near the front, the kill ratio is horrifically against the Kievan forces.”

[Anon] Sources for this? Must be reporters who’s provably gone to the front and also pro-Western according to your own standards.

I have documented this again and again.

Click on my name and look through my earlier posts.

I am frankly sick and tired of playing silly games with guys like you on this.

Check out my earlier posts and the links therein.

Or don’t. I don’t care.

Frankly, I just no longer give a damn about fools like you. I do care about the innocents who are dying.

The Kiev regime is going to lose, at horrendous cost.

I hate that: I would like to see an immediate, negotiated peace, as I have said again and again and again.

But the US Deep State will not allow it.

And so Ukrainians will die.

As far as I know, this guy is still considered respectable:

I am not worried about offramps for Putin. I am not worried about a hardline coup in Russia. I am not worried about chaos inside Russia. I am not worried about the disintegration of the Russian Federation. I am worried about the continued Russian occupation of Ukraine.

— Michael McFaul (@McFaul) December 27, 2022

Russia must have done whatever it did to influence the 2016 election because they thought Trump would not be as hostile to them as the other U.S. administrations have been over the last decade or so.

You’ve got to give Sailer credit for consistency. He’s opposed Russia on this since the beginning, unlike, say Richard Hanania.

In February you said "there's no moral case for supporting Ukraine". Genuinely curious as to why your stance changed so dramatically? https://t.co/X8rqAvhmX7

— Noah Carl (@NoahCarl90) December 26, 2022

Something about Ukraine brings out the inner boomer in Southern Californians like Sailor and Victor Davis Hanson.

Steve Sailer wrote to Colin Wright:

The Russians recognized Ukraine in 1994 and everybody else has too. You don’t get too change your mind and invade another country 28 years later without other countries looking askance.

Unless of course you are the US Deep State.

Then you bomb Serbia because you decide that the boundaries of Serbia are going to be reduced by the secession of Kosovo.

Or you cheer on Saddam Hussein when he tries to conquer part of Iran, but attack him when he goes after Kuwait.

Or you enable the Kurds to establish de facto independence from Baghdad.

Or you try to dismantle the country of Syria.

Or you openly facilitate the secession of Western Ukraine from the legally elected government of Ukraine in 2014, but then arm and encourage the rebel regime to attack and conquer those areas of Eastern Ukraine that were loyal to the legal government.

Steve, you are they guy who made the phrase “Deep State” famous in the context of the US and who decried the behavior of “Invade the world, invite the world.”

But somehow you cannot bring yourself to view with open eyes what has actually happened in the world in the last thirty years: the main aggressor, by any standard, has been the US Deep State.

Not Putin.

Facts matter.

They’re getting bombed because NATO keeps supplying them and encouraging/bribing/blackmailing them to continue the fight. The war would have been over in days had outside countries stayed out.

Hanania’s argument that “it makes you look like a loser, which is unappealing” suggests that it’s about marketing for him. Maybe he’ll switch back if the Russians start taking territory?

Cagey Beast wrote to me:

Even the Russians concede there are militantly anti-Russian Ukrainians in Galicia who they don’t want to share a country with.

I have said all along that I hope that this ends with a neutralized rump regime in Greater Galicia: yes, it will be a nightmare for all concerned if the Russian Federation ends up having to govern Western Ukraine.

Unfortunately, I think we have reached the point that Russia cannot be secure until the Zelensky regime is overthrown and West Ukraine is deNazified. That is going to be a mess.

CB also wrote:

I agree with your sentiments generally but let’s admit Russia has invaded Ukraine and is now fighting Ukrainian nationalists.

When Western Ukraine chose to secede from the legally elected government of Ukraine in 2014, at the instigation of the US Deep State, the Donbass, remaining loyal to the legal government of Ukraine, chose not to accede to the new puppet regime.

They were legally in the right to do that.

When the puppet regime, for eight long years, engaged in an unprovoked war of aggression against the Donbass, the Donbass pleaded with Russia to aid them. On February 24, 2022, Putin did so.

That is not an “invasion” of Ukraine, any more than Lafayette et al. “invaded’ the USA by providing us aid against the British imperialists. Putin merely gave military assistance to a neighboring country that was being attacked and invaded by an illegal puppet regime of the US Deep State.

Completely and totally legal under international law.

What the US Deep State did was to violate the sovereignty of Ukraine.

Not legal under international law.

Facts do matter.

Even ugly facts that the US regime would like to suppress.

No I don’t think they are fighting more bravely . They are fighting for far longer and some are actual Nazis (the Azov battalion says ‘hi’). I’m guessing the Russian air force is not suicidal that’s why we don’t see them much.

