Eric Weinstein talking to the mediocre Piers Morgan — https://rumble.com/v5evlmz-eric-weinstein-to-piers-morgan-the-entire-political-charade-has-come-crashi.html — is succinct, insightful. This video is worth the ten minutes of your time.
Also on the electoral front, Trump won the debate. The tsunami of memes has made that clear. One of my favorites (from a Leslie Eastman tweet):
A brilliant friend of mine had been asking me to comment on the Cuban Empire and how it’s part of the nine-head monster that Demarest writes of in On Multiform War. Demarest didn’t describe it as such in that work, but it surely fits within the category of communist, workers and socialist parties, that category being one of the monster’s nine heads. The Cuban Communist Party indeed runs an evil empire, however, and it is one of our major, if ignored, enemies.
The plight of geese and cats in Springfield, Ohio is what spurred me to post at this time. The concentration of Haitian voodoo in Ohio may only be tangential to the point I’m about to make, or it might not be. It seemed like that piece of news created the needed moment to remind everyone that the regime in Caracas is a wholly submitted local tool of an empire led from Havanna. The news coming out of Springfield spills at about the same time as news of apartment building takeovers in places like Aurora, Colorado. For me, the appearance of violent Venezuelan gangs was too logical and too expected, and so I shrugged. I should not have. Disconcerting about both the Haitian and Venezuelan items were the similar ‘vista gorda’ responses local US governments gave to them. Sure, it can be explained as not wanting to highlight the costs of illegal immigration generally, but the impunity Democrats provide fuels something worse than just the local overburdening of law enforcement. CCP leaders not only decided on an efficient way to lessen the burdens of their empire’s social support and incarcerating institutions. They also engorged the ranks of their own Hezbollah inside the United States. I’m betting the empire coordinates more violent activities, making the riots of 2020 look mostly peaceful. The Democrats? They’ll help with visas and logistic support, stumble law enforcement and prosecutions — and buy more Che t-shirts.
Has the American objective of this war been to exhaust the Russians until they give up and go home (Therein Willy OAM’s insistence on defining it as an attritional war? Eastern Front Collapse | Kursk Offensive – Optics, Strategy & Reality – Ukraine Map & News Update (youtube.com))? If so, we need to seek evidence that the Russians are wearing out. I’m not seeing it. They did wear out in Afghanistan, it is true, and I’m willing to say that Afghanis engaged a successful strategy of attrition against Russians (as against British and then against Americans). Ukraine is a lot more important to Russians than Afghanistan was.
Clausewitz (and plenty of other military writers before and after, including me) advise that slowly exhausting a stronger foe (husbanding resources, using hit-and-run tactics, sabotage, etc.) can be a valid choice for action and inaction given some circumstances. But exhausting one’s own resources at faster rate than the enemy’s? Not so much. Have the Germans ever been worn down in war? The French? The Ottomans? the Austrians? Yes, all of them have. Are they being worn down in this one? Probably.
Just because Clausewitz described an approach to warfare available to a contestant doesn’t make it a good idea. If the objective of a war is just to wear the other guy out, then there is a good chance that purpose has been confused with method. Let’s say for a moment of argument that the purpose of this war is rather territorial and the method hopeful-attritional. If that is the case, then I would say that the territory in question was never consequential to US security or to its treat obligations, and that the method has been wasteful beyond unethical.
An article by Josh Stevens, “Trust in Doctors and Hospitals Plummets,” (https://brownstone.org/articles/trust-in-doctors-and-hospitals-plummets/) is a significant piece relating to the cultural part of the War for America. (tip to Citizen Free Press) A study by Dr. Roy H. Perlis, et al., in the Journal of the American Medical Association, JAMA, reveals that trust in doctors took a plunge of around thirty percent, from positive to negative, as a result of the scamdemic. Many of us (family, generation, community) believe that the study’s results reflect our feelings and experiences on the matter. My bet (hopefully not just based on hope) is that the profession will indeed take this data to heart. We’ll be seeing a lot of BS from the usual suspects — a lot of ethically-challenged ‘medical professionals’, benefactors of the scam – but many good doctors will rise up, sincerely contrite and fortified. A sign on the door of the clinic we go to said no COVID shots would be given there.
The ICC is an embarrassing coffee clutch of silly sanctimonious lawfare minions. No trials, no equal protection, no way to sue for abuse of process. Selective-as-all-hell-prosecutions. It will be interesting to watch when the governments of Red China, Russia, the USA and India all come together on one glorious thing — that it’s time for a Snatch-n-Guantanamo operation against ICC prosecutors. There they could try each other for a while. It would cool the jets of globalism.
All writing is a Rorschach blot to one degree or another. Less Rorschachiness is better for things like military strategy-making (that is, things with immediate material consequence). By Rorschachy, I mean a writing that is vague enough to allow the reader a good deal of personal interpretation based on the reader’s own predispositions, life experiences and other reading. A technical manual on how to operate a radio needs to be unrorschacky. A writing on military strategy isn’t a radio manual, but it should be closer to that (as to its Rorschackiness) than it is to political poetry. Clausewitz is way too Rorschacky for me. All that wonderous triangle stuff is dopey.
