Chances are 90% the United States won’t exist in 12 months.
In 1964 Stanley Kubrick measured the American mind with Dr. Strangelove:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057012/
An insane American general orders a bombing attack on the Soviet Union, triggering a path to nuclear holocaust that a war room full of politicians and generals frantically tries to stop.
Today no one tries to stop it. On the contrary they all frantically desperately do everything possible to actualize it. We’re all Ripper now1:


Russia today has AD systems that are effective. Some strikes will get through, damage will be done. But most won’t.
The US has no defense.
So why would they do this?
Watch Strangelove.
You’ll see why.
Kubrick makes the answer perfectly and abundantly clear.
Russia is in this for the long haul and understand now exactly who and what they are confronted with. They will be conservative, pummel the Ukrainians with artillery and slowly strangle Ukraine by destroying it's critical infrastructure, all the while protecting and increasing their military capabilities for what they must believe at this point will be an inevitable military confrontation with NATO.
The west has gone insane...on pretty much every level. It has reached a level of dystopia that I feel I wake up each day in the Matrix waiting for Agent Smith to come and get me...for simply refusing to stay within the designated lines...
How can this not end in all out conflagration with the entire western world being led by madmen and outright psychopaths. Someone is going to do something extremely stupid and we will all pay the price. At this point I really no longer care if I go down, as long as the Empire of Lies goes down with me.
Posted by: JustAMaverick | Dec 10 2022 17:48 utc | 1
http://smoothiex12.blogspot.com/2022/12/andrei-raevsky-asks-reasonable-question.html
“Using the logic of the Third Stage Guild Navigator from Dune--the answer is within the question. Thus Andrei's observation fits extremely well with the issue of the US military discussed by Larry and his friend.“
http://smoothiex12.blogspot.com/2022/12/larry-on-us-military.html
https://sonar21.com/the-war-in-ukraine-has-exposed-the-weakness-of-the-u-s-military/
“The War in Ukraine Has Exposed the Weakness of the U.S. Military
10 December 2022 by Larry Johnson 40 Comments
I would love to take credit for the following words, but they belong to a new friend. A now retired journalist who had an exemplary career. He reached out to me recently and expressed his appreciation for what I was writing and encouraged me to keep it up. It is humbling when a legend takes the time to tell you that you are doing good work.
I will leave his name out of this for now (unless he grants me permission to reveal his identity). But he is spot on in his analysis of what has happened to the U.S. military. While U.S. politicians keep insisting, like the Evil Queen in Snow White staring into the Magic Mirror, that the United States is the fairest of them all, the truth is otherwise.
“19th century Britain went almost a century after Waterloo with no major war (beside Crimea). Its military became an expeditionary force dispatched on brief wars against various Fuzzy Wuzzie without first class weapons or even good tactical discipline. Rather like the US since Vietnam.
What Trump calls the “forever wars” (and I call the wars of sheer imperialism), after the fall of the USSR the Pentagon shifted planning and operations to what had been the stepchild of DOD for years — “Special Operations.” The Special Operations Command (aka SOCOM) came into being and the battle doctrine became dominated by Rangers, Special Forces, SEALS, etc and our military arsenal shrunk accordingly to support light operations with air control and total domination of the battle field. War by XVIII Airborne Corps.
Fielding of weapons became a lost art. Even paying attention to the Air Defense leapfrog by the Russians and Chinese, which we are seeing chew up Ukraine and NATO support weapons, became too much trouble. Now the Russians are exposing the paper tiger of American and NATO military power as they “demilaratize” us as well as Ukraine. Our response to the huge new challenge to carrier groups and old fashioned manned bombers is the Idiotic B 21. We are strangled by past legends, an arrogant assumption of continued postwar hegemony, and are sliding towards becoming a 2nd rate power.
Whatever US staff planned the support operation for Ukraine should be shot. We sent them the wrong armaments (lacking the right ones) and sat by while they ran through all the warehoused support we had like a drunken teenager. Now we can no longer support them. And they are hanging on the ropes.
After Napoleon, the Russians are the best artillerymen in the world. This war was always going to come down to artillery. And we sent them a air deliverable special operations design basic howitzer M777 that wasn’t tough enough for the job and easily disabled from excessive use and then ran out of ammo.
We should have seen all this coming up front. We not only proceeded on an arrogant basis without proper study, We knew we were in an industrial war and that was a game we couldn’t play for long. This was a military catastrophe from the beginning. Any planner worth his salt would recommend against it. Looks like DOD is scared now and is going to resist Biden Administration neocon pressure to “escalate.” The muttering about Crimea indicates the Administration is beginning to think about the end game.”
I have had the honor of working with U.S. military Special Operations Forces for 37 years. These units have some remarkable capabilities in conducting hostage rescue and raids. What makes them “special” is the selection process the various units employ for qualifying men (and some women) to carry out the missions. Notwithstanding their skill and smarts, these units cannot turn the tide of battle in a peer-to-peer war. They do not have magic powers to withstand sustained artillery bombardments. They may be able to endure the hardship better than a regular Army or Marine troop, but when confronted with a foe that commands the air and dominates with artillery and armor they are as susceptible to being killed or wounded as the average grunt.
I believe we are witnessing the end of America’s days as the World’s Policeman. The U.S. military is an expensive expeditionary force. Deploying troops and equipment to foreign countries to wage war is a costly business. Not just in terms of lives lost, but it requires, as we have seen in Afghanistan and Iraq, billions of dollars that are burned up on battlefields without achieving any significant political outcome that strengthens the security of the United States.
We are witnessing a new phase of this reality in Ukraine. U.S. weapons on the battlefield on the Donbas are not game changers. The war in Ukraine has exposed the weakness of the logistics capability of both the United States and the NATO members. We have reached a point where the United States defense contractors can only produce 20,000 artillery shells in a month while Russia is firing that many in one day and is able to continue supplying its troops.
The obsession of the United States in producing grossly expensive combat and bomber aircraft is self destructive. We have reached the point in history where piloted aircraft no longer are viable in light of the air defense systems that Russia and China have deployed. Technology has brought us to the point where a precision guided missile can do the work of a bomber or a jet fighter with only a fraction of the money required to deploy and maintain a manned aircraft.
The United States military is aggravating the mistake the U.S. Army made going into World War II:
“The last cavalry charge made on horseback by the U.S. Army took place in 1942, when the United States fought the Japanese army in the Philippines. After that, the mounted cavalry was replaced by tanks.”
https://www.ridinghall.com/when-did-the-us-cavalry-stop-using-horses/none
Think about that for a minute. World War I and the advent of the tank and the machine gun rendered horse cavalry irrelevant to modern warfare. Yet, the U.S. Army insisted on maintaining that capability even though it was useless strategically and tactically. The U.S. military today is making a similar mistake — i.e., hanging onto legacy defense systems that have been made obsolete by technology.”
https://sonar21.com/the-war-in-ukraine-has-exposed-the-weakness-of-the-u-s-military/
Oddo says
I have said this repeatedly and I will say it again – when this is done and over with – we will find ourselves on the outside looking in. Nobody will respect us, nobody will even be interested in talking to us or doing business with us. We will be the pariah. Give me one good reason why someone in Africa would talk to USA or UK or France or any of the ex-colonial powers. For that matter, why would anyone anywhere outside of the western world talk to us anymore? We have demonstrated that we are willing to stop at nothing to protect our dominant position but we have also shown that we have no shame with our lies.
In a few years you may see countries starting to refuse to pay the debt or interest on debt. All that is needed is the new BRICS currency, which will make the USD worth nothing.
Not only that but soon we will find that due to being the pariah – everything will become more expensive – the “slaves” are figuring out that everything we have in America today is because of cheap labor, components and “just in time logistics” the West invented in its trade off between independence and profits.
But, do not fool yourselves – the leaders in the West know all this – it is just that there are no more politicians with balls to come out and tell us that we have at most 5 years before we turn into something like Venezuela. When the world shuts us out, we will find that 90% of the crap we have, the cheap food, the social media and the rest of the “multi billion dollar industries” – are just that – virtual. When that happens, I would not want to be (and will not be) here for it. The time has increasingly come where people who can – will leave this country in a hurry.
https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/some-lights-go-out-some-lights-go-on/
“Watching the post-election political vaudeville during the lame-duck Christmas intermezzo, one can’t escape perceiving that just about everything in the USA is now heading south toward breakdown and ruin. The on-the-ground economy craters, inflation rages at the supermarket, supply lines break, the oil and gas industries get strangled, health care goes down smoking and burning, public education folds in disgrace and failure, Wall Street ends with a bang and a whimper, and John Fetterman prepares for his place in history.
Our government’s Ukraine op is ending in disaster for that sad-sack former Russian province and, surprise-surprise, for the European Union, NATO, and us, too. We finally played the Russia card like we’re the proverbial patsy at the poker table. Our hand turns out to be a pair of deuces with the five-of-diamonds high. Russia rakes in the chips with its massive natural resources and the world’s most stable currency, soon to be backed by gold. How’d that turn out, Victoria Nuland?
The EU was already functionally bankrupt. Now it has lost its entire industrial base for a lack of fuel to run it — self-Epsteined, shall we say, on the national scale — and faces not just a return to the medieval standard-of-living but also to the competitive savagery of many small nations soon to be fighting among themselves, making bad conditions worse. So sad. Euroland was a nice place to visit at the turn of the millennium and now the lights will blink out, like seeing a fond relative expire, eyes going vacant, on her deathbed.”
NATO is slowly falling apart. NATO is losing the proxy war in Ukraine and it is losing it badly. The people know it and it will have consequences. An increasingly authoritarian EU will follow the same path.
But there are powers in NATO that want to prevent that downfall. They will try to get NATO directly into the fight:
NATO’s secretary general warned on Friday that Russia’s war in Ukraine could expand into a wider war with the Atlantic alliance.
The official, Jens Stoltenberg, repeatedly cautioned in news media interviews this week against underestimating the situation in Ukraine and emphasized the wider threat President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia could pose to Europe.
“If things go wrong, they can go horribly wrong,” Mr. Stoltenberg said in an interview released on Friday with the Norwegian journalist Anne Lindmo, in which he added that there was “no doubt” a full-blown war against NATO was a “real possibility.”
“I understand everyone who is tired of supporting Ukraine. I understand everyone who thinks that food prices and the electricity bills are far too high,” he said. “But we have to pay a much higher price if our freedom and peace are threatened through Putin winning in Ukraine.”
Reread that last sentence:
“But we have to pay a much higher price if our freedom and peace are threatened through Putin winning in Ukraine.”
Putin wining in Ukraine, which he is doing, will threaten our freedom and peace?
Russia has no interest in Europe beyond Ukraine's borders. So how is that suppose to endanger us?
It is bullshit but it is designed to push for NATO entering the war when it becomes obvious to everyone that Russia is wining it.
The Russians see that coming:
NATO countries are increasingly involved in the conflict in Ukraine, with the United States intentionally proceeding with an escalation on this track, Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov said on the Rossiya-24 TV channel on Thursday.
"NATO members are increasingly and directly involved in this conflict. Their support for Kiev is now much diversified than it was a few months ago. This is a reflection of Washington’s intentional policy, obediently pursued by the Europeans, of escalating the conflict. They are playing with fire. The risks are soaring," Ryabkov said.
Indeed. But Stoltenberg has one thing right:
Mr. Stoltenberg’s comments came two days after he said that Russia was intentionally stalling the war in order to prepare a renewed onslaught against Ukrainian forces next year.
Let us assume that Russia waits until March for its all out attack on Ukraine. In the meantime it continues to grind the Ukrainian army down without itself having significant casualties. The Ukrainian army will by then have lost another 72,000 men. That is probably a third of its current strength. By then its acute 'regeneration problem' will have become even more acute. It means that it will then be much weaker.
What plans may Russia have for an all out spring attack?
Dr. Michael Vlahos and Col. Douglas Macgregor are military historians. They have watched the war in Ukraine and recently discussed it. They have come to their own conclusions. Neither believes in the nonsense of a winning Ukraine that the 'western' media are trying to sell us. They have ideas how Russia may want to attack.
Part one of their talk is here:
Is the war in Ukraine entering its decisive phase? Pt.1
Why NATO strategic failure? A war of deceit, denial Pt2
What is to be done? Can a corrupted US military be renewed? Pt.3
Each of those videos is some 30-50 minutes long. But it is content on a higher level than what you will see in other talk shows. I highly recommend these.
Posted by b on December 10, 2022 at 17:24 UTC | Permalink
With the inversion since ‘64, now instead of one lone lunatic and a room full of sane actors, now we have a room full of lunatics in charge and one sane mind:
But of course no one hears.


Seems we're slowly sliding towards disaster. I don't think the West can afford not to break Russia, unfortunately.