Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

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Another Decent Summary Of The Ukraine War

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On July 10, 2026

4 Comments

I’d have just linked and excerpted, but this account is currently private. My comments in italics.

It’s immediately apparent when someone has zero exposure to Ukrainian language reporting on the war, which is the norm. There’s an entire parallel infospace where actual AFU soldiers and even the mainstream Ukrainian media speak quite frankly about the war in a way that would shock most casual observers. So what are the Ukrainians saying about the current strategic balance?

• Ukrainian residents of large cities need to evacuate them because major cities will be unlivable this winter (former Minister of Defense Dmytro Kuleba) Civilian infrastructure was not significantly targeted by Russia till Ukraine started hitting Russian energy infrastructure. Escalation does not favor the weaker side.

• Ukraine has no Patriot interceptors left and all Ukrainian infrastructure will be destroyed unless something changes (MoD aide Serhiy Bezkrestnov) This is credible because the interceptors have been going to Israel and US forces in the Middle East by priority, so much so that we had reports of missiles being transferred from the Pacific. It also explains why the US is talking about letting Ukraine manufacture its own patriot missiles.

• Russia’s deployment of jet-powered Gerans is increasing while 200 older gas powered Gerans attack Ukraine every day (Sergei Bezkrestnov, MoD)

• Russian EW and air defense are becoming more advanced and are being deployed more widely, mitigating the effects of the Ukrainian mid-range drone campaign, while Russian drones are increasingly equipped with AI image recognition terminal guidance. Ukrainian EW and AD aren’t keeping up (Oleksandr Karpyuk, AFU) This is the opposite of what is being reported elsewhere. I don’t know the truth of it, but Russia does have industrial power and Chinese backing.

• The Russians retain the initiative essentially everywhere on the front line (Ukrainska Pravda) Fits with what I read from other alternative sources.

• The mid-range drone campaign has had zero effect on the situation on the front line (Ukrainska Pravda)

• The triumphalism in the Western press is exaggerated and premature. The most realistic Ukrainian goal now is simply to stop the continuous degradation of the AFU’s position, which has been underway since 2023 (Ukrainska Pravda)

• The Russian campaign against Ukrainian fuel infrastructure, gas stations, and power plants will result in a “Crimean situation” across much of Ukraine unless drastic measures are taken (Dmitry Leushkin) Again, Ukraine escalated and Russia matched the escalation, but has more capacity.

Reading Ukrainian reporting, the mid-range drone campaign is turned on its head. Ukrainian planners hope to manufacture 100,000 mid-range drones by the end of the year not in the expectation that it’ll fundamentally shift the balance in their favor, but to help close the gap with the years-long Russian glide-bomb campaign. This target is extremely ambitious, but if achieved, it would put them roughly at parity with the number of glide bombs Russia drops on Ukraine in a year.

The issue is that none of these drones have anything approaching the payload of a Russian glide bomb, with drones like the Hornet delivering something like 4.5kg of explosive to a FAB-250’s 100kg. Drones are more versatile, but the Ukrainians have a long way to go to catch up. In most ways, the drone war is a game of leapfrog, but the Ukrainians still have major disadvantages that have strong effects on the frontline. All the information above was shamelessly cribbed from @EventsUkraine, who tirelessly compiles reports from the Ukrainian media and Telegram multiple times a week. Reading his Substack will expose you to a side of the war that’s rarely visible in the Western press.

This seems more aligned with what I’d expect. He notes elsewhere that he thinks that Ukraine can keep up manpower losses for another few years. I’m not sure, nations tend to collapse before the very end of their manpower.

Basically, a war of attrition favors the side with more weapons, more advanced weapons and more manpower. Which is what I noted at the very start of the war. Ukraine has done amazingly well, far better than most expected, in large part due to massive NATO support, which Trump has recently doubled down on: he seems to have given up on peace.

It should also be noted that the increased attacks in Russia, which are made with Western supplied weapons, whose targeting is chosen by Westerners, and which are overseen by Westerners are degrading Putin’s ability resist hardliners calls for direct strikes against European sites. This war could easily escalate especially if Ukraine makes a high symbolic value attack that hits a major cultural site or kills a lot of civilians.

In “turn about is fair play” Russia appears to have been helping Iran with satellite data and targeting, which is exactly the sort of blowback many of us warned about.

Empires die messy. America’s is dying, and a lot of people are dying with it. Let’s hope this doesn’t turn into a world war at some point, as it did twice during Britain’s decline.

