"Russia's small weapon, the Lancet drone, has become a big headache for Ukraine. Russia is using these drones to hunt down and destroy Kyiv's weapons, like the Leopard main battle tanks. According to reports, all the German Leopard tanks were bombed using Lancet drones. Not just the "mighty" Leopards, but U.S.-supplied Bradley fighting vehicles and French AMX-10RC units were wiped out on the battlefield with Russian Lancet drones. This intensification in drone usage marks a shift in the Russian Army's tactics. Russia's focus has been shifted to the neutralisation of Kyiv's modern armoured units. The Russians are hunting and destroying these western weapons due to their advanced capabilities. The destruction of these advanced western weapons proves that Kyiv is ill-prepared while Russia's wargame under Vladimir Putin is unmatched at the moment."
"Russia Bombed 'Mighty' Leopards Using This Weapon -
All About Putin’s 'Game-Changer' Drone"
"Russia's small weapon, the Lancet drone, has become a big headache for Ukraine. Russia is using these drones to hunt down and destroy Kyiv's weapons, like the Leopard main battle tanks. According to reports, all the German Leopard tanks were bombed using Lancet drones. Not just the "mighty" Leopards, but U.S.-supplied Bradley fighting vehicles and French AMX-10RC units were wiped out on the battlefield with Russian Lancet drones. This intensification in drone usage marks a shift in the Russian Army's tactics. Russia's focus has been shifted to the neutralization of Kyiv's modern armored units. The Russians are hunting and destroying these western weapons due to their advanced capabilities. The destruction of these advanced western weapons proves that Kyiv is ill-prepared."
War, inflation and the familiar path to the graveyard of empires...
by Bill Bonner and Joel Bowman
Youghal, Ireland - "Making life more interesting for cynical observers of politics and markets, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is running for president. He is the first threat to the bi-partisan empire agenda in more than half a century. How serious this challenge is remains to be seen. But judging from the efforts to discredit him, the elite are taking no chances.
First, we set the stage. Here’s the Committee for the Responsible Federal Budget: "The Deficit Was $2.1 Trillion Over Past Year." "…up 50 percent from the $1.4 trillion deficit in Fiscal Year (FY) 2022 and more than twice as large as the deficit prior to the beginning of the pandemic. The 12-month rolling deficit is also $170 billion higher than it was last month, thanks to a $236 billion deficit in May of 2023, compared to $66 billion last May. Compared to a year ago, total nominal spending is up 11 percent to $6.6 trillion and revenue is down 6 percent to $4.5 trillion.
As a share of the economy, deficits have totaled 8.1 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) over the past year, over three times the historical average of 2.5 percent and three percentage points higher than 2019."
War and Inflation: At least half of that deficit comes from something that does Americans no apparent good – the US empire. RFK, Jr, proposes to trim it back. He is “nuts,” says HotAir. He’s an “eccentric,” says SLATE. “Lunacy,” says the Daily Beast. “Wacky conspiracy theories,” says Cleveland Magazine. Here’s Robert Reich, a former Secretary of Labor…a cretin who is reliably wrong about everything: "Were it not for his illustrious name, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would be just another crackpot in the growing number of bottom-feeding right-wing fringe politicians seeking high office." Even his own family says Kennedy is “tragically wrong”…according to Politico.
We have no doubt that RFK, Jr. is wrong about a lot of things, but we also doubt that he is wrong about everything…and perhaps not about the most obvious threat the US faces. And since we have a soft spot for diehards, lost causes, and underdogs…we will look closer.
“Inflation,” wrote Hemingway, “is the first panacea of a mismanaged government. War is the second. Both bring a temporary prosperity. Both bring a more permanent ruin.” We’re not sure Hemingway had them in the right order. Sometimes war leads inflation. Sometimes it is the other way around. But the two tend to go together, like rats and plague, until a country is laid low.
Far Flung Claptrap: Not that we are making a prediction. We’re just adding two plus two. And the expense of maintaining a far flung empire… along with the delusional claptrap that accompanies a degenerate empire (sanctions, wars, trade barriers, prohibitions, tariffs) may be more than we can afford.
