You are making the mistake in thinking that just because you were one of the minority of libs who became radicalized and turned left, it would also mean that every lib could have the same experience and trajectory as yours.
History has proven again and again that this is false. The vast majority of German liberals allowed Nazism to take hold of the country in silence. They were probably disgusted by the brutality of the fascists, and maybe even reacted emphatically with how many communists, socialists and social democrats were killed, but at the end of the day, getting rid of communist ideology and preventing it from taking root in their country were far more preferable for the liberals.
At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter how many people are anti-capitalists in the country or how many people had been radicalized by the recent events. The only way to prevail is through having strong organized left wing movements, without which all of these protests energy will be channeled down the drain, and fascist violence will once again save the day for the capitalist ruling class.
Without an organized left in the country, the movement is certainly doomed to fail.
Yes, and that’s why the US is going to make it very difficult for them to do so.
Businesses don’t just exist in a vacuum. They have suppliers and vendors and collaborators and customers, the entire chain of which most have been locked into more or less the same ecosystem, and taking a leap of faith to completely switch over to an entirely different ecosystem alone is going to be very costly especially if the US declares very stringent rules that you have to follow.
Of course, companies can opt out of doing business with the “Western world” (and I think this kind of “regionalism” is where the world is heading towards) and stick to Asian businesses that are already under the Chinese sphere, but it’s going to make a lot of international businesses think twice, whether such changes will be worth it for their businesses (we’re talking about replacing hardware, revamping existing protocols, retraining staff etc.)
And here’s the kicker: China as long as it remains an export-led economy will need to make profit from exports to maintain their growth, and if international demand for their technology is dampened for political reasons, then it ends up hurting China’s technology sector.
The US knows this, probably their only chance at creating substantial damage to China, and will play this card as relentlessly as it can.
China’a only way out is to transition into a domestic consumption economy to shake off the US control, and that’s why the US is only sanctioning Huawei, and not other mobile phone manufacturers because they want China to keep relying on export for their plan to work. Sanctioning all the Chinese companies at the same time is only going to accelerate China’s move toward an internal circulation model, which is the US’s worse nightmare because they can no longer exert their control over China.
Meanwhile, Huawei has been forced to retreat “back” to China and has been destroying its competition at home, allowing Chinese native technology to flourish, while the competitors have retreated “out” to the overseas market to displace Huawei’s position there.
This is simply one of the first steps towards US-China decoupling.
The US knows that it cannot contain China, cannot stop China from technologically surpassing itself. But the US still controls the global tech industry market, and China is still distances from transitioning away an export-led economy.
That’s why the US is specifically targeting Huawei. These targets were very specifically and strategically chosen. They want Huawei to succeed in developing their native technology and architectures, so down the road the US can simply force the rest of the world to choose between Apple/Google ecosystems, or the Chinese Harmony ecosystem, citing technical incompatibility between the two (many US government agencies already have a strict requirement regarding technology use involving Chinese components).
The global tech sector has far too much invested in and have their entire operations built around the existing Apple/Google/Amazon ecosystems so it will become very painful and costly to make the switch even if a superior Chinese alternative is available. At the end of the day, if you want to earn dollars, as a business, you’d have to weigh how much you’d be willing to risk losing (especially against your competitors) when the US declares that use of native Chinese technology is no longer accepted in your business dealing with them.
This Tiktok debacle is really just setting up the legal precedences for what they actually intend to commit to in their strategic planning down the road.
To understand the landlord empire, you need to think like a landlord. Microsoft did not dominate the consumer market because they made the best products, but because they were the best at using legal means to stop their competitors from penetrating the market.
Because the Republicans needed to assassinate Hunter Biden’s character to sever the corruption that the Democrats are blatantly doing in Ukraine, which the Democrats have built an entire network of money laundering operations in (think how AIPAC works) and where Hunter is a key figure on that front.
The Republicans cannot compete with the Democrats to funnel money to their donors, so they have to destroy the Bidens’ images in hopes to stop this money laundering scheme from prying away their donors.
See that $61 billion just passed for Ukraine? Where do you think those money are going? They are coming back to the Democrat politicians and their proxies one way or another.
This is how the circular flow of how the spending works:
US corporate donors (and AIPAC) lobby the Biden administration -> Biden pushes for spending bill on Ukraine and Israel -> billions of dollars poured into recipient accounts in Ukraine and Israel -> Ukraine and Israel buy stuff from the US and European companies -> Europeans then use the dollars to purchase American fossil fuel in dollars -> all of the dollars eventually come back to the US corporations and the additional surpluses are then taxed and destroyed in the Federal Reserve -> US corporate donors (and AIPAC) spend some of that to lobby the Biden administration (the loop is now complete)
The Republicans do not have anything remotely similar in scale of what the Democrats have in Ukraine, which they are using the excuse of a war to funnel billions and billions of government spending there and profit from the spending.