But the Afghans had no air force and chased us with the most powerful air assets in the world out of their country.

Might be an actual question you could ask without swallowing whatever the MSM is feeding you.

You know the same folks who admitted to lying to us for at least six years because the Orange Man was so very bad.

A Palantir was a communication device similar to a crystal ball found in Tolkien’s works. The problem being that several were acquired by Sauran and used against the realms of men.

That doesn’t give me a warm fuzzy.

“Can the Department of the Interior run “gentleman’s clubs”?”

I’m pretty sure the Clinton era Secret Service were found to have this entrepreneurial spirit.

Completely and totally legal under international law.

I don’t think even the BRICS countries go that far. As far as I know they say the Russian invasion of Ukraine was unlawful but with mitigating circumstances. That’s my view too. The crucial difference between international law and domestic law is there are no police to call.

What the US Deep State did was to violate the sovereignty of Ukraine.

The US and its European allies have repeatedly interfered in Ukraine, including backing the Euromaidan coup, turning a blind eye to the “anti-terror” crackdown in Donbass and slow-walking the Minsk II Agreement. They deserve as much blame as Washington.

That is not an “invasion” of Ukraine, any more than Lafayette et al. “invaded’ the USA by providing us aid against the British imperialists. Putin merely gave military assistance to a neighboring country that was being attacked and invaded by an illegal puppet regime of the US Deep State.

I’m a Canadian of the Tory variety so that comparison doesn’t really resonate with me. If anything, the French were supporting a colour revolution in the American colonies in order to mess with their British rivals. Hopefully the Russians and Ukrainians will eventually get along with one another as well as the Americans and Canadians eventually did.

I missed where he said the war was over or mission accomplished. Of course maybe you could put down the pom-poms for a minute. Might improve your vision.

If you’re going to do a ‘Jack’ impersonation on your own blog you could save everyone the trouble maybe just fundraise for whomever pays his bills

Shouldn’t the same corruption problems be true of the Ukraine?

No because Ukraine and Russia are not the same country. Ukraine is half-Western while Russia is full Slavic corruption.

It seems that everyone in Russia has been lying to Putin and themselves.

They weren’t ready for this war and they don’t even have enough winter boots and armor to go around.

Putin and his fake military commanders don’t know what they are doing. Look at the way these Russian conscripts run around:
https://funker530.com/video/ukrainian-artillery-brackets-and-destroys-russian-platoon/

No armor support and just running around like teenagers at a concert.

Look at how they bunch up in that video. They’re not even following the basics of combat.

Putin is taking random men and just dumping them on the front. He may be good at keeping power but he is clueless when it comes to war. They are ignoring lessons from both WW1 and WW2. In WW1 they learned quickly to not bunch up in a field when under artillery attack.

Do you take seriously Putin’s claims about the mistreatment of ethnic Russians in the Donbass?

I certainly don’t. First he decreed LPR/DPR to be independent countries and they have been since taken as Russian territory. The militias are mostly dead as they were sent to the front.

If Donbas was truly the cause of the war then he would have tried negotiating first. He in fact cut off all diplomatic ties with Ukraine. The leaked plans show that he planned on taking Ukraine and then moving on to Moldova. He only claimed the war was about Donbas after he failed to take Kiev. In his original speech he claimed it was about NATO even though Ukraine didn’t have the votes of France or Germany.

Putin is just plain full of shit. Just because our media supports Ukraine doesn’t make him any less of a weasel.

“That’s what let the US establish complete air supremacy over the Iraqis in 1991 with their Soviet weapons. ”

You mean it had nothing to do with the quality of pilots facing off against one another?

When Western Ukraine chose to secede from the legally elected government of Ukraine in 2014, at the instigation of the US Deep State

Facts do matter.

Yes facts do matter and there was never a secession by the government of Ukraine.

They removed a pro-Russian president who broke the law and has been convicted of treason. He never denied the charges and fled to Russia.

If Biden was convicted of treason would you argue that he should stay for the sake of democracy?

Not legal under international law.

It’s not legal under Ukrainian law to take tens of millions in bribes from a foreign country. They used to hang people for doing that.

Not even Putin disputed the charges. It was a clear case of corruption and in service of a foreign country which means treason.

His corruption was outrageous:
https://eurasianet.org/a-brief-history-of-corruption-in-ukraine-the-yanukovych-era

He is also accused of having protestors shot:
https://www.newsweek.com/ukraine-protesters-shot-under-direct-leadership-yanukovich-243771

If Biden did anything like that I doubt you would take his side just because he was elected.

When the US makes endless wars for Israel’s interest, destroying the Middle East and Libya with millions of its people (and Africans through Libya) then coming to Europe, that certainly is my concern since I leave in Europe.

