🚨 BREAKING:
U.S. intelligence has confirmed that Larry Ellison’s wife is a Chinese intelligence operative who infiltrated Silicon Valley to obtain strategic tech information.
Authorities are now tracing possible data leaks from Oracle and other major networks.
and – surprise, surprise – neither of the links attached to that post work
So yeah, just in case anybody here still doubts all the warnings we are getting from Ian about how completely outclassed we are by China, now we have this new tidbit.
Even better, that means that the new owner of CBS is the son of a Chinese spy.
Thanks. I was coming back here to correct the post too. Someone in comments over there checked the source too and corrected me. I really need to learn to be more skeptical and so far doesn’t look like I’m learning fast enough. Gotta keep trying though, because the internet is getting less trustworthy by the day. At least I’m not afraid to hang out with people smarter than I am, or accept corrections, so maybe that is a good start.
Media recommendation.
Bearing in mind that my ancient, brief enlistment wasn’t even in the Navy; “SEAL Team” starring David Boreanaz, gives glimpses of aspects of military life hardly seen anywhere else.
A exceptional amount of effort has obviously been put into “SEAL Team” in getting the technical aspects right, and as far as I can tell, they are as accurate as you can probably get in popular entertainment. I am regularly amazed by the attention to detail. This is an accomplishment by itself.
But where “SEAL Team” shines, are the portrayals of the personalities and the way they relate to each other. These are exactly the type of people who serve. Any of these characters could have walked into my old unit and fit right in. Some of the character portrayals are echos of people I knew. This is how real people in the military really talk to each other and this is what they talk about.
Perversely, these SEALs, the fictional ones of “SEAL Team”, are more like the small number of random, real-life SEALs I met decades ago, than the ones making news in recent years.
Where SEAL Team departs from cliché;
Almost all popular depictions of the military have Commissioned Officers as the heroes, doing the actual fighting. In real life, they are management, with the exception of aviation.
In “SEAL Team,” almost every character is an enlisted Petty Officer; the Navy’s equivalent of Sergeants. Showing this is super rare in popular culture.
The class tension between the Commissioned Officer and Enlisted ranks is actually depicted, though of course it is dialed down and diluted. This is so rare, I actually can’t think of another example of this.
Let’s remember, my experience is decades old. My only experience was in the Army.
If you walk into a recruiting office and enlist, you start as a Private E1, the lowest enlisted rank. The military trains you from the ground up in a military occupational specialty (a job) and theoretically, you stay in the same job for your entire career.
A Sergeant gets his rank through seniority and performance, while living the job 24/7. First by following orders as a Private, then by formulating and issuing orders himself as he gets more experience. If you are a fuckup, you don’t get promoted.
Commissioned Officers complete 60 college credits, go through either ROTC or Officer Candidate School and are Commissioned. They have specialty schools as well, but their career path means they change jobs and responsibilities every 3 to 5 years.
Two notable features were the up or out principle, and the Officer Efficiency Report (OER). “Up or out” means if you don’t get promoted to the next rank by a particular time, you get kicked out. There is no rising to a level you like and are good at and staying there. The Officer Efficiency Report is written by whoever your boss is at every step of the way. A single bad one ends your career.
The lowest Commissioned rank, outranks even the most senior Enlisted rank.
In theory, the Commissioned Officer formulates the orders, and the Sergeant insures they are carried out. In the days before widespread Enlisted literacy, Sergeants needed to be large and thuggish.
That world was gone at least a century and a half ago in this country.
Historically, the reason for a separate command class was that Commissioned Officers were recruited from the ruling-class to insure ruling-class control and to insure commanders were literate.
60 college credits and a Commission makes you a leader of men, and even more problematically, a military prodigy.
After I left the military, I picked up a couple of bachelors degrees and did a couple of years graduate school. In terms of intellectual potential, every single Enlisted person I served with was my peer, or better. Formal educational achievement indicated exactly nothing.
So, you have two parallel hierarchies of authority and leadership. One based on experience, the other appointed and dominant, based on assumptions of class superiority.
There are many militaries where everyone starts a Private, or at least, Enlisted. Eliminating class assumptions widens the pool of potential leadership exponentially. It is hard to see how you could do worse that way.
No Sergeant really believes that the ROTC 2nd Lieutenant who spent the last four years getting a Phys. Ed degree, while he was learning soldiering, is his superior. None. But they have to pretend they do, or else.
Consider the difference it makes in one’s development as a person, over 20-30 years, to always have recourse to arbitrary authority. To never really have to argue, persuade, or think things through. To always be able to end a discussion by saying “because I told you to, now do it.”
In the Army, the junior Commissioned Officer ranks were mostly tolerable. To be sure; a freshly minted 2nd Lieutenant is a grotesquely overpaid Private, but they are only dangerous if they think they are in charge. But the older they got, the worse they got. The more arbitrary, the more disconnected, the more likely to be crazy. And of course, more powerful.
“If you forget to salute that Generals car, he will make you a Private again, on the spot, and file the paperwork later.”
It was sometimes like working for Anthony Fremont, the six-year-old child with the god-like powers in that old Twilight Zone episode. I still am struck by the number of Commissioned crackpots I managed to meet during a seriously short career.
An Army General is someone who has not had their views seriously challenged in at least a decade, but thinks they have.
The Army Officer Corps weren’t monsters, they were what your boss would be if he could imprison you for refusing to work. Nothing I saw justified the pay and power disparity. But even I was surprised when these guys went to Iraq and Afghanistan and repeated every every single mistake made in Vietnam as though working from a list.
A senior Sergeant in Afghanistan was sent home because he wasn’t killing enough terrorists. The reason was that he had made it impossible for the Taliban operate in his sector. When this little irony was pointed out to the commanders responsible, it was laughed off.
Now consider, contra-wise, the effect on character development of virtually always having to persuade. Your primary power is the power to cajole a six-year-old god. As a young Sergeant, I was told; “Cultivate the ability to get so angry you feel like your head is going to explode, without giving any external sign.”
In the Enlisted ranks, the more senior the rank, the more reliable, laid-back, competent. And let’s not forget; at significantly lower pay and benefits.
If someone makes it to Sergeant Major, it generally means they are one of most capable people on the planet.
One of the ways to compensate for an over-powered, under-accountable Officer Corps, is by challenging that arbitrary authority at every opportunity.
The senior Sergeant who was my boss, did that virtually non-stop, using the regulations, common sense, working with other senior Non-Commissioned Officers, appeals upward through the chain of command or any other tactic he could invent. It looked exhausting.
Some of this is depicted in “SEAL Team,” but without context.
From WWII (at least) to SOG Vietnam, the hallmark of real elite combat units, is they effectively erase formal appointed rank. In “SEAL Team” that is what it means when everyone plans the operations together.
The person with the most on-the-ground experience leads by common consent.
There are multiple ways to arrange this. My over-paid pretend boss typically had 3-5 years in the service. My real boss had 26 years in the Army, at least 15 of those in the unit doing the job. He was in his late ‘40s, and got up every morning and ran men half his age into the ground.
And that is also why, at least in U.S. military, such units can be red-headed stepchildren for their parent services; Enlisted excellence undermines claims to legitimacy and elite status of the Officer Corps.
Once you get there, there is no screaming in real elite units. Every single person wants to be there, and had to prove it with considerable effort. Everyone in such a unit, treats everyone else consistent with that.
This why people join such units.
As a former soldier, I actually find watching “SEAL Team” uplifting.
The preferred choice for exercising military force for most of the last century has been aerial bombing. Unfortunately, air-dropped high explosives are one of the most savage weapons ever invented. They should be considered one step above poison gas, if they even are better than poison gas.
“SEAL Team” gives the impression that instead of sending F-35s to drop 500lb bombs they now send small teams of commandos.
If this happened, it would be a win for enlightenment. It would be cause for celebration, on multiple levels.
Even if they are the worst, a dozen people at a time can’t approach the random, hideous destructiveness of a single general purpose bomb.
If you send commandos, and they can’t find the ‘bad guy’, the strongest incentive possible is to just leave. But also, instead of blowing up random strangers and calling it a day, now someone is going to ask; why was the intelligence wrong?