Imagine you’re a Republican donor, and you see the Democrats are getting all that easy money, while you are left out in the cold, you’d be upset too. You’d want to jump ship to the Democrat side to get the easy money, and in response, the Republican politicians want to stop the Democrats through tarnishing the image of the Bidens so they don’t get to do this blatantly.
The Republicans have been stalling the spending bill for months in the House and Senate. Biden wanted to give money to both Israel and Ukraine at the same time, but the Republicans only wanted to give money to Israel.
So what did Biden do? Provoke a war with Iran. Iranian strikes on Israel angered the Zionist donors, who then pushed the Republicans to yield to Biden’s demand to also give money to Ukraine. The Democrats won. $61 billion is now on the way to Ukraine.
“Russia only knew how because they copied Nazi rocket technology!”
lol I don’t know anything about milblogging but do know a thing or two about the Russian space program.
I don’t think you realize how many tons and tons of NATO weapons and munitions have been depleted in Ukraine over the past two years, not just on the battlefield, but the relentless cruise missile strikes on the ammunition depots and warehouses where all the equipments and munitions just went up in smokes.
There is no coming back from this. I have said before, the war in Ukraine can only end in the demilitarization of NATO.
I agree with the commenter below the Simplicius article that the author didn’t do his homework when it comes to Russian scramjet hypersonic missiles:
full comment here:
It doesn't appear Simplicius did his homework today.
Few obvious points:
- Zircon doesn't use any "cap" to protect any Oniks-like intake. It's a part of the launching system and the cap carries thrusters to orient a cold launched missile and is used by almost all cold launched VLS systems, irrespective of where the missile's intake is.
- as for the intake, we do know how Russian hypersonic vehicles look like. There were two schools of thought, one looking like old ramjet powered SAMs (4 side intakes around the airframe - this was Kholod) or GLL series, which looks a bit like the Waverider and is reportedly the direct ancestor of the Zircon. Pictures of both of them are freely available (funny, I just noticed they're even on English wikipedia).
- why do GLLs look a lot like Waverider? Because the Waverider is a direct descendant of the early 1990's program when US and France (don't forget that France also has a hypersonic scram jet program, probably even more successful than the US) joined the Russian programs and tested both the Kholod and Igla (what became the GLL) solutions together.
- why not intake on the tip? Because the tip is essentially crashing into the shockwave and splits it up (Waverider is called Waverider because it rides on the bottom part of the wave split by the tip). You don't want this shockwave crashing into the inside of your engine. It even splits ramjets into two categories - P-800 being the slower one(up to around M=3), which uses essentially the same mechanism as "nose intake" turbojets (ie MiG-21) except it has no moving parts in the engine. Then there is the "fast ramjet" category (1950's Bloodhound, Kh-31, Meteor) which use side intakes.
As with the Igla line (ie GLL-8), Zircon would highly probably be Waverider-looking, or using a 3rd approach (there's a 3rd way to do this, a sort of combination of both approaches, but I don't remember any functional demonstration of it - maybe I'm wrong). One thing is 99% certain - the intake is not at the front, unless Russians somehow invented another approach which would logically be better than both approaches they demonstrated previously.
Note: there were sporadic reports of Russian hypersonic developments over the past 3+ decades even in western media (there were successful launches of missile-like vehicles under own power since late 1990's or early 2000's). Something I should perhaps revisit and try to find again, but it's not a task for my morning commit to work while typing on a phone.
Simplicius’s assertion that the Zircon looks more like Oniks and less like Boeing’s X-51 Waverider does not have a factual basis and is purely the author’s own uninformed speculation.
Because believe it or not, Boeing’s Waverider is a direct descendent of the Soviet/Russian Kholod experimental scramjet rocket project that became part of the CIAM/NASA collaboration project in the 1990s.
In fact, NASA even published test flight results of the Kholod: 1996 results, 1998 results
(Note: NASA seems to have scrubbed these papers from their website, which were still accessible as of late 2023. Fortunately the Internet Archive has a copy of them, which I have retrieved and linked here. Interesting, isn’t it?)
From Wikipedia’s Kholod entry:
Russia would continue to research scramjet platforms under the ORYOL-2-1 program that focused on developing the GLL-8 Igla platform. The success of the Kholod program led to the development of NASA's X-43 to further refine the mechanics of scramjets and to develop control surfaces to enable maneuverability at hypersonic speeds.
This is what NASA’s X-43 looks like:
This is what Boeing’s X-51 Waverider looks like:
This is what Russia’s GLL variant GLL-AP looks like:
This is what P-800 Oniks looks like, which Simplicius thinks is the predecessor of Zircon:
Interesting, isn’t it?
From Anatoly Zak’s Russian Space Web’s Kholod entry (a great resource for Soviet/Russian space program, and the author is anti-Putin and a strong critic of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, if that matters to you):
During the 1990s, when the Russian space program was largely left for dead, the nation's engineers flight-tested a pioneering propulsion system that one day might revolutionize space travel. Known as scramjet, for supersonic combustion ramjet, the engine still remains a cutting-edge technology, while its early history in Russia has ended up largely forgotten.
…
In November 1994, NASA finally joined the Kholod program. During the same year, Department 101 at the KB Khimavtomatiki propulsion bureau, KBKhA, in the city of Voronezh took over the development of the scramjet engine, which was now designated 58L. (331) The engine was re-designed to withstand higher temperatures, which would result from sustained operation of the engine in a supersonic combustion mode.
A NASA-sponsored test mission, which featured an upgraded engine supplied by KBKhA lifted off on February 12, 1998. With the goal of reaching a speed of Mach 6.5, the Kholod vehicle accelerated from Mach 3 to around Mach 6.41-6.47, after successfully firing for record-breaking 77 seconds at a maximum altitude of 27.1 kilometers. (688, 331, 689) Ironically, despite its terrible economic woes in the 1990s, Russia became the first to fly a scramjet vehicle.
NASA likely used the experience from the Kholod project to build an unmanned experimental aircraft with a scramjet engine designated X-43A. The program was conducted jointly by NASA's Langley and Dryden research centers. Not coincidently, Dryden had participated in the last launch of the Kholod vehicle on behalf of NASA. Record-breaking flights of the X-43A vehicle were first attempted just three years after the last launch of Kholod.
The summary is, Russia has been field testing experimental scramjet rocket propulsion for at least 30 years, based on earlier Soviet research. As usual, the Americans gave up on the project early, while the Soviets/Russians went on to master the technology (close cycle staged combustion rocket engine e.g. RD-170/RD-180 comes to mind).
We don’t have the full details, of course, but it is far more likely that the Zircon is a descendant of the Kholod/GLL line than that of P-800 Oniks, which is why the design that we know of bears such resemblance to Boeing’s Waverider, which is itself also a descendant of Kholod.
Simplicius seems to know a lot of military stuff, but honestly Soviet/Russian space program appears out of his depth.
To be fair, I never said they were playing 5D chess.
I said that Biden took a huge gamble with confiscating Russian dollar reserves and hiking interest rates, which in turn placed the dollar in a highly vulnerable position especially during the fall of 2022, betting that China and BRICS wouldn’t dare to challenge it, and it paid off hugely for both the US imperialists and especially for the Democrats, who have now not only out-played the Republicans as the war-mongering party, but also became addicted to weaponizing the dollars for their own gains.
The weakness of the dollar hegemony that Biden himself created has been patched up, with the latest $95 billion spending bill being the final nail in the coffin for the current wave of de-dollarization attempt. Until the next dollar crisis, that is.
What I am saying though is that Biden is prone to taking high risk high reward moves (reward as in asserting the hegemony of the US empire), who is not afraid to start wars with other major powers and sacrificing millions in the process. A lot of what Biden has done since assuming the office is predicated on being ruthless and willing to take huge risks (far more than his predecessors would be comfortable with), and betting that your enemies wouldn’t dare to upset the US-dominated network of global institutions. And so far, as we have seen, it is working out well for the US empire.
To be fair, Israeli F-35s have entered Iranian airspace before. We just don’t know how many other countries are involved in the logistics, assuming the story is true,
Isn’t this the opening of The Sum of All Fears? Escobar has been watching too many Tom Clancy movies recently?
As I said, if it’s one plane going down it is very easy to pretend like nothing is happening and everyone just keeps quiet about it, especially when it is in nobody’s interest to spark a wider confrontation. This happens all the time on the battlefield.
I’m not saying the story is true, just pointing out that there could be recovery operations underway and how are we supposed to know about this if no one is reporting on it?
Planes malfunction all the time and they don’t all get reported.
Back in 2017, an Israeli F-35 was downed in Syria due to “bird strikes”, though there are rumors that it was shot down by Russian air defenses.
Generally speaking, if only one plane goes down, you can blame it on malfunction. If you have four planes in a sortie and they all go down, it’s much harder to cover up.
Russell Bentley has been killed, by the Russians.
From Telegram:
They write that our Texas is lost.
Everything.
An elderly man, a sweet romantic, who came to us from distant America, was killed by some crazed werewolves in military uniform.
I see no point in holding anything back now. On April 8, Russell was detained at the scene of the shooting [filming the aftermath of Ukrainian bombing], where the Texan came to help the victims. The military detained, most likely they were talking about tank crews of the 5th brigade. They were probably confused by his accent, and they decided that they had caught a spy. And they behaved with him accordingly, although he had both a passport and a military ID.
Just think what Texas could have thought in the last minutes of his life, who 10 years ago came here at the call of his heart to defend the besieged Donetsk, who had unlimited trust in all people in uniform, and in people in general, his usual expression was: “Bro.”
There's a lot to be said about Texas. He was an Orthodox Christian, found love in Donetsk and lived with his Lyudmila in Petrovka. Story for the film. In his wallet he had a portrait of his wife right next to his own driver’s license photo, he arranged them in such a way that when the wallet was closed, it turned out that the spouses were kissing...
Is this what he remembered when these freaks kicked him? About your wife? Mom?
He loved his mother very much, he told me in an interview that once during heavy shelling he thought: “But if I die now, I will immediately meet my mother.”
I don’t know why we should take Kyiv and Odessa now. War must be waged with clean hands or not waged at all.
Now only two things can be achieved: punishment of the guilty and an Orthodox funeral for Russell. And a funeral is possible only when the body is given away.
Can we at least achieve this?!
There are even worse rumors about what had been done to him, I’m holding off now awaiting confirmation.
Germany cannot do anything without the dollar.
They desperately need the foreign aid to happen so that Israel and Ukraine can use those dollars to buy stuff from Europe, which in turn allowing European countries to earn dollars to then import the expensive energy since they were cut off from Russian oil and gas that they themselves sanctioned. Their economy is heavily dependent on the US flooding those regions with billions and billions of foreign aid dollars.
That’s why Germany will support the US genocide to the end. Biden is making them choose between saving Gazan Palestinian lives or saving their own. The answer is clear.
This is how American hegemony works.
Here is the circular flow of the “foreign aid”:
US legislature approves spending -> US treasury spends -> Federal Reserve creates the dollars and credit into the Ukrainian and Israeli accounts -> Ukraine/Israel buy stuff from Europe -> Europe imports American oil and gas -> Dollars go back to US companies -> Additional taxes destroyed by US treasury
As I said, in another universe the Donbass would have been sold out by Putin and Russia joining the fascist club of the EU.
It only didn’t happen because Russia wasn’t allowed entry to the fascist club. This kicks off their cooperation with China and pivoting away from the Western imperial core.
Russia wanted to give Donbass back to Ukraine via Minsk. Putin clearly didn’t want to deal with this Donbass shit, wanted to have good relations with the EU and ended up lashing out at Lenin for making his life so difficult.
The communists were completely opposed to this plan. If anything, the communists are even more nationalist than Putin’s neoliberal government in this case.
It was only after 8 years of having the illusions repeatedly shattered that Putin decided enough is enough.
Absolute masterful play by Biden. Provoking a war with Iran got the Republicans to fold on Ukraine, after dragging it out for so many months. I guess their Zionist donors got angry at them finally. I know some here still see Biden as this senile figure but this is some House of Cards level shit.
This bill has far reaching implications, allowing Biden’s tier 1 patreon subscribers to finally get the exclusive treats they were promised, the Democrats out-classing the Republicans in their capacity to hand out treats (which is a huge deal for the Republican donors) and sowing an internal division among the GOP, and of course, propping up dollar hegemony by unleashing a huge volume of dollar liquidity to the foreign sector.
This is the Biden administration fully literate about the weaponization of dollar and using it masterfully for pure evil intentions, killing three birds with one stone.
It is both incredible and appalling to witness. I was still hoping that the Republican bickering could somehow delay the funding, but they simply could not out-play Biden’s political acumen.
In 2008, Ukraine aired a television polling program called The Greatest Ukrainians and the winner of the poll turned out to be Yaroslav the Wise.
However, it was later revealed that the result had been manupulated as the actual winner was Stepan Bandera:
The Chief of Great Ukrainians project, journalist Vakhtang Kipiani, informed the public in his blog, that the voting system had been manipulated by unknown persons. He stated that a couple of days prior to publishing the results he was aware of a possible win for Yaroslav the Wise. Prior to that, with a huge lead in first place was the controversial Stepan Bandera. For example, the winner, Yaroslav I, received 60,000 votes in one month and almost 550,000 in just one day. Mykola Amosov, who took second place, received almost 150,000 votes in just one day. Kipiani said that if these manipulation hadn't taken place Yaroslav would not have won.
Very interestingly, also in the same year, Russia aired a similar television program called The Name of Russia and the winner was Alexander Nevsky.
It was also exposed that the polling result was rigged as the actual winner was Joseph Stalin:
In his book Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia, author Peter Pomerantsev (working as a consultant for the Russian television industry at the time) claims the actual winner of the contest was Joseph Stalin, rather than Alexander Nevsky, and that the "embarrassed" producers had to rig the vote in favor of Nevsky.
Absolutely amazing. Bandera and Stalin occupied the hearts of the Ukrainian and Russian people and continued to fight it out in the 21st century, and the respective governments had to bury their popularity and prop up medieval historical figures to keep things calm.