 

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Platner Folds

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On July 9, 2026

32 Comments

Update: It turns out the accuser only described the DMs. She did not produce them. So this is she said/he said. Under such circumstances in no way should Platner drop out and yes, this is a political hit. It was coordinated by the party and media, they immediately withdrew all funding and voter lists and had a plan for choosing their own candidate.

 

A while back I wrote that the way Democrats get taken out, especially but not only the left, is usually a sex scandal.

for whatever reason, Americans take allegations like these much more seriously than gross corruption, bribe taking, insider trading, or mass murder.

And now an allegation against Platner which was organized by a Democratic establishment lawyer has lead to Platner quitting.

Which is exactly the wrong thing to do. He says he didn’t do it, the Maine party will pick the new candidate through a meeting of six hundred insiders, so the candidate won’t be a strong progressive, and by stepping down he removes protection from those who supported him.

The reason Stoller is on this is that like me he came up through the Netroots. We’ve seen this playbook over and over and over again. We recognize it.

The idea that it is principled is laughable. I saw Fetterman attacking Sanders for supporting Platner, as if Fetterman doesn’t support Israel, who rapes as policy and raped at least one person to death (and it won’t just be one.) Oh, and that genocide.

The left is getting scary to the center. They won quite a few primaries, and the goal now is to take them out post-primary. The most important thing is always controlling the party, winning is secondary, especially in America where the duopoly means that whichever party is out of power knows it will soon be back in.

This is why Starmer purged the left, including kicking out Corbyn.

Platner may or may not be guilty. I don’t know. But I do know that he just made a mistake in folding. To be fair, practically all his support in the party “un-endorsed” him, but frankly, who cares. At the least he should have stuck firm till he got to choose his successor. Make it clear that they’ll have him around all election season, drawing media attention the party doesn’t want, one way or the other.

Folding never gets you anything. There is no honorable peace between the left and the establishment: there are no rules of war, and the left needs to stop acting as if there are. Platner will be smeared as a rapist either way (even if he’s never charged) and the people who believed in him will be fucked over.

(And yeah, he had plenty of red flags and someone else should have been found. But charisma is a thing, and he had it and the safer candidates didn’t.)

What I write here is for the benefit of everyone, but alas, I live in capitalism and I, and the site, take money to keep running. If you value the writing here and can, please subscribe or donate.

America Attacks Iran & Declares The Truce Over

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On July 8, 2026

29 Comments

From the orange man’s mouth:

“As far as I’m concerned, it’s over,” Trump said at the ongoing Nato summit in Ankara when asked if the truce with Iran was now finished.

“It’s just a waste of time dealing with them,” AFP reported.

He blasted Iran’s leaders after Washington launched strikes on the Islamic Republic and Iran said it targeted US bases in the Gulf.

“They’re sick, there’s something wrong with them,” he said.

Treasury also re-instated oil sanctions on Iran.

The simple calculus is that the US was trying to re-open the Strait through Oman waters, and while they got a few ships thru, the Iranians stopped most of them hit some. As long as the Strait stays closed, the US is under pressure, because there is a physical economy, and reserves are running down, leaving aside shortages in fertilizer, helium and so on.

Iran just needs to keep the Strait closed to put pressure on the US homeland. As usual, the US can’t be hit directly by its enemies, so this is Iran’s way of hurting America even though its missiles can’t reach American cities.

On the other hand, the US can directly hit Iran, and if they didn’t actually want peace on the terms of the MOU, which apparently they didn’t (though I think this is a factional dispute inside the administration), then going back to hitting Iran makes sense.

Problem is that if the Iranian military does what it’s threatening to do, which is to blow the hell out of oil infrastructure in the Gulf States, the shortages will last years.

And the US isn’t leaving Iran with a lot of other options in terms of escalation.

Anyway, we’ll see what happens. Trump’s decisions have the consistency of runny jello, the real question is if the Iranian hard line faction wins their internal debate and is given the green light to go all out.

What I write here is for the benefit of everyone, but alas, I live in capitalism and I, and the site, take money to keep running. If you value the writing here and can, please subscribe or donate.

Unintended Consequences: Germany Sick Leave Edition

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On July 7, 2026

18 Comments

So, Merz has announced that German workers will need a note from a doctor day one of calling in sick, and they must get that note in person: phone calls are no longer acceptable.

All the usual garbage: uncompetitive, high costs for employers, blah, blah, blah. (This comes after raising the retirement age.)

Here’s the actual sick leave situation:

Hey, it suddenly increased after 2020? Is anyone surprised? Bueller?

Anyway, doctors and clinics are a fixed resource. Forcing people to go in and see a doctor (normal wait times in Germany are two to three days) mean taking more time with the patient. That means pushing other patients back. So wait time will increase.

Second more sick people will go into work. Some of them will be infectious. More people would wind up sick than if you just let people stay home.

Sub voce this is “we don’t trust people, we think some of them are lying” plus “people really should work when only slightly ill. Suck it up sunshine.”

But the increase in sick time is clearly Covid related, presumably long Covid, so it isn’t likely there’s a sudden epidemic of malingering. And while you can’t pass on long Covid directly, it still means that other people who do have diseases they can donate to their co-workers will come in.

Governments rarely seem to think thru these second order effects and ask if they’re worth it. The City of Toronto has been forced by the Province of Ontario to shut down supervised injection sites.

Now if you’re a normal human person you’re probably thinking “oh no, people will die!”

And that’s true. But Premier Ford doesn’t give a damn about that. There is another effect, however, that he should give a damn about, because voters care, and the Conservaties do have seats in Toronto.

Average wait times in emergency wards are a bit over an hour thru the province. But they’re much higher in Toronto. As of this writing the closest emergency department to me has a wait time of a bit over five hours.

According to ER doctors overdoses can drive those times up significantly. Overdoses require priority treatment, after all. So if more drug users are overdosing (or their drug wasn’t what they thought it was, because the supply is so adulterated), then wait times will go up more.

And voters care about this. A lot. (Last time I went to an emergency department I waited over eight hours. I needed stitches, it was overnight, but I was in no danger, so I got to wait a very long ) People have in some cases died because of wait times, since it isn’t always obvious how bad something is, and while the number may not be large, the bad publicity often is.

This is something Ford and the Conservatives should care about, but it’s rarely mentioned. Bleeding hearts (which I mostly am) tend to lead with “drug users will die”, not getting that to Ford that’s probably a good thing. But “regular citizens will wait longer in the ER and some of them will die” is not something he wants. He may not personally care (I doubt he cares about anybody but himself), but he does care politically.

As for Merz, he’s the worst German leader of my lifetime, trying to run military Keynesianism and letting Germany’s industry be destroyed while he fiddles with marginalia. A few extra sick days aren’t why Germany’s losing its industry and it won’t make the least bit of difference. What is required is innovation and driving down energy prices, but that would require making peace with Russia and Merz is a warmonger.

Ruled by fools.

 

What I write here is for the benefit of everyone, but alas, I live in capitalism and I, and the site, take money to keep running. If you value the writing here and can, please subscribe or donate.

Most US Jobs Won’t Support An American Lifestyle

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On July 6, 2026

30 Comments

Over at Interfluidity there’s a good post titled “Why Are Americans So Unhappy?”

Part of the answer boils down to this graph:

What this measures is what percentage of expenses of employees wages pay.

You’ll notice it keeps going down. It peaked near 100% around 1968 and has been trending down since. It’s now under 80%. Note the spike in 2020 when the government let lose the taps and actually helped people. I know a lot of people who, contra the “lockdowns sucks” remember 2020 as the only time they got to take a paid vacation. (And suicides in the under 18 group dropped massively, because school sucks.)

What makes up the rest of the money people use to support themselves? Well, for the better off its assets based wealth: dividends,  capital gains and all that good stuff. But for all intents and purposes if you aren’t in top 10% the amount of money you get from these sources is infintesimal. So, in fact, what actually makes it up is having two people working where one plus maybe a minor part time job would cover it.

The post is worth reading in total, but I want to point out something simple: this is deliberate. This is a result of policy. This is what American elites worked hard to create.

There are a lot of moving parts, but the most important for a long time was that the idea of NAIRU, that unemployment below a certain level was bad and caused inflation, so every time unemployment got low, the Federal reserve would crush the economy. (This is why good employment news would cause the market to go down, and bad employment news would cause it to rise all through the 80s to 2000s.)

Low unemployment is when employers are forced to raise wages, since there’s more jobs than applicants. It’s when labor has pricing power. So the Federal Reserve spent over 30 years (and still does occasionally) deliberately suppressing wages because they figured that wages were the most important form of inflation.

Or that’s what they said. There’s lots of sources of inflation, but somehow the Fed was never concerned with bubbles, never concerned with moral risk, never concerned with oligopolies and monopolies, never concerned with actually supply as opposed to demand. Nope, it was all those nasty workers who wanted raises.

Now a cynic, or perhaps a realist, might think “if there were a lot of ways to deal with inflation and the only one they did was crush wages” that perhaps inflation wasn’t at least 50% just an excuse to crush wages.

A realist might notice that everything else happening, like tax cuts on the rich, the end of Glass-Steagall, deregulation and much more all seemed to have as its effect making the already rich richer, and notice that wages are an expense to rich people, not their primary source of income, and that crushing wages thus also helped make the already wealth even richer.

Since many people pointed out, as early as the mid 80s, that the result of the policies being pursued would be rampant inequality, and indeed it was showing up in the stats as early as those 80s, one can safely assume that decision makers, whether at the Fed, Congress or anywhere else understood what the results would be.

But, after all, they are the important people. The good people. The job creators. The people who are worthy of having lots of money. Nurses, orderlies, janitors, clerical workers, garbage men:  pretty much everyone who has a job that actually does something the economy actually needs done and when it isn’t done people scream, they’re putzes and don’t deserve to have a good life. Just disposable trash.

At its heart it really is this simple. There were plenty of ways to deal with inflation, and many were suggested at the time. The most regressive path, one everyone knew would cause a lot of poverty and increase the wealth of a minority massively was chosen. It was chosen because it benefited the people in charge and their retainers, and those people didn’t and don’t care about anyone else.

Along the way the morons also managed to piss away America’s industrial and tech lead and lose America’s superpower status. But being fake rich (because it’s China that’s actually rich now, no matter how many billions of US dollars you have) and crushing their lessers was what was important to them.

And yeah, plenty of people, your kind and gentle host included, predicted this, well in advance. It was known. If you didn’t know, it was because you metaphorically had your fingers in your ears as you chanted “it doesn’t matter who makes things, or where. The market is global and fungible. It doesn’t matter who makes things, or where the market is….”

Anyway, it worked out for a few people. A few million. It’s a big club, as a comedian once noted, and you aren’t in it.

Your living standard was crushed, your wife was forced to work (not just permitted, but forced) and your children’s future was pissed down the drain deliberately, along with America’s place in the world, because it made a few million people rich, and a few thousand so rich Gilded Age barons would be jealous.

There was a class war.

The rich won.

You lost.

What I write here is for the benefit of everyone, but alas, I live in capitalism and I, and the site, take money to keep running. If you value the writing here and can, please subscribe or donate.

 

 

Open Thread

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On July 4, 2026

25 Comments

Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts. If you’re in America, I hope you enjoyed the holiday.

The Surveillance Society Is Here Courtesy Of Private Enterprise

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On July 3, 2026

17 Comments

In China they have cameras everywhere. I’m not a fan, but by most accounts the government doesn’t abuse this power much and it has made Chinese cities far safer. (If you want to argue they do abuse the power a lot, please look at incarceration per capita in China compared to the US. China seems to suck at police stateing. Yes, I know that’s not a word, but this is my blog and I’m going to use it anyway!)

In the US it’s flock cameras. They’re everywhere it seems.

The network currently is mostly about license plate readers, but the cameras are being expanded (no facial recognition yet, but I’d lay long odds they have it soon.)

Flock has recently expanded into other technologies, including advanced cameras that monitor more than just vehicles. Most concerning are the latest Flock drones equipped with high-powered cameras. Flock’s “Drone as First Responder” platform automates drone operations, including launching them in response to 911 calls or gunfire. Flock’s drones, which reach speeds up to 60 mph, can follow vehicles or people and provide information to law enforcement.

The key thing here is that police can get this data easily, without a warrant. Even if you’re smart enough to leave your phone at home, pretty soon they’ll be able to track everything you do. This data will be stored, and if it’s ever time to get you, they will have years of data. What was innocuous at the time (that organization wasn’t on the watch list when you were involved) can be used against you, especially since America’s laws are so labyrinthine that practically everyone has committed something a prosecutor could call a crime.

And the idea that only police will have access to the data is laughable.

Trust America to create a panopticon which is worse than a government controlled one. Not only does the government get your 24/7 activities, but so can corporations and connected rich people.

God bless the Free market.

Old timers will know I used to write a lot about the coming surveillance society. Well, it’s pretty close to her. Less than five years, I’d guess, and anonymity will be essentially totally gone. Welcome to fishbowl world.

I also wrote many years ago that I’d know people were getting serious about freedom when they started destroying surveillance cameras, and there’s some signs of that:

A sliver of a silver lining, but better than nothing.

As for China, the CPC may be using this mostly responsibly, but it’s a loaded gun waiting to picked up when the government turns tyrannical and if history tells us anything it’s that over a hundred years or so, that’s almost guaranteed.

A surveilled world may be safer in some ways, but the price is significant.

 

What I write here is for the benefit of everyone, but alas, I live in capitalism and I, and the site, take money to keep running. If you value the writing here and can, please subscribe or donate.

The Basic Elements of Meditation: Meditation As Exercise

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On July 2, 2026

6 Comments

Meditation is simple.

Not easy, but simple in the same way exercise is. You do reps, with proper technique (bad technique can injure you or make the meditation unsuccessful).

Over time these reps teach your mind to operate in different and hopefully better ways.

To meditate all you need is a simple algo. Concentration meditation:

Pick an object of meditation. Your breath, a mantra, the center of your forehead, a flame, pretty much anything., Put  your attention on it. When you notice you’re not paying attention, congratulate yourself for noticing and put your attention back on the object.

That’s it. It really is that simple, though as you advance there are various tricks and so on which can help. But you could go all the way just with that.

Vipissana (one type)

Notice something in your consciousness. Place your attention on it for a few seconds, then dismiss it gently (with love if you can), move to another object, do the same thing again. If you notice you’ve stopped this sequence, congratulate yourself for noticing and go back to it.

Not exactly rocket science, is it? It’s just that we are never trained how to use our minds or control our attention or awareness. There are plenty of different variations, but at their heart, almost all of them are like this.

Any type of meditation of this sort of also trains meta attention, which is just knowing what you’re paying attention to at any time. If you’ve ever intended to do something and realized you’ve been doing something else for a few minutes, or longer, then your meta-attention failed. For most people, this is frequent. You can’t control your attention if you don’t know if what it’s doing is what you intended. This is probably the most important meditative capacity, and it’s useful in life as well.

There are two types of meditative accomplishments.

The first are like exercising to stay in shape. If you stop doing cardio your resting heart rate goes back up and you can’t run for very long without losing your breath., If you stop lifting weights the muscles slowly go away. Concentration meditation and the altered states it can get you into (which are VERY nice) is like this. If you want this capacity you’ll first have to get into mental, probably at a retreat, then you need to maintain the ability, which is about two hours a day.

The second type is like learning how to throw a ball or ride a bike. If you keep meditating/exercising, you’ll be a better, but if you stop you don’t forget. These sorts of accomplishments include things like being less reactive and more relaxed, various psychological improvements and various attainments that are sometimes considered enlightened such as viewing the world as yourself, having no self (interpretative difference), lack of suffering on automatic as opposed to requiring meditative tricks and so on.

The second type are often called insights. They aren’t like intellectual insights (though intellect can be used to help gain them), they are changes in how you view the world at a subconscious level. Sometimes this can go back, there’s a whole group of shrinks treating meditators who drove themselves crazy with depersonalization or derealization. Both “I am not a person” and “I am not real” are insights, but if you can’t handle them, they go from good to bad.

So the general rule of meditation is that if starts getting really scary, stop. Consult a teacher you trust, but take a break. Now this doesn’t mean stopping at any unpleasantness because as soon as you make actual progress there will be unpleasantness. Your mind starts to calm, the chatter grows less, and all the garbage and trauma and fears and desires that have been suppressed start bubbling up.

It’s ugly. The more screwed up you are (and you may be more screwed up than you think) the more it sucks. Over time, if you stick it out, you learn to let all this crap go, or most of it and you feel a lot better. But the process isn’t fun.

Anyway. Meditation is just learning how to control your own mind, or learning about the mind in general, since you sure can’t control a lot of it. It’s pretty simple, the complications all come from what happens when you begin to realize you aren’t who or what you thought you were. That can be ugly.

Find a meditation you like, do the reps. Always be sure to include some lpving kindness or concentration meditation, never do just insight meditation except under the instruction of a teacher you trust who is monitoring your progress.

 

What I write here is for the benefit of everyone, but alas, I live in capitalism and I, and the site, take money to keep running. If you value the writing here and can, please subscribe or donate.

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