When attacked in a real war, a nation’s people rally to buy ‘war bonds’ to support their ‘boys in uniform.’ But few people want to pay real money so the military can attack some godforsaken country in a ‘war of choice.’ Few people willingly fatten Raytheon’s profit margins. And who really wants to pay good money to kill Syrians, Iraqis, Iranians, Serbians, Somalis, etc? Some do. But not many.
That is why empires cannot be financed by taxation alone; people won’t want to pay for them. Like almost all government programs, ‘wars of choice’ are a racket, meant to enrich and empower the few at the expense of the many. Elites readily turn to inflation to finance them. Then, both inflation…and the empire itself…take on lives of their own. Stay tuned."
o
Joel’s Note: Even as the size and cost of the federal government balloons to record historic levels… many voters are keen to see the beast grow even larger. Yes, you read that correctly. A recent poll by the folks at the Pew Research Center found that about half (49%) of Americans say they want a bigger federal government providing more (ahem…) “services.” The same survey found that more than half (52%) of Americans thought the government should be “doing more” to solve problems, whatever that means. And more than four in ten (43%) of respondents said they also wanted a larger military, while only 17% said they would like to see the size of the military reduced. (38% reckon it’s “just about right.”)
How to pay for all all these guns ‘n’ butter programs? Tax the rich, of course! (And the companies they’ve built.) About two-thirds of Americans (65%) say that tax rates on large businesses and corporations should be raised. A somewhat similar share (61%) support raising tax rates on household incomes over $400,000.
Whether it’s on warfare or welfare… it’s so easy to spend other people’s money. But as we’ve pointed out in this space before, even if the federal government could somehow “eat the rich,” taxing every billionaire from sea to shining sea 100% of their wealth… the windfall wouldn’t be enough to cover a fraction of the government’s outgoing expenses. The money’s gotta come from somewhere else.
Where does that leave the big spenders in D.C.? Cutting back and trimming porky programs? Unlikely. Here’s Tom Dyson, outlining the situation to BPR members in last week’s research note…"Here at Bonner Private Research, our thesis is simple. They inflated a gigantic debt bubble by suppressing interest rates, printing money and cajoling investors to speculate. There were many ramifications to this crazy experiment. But the biggest, most important one – from my perspective as a macro investment strategist – is that the U.S. government developed a terrible spending addiction and went way too far into debt.
Now the U.S. government’s only reasonable way out is to default on its debts by watering down the value of the loans creditors hold through a process economists sometimes call “financial repression.” Put simply, financial repression means the government will coerce its creditors into holding its debt, and then it will try to pay a negative interest rate on that debt, chipping away -3% or -5% a year, until its debt burden has shrunk to more manageable levels.
The only other alternative is some kind of chaotic collapse of the system. I just don’t consider that likely at this stage, although there may be some mini-panics along the way that help rationalize the money printing. (The markets are fragile, so you can never rule out some unexpected event triggering a chaotic collapse, even if the authorities would rather manage the decline in an orderly fashion.)
Otherwise, debasement and negative interest rates is the only way. The Feds will gradually erode the dollar’s purchasing power through inflation while they keep interest rates below the rate of inflation… and they’ll do it carefully and deceitfully so creditors don’t get spooked and bolt."
"Commercial real estate is a very real problem. Goldman Sachs steps forward and says that Elon musk is contributing to the downward spiral of commercial real estate. That is ridiculous."
“You give me a piece of ground and a sword and I am going to take back this country with your help and the help of all the homeless Democrats and Republicans who are Americans first.”
- Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
"If you’re wondering why our country is lost in lunatic raptures of lawless Lawfare and futile MAGAry, it’s because our economy has already collapsed, and our culture and politics with it downstream have also collapsed into spectacular degeneracy. It has already happened. Maybe you don’t know it.
The business model is broken. We’re a shadow of the industrial economy that won a great war and enjoyed a boisterous peace. You can’t replace ball bearing factories with theme parks and hedge funds. Sorry. The full faith and credit of the USA is not embodied in those frivolities, so our money is losing its mojo fast.