Expending the lives of highly trained professional soldiers who are volunteering for the mission in order to preserve the lives of non-combatants, is exactly their correct use.
The fundamental mistake the Dutch made with Nexperia is not just a miscalculation — it’s the cognitive dissonance of the hyper-financialized Western mindset. In the Western corporate-financial worldview, power = paperwork. Whoever controls the shares, the HQ, and the boardroom is assumed to control reality. But in the Chinese model — and more broadly in industrial economies still rooted in production — power = control over material processes: factories, engineers, suppliers, and logistics.
The Dutch seemed to believe that by seizing and controlling Nexperia’s headquarters in the Netherlands, they would somehow control the entire company, including its production and supply chain in China. But the “HQ” is just an administrative shell — paperwork, legal, marketing, sales, human resources. It’s where people shuffle documents, not where anything tangible is made.
So when the Dutch “seized” Nexperia HQ, they thought they had captured the company. In truth, they only seized a symbol of control, not the substance of it. The real levers — machines, workers, know-how, and infrastructure — all remain in China. When Beijing or local managers stopped responding to “instructions” “orders” and from the HQ, the Dutch executives were left in existential perplexity.
It’s like watching a boardroom coup staged in Holland — the office rebels seize the PowerPoint, but not the production lines.
This is the limiting mindset of executives, managers, lawyers, and paper shufflers who genuinely believe that when they seize offices and departments — the world they know — manufacturing and production must automatically obey. That is how the world has always worked for them: paperwork dictates reality.
But when China cuts off real production, the Dutch simply freeze. Their brains can’t compute. They are paralyzed, staring at their documents and wondering why the factory stopped taking orders from the HQ.
Hyper-financialization has produced a managerial class that confuses abstraction for reality. They live in spreadsheets, compliance reports, and stock tickers, mistaking control of symbols for control of systems.
This is a clash between two worlds — the financialized illusion of paper control versus the industrial reality of material control. The Dutch grabbed the symbols of power, but China still holds the substance of it.
China’s response is a real-world stress test of that illusion. When the material economy — factories, labor, logistics — refuses to obey “paper sovereignty,” the Western managerial mind short-circuits. They have no muscle memory for production, only for process. And now, stripped of the illusion, the Netherlands finds itself holding the paperwork — while China holds the world that still makes things.
“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.” –Dune
“One is never afraid of the unknown; one is afraid of the known coming to an end.” ― Jiddu Krishnamurti
—–
“We used an ecological regression approach to model COVID-19 deaths in small areas (counties) across the contiguous USA”
Replication models were undertaken” “for England and Italy.”
“A number of demographic, socioeconomic, long-term environmental exposure and infection susceptibility variables were used”
Results:
“The mortality rate ratio (MRR) in the USA falls by 29%” “per 100 kJ m–2 increase in mean daily UVA”
Sun exposure “lowers TMPRSS2 expression and subsequently reduces SARS-CoV-2 infectivity.”
“(IL)-6 receptor and C-reactive protein concentrations increase during winter and estradiol receptor gene expression increases during summer.”
“which plays a significant role in COVID-19”
“vitamin D deficiency is primarily associated with increased susceptibility to, and severity of, many infectious diseases” https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8517466/
—-
“Low vitamin D levels and susceptibility to COVID-19 infection: a meta-analysis of observational studies”
“a low plasma 25(OH) vitamin D level is a critical risk factor for being susceptible to COVID-19.”
” COVID-19 cases are negatively associated with temperature, UV index, and UVDVF” https://febs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2211-5463.13309
—–
“The man who has a conscience suffers whilst acknowledging his sin. That is his punishment.” ―- Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Once men turned their thinking over to (Experts) in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with (Experts) to enslave them” –Dune
I sometimes wonder if Oakchair knows Dune and Krishnamurti by heart.
I picked up my first Krishnamurti book in an Antigua, Guatemala bookstore when I was twenty and became an instant fan. Trouble with that Annie Besant cultivated prodigy is that he was good at pointing out, but he never told you how to get there. I think I still have all those dogeared volumes in a storage box, along with lots of others.
None of this is what I started out to say, but it’s what I said, so so be it. For now anyway.
To continue with my unpublished comments here, somecomputerguy’s observations about military culture are reflected in larger cultural power dynamics. My general view is screw the military and not because I come from a military family, but because it’s a backward enforcement mechanism.
(Nationalism is a primitive emotion by the way.)
A friend raised in Mexico once responded to a comment I made about Costa Ricans by saying they’re a bunch of pussies because they don’t have a military, and I had to secretly agree.
But what I really wanted to say is that theists believe in a God because the universe is so vast and incomprehensible that there had to be a divine creator because otherwise it couldn’t exist. That’s horse pucky. There’s no beginning, no middle and no end, no arising, dwelling or ceasing. There’s just space where everything appears like a mirage, a dream, an apparition.
Um, yeah, well anyway. . .
Trouble everywhere and the world has gone astray
Best to help each other along the way
While beneath the waxing moon autumn fades to winter and assholes rule the day.
Cheap rhymes to meet the times.
Don’t know what to say. . .
Maybe nothing is best, but too late now.
Ciao
@somecomputerguy
When I was a Navy enlisted man, an EM3 as I recall, I was standing outside the base exchange with a buddy, in uniform, smoking a cigarette, when a commander came out of the store. Seeing that I was smoking, he quite pleasantly asked me for a light for the cigarette he was holding.
I reached in my pocket for my Zippo lighter, which I had just that morning filled with fuel. So, given that it currently closely resembled a flame thrower, I held it down low to ignite it before bringing it up to light the commander’s smoke. Unfortunately, he apparently thought I was some kind of nut who intended to keep it down low, and did not wait for me to raise it. When it ignited he got a face full of flame.
I almost set his hat on fire raising the lighter to head height, but somehow he did manage to light his smoke. He gave me a kind of funny look, nodded, and walked off.
I was a bit shaken, and my buddy commented, “It’s a good thing you did that to a commander. An ensign would have put you in the brig.”
@mago
I love JK and am frustrated somewhat with the same thing – the “problem” is articulated inside and out but what to do is not.
Isn’t that the game though? If you don’t work it out for yourself, it’s useless?
Oh, i wish someone would spoonfeed me, sit this way, breathe this way, think or don’t think this way or that. It’s all manipulation.
That’s what I “understand” anyway. He’s not huggy, that’s for sure 😁.
The only spiritual practice that ever made sense to me was Taoism. My sense of it is that it is a program of practices/attitudes that teach a person exactly how much space a human being should reasonably occupy in the material world. The essence of it seems to be to absolutely do what you can/should do and then stop before you slide over the line into delusion or toxic excess.
Was never in the military but closest childhood friends were from military families. One friend’s father was a master sergeant who spent his life in the army and always declined to become an officer. He was a quiet, decent, steady man much loved by his family. Another friend’s father was an officer and a pilot who flew missions in Korea. A super nice guy, but with a quiet tough side who never hesitated to step up if some other guy was misbehaving, despite being a somewhat small fellow. Also much loved by his family. Toward the end of his life my friend told me that the confessed to her that some of the things he did/saw in Korea were horrors he was never able to forget.
The Officer Corps of the US military is filled with scrotum cuppers who couldn’t fight their way out of a gay bar at last call in the slowest night of the week.
And MONEY is the problem. Let’s discuss tax free pay for being in the “combat theater.”
Let’s say you were a LTC assigned to CentCom in Tampa. Your “goal” each and every month is to get into the “Green Zone” in Iraq via C-17.
If you get there, your ENTIRE month’s salary is TAX FREE.
Thus, if you are making $12k a month stateside, you are paying about $4k a month in taxes.
Visit the “Green Zone” for three days and you pocket $4k a month, maybe $40k a year.
Meanwhile, the E-1s through E-5, the ones doing the actual fighting and dying, might grt an extra $300 a month.
INCENTIVES for the incompetents.
I am a 20 year retired major, USAF, C-130 Navigator with thousands of hours of flight time and hundreds of hours of combat flight time. Was on the list to be promoted to LTC but told the military to stick it where the sun never shines.
Oddly, I NEVER completed any PME – Professional Military Education – after basic charm school (OCS), yet I was promoted, mostly because my AFSC (Air Force Specialty Code) was in short supply, though I was very good at my job – the Navigator is the “brains” of the C-130H and the “moxie” that operates the defensive systems on board the aircraft.
Pilots are simply monkeys, like the first manned flights into space – “Mon-key see, mon-key do, mon-key be a pi-lot too!”
I quit in February 2003 – right before OIF kicked off – because I could no longer be party to the crimes of the US military.
The linked conversation between Diesen and Doctorow is hard for me to evaluate. Doctorow concedes that the Moscow foreign policy elite are mostly comfortable with Putin’s muted responses to lunatic provocations from, say, the American Deep State (given free rein in the Obama or Biden Administrations and always at the ready from the many Trump neocons) or the Europeans. As Ian has pointed out, best guess has always been that after Putin goes, the responses from Russia will no longer be muted.
I am old enough to remember Herman Kahn and Tom Schelling and, of course, the fictional Dr Strangelove. They developed the game theory approach to deterrence in the approach to the chaotic anarchy of international relations. The advantage attaching to acting like a mad man was identified by them, along with the horrifying implication that extreme risk-taking becomes a bit of a strange attractor for player strategy with massive destruction an equilibrium outcome.
There was a lot of institution building on the principle that multilateral deliberation could be an effective constraint on a breakout of individual madness. I am not sure anyone anticipated how a political class could become infected with the contagion of Russophobic madness and lose track of all other bearings with which to navigate state relations. (Germany struggling to investigate the Nordstream bombing is just one example.)
I am assuming Putin sees this madness sweeping across Europe and hopes to wait it out. The EU-NATO mad dog cannot be taken out with a simple headshot. Where would Putin aim? The danger is clearly sending animal into an uncontrolled frenzy.
The more reasonable course is to wait for Ukraine to collapse. Trump et al. are cooperating to bring about this result.
Doctorow tells us something about his personal motivations for a change of heart: he is sick of authoring false projections of Russia winning on the battlefield. Doctorow personally never claims any military insight in his blogging, but he is definitely on the Russophile Team and, imo, is tired of being trapped in that epistemic silo, but not responding appropriately, not embracing realism.
I think the Russian military was seriously deficient in its readiness, munitions, tactics and logistics at the beginning of the SMO. I do not agree with Doctorow that Russia had a tactical military advantage and whatever edge they had with hypersonics was theoretical in 2022. Not theoretical in 2026. And, Russia in 2025 acquired a superior tactical package and a vastly larger force trained to apply that superior set of tactics. I follow the fight intermittently and Ukraine’s army is collapsing all along a lengthening line of contact. Russia, too, is under strain, which the Russophiles do not admit and the Russophobes exaggerate past the point of delusional psychopathic fantasy. Ukraine’s tactical inferiority is approaching a critical point and that may prove to be decisive.
I have said all along that I see no way for Russia to compel a settlement by military means alone. Russia does NOT have the resources to occupy the whole of Ukraine. They have to hope for regime change, in Ukraine and to some extent across the EU-NATO. Romania, Georgia, Armenia, Germany, Hungary, Moldova, even France and the UK are contested. I am not saying that Russia is a driving force in all those cases; I presume the Russians would be shy of a clumsy intervention backfiring in the circumstances. But, I am saying that rational deterrence like rational bargaining of all kinds requires a rational counterparty. Deterrence is NOT a move that can “wake up” a mad opponent reliably. Maybe a bloody nose brings a bully to his senses and maybe it sets off an explosive frenzy.
I also disagree with Doctorow’s assessment of Trump and the Trump administration. There is a complex factional stalemate in place that Trump and Vance et alia are navigating. I read Trump as a skeptic of his own neocons (including the deep state and military-industrial complex neocons who are really just empty-headed salesmen for more perpetual war) as well as of Putin’s claims that Ukraine is about to collapse. Trump has tried to confront Zelensky and the EU-NATO political class with their own madness in wanting to double-down on continuing to escalate the war and the sanctions. Trump seems to me to be in a mode where he is letting things play out a bit more, hoping that events will change minds or personnel, making the kind of negotiate-a-stalement-into-a-settlement outcome he favors, possible.
I wrote above that Ukraine’s tactical inferiority is approaching a critical point and that may prove to be decisive. The War of Narratives has always been in Ukraine’s favor in the West at least — not globally, though. It seems to me the EU political class is already responding with hysteria to the twin assaults on its narrative control of Gaza and Ukraine. Ukraine was always a surer narrative, but if it spoils suddenly with collapse and civil chaos in Ukraine, I do not feel confident I could predict the further outcome.
I tend to see secondary sanctions and “long-range” Tomahawks and the like as latter day attempts to rescue the Narrative that the EU-NATO could win, destroying Russia, when all they have actually done is devastate Ukraine. Can Russia “deter” that fantasy Narrative with a hypersonic missile? Aimed at what? Starmer’s lying pie hole? Ursula’s? Doctorow misses the mark.
Thanks someofparts. You’re most polite with the use of the word “interesting “.
In the time and place where I grew up the hangover and influences from WWII and the Korean War hung heavy in the air and affected most everyone and everything one way or the other. Car dealerships, bars and restaurants, shops and soda fountains were run by vets. School administrators and teachers were vets or married to vets. The Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) was a major fraternal organization.
PTSD was a thing even if it wasn’t labeled and identified. Alcohol abuse was common, but not discussed. Dad disappeared into his shop after dinner where the hidden bottle resided.
My own father was a front line infantry Sargent and a sharp shooter with a box full of medals. He was also a drinker, a gambler and a womanizer. I don’t know how many people he killed. Never got a chance to ask him before he killed himself.
So yeah, the military. One of my eighth grade teachers was a decorated vet who didn’t like me. Good old Mr. Hicks. Once when I turned around in my desk to answer a question from Babs, the girl seated behind me, he took me out into the hall and repeatedly banged my head against a metal locker while telling me what a fuck up I was. Fond memories. I didn’t tell anyone in authority about it, knowing that would be futile. I’d be told it was my fault, and I probably deserved it. Times have changed.
There are more stories I could tell from that time, but who cares? There was lots of abuse all the way around. Did I really have to learn how to make my bed and shine my shoes to military standards at age five when I could have been doing normal kid stuff?
Then came Vietnam, but I’ll leave it here. Thanks for reading if anyone has bothered.
@bruce wilder do you truly think Trump is a rational actor? Asking for a.friend as NC commenters are fond of saying.
Opinions are just that. Doesn’t matter.
a phenomenal amount of A-B message testing and a conman’s instinct for persuasion
I get that a lot of people are repulsed by Trump’s vulgarity. I personally despise the social dominance orientation of his personality and authoritarian attitudes, but those are common vices among the rich and powerful. That makes them untrustworthy — they are dishonorable cheats who tolerate cheating — but not irrational per se, or at least not until the institution undermined by cheating collapses.
What envelops political leaders in large groups into shared irrationality is ideology and particularly an ideology that comes as the price of admission to an exclusive club or class. It may be tied to upbringing in a particular culture’s mythology for some. It typically is anchored hypnotically to emotional associations, unquestioned expectations and systems of meaning.
The American Empire has incubated several overlapping groupings with ideologically-driven agendas for the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. The war itself is irrational for Ukraine and for the U.S. — the alleged benefits are illusory at best and the costs substantial, indeed horrifying. I do credit Trump with recognizing that the Ukraine War is not worth fighting for the U.S. or the participants. I do see that as a rational view.
There is a good deal of irrationality attaching itself to promoting that war and that makes a game theory analysis of the geopolitical maneuvering problematic.
I fork-dug up the rest of the bed that I had planted potatoes along one side of. When I dug up along that side a little over a week ago I got 52 potatoes. When I dug up the rest of the bed I got 20 more potatoes. So . . 72 potatoes grown by those 10 potatoes I planted, ranging in size from marbles to large-medium.
Meanwhile, in another bed where i planted about 25 potatoes in early August, those are still growing. A groundhog that I have has eaten the leaves off quite a few of them. I threw some smelly old urine down the groundhog hole one recent night, and haven’t seen any more leaf-eating. When all the potato plants in that patch are dead, I will see if they grew any potatoes.
@mago
So you actually did serve in the military, just not by choice. Enduring the consequences of the Armys fuckups. Only bad parts and none of the good. You had a harder tour than I did.
Disagree on Costa Rica. Disbanding their military in the ‘50s, especially given their neighbors, was and still is, incredibly gutsy, resulted in stability and prosperity and should be an example for the rest of the hemisphere. Maybe with U.S. decline everyone else can follow suit.
@somecomputerguy. Apologies for not remembering or researching it, but Costa Rica did not voluntarily disband their military. There was some coercion in 48 or 49 after WWII that forced their hand. You can be sure that Tito Samuel had a hand in it.
I am really surprised that everyone is buying this claim that the Russians have produced a cruise missile with a nuclear powered engine. Or, that a torpido uses a nuclear powered engine. Nulear reactors make energy by creating heat which creates steam which turns a turbine.
Such a system can not be minaturized and also be used to get a extraordinary long range.
That should be obvious. Therefore if the Russians have created something that does what they claim it can do. I think that it is more plausible that it uses some other kind of technology. A miniturized nuclear explosion creating thrust is certianly not what they have built.
@Kurt: miniaturizing nuclear reactors is kind of the holy grail of nuclear energy at present and space travel. Did the Russians actually do it? You raise valid points. My only reply is one by way of personal observation of the Russians in Russia.
On my second visit to Moscow in 1998–when it was the Wild Wild East–I happened to wander off down Leninsky Prospekt. Russia was a mess. Yeltsin was president. Russian power was at its nadir. Chechnya had been granted provisional independence. As I walked I looked down, as pedestrians in Moscow DO NOT look at each other. But it was a gorgeous December day, probbaly about 3* Celsius and no wind, bright blue skies so I looked up. Lo and behold, atop a large titanium spire, in that communist style of architecture we all know so well, Yuri Gagarin stared off into the distance.
The realization of what I was looking at hit me like a brick wall. This was a monument to the first human in outerspace. He was put there by Soviet/Russian engineers and rocket scientists. Before we did it, the Soviet Union did. Respect is not given, it is earned. What I saw before me earned my respect. I recount this story to make a simple point: never underestimate the Russians.
As I said before: you raise very valid points. But, they’ve done some outlandish crazy shit before and succeeded so who knows until we see it in action–on a testing ground, not as targets. Until then I grudglingly agree with your objections.
The link that I posted above just raises even more questions.
One, what purpose does it serve to develope or even to claim to develope these new weapons. To most people in the world it seem that both of these new weapon systems are completely redundent. What can these two new weapons do? They can destroy a city or a hardened military target somewhere in the USA by a nuclear explosion. But can’t ICBMs and SLBMs already do that?
If ICBMs and SLBMs could already do the job that these new weapons will be able to do then why spend resources making what is essentially a duplicate product?
Yes these weapons would be able to survive a nuclear sneak attack from another country. But is there really any need for that? If the USA were to try to destroy the Russian ICBM silos in a first strike I bet that the result would be a world wide nuclear winter even if the Russians did not respond to the attack. And that does not even consider Russias SLBMs.
But what if the Russian ICBMs and SLBMs can, for one reason or another, no longer be relied upon? If that were the case then these new weapons certianly make sense if they are real. I have not had enought time to think through the implications of these claimed weapons if it all a psy op.
It is also possible that the psy op part of the claim that these weapons have, for all practical purposes, an unlimited range due to some kind of use of a nuclear fuel. Maybe the Russians have discovered some kind of revolutionary power source and the claim that it is nuclear is just a red herring to get the rest of the world headed down the wrong track in a effort to catch up.
Perhaps the psy op is an implied threat. The US and the NATO nations that it controls have been arming and financially supporting Ukriane in its war on Russia. Now Russia can supply these weapons for example to Iran, Venezuela, Cuba or Yemen. and these nations would then have parity with the US. In fact it would not even be neccessary for the Russians to provide the weapons to those countries they could just set everythign up and have a Captain from any of these countries push a button that would result in the destruction of a US city or a US base say near El Paso or near Savannah or perhaps just a bridge over the Ohio river in Pittsburgh or Cinncinatti.
Therby giving the Russians plausble deniabilty for the attack. Remmington and Winchester do not take responsibility for how their products are used. The Russians might wish to take a page out of their book.
Several years ago Forcasting Intellegence or Different Clue or Purple Library Guy wrote that the liberation of Ukriane would not turn in to a nuclear war because a reliable defence using not yet disclosed technology had been developed against an attack by ICBMs. I forgot if it was the Russians or the US or both that had this technology. It seems to me that since the Russians went through so much trouble to develope a new technology or to at least claim to develope a new technology that would potentially make ICBM unneccessary for defence the claim that ICBMs were vulnerable to defensive tecnnologies appears more plausible. The developement of hypersonic missles probably plays a part in that story as well.
Speaking of wells, many are going dry all over the world. But Iran, Pakistian, and Afghanistan are getting hit especially hard in that requard. Not only that but many Shia think that the Mahdi, Zoro Oster, is hiding in a well until the time is right for him to return and slay the anti christ. But if the well that is the enterance to his hiding place has run dry the day of judgement will have to be canceled due to his untimely demise. I am pretty sure that is where things are headed.
No, it wasn’t me who made that prediction. I don’t know anything about the relevant technologies involved to be able to predict things like that.
A prediction I did make several years ago is that Russia would try to maintain as static a front line as possible so as to get Ukraine to get all its soldier-age people killed on that line. The Russian goal was to conquer and assimilate East Ukraine, turn Middle Ukraine into a nearly-uninhabited buffer-zone/ free-fire zone to be Groznified every time any presence of any potentially military anything was seen in that buffer-zone.
Galicia would be allowed to survive as a Banderastan bitter about the West not having helped it enough to conquer all of Russia. The Russian long-range goal would be to have the Banderastanis spend the next few decades setting off terror bombs all over EUrope to get revenge for not having had enough support. That would keep the EUropeans too busy to try plotting further aggression against Russia.
I don’t know how much of that I would still predict. I would certainly still predict that the long range Russian goal is to turn Ukraine into the Paraguay of Europe . . . . the Paraguay as it existed just after the end of the Chaco Wars.
Different Clue,
When the war broke out I thought that the Russian Army was far to small to win. I thought that Russia would be defeated and then the west would move on to directly destablizing Russiand, eventually being successful.
But the Russian people have risen to the task of recognizing the danger that they are in.I did not count on the average Russian being smarter than the average American. Then as I saw that the Russian Army was not going to collapse I did not make any predictions about what they would do next because I did not have a clue. I did come to the conclusion that to be able to say they won the war they would have to as a minimum capture all of the territory east of the Dniper. I also came to the conclusion that the west will never stop trying to destabilize Russia and bring Russia under its control, unless Russia and Russian allies* liberate Europe. Therefore this conflict will most likely continue until climate change and resource depletion cause the collapse of nation states and the Mad Max world that will precede human extinction. Or one side decides that it is going to lose and unleashes nuclear weapons leading to human extinction, at least in the northern hemisphere.
I also predict that if anyone ever wins this contest between the collective west and the axis of resistence it will be at best a phyric victory. i also predict because of the climate 8 ball no one can predict what the outcome will be with much certianty. But cheering for the Russians gives me something productive to do while I await the collapse of industrial civilization.
*Who might Russian Allies be, in addition to China and Iran, people in Europe who are fed up with those who are in charge of Europe now.
someofparts
from links at Naked Capitalism this morning –
🚨 BREAKING:
U.S. intelligence has confirmed that Larry Ellison’s wife is a Chinese intelligence operative who infiltrated Silicon Valley to obtain strategic tech information.
Authorities are now tracing possible data leaks from Oracle and other major networks.
and – surprise, surprise – neither of the links attached to that post work
So yeah, just in case anybody here still doubts all the warnings we are getting from Ian about how completely outclassed we are by China, now we have this new tidbit.
Even better, that means that the new owner of CBS is the son of a Chinese spy.
Can’t stop laughing
bruce wilder
X-twitter had suspended the account Larry Arnault (@arnaultwhale) that tweeted the Larry Ellison story before I saw it.
Google search shows the Larry account to have been a crypto hypester.
Not sure why Yves would have treated it as credible.
someofparts
Thanks. I was coming back here to correct the post too. Someone in comments over there checked the source too and corrected me. I really need to learn to be more skeptical and so far doesn’t look like I’m learning fast enough. Gotta keep trying though, because the internet is getting less trustworthy by the day. At least I’m not afraid to hang out with people smarter than I am, or accept corrections, so maybe that is a good start.
somecomputerguy
Media recommendation.
Bearing in mind that my ancient, brief enlistment wasn’t even in the Navy; “SEAL Team” starring David Boreanaz, gives glimpses of aspects of military life hardly seen anywhere else.
A exceptional amount of effort has obviously been put into “SEAL Team” in getting the technical aspects right, and as far as I can tell, they are as accurate as you can probably get in popular entertainment. I am regularly amazed by the attention to detail. This is an accomplishment by itself.
But where “SEAL Team” shines, are the portrayals of the personalities and the way they relate to each other. These are exactly the type of people who serve. Any of these characters could have walked into my old unit and fit right in. Some of the character portrayals are echos of people I knew. This is how real people in the military really talk to each other and this is what they talk about.
Perversely, these SEALs, the fictional ones of “SEAL Team”, are more like the small number of random, real-life SEALs I met decades ago, than the ones making news in recent years.
Where SEAL Team departs from cliché;
Almost all popular depictions of the military have Commissioned Officers as the heroes, doing the actual fighting. In real life, they are management, with the exception of aviation.
In “SEAL Team,” almost every character is an enlisted Petty Officer; the Navy’s equivalent of Sergeants. Showing this is super rare in popular culture.
The class tension between the Commissioned Officer and Enlisted ranks is actually depicted, though of course it is dialed down and diluted. This is so rare, I actually can’t think of another example of this.
Let’s remember, my experience is decades old. My only experience was in the Army.
If you walk into a recruiting office and enlist, you start as a Private E1, the lowest enlisted rank. The military trains you from the ground up in a military occupational specialty (a job) and theoretically, you stay in the same job for your entire career.
A Sergeant gets his rank through seniority and performance, while living the job 24/7. First by following orders as a Private, then by formulating and issuing orders himself as he gets more experience. If you are a fuckup, you don’t get promoted.
Commissioned Officers complete 60 college credits, go through either ROTC or Officer Candidate School and are Commissioned. They have specialty schools as well, but their career path means they change jobs and responsibilities every 3 to 5 years.
Two notable features were the up or out principle, and the Officer Efficiency Report (OER). “Up or out” means if you don’t get promoted to the next rank by a particular time, you get kicked out. There is no rising to a level you like and are good at and staying there. The Officer Efficiency Report is written by whoever your boss is at every step of the way. A single bad one ends your career.
The lowest Commissioned rank, outranks even the most senior Enlisted rank.
In theory, the Commissioned Officer formulates the orders, and the Sergeant insures they are carried out. In the days before widespread Enlisted literacy, Sergeants needed to be large and thuggish.
That world was gone at least a century and a half ago in this country.
Historically, the reason for a separate command class was that Commissioned Officers were recruited from the ruling-class to insure ruling-class control and to insure commanders were literate.
60 college credits and a Commission makes you a leader of men, and even more problematically, a military prodigy.
After I left the military, I picked up a couple of bachelors degrees and did a couple of years graduate school. In terms of intellectual potential, every single Enlisted person I served with was my peer, or better. Formal educational achievement indicated exactly nothing.
So, you have two parallel hierarchies of authority and leadership. One based on experience, the other appointed and dominant, based on assumptions of class superiority.
There are many militaries where everyone starts a Private, or at least, Enlisted. Eliminating class assumptions widens the pool of potential leadership exponentially. It is hard to see how you could do worse that way.
No Sergeant really believes that the ROTC 2nd Lieutenant who spent the last four years getting a Phys. Ed degree, while he was learning soldiering, is his superior. None. But they have to pretend they do, or else.
Consider the difference it makes in one’s development as a person, over 20-30 years, to always have recourse to arbitrary authority. To never really have to argue, persuade, or think things through. To always be able to end a discussion by saying “because I told you to, now do it.”
In the Army, the junior Commissioned Officer ranks were mostly tolerable. To be sure; a freshly minted 2nd Lieutenant is a grotesquely overpaid Private, but they are only dangerous if they think they are in charge. But the older they got, the worse they got. The more arbitrary, the more disconnected, the more likely to be crazy. And of course, more powerful.
“If you forget to salute that Generals car, he will make you a Private again, on the spot, and file the paperwork later.”
It was sometimes like working for Anthony Fremont, the six-year-old child with the god-like powers in that old Twilight Zone episode. I still am struck by the number of Commissioned crackpots I managed to meet during a seriously short career.
An Army General is someone who has not had their views seriously challenged in at least a decade, but thinks they have.
The Army Officer Corps weren’t monsters, they were what your boss would be if he could imprison you for refusing to work. Nothing I saw justified the pay and power disparity. But even I was surprised when these guys went to Iraq and Afghanistan and repeated every every single mistake made in Vietnam as though working from a list.
A senior Sergeant in Afghanistan was sent home because he wasn’t killing enough terrorists. The reason was that he had made it impossible for the Taliban operate in his sector. When this little irony was pointed out to the commanders responsible, it was laughed off.
Now consider, contra-wise, the effect on character development of virtually always having to persuade. Your primary power is the power to cajole a six-year-old god. As a young Sergeant, I was told; “Cultivate the ability to get so angry you feel like your head is going to explode, without giving any external sign.”
In the Enlisted ranks, the more senior the rank, the more reliable, laid-back, competent. And let’s not forget; at significantly lower pay and benefits.
If someone makes it to Sergeant Major, it generally means they are one of most capable people on the planet.
One of the ways to compensate for an over-powered, under-accountable Officer Corps, is by challenging that arbitrary authority at every opportunity.
The senior Sergeant who was my boss, did that virtually non-stop, using the regulations, common sense, working with other senior Non-Commissioned Officers, appeals upward through the chain of command or any other tactic he could invent. It looked exhausting.
Some of this is depicted in “SEAL Team,” but without context.
From WWII (at least) to SOG Vietnam, the hallmark of real elite combat units, is they effectively erase formal appointed rank. In “SEAL Team” that is what it means when everyone plans the operations together.
The person with the most on-the-ground experience leads by common consent.
There are multiple ways to arrange this. My over-paid pretend boss typically had 3-5 years in the service. My real boss had 26 years in the Army, at least 15 of those in the unit doing the job. He was in his late ‘40s, and got up every morning and ran men half his age into the ground.
And that is also why, at least in U.S. military, such units can be red-headed stepchildren for their parent services; Enlisted excellence undermines claims to legitimacy and elite status of the Officer Corps.
Once you get there, there is no screaming in real elite units. Every single person wants to be there, and had to prove it with considerable effort. Everyone in such a unit, treats everyone else consistent with that.
This why people join such units.
As a former soldier, I actually find watching “SEAL Team” uplifting.
The preferred choice for exercising military force for most of the last century has been aerial bombing. Unfortunately, air-dropped high explosives are one of the most savage weapons ever invented. They should be considered one step above poison gas, if they even are better than poison gas.
“SEAL Team” gives the impression that instead of sending F-35s to drop 500lb bombs they now send small teams of commandos.
If this happened, it would be a win for enlightenment. It would be cause for celebration, on multiple levels.
Even if they are the worst, a dozen people at a time can’t approach the random, hideous destructiveness of a single general purpose bomb.
If you send commandos, and they can’t find the ‘bad guy’, the strongest incentive possible is to just leave. But also, instead of blowing up random strangers and calling it a day, now someone is going to ask; why was the intelligence wrong?
Expending the lives of highly trained professional soldiers who are volunteering for the mission in order to preserve the lives of non-combatants, is exactly their correct use.
KT Chong
The fundamental mistake the Dutch made with Nexperia is not just a miscalculation — it’s the cognitive dissonance of the hyper-financialized Western mindset. In the Western corporate-financial worldview, power = paperwork. Whoever controls the shares, the HQ, and the boardroom is assumed to control reality. But in the Chinese model — and more broadly in industrial economies still rooted in production — power = control over material processes: factories, engineers, suppliers, and logistics.
The Dutch seemed to believe that by seizing and controlling Nexperia’s headquarters in the Netherlands, they would somehow control the entire company, including its production and supply chain in China. But the “HQ” is just an administrative shell — paperwork, legal, marketing, sales, human resources. It’s where people shuffle documents, not where anything tangible is made.
So when the Dutch “seized” Nexperia HQ, they thought they had captured the company. In truth, they only seized a symbol of control, not the substance of it. The real levers — machines, workers, know-how, and infrastructure — all remain in China. When Beijing or local managers stopped responding to “instructions” “orders” and from the HQ, the Dutch executives were left in existential perplexity.
It’s like watching a boardroom coup staged in Holland — the office rebels seize the PowerPoint, but not the production lines.
This is the limiting mindset of executives, managers, lawyers, and paper shufflers who genuinely believe that when they seize offices and departments — the world they know — manufacturing and production must automatically obey. That is how the world has always worked for them: paperwork dictates reality.
But when China cuts off real production, the Dutch simply freeze. Their brains can’t compute. They are paralyzed, staring at their documents and wondering why the factory stopped taking orders from the HQ.
Hyper-financialization has produced a managerial class that confuses abstraction for reality. They live in spreadsheets, compliance reports, and stock tickers, mistaking control of symbols for control of systems.
This is a clash between two worlds — the financialized illusion of paper control versus the industrial reality of material control. The Dutch grabbed the symbols of power, but China still holds the substance of it.
China’s response is a real-world stress test of that illusion. When the material economy — factories, labor, logistics — refuses to obey “paper sovereignty,” the Western managerial mind short-circuits. They have no muscle memory for production, only for process. And now, stripped of the illusion, the Netherlands finds itself holding the paperwork — while China holds the world that still makes things.
Oakchair
“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.” –Dune
“One is never afraid of the unknown; one is afraid of the known coming to an end.” ― Jiddu Krishnamurti
—–
“We used an ecological regression approach to model COVID-19 deaths in small areas (counties) across the contiguous USA”
Replication models were undertaken” “for England and Italy.”
“A number of demographic, socioeconomic, long-term environmental exposure and infection susceptibility variables were used”
Results:
“The mortality rate ratio (MRR) in the USA falls by 29%” “per 100 kJ m–2 increase in mean daily UVA”
One author was a director for suncrean developement. The conflicts of interests are opposed to the results found in the study.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/bjd.20093
——
Sun exposure “lowers TMPRSS2 expression and subsequently reduces SARS-CoV-2 infectivity.”
“(IL)-6 receptor and C-reactive protein concentrations increase during winter and estradiol receptor gene expression increases during summer.”
“which plays a significant role in COVID-19”
“vitamin D deficiency is primarily associated with increased susceptibility to, and severity of, many infectious diseases”
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8517466/
—-
“Low vitamin D levels and susceptibility to COVID-19 infection: a meta-analysis of observational studies”
“a low plasma 25(OH) vitamin D level is a critical risk factor for being susceptible to COVID-19.”
” COVID-19 cases are negatively associated with temperature, UV index, and UVDVF”
https://febs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2211-5463.13309
—–
“The man who has a conscience suffers whilst acknowledging his sin. That is his punishment.” ―- Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Once men turned their thinking over to (Experts) in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with (Experts) to enslave them” –Dune
mago
KT Chong is on a roll these days.
I sometimes wonder if Oakchair knows Dune and Krishnamurti by heart.
I picked up my first Krishnamurti book in an Antigua, Guatemala bookstore when I was twenty and became an instant fan. Trouble with that Annie Besant cultivated prodigy is that he was good at pointing out, but he never told you how to get there. I think I still have all those dogeared volumes in a storage box, along with lots of others.
None of this is what I started out to say, but it’s what I said, so so be it. For now anyway.
mago
To continue with my unpublished comments here, somecomputerguy’s observations about military culture are reflected in larger cultural power dynamics. My general view is screw the military and not because I come from a military family, but because it’s a backward enforcement mechanism.
(Nationalism is a primitive emotion by the way.)
A friend raised in Mexico once responded to a comment I made about Costa Ricans by saying they’re a bunch of pussies because they don’t have a military, and I had to secretly agree.
But what I really wanted to say is that theists believe in a God because the universe is so vast and incomprehensible that there had to be a divine creator because otherwise it couldn’t exist. That’s horse pucky. There’s no beginning, no middle and no end, no arising, dwelling or ceasing. There’s just space where everything appears like a mirage, a dream, an apparition.
Um, yeah, well anyway. . .
Trouble everywhere and the world has gone astray
Best to help each other along the way
While beneath the waxing moon autumn fades to winter and assholes rule the day.
Cheap rhymes to meet the times.
Don’t know what to say. . .
Maybe nothing is best, but too late now.
Ciao
Bill H.
@somecomputerguy
When I was a Navy enlisted man, an EM3 as I recall, I was standing outside the base exchange with a buddy, in uniform, smoking a cigarette, when a commander came out of the store. Seeing that I was smoking, he quite pleasantly asked me for a light for the cigarette he was holding.
I reached in my pocket for my Zippo lighter, which I had just that morning filled with fuel. So, given that it currently closely resembled a flame thrower, I held it down low to ignite it before bringing it up to light the commander’s smoke. Unfortunately, he apparently thought I was some kind of nut who intended to keep it down low, and did not wait for me to raise it. When it ignited he got a face full of flame.
I almost set his hat on fire raising the lighter to head height, but somehow he did manage to light his smoke. He gave me a kind of funny look, nodded, and walked off.
I was a bit shaken, and my buddy commented, “It’s a good thing you did that to a commander. An ensign would have put you in the brig.”
Bob
@mago
I love JK and am frustrated somewhat with the same thing – the “problem” is articulated inside and out but what to do is not.
Isn’t that the game though? If you don’t work it out for yourself, it’s useless?
Oh, i wish someone would spoonfeed me, sit this way, breathe this way, think or don’t think this way or that. It’s all manipulation.
That’s what I “understand” anyway. He’s not huggy, that’s for sure 😁.
someofparts
mago – You are such an interesting person.
The only spiritual practice that ever made sense to me was Taoism. My sense of it is that it is a program of practices/attitudes that teach a person exactly how much space a human being should reasonably occupy in the material world. The essence of it seems to be to absolutely do what you can/should do and then stop before you slide over the line into delusion or toxic excess.
Was never in the military but closest childhood friends were from military families. One friend’s father was a master sergeant who spent his life in the army and always declined to become an officer. He was a quiet, decent, steady man much loved by his family. Another friend’s father was an officer and a pilot who flew missions in Korea. A super nice guy, but with a quiet tough side who never hesitated to step up if some other guy was misbehaving, despite being a somewhat small fellow. Also much loved by his family. Toward the end of his life my friend told me that the confessed to her that some of the things he did/saw in Korea were horrors he was never able to forget.
Poul
Gilbert Doctorow normally has views that are a bit off the mainstream but always worth listening to. Doctorow does not rate Putin’s decisions highly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttYcjybLWBY
Jack
To somecomputerguy:
Outstanding Post!
The Officer Corps of the US military is filled with scrotum cuppers who couldn’t fight their way out of a gay bar at last call in the slowest night of the week.
And MONEY is the problem. Let’s discuss tax free pay for being in the “combat theater.”
Let’s say you were a LTC assigned to CentCom in Tampa. Your “goal” each and every month is to get into the “Green Zone” in Iraq via C-17.
If you get there, your ENTIRE month’s salary is TAX FREE.
Thus, if you are making $12k a month stateside, you are paying about $4k a month in taxes.
Visit the “Green Zone” for three days and you pocket $4k a month, maybe $40k a year.
Meanwhile, the E-1s through E-5, the ones doing the actual fighting and dying, might grt an extra $300 a month.
INCENTIVES for the incompetents.
I am a 20 year retired major, USAF, C-130 Navigator with thousands of hours of flight time and hundreds of hours of combat flight time. Was on the list to be promoted to LTC but told the military to stick it where the sun never shines.
Oddly, I NEVER completed any PME – Professional Military Education – after basic charm school (OCS), yet I was promoted, mostly because my AFSC (Air Force Specialty Code) was in short supply, though I was very good at my job – the Navigator is the “brains” of the C-130H and the “moxie” that operates the defensive systems on board the aircraft.
Pilots are simply monkeys, like the first manned flights into space – “Mon-key see, mon-key do, mon-key be a pi-lot too!”
I quit in February 2003 – right before OIF kicked off – because I could no longer be party to the crimes of the US military.
Everyone – keep up the good work and always…
Check Six.
bruce wilder
The linked conversation between Diesen and Doctorow is hard for me to evaluate. Doctorow concedes that the Moscow foreign policy elite are mostly comfortable with Putin’s muted responses to lunatic provocations from, say, the American Deep State (given free rein in the Obama or Biden Administrations and always at the ready from the many Trump neocons) or the Europeans. As Ian has pointed out, best guess has always been that after Putin goes, the responses from Russia will no longer be muted.
I am old enough to remember Herman Kahn and Tom Schelling and, of course, the fictional Dr Strangelove. They developed the game theory approach to deterrence in the approach to the chaotic anarchy of international relations. The advantage attaching to acting like a mad man was identified by them, along with the horrifying implication that extreme risk-taking becomes a bit of a strange attractor for player strategy with massive destruction an equilibrium outcome.
There was a lot of institution building on the principle that multilateral deliberation could be an effective constraint on a breakout of individual madness. I am not sure anyone anticipated how a political class could become infected with the contagion of Russophobic madness and lose track of all other bearings with which to navigate state relations. (Germany struggling to investigate the Nordstream bombing is just one example.)
I am assuming Putin sees this madness sweeping across Europe and hopes to wait it out. The EU-NATO mad dog cannot be taken out with a simple headshot. Where would Putin aim? The danger is clearly sending animal into an uncontrolled frenzy.
The more reasonable course is to wait for Ukraine to collapse. Trump et al. are cooperating to bring about this result.
bruce wilder
More on Doctorow-Diesen
Doctorow tells us something about his personal motivations for a change of heart: he is sick of authoring false projections of Russia winning on the battlefield. Doctorow personally never claims any military insight in his blogging, but he is definitely on the Russophile Team and, imo, is tired of being trapped in that epistemic silo, but not responding appropriately, not embracing realism.
I think the Russian military was seriously deficient in its readiness, munitions, tactics and logistics at the beginning of the SMO. I do not agree with Doctorow that Russia had a tactical military advantage and whatever edge they had with hypersonics was theoretical in 2022. Not theoretical in 2026. And, Russia in 2025 acquired a superior tactical package and a vastly larger force trained to apply that superior set of tactics. I follow the fight intermittently and Ukraine’s army is collapsing all along a lengthening line of contact. Russia, too, is under strain, which the Russophiles do not admit and the Russophobes exaggerate past the point of delusional psychopathic fantasy. Ukraine’s tactical inferiority is approaching a critical point and that may prove to be decisive.
I have said all along that I see no way for Russia to compel a settlement by military means alone. Russia does NOT have the resources to occupy the whole of Ukraine. They have to hope for regime change, in Ukraine and to some extent across the EU-NATO. Romania, Georgia, Armenia, Germany, Hungary, Moldova, even France and the UK are contested. I am not saying that Russia is a driving force in all those cases; I presume the Russians would be shy of a clumsy intervention backfiring in the circumstances. But, I am saying that rational deterrence like rational bargaining of all kinds requires a rational counterparty. Deterrence is NOT a move that can “wake up” a mad opponent reliably. Maybe a bloody nose brings a bully to his senses and maybe it sets off an explosive frenzy.
I also disagree with Doctorow’s assessment of Trump and the Trump administration. There is a complex factional stalemate in place that Trump and Vance et alia are navigating. I read Trump as a skeptic of his own neocons (including the deep state and military-industrial complex neocons who are really just empty-headed salesmen for more perpetual war) as well as of Putin’s claims that Ukraine is about to collapse. Trump has tried to confront Zelensky and the EU-NATO political class with their own madness in wanting to double-down on continuing to escalate the war and the sanctions. Trump seems to me to be in a mode where he is letting things play out a bit more, hoping that events will change minds or personnel, making the kind of negotiate-a-stalement-into-a-settlement outcome he favors, possible.
I wrote above that Ukraine’s tactical inferiority is approaching a critical point and that may prove to be decisive. The War of Narratives has always been in Ukraine’s favor in the West at least — not globally, though. It seems to me the EU political class is already responding with hysteria to the twin assaults on its narrative control of Gaza and Ukraine. Ukraine was always a surer narrative, but if it spoils suddenly with collapse and civil chaos in Ukraine, I do not feel confident I could predict the further outcome.
I tend to see secondary sanctions and “long-range” Tomahawks and the like as latter day attempts to rescue the Narrative that the EU-NATO could win, destroying Russia, when all they have actually done is devastate Ukraine. Can Russia “deter” that fantasy Narrative with a hypersonic missile? Aimed at what? Starmer’s lying pie hole? Ursula’s? Doctorow misses the mark.
mago
Thanks someofparts. You’re most polite with the use of the word “interesting “.
In the time and place where I grew up the hangover and influences from WWII and the Korean War hung heavy in the air and affected most everyone and everything one way or the other. Car dealerships, bars and restaurants, shops and soda fountains were run by vets. School administrators and teachers were vets or married to vets. The Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) was a major fraternal organization.
PTSD was a thing even if it wasn’t labeled and identified. Alcohol abuse was common, but not discussed. Dad disappeared into his shop after dinner where the hidden bottle resided.
My own father was a front line infantry Sargent and a sharp shooter with a box full of medals. He was also a drinker, a gambler and a womanizer. I don’t know how many people he killed. Never got a chance to ask him before he killed himself.
So yeah, the military. One of my eighth grade teachers was a decorated vet who didn’t like me. Good old Mr. Hicks. Once when I turned around in my desk to answer a question from Babs, the girl seated behind me, he took me out into the hall and repeatedly banged my head against a metal locker while telling me what a fuck up I was. Fond memories. I didn’t tell anyone in authority about it, knowing that would be futile. I’d be told it was my fault, and I probably deserved it. Times have changed.
There are more stories I could tell from that time, but who cares? There was lots of abuse all the way around. Did I really have to learn how to make my bed and shine my shoes to military standards at age five when I could have been doing normal kid stuff?
Then came Vietnam, but I’ll leave it here. Thanks for reading if anyone has bothered.
mago
@bruce wilder do you truly think Trump is a rational actor? Asking for a.friend as NC commenters are fond of saying.
Opinions are just that. Doesn’t matter.
bruce wilder
@mago
“rational actor” ? sure. why not?
a deep thinker? no
calculating? yes
a phenomenal amount of A-B message testing and a conman’s instinct for persuasion
I get that a lot of people are repulsed by Trump’s vulgarity. I personally despise the social dominance orientation of his personality and authoritarian attitudes, but those are common vices among the rich and powerful. That makes them untrustworthy — they are dishonorable cheats who tolerate cheating — but not irrational per se, or at least not until the institution undermined by cheating collapses.
What envelops political leaders in large groups into shared irrationality is ideology and particularly an ideology that comes as the price of admission to an exclusive club or class. It may be tied to upbringing in a particular culture’s mythology for some. It typically is anchored hypnotically to emotional associations, unquestioned expectations and systems of meaning.
The American Empire has incubated several overlapping groupings with ideologically-driven agendas for the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. The war itself is irrational for Ukraine and for the U.S. — the alleged benefits are illusory at best and the costs substantial, indeed horrifying. I do credit Trump with recognizing that the Ukraine War is not worth fighting for the U.S. or the participants. I do see that as a rational view.
There is a good deal of irrationality attaching itself to promoting that war and that makes a game theory analysis of the geopolitical maneuvering problematic.
mago
‘@ bruce wilder
Good points.
I’m persuaded to your views.
different clue
Header: Garden Report addendum . . .
I fork-dug up the rest of the bed that I had planted potatoes along one side of. When I dug up along that side a little over a week ago I got 52 potatoes. When I dug up the rest of the bed I got 20 more potatoes. So . . 72 potatoes grown by those 10 potatoes I planted, ranging in size from marbles to large-medium.
Meanwhile, in another bed where i planted about 25 potatoes in early August, those are still growing. A groundhog that I have has eaten the leaves off quite a few of them. I threw some smelly old urine down the groundhog hole one recent night, and haven’t seen any more leaf-eating. When all the potato plants in that patch are dead, I will see if they grew any potatoes.
Curt Kastens
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fi_nq_MDoAw
A link about world wide sales of EV and hybrid autompbiles.
somecomputerguy
@mago
So you actually did serve in the military, just not by choice. Enduring the consequences of the Armys fuckups. Only bad parts and none of the good. You had a harder tour than I did.
Disagree on Costa Rica. Disbanding their military in the ‘50s, especially given their neighbors, was and still is, incredibly gutsy, resulted in stability and prosperity and should be an example for the rest of the hemisphere. Maybe with U.S. decline everyone else can follow suit.
mago
@somecomputerguy. Apologies for not remembering or researching it, but Costa Rica did not voluntarily disband their military. There was some coercion in 48 or 49 after WWII that forced their hand. You can be sure that Tito Samuel had a hand in it.
Curt Kastens
I am really surprised that everyone is buying this claim that the Russians have produced a cruise missile with a nuclear powered engine. Or, that a torpido uses a nuclear powered engine. Nulear reactors make energy by creating heat which creates steam which turns a turbine.
Such a system can not be minaturized and also be used to get a extraordinary long range.
That should be obvious. Therefore if the Russians have created something that does what they claim it can do. I think that it is more plausible that it uses some other kind of technology. A miniturized nuclear explosion creating thrust is certianly not what they have built.
Sean Paul Kelley
@Kurt: miniaturizing nuclear reactors is kind of the holy grail of nuclear energy at present and space travel. Did the Russians actually do it? You raise valid points. My only reply is one by way of personal observation of the Russians in Russia.
On my second visit to Moscow in 1998–when it was the Wild Wild East–I happened to wander off down Leninsky Prospekt. Russia was a mess. Yeltsin was president. Russian power was at its nadir. Chechnya had been granted provisional independence. As I walked I looked down, as pedestrians in Moscow DO NOT look at each other. But it was a gorgeous December day, probbaly about 3* Celsius and no wind, bright blue skies so I looked up. Lo and behold, atop a large titanium spire, in that communist style of architecture we all know so well, Yuri Gagarin stared off into the distance.
The realization of what I was looking at hit me like a brick wall. This was a monument to the first human in outerspace. He was put there by Soviet/Russian engineers and rocket scientists. Before we did it, the Soviet Union did. Respect is not given, it is earned. What I saw before me earned my respect. I recount this story to make a simple point: never underestimate the Russians.
As I said before: you raise very valid points. But, they’ve done some outlandish crazy shit before and succeeded so who knows until we see it in action–on a testing ground, not as targets. Until then I grudglingly
agree with your objections.
Curt Kastens
Here is a link to an apparent Russian explination of the Beresknick and the Poseiden.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeUrFnYUWvY
Curt Kastens
The link that I posted above just raises even more questions.
One, what purpose does it serve to develope or even to claim to develope these new weapons. To most people in the world it seem that both of these new weapon systems are completely redundent. What can these two new weapons do? They can destroy a city or a hardened military target somewhere in the USA by a nuclear explosion. But can’t ICBMs and SLBMs already do that?
If ICBMs and SLBMs could already do the job that these new weapons will be able to do then why spend resources making what is essentially a duplicate product?
Yes these weapons would be able to survive a nuclear sneak attack from another country. But is there really any need for that? If the USA were to try to destroy the Russian ICBM silos in a first strike I bet that the result would be a world wide nuclear winter even if the Russians did not respond to the attack. And that does not even consider Russias SLBMs.
But what if the Russian ICBMs and SLBMs can, for one reason or another, no longer be relied upon? If that were the case then these new weapons certianly make sense if they are real. I have not had enought time to think through the implications of these claimed weapons if it all a psy op.
It is also possible that the psy op part of the claim that these weapons have, for all practical purposes, an unlimited range due to some kind of use of a nuclear fuel. Maybe the Russians have discovered some kind of revolutionary power source and the claim that it is nuclear is just a red herring to get the rest of the world headed down the wrong track in a effort to catch up.
Perhaps the psy op is an implied threat. The US and the NATO nations that it controls have been arming and financially supporting Ukriane in its war on Russia. Now Russia can supply these weapons for example to Iran, Venezuela, Cuba or Yemen. and these nations would then have parity with the US. In fact it would not even be neccessary for the Russians to provide the weapons to those countries they could just set everythign up and have a Captain from any of these countries push a button that would result in the destruction of a US city or a US base say near El Paso or near Savannah or perhaps just a bridge over the Ohio river in Pittsburgh or Cinncinatti.
Therby giving the Russians plausble deniabilty for the attack. Remmington and Winchester do not take responsibility for how their products are used. The Russians might wish to take a page out of their book.
Several years ago Forcasting Intellegence or Different Clue or Purple Library Guy wrote that the liberation of Ukriane would not turn in to a nuclear war because a reliable defence using not yet disclosed technology had been developed against an attack by ICBMs. I forgot if it was the Russians or the US or both that had this technology. It seems to me that since the Russians went through so much trouble to develope a new technology or to at least claim to develope a new technology that would potentially make ICBM unneccessary for defence the claim that ICBMs were vulnerable to defensive tecnnologies appears more plausible. The developement of hypersonic missles probably plays a part in that story as well.
Speaking of wells, many are going dry all over the world. But Iran, Pakistian, and Afghanistan are getting hit especially hard in that requard. Not only that but many Shia think that the Mahdi, Zoro Oster, is hiding in a well until the time is right for him to return and slay the anti christ. But if the well that is the enterance to his hiding place has run dry the day of judgement will have to be canceled due to his untimely demise. I am pretty sure that is where things are headed.
different clue
@Curt Kastens,
No, it wasn’t me who made that prediction. I don’t know anything about the relevant technologies involved to be able to predict things like that.
A prediction I did make several years ago is that Russia would try to maintain as static a front line as possible so as to get Ukraine to get all its soldier-age people killed on that line. The Russian goal was to conquer and assimilate East Ukraine, turn Middle Ukraine into a nearly-uninhabited buffer-zone/ free-fire zone to be Groznified every time any presence of any potentially military anything was seen in that buffer-zone.
Galicia would be allowed to survive as a Banderastan bitter about the West not having helped it enough to conquer all of Russia. The Russian long-range goal would be to have the Banderastanis spend the next few decades setting off terror bombs all over EUrope to get revenge for not having had enough support. That would keep the EUropeans too busy to try plotting further aggression against Russia.
I don’t know how much of that I would still predict. I would certainly still predict that the long range Russian goal is to turn Ukraine into the Paraguay of Europe . . . . the Paraguay as it existed just after the end of the Chaco Wars.
Curt Kastens
Different Clue,
When the war broke out I thought that the Russian Army was far to small to win. I thought that Russia would be defeated and then the west would move on to directly destablizing Russiand, eventually being successful.
But the Russian people have risen to the task of recognizing the danger that they are in.I did not count on the average Russian being smarter than the average American. Then as I saw that the Russian Army was not going to collapse I did not make any predictions about what they would do next because I did not have a clue. I did come to the conclusion that to be able to say they won the war they would have to as a minimum capture all of the territory east of the Dniper. I also came to the conclusion that the west will never stop trying to destabilize Russia and bring Russia under its control, unless Russia and Russian allies* liberate Europe. Therefore this conflict will most likely continue until climate change and resource depletion cause the collapse of nation states and the Mad Max world that will precede human extinction. Or one side decides that it is going to lose and unleashes nuclear weapons leading to human extinction, at least in the northern hemisphere.
I also predict that if anyone ever wins this contest between the collective west and the axis of resistence it will be at best a phyric victory. i also predict because of the climate 8 ball no one can predict what the outcome will be with much certianty. But cheering for the Russians gives me something productive to do while I await the collapse of industrial civilization.
*Who might Russian Allies be, in addition to China and Iran, people in Europe who are fed up with those who are in charge of Europe now.