You’re all tired up in knots. The fact of the matter is that you and others HAVE to perpetuate the lie that all or most media content is Fake News. The world doesn’t work that way, as evident by Ron Unz’s moment of truth.

Putin enriched himself along with the oligarchs he personally supported. It’s all well documented. So stop f—- lying.

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2022/03/29/1088886554/how-putin-conquered-russias-oligarchy

Thanks for that, Ron. I read your article from which you drew your comment… and agree.

The rulers of the USA (not the politicians, I mean the people who ultimately control Biden’s teleprompter) seem to be overplaying their hand. This seems to be a general trend in the West, a general “unseriousness”. Irrespective of the origins and explanations for WWII, amongst the population there seems to have been a practicality and seriousness about that time or growing up in that time, enforced by the conditions of war and war economy, that persisted for most of the lifetimes of the baby boomers.

The Cold War prolonged and retained that sense of practicality until 1990.

In the absence of that sort of existential threat with the relatively brief “unipolar world” (unipolar if the great equalizer of nukes was ignored) there seems to be a lack of strategic vision and practicality to the whole affair. It’s a “let’s do more of the same, but amplified (more so than the other courtiers)” rather than the result of asking questions like “What do we ultimately want? Why do we want it? How will that benefit us? What is that likely to achieve?”

It seems that momentum from the Frankfurt School has persisted. One would think that after 100 years, a review of the strategic aims of the goals of the FS would be in order. The white goyim now less than 10% of the world’s population… are they the “big bad” still? for example. Are the old tribal enmities the most important thing at stake now? e.g. Russia, Ukraine.

I too have been watching Sachs, Douglas MacGregor, Mearsheimer, Gabbard, and Tucker on youtube. I am not sure what is true and what will ultimately come to be.

However, I do believe that Russia has a 3:1 population advantage of Ukraine, a similar people. If it just came down to Russia and Ukraine in a vacuum, I think Russia would have won already. But the USA has decided that it wants to fight a proxy war.

Due to the proximity and the fact that the ultimate backstop is nukes, I believe that Russia wants it more than NATO and are prepared to get it. I am not sure with the destruction of the Nordsteam pipeline, the USA will be able to repair the damage to its own credibility there. But ultimately in a battle of wills, this war is on Russia’s borders, and a year ago none of us knew what a Kherson, Mariupol or a Bakhmut was. One would think that this was not the case for many Russians. (Steve would likely say that Ukraine wants it more because it is defending their own country… but did they really want the Eastern, Russian ethnic areas that were in their country when they were shelling them?)

For the Russian, Ukraine potentially joining NATO crossed a red line. After decades of F(*&ing Around, the USA is finally going to “Find out”.

More accurately…

The original police action style operation was enough to work if Ukraine was willing/allowed to negotiate. It’s a bit like discussing actions with your children. “Do you want to do this the easy way, or do you want to do this the hard way?” Sometimes they choose the hard way. And that’s ok, the hard way works also. The easy way would have been a negotiated peace with minimal Ukrainian territory loss (just the ethnic Russian areas), no NATO ever for the rump Ukraine state.

What this means is that now Russia will ask the question, what do we have to do in order to secure our strategic aims? Now that we are going to conduct a proper war, what is the best bang per buck achievable militarily? Might that be the entire coastal access of Ukraine, of course the Russian areas… maybe some other key things.

The time span will be years, potentially. Even decades. It might mean making winters very uncomfortable for the Ukrainian populace. It can mean holding the existing lines while training and building the force required to accomplish the goals of a proper war. You can take time though. Eventually the USA forgets why it fights a war in a far-flung state. Good, fast, cheap, pick any two. So in a war where Russia can potentially take its time, they would take longer and do it more inexpensively. Every Russian war is not WWII, a meat grinder of existential threat.

In fact, if I was looking at this strategically from the Russian perspective, we see that:
1) US lacks multi-decadal patience for long, intractable proxy wars far from home.
2) A key driver of US foreign policy is defense spending. They love a conflict that is going to consume a lot of materiel. But eventually the US tires of it, see 1.

So you fight this in a way that is going to consume the US coffers in a way that doesn’t cause strategic harm to your own side, minimizes your own casualties and economic losses, and be prepared to do that for a decade or two if you can’t achieve shorter term victory. Eventually there is goint to be some other squirrel that diverts the US attention.

I am also not sure why there is this focus on air power, why it should be used. Ukraine does not have appreciable air power. There is no compelling reason for Russia to use its air assets if it can accomplish its goals with ground forces.

I often agree with Steve (even on COVID) but don’t always agree, and it seems I differ on the current war in Ukraine. We’ll see what happens I guess.