But get this: we will go on. This is not the end of the world or the end of history. It is the end of an era. Believe it or not, the economy will fix itself, it just won’t be what it was in 1957. It won’t be what the techno-supremacists think, either. (You need a dependable electric grid to run all those server farms and the apps they serve, and the AI supposedly looming.) It will fix itself because when things fail, as they are doing now, a lot of opportunities will open up to do things differently, even very differently.
When the chain stores fail along with their twelve-thousand-mile supply lines, Americans will figure out how to find stuff, make stuff, move stuff, and sell stuff at a smaller scale, maybe back on your Main Street (if it’s still there). There will be a lot less stuff, of course. But it may be enough stuff, and some of you will be busy making stuff of some kind. Imagine an economy where practically everybody has a useful role to play. Do you know how much more important it is to lead a purposeful, acrtive life of than to be lost in leisure and anomie with more stuff than you know what to do with? Which is where we’re at now, even for many who are statistically “poor.”
When the Happy Motoring colossus tweaks out, we’ll spend less time moving around and more time doing useful things, staying put around the places where we live. We’d be lucky if we could keep some railroads going, but the prospects are not great for that now. Sorry, we blew it. Should have re-started that project in 1970 when the handwriting was on the wall. (We made a lot of bad choices.) Cars and trains require elaborate networks of many interdependent technologies all integrated smoothly at the giant scale - oil, steel, plastics, electronics - and all of that is disintegrating. Pretty soon, you can forget about airplanes, too. That leaves… what? Yes, boats and horses. I know… it sounds inconceivable. Wait for it.
When our grotesque medical racketeering matrix fails, doctors will practice medicine at smaller scale, probably without advanced pharmaceuticals and techno-diagnostics. They’ll open small local clinics while zombies squat in the broken mega-hospitals. You’ll have to pay in cash, whatever form that comes in. You’ll have to take care of yourself, too, but there will be a whole lot less enticing, engineered, toxic crap available to stuff into your body - Froot Loops, Hot Pockets - and the food markets won’t be all that super. There will certainly be less food altogether, but there will be fewer of us to feed, and more of that fewer-of-us will be busy producing that food, one way or another.
That’s the reality I see coming. As you’ve seen vividly, the journey from where we were in, say, the year 2000, to where we’re going has been psychologically disordering at the mass scale. These days, people who ought to know better express ideas that would have gotten them laughed out the room in 1999. The catch is that few of you know that this mass disordering grew out of fear of the journey. It was a phenomenon of infectious mass anxiety over something only dimly apprehended. You just thought it was about bad people.
You’re now faced with the question: how to avoid committing suicide, directly or inadvertently, personally or as a whole society, slowly or quickly? - and its corollary, how to get through the madness in the meantime? Politics happen whether you pay attention to it or not. Politics is concerned with how a society navigates through history. Today, it seems that either A) somebody is steering badly; B) Nobody is steering; or C) some outside force has commandeered the ship’s wheel and is steering for us.
Any way you look at that, we need somebody to steer. Mr. Trump has volunteered to try doing it again. The first time, forces in every quarter of American power set out to bushwhack, sandbag, harass, hector, and hound him. In the process, they just about destroyed the rule of law. Then they simply dis-elected him surreptitiously, something you’re not supposed to say, but there it is, like so much meat on the table. Now they’re trying to hoo-rah him into jail. Whatever you think of his, er, complex personality, you must admire his perseverance through adversity. If he somehow manages to wriggle through the present obstacle course of Lawfare chicanery, his next term would be an extravaganza of retribution. The spectacle would provide much satisfaction but, in the end, it would just be a sideshow, and it is not the same thing as taking care of business.
“Joe Biden,” of course, the man who is not really even there, is only pretending to run for reelection, or at least a coterie around the Oval Office is pretending for him while they try to figure out what to do. They’re in an awful quandary. They hold all the levers of power and they have no other credible candidate, not a living soul, in their own official hatchery.