‘Willy OAM’ follows the Ukraine War. Diligent, sincere, moral, a student of warfare. I wish he were not so abused by PoliSci and neocon thought. He likes to cite Clausewitz and Kissinger. He has also taken to making plaintive comments about international law, the laws of war and all that. Anyhow, because my legion of followers knows that I’m a lawyer and total expert, here is my take.
Wife and I live in relatively remote little neighborhood out in the woods. It’s grown from about twelve to twenty homes within the last three or four years. All of the home buyers signed a ‘deed covenant’ that had neighborhood requirements (home size, no renters, no steel sheds, etc.) that all of you would recognize as HOA rules. Thing is, the original developer had been the HOA administrator. He and family fell out of the picture several years ago after a variety of personal and financial events. There has been little enforcement energy since, and no neighborhood unity regarding the covenants. Those supposed rules have been broken by so many new builders and owners, and in so many ways without an effective response, that the deed covenants are all but a dead letter. They’re an interesting wish list. I kind of wish they had been obeyed and I’m simultaneously glad I don’t have to worry about them anymore myself.
The outcome of our November elections will influence the course of the war in eastern Europe, and the war will influence the outcome of our elections. I suspect that within the next six weeks, Russian advances and Ukrainian losses could paint another picture of American strategic error. As that would likely depress Democrat prospects, we are likely to be treated to a lot of not much coverage about the war from the major propaganda media. Or we might be bombarded by some straight-up lies about how things are going on the battlefield. Sad. It looks now that the whole “Kursk Invasion” gambit was a Zelensky play to create the opposite impression — a feeling of victory in time to help the Democrats before the elections. That gamble has evidently gone south. I could be wrong. Maybe the Ukrainian regime has some amazing 4-D chess move up its sleeve. Nah.
First Item: Julie Kelly says (Kamala Harris’ Likely Pick for Attorney General: Matthew Graves (declassified.live) that Kamala will likely pick Matthew Graves as her Attorney General; Second Item: Leading Democrat Kelley Robinson says people should “reimagine freedom and democracy beyond the Founders’ little piece of paper.” (Fox News). Third Item: The California legislature might approve lending illegal aliens $150 grand to cover down payments. (Fox News) These are just a few of the latest examples of the same irritating thing, right?! What moves me to comment on it today is the habit of Fox News to analyze such amazing things – to go into how the Democrat policy preferences or attitudes are wrong, and why they would be detrimental if manifested. All that sort of analyzing comes across as dopiness or red-herring shiftiness — maybe guileless negligence, but as likely intentional failure to address what should be the lede. I would like to think, hope, wish that these disturbing news items are just election year errors, mistakes, screw-ups on the part of silly Democrats. Nice if they were to help expose who the Democrats really are and drive more and more sane people away from the party. It is a comforting thought.
My other thought is not hopeful, it’s horrible. The other thought is that Democrats across the country are now just shoving the truth in our faces. The items are expressions of dominance. They are telling us that the leftist revolution is full upon us, they know the election fix is in, and that there is no need for them to hide anything. Not long ago we would have dismissed it all out-of-hand as absurd, disgusting, impossible – now they sneer and boast. The Overton Window has been blown out. We are to take it and like it, or not, doesn’t matter. This is the most frightening election season ever.
Some folk anticipated a big airstrike against targets inside Ukraine for Saturday the 23rd of August, that being a sort of independence celebration day (the ‘sort of’ is deserved, BTW). The attack came Sunday (yesterday), and as of this post, I have not read any real damage assessments. My guess is that the Ukrainian energy grid took another body blow, but that nothing much has changed. More significant is the Ukrainian regime’s public worrying about armored forces massing in southern Belarus. Maybe those forces are Russian? Dunno, but the Ukrainian Kursk offensive may or may not be stalled at this time. Meanwhile, the Russians’ grinding advance from the east continues. I think the Ukrainians have done well on the ground to this point but may have made their last-gasp play in Kursk. OK, so here is my prediction: By November, the Russians will have taken Pokrovsk and will continue eastward against decreasingly effective opposition. The Ukrainian regime will not have solved its manpower problem, that is, will not be able to change the huge imbalance in warfighting capacities. Donald Trump will win the election in the United States. The lame-duck regime in Washington will do what it can to delay the Ukrainian regime’s demise, but seeing the future more clearly, will be trying to establish golden parachutes for select regime members, trying to destroy evidence, killing witnesses, and maybe laying the psychological-political foundation for a big virtuous Ukrainian rebuild money cow. Within three months after President Trump’s inauguration, the warfare in Ukraine will be over, the future borders of Ukraine clarified. Ukraine will be smaller, not in NATO, not in the EU, and not getting much US money. It will still have Odessa, however, and probably Kharkiv. Anyone?