Outside of that ghastly edifice, Robert F. Kennedy is making a determined flanking move, an end-run near the sidelines. The Democratic Party in all its florid and mendacious lunacy is pretending to not notice him, especially their praetorian news media that is the vector for America’s mass mental illness. Mr. Kennedy put it so simply in April when he announced a run to preside over the stupendous mess that is our government. He said his mission is an experiment to see what happens when you tell Americans the truth. Hold that thought. How long has it been since you thought anything like that was possible?
There’s a broad-based assumption across the land, derived from our fading prime artform, the movies, that Americans can’t handle the truth. Like so much else in our national life, that is probably erroneous… fake truth. And what is so striking in Mr. Kennedy’s performance so far is an absence of fakery. It’s more than refreshing, it’s… startling. Makes you blink, a little bit. Makes you remember what it’s like to not be lied-to incessantly. Makes you want to see more of it because it gives you strength when you thought you were finished. Get this now: our world is changing, and deeply, but we’re not finished."
“An alien threat is a government spending bonanza,” claims Edward Dowd, founding partner of Phinance Technologies. He also warns that central bank digital currencies could give the government more control over people’s money and freedom, adding more economic chaos to today's bear market. And as economic conditions worsen, the U.S. dollar is “at an endgame” and the government would need to introduce a new financial system, he explains. In order to survive this ongoing turmoil, Dowd advises investors to seek opportunities in cash. “People at the maximum amount of fear will want to sell everything. You have to fight that fear,” he claims. Finally, he says that de-dollarization is unlikely to happen given the dollar’s dominance in global trade. “So the dollar system, if it fails, will fail up, meaning it will destroy the rest of the globe before it destroys us,” he concludes."
"The OFR Financial Stress Index (OFR FSI)is a daily market-based snapshot of stress in global financial markets. It is constructed from 33 financial market variables, such as yield spreads, valuation measures, and interest rates. The OFR FSI is positive when stress levels are above average, and negative when stress levels are below average. The OFR FSI incorporates five categories of indicators: credit, equity valuation, funding,safe assets and volatility. The FSI shows stress contributions by three regions: United States, other advanced economies, and emerging markets."
"An unprecedented tidal wave of colossal proportions is about to hit the shores of the car market. Experts are referring to this as the most significant car price cataclysm in our living memory. The storm clouds have been gathering for the past three years, leading to an unparalleled auto price bubble. An excess supply is poised to deluge the market, while consumer demand is contracting. The current sky-high prices? They're like a house of cards in the face of a hurricane. Absolutely untenable.
Today, we're going to delve into the heart of this crisis. We'll shine a light on those vehicles that have already taken a nosedive in price this year. More importantly, we're going to arm you with the knowledge to protect your finances.It's not a matter of if this car price earthquake will hit. The question is when. For a while now, we've seen car prices, both old and new, ascending like a rocket. Dealer markups have been a rocket booster, and the scarcity of those tiny yet essential semiconductor chips has pressed the brakes on production. Auto loan defaults have climbed the ladder to an all-time high, and negative equity is spreading through the industry like wildfire. This is a time bomb waiting to explode, threatening to toss the car market into a turmoil and potentially triggering a domino effect on the entire US economy. The middle-class American dream could be hit hard, leaving nothing but disillusionment and financial voids.
Sounds like a grim scene from a dystopian movie, right? Well, the US Federal Reserve's latest data only adds to the intrigue. Serious delinquencies, the kind where payments are lagging 90 days or more, have soared to heights unseen since the harrowing financial crisis that gripped 2008 and 2009. The climax intensifies for those under 30, as they've seen delinquency rates rocketing in the last six months more than any other time in the past two decades. Edmunds, suggests that average negative equity in auto trade-ins saw a 29% jump in the final act of 2022. Moving into 2023, this equity gap continued its uphill journey, hitting a 15-year high.
Reports are streaming in from all corners of the country. Wholesale car prices are on a steep downhill slope, with the number-crunchers at Mannheim Consulting predicting a 9% skid for new models and a hair-raising 26% plunge for used cars. Now, when wholesale prices nosedive, retail prices follow suit, parachuting down to more manageable levels. April saw the average price of a new car dip below the sticker price for the first time in almost two years. Mannheim also revealed that the rocketing prices have hit the ceiling. In the two-year period between January 2021 and January 2023, used car prices revved up by an extraordinary 52%, while new cars accelerated by nearly 28%. In the same time frame, the median household income in the U.S. only increased by 13%. And let's not forget inflation. When we factor that in, the increase in incomes shrinks to a paltry 7.1%.
Put simply, in this rollercoaster economy, the affordability of used cars nosedived by nearly 40%, and new cars became 15% less affordable. In a marketplace where consumers are being priced out faster than a Ferrari on the freeway, a market crash is inevitable. The question isn't if, but when. Market analysts have already sounded the alarm, and a significant correction is already taking shape. But brace yourselves folks, because the upcoming market collapse is set to dwarf anything we've seen before, even outdoing the auto market crisis of 2008. The Fed, in their bid to wrestle inflation, pushed rates to a peak not seen since 2007. As a result, lenders put the pedal to the metal, cranking their auto loan rates up nearly 25%, from 8.22% in 2021 to 10.26% in 2022, according to the Experian State of Automotive Finance Report for Q4. The first shots of the price war have been fired in the EV sector. We expect this to ripple into the combustion engine segment by the second half of 2023. The biggest cannonball so far?"
"Light-years across, this suggestive shape known as the Seahorse Nebula appears in silhouette against a rich, luminous background of stars. Seen toward the royal northern constellation of Cepheus, the dusty, obscuring clouds are part of a Milky Way molecular cloud some 1,200 light-years distant.
Click image for larger size.
It is also listed as Barnard 150 (B150), one of 182 dark markings of the sky cataloged in the early 20th century by astronomer E. E. Barnard. Packs of low mass stars are forming within, but their collapsing cores are only visible at long infrared wavelengths. Still, the colorful stars of Cepheus add to this pretty, galactic skyscape."
“Grandfather, Great Spirit, once more behold me on earth and lean to hear my feeble voice. You lived first, and you are older than all need, older than all prayer. All things belong to you – the two-legged, the four-legged, the wings of the air, and all green things that live. You have set the powers of the four quarters of the earth to cross each other. You have made me cross the good road and road of difficulties, and where they cross, the place is holy. Day in, day out, forevermore, you are the life of things.
Hey! Lean to hear my feeble voice. At the center of the sacred hoop You have said that I should make the tree to bloom. With tears running, O Great Spirit, my Grandfather, With running eyes I must say The tree has never bloomed. Here I stand, and the tree is withered. Again, I recall the great vision you gave me. It may be that some little root of the sacred tree still lives. Nourish it then, That it may leaf And bloom, And fill with singing birds! Hear me, that the people may once again Find the good road And the shielding tree.
The Six Grandfathers have placed in this world many things, all of which should be happy. Every little thing is sent for something, and in that thing there should be happiness and the power to make happy. Like the grasses showing tender faces to each other, thus we should do, for this was the wish of the Grandfathers of the World.”
“A reader shared with us those well-known lines of T. S. Eliot (“Little Gidding”). It is not quite what Eliot is up to, but I was reminded of some lines of Pascal that I shared here several years ago: “Scientific learning is composed of two opposites which nonetheless meet each other. The first is the natural ignorance that is man’s lot at birth. The second is represented by those great minds that have investigated all knowledge accumulated by man only to discover at the end that in fact they know nothing. Thus they return to the same fundamental ignorance they had thought to leave. Yet this ignorance they have now discovered is an intellectual achievement. It is those who have departed from their original condition of ignorance but have been incapable of completing the full cycle of learning who offer us a smattering of scientific knowledge and pass sweeping judgments. These are the mischief makers, the false prophets.” (“Pensees” V:327)
It took almost three centuries for Pascal’s remarkable insight to become the common opinion of scientists. The 20th-century philosopher Karl Popper expressed it this way: “The more we learn about the world, and the deeper our learning, the more conscious, specific, and articulate will be our knowledge of what we do not know, our knowledge of our ignorance. For this, indeed, is the main source of our ignorance- the fact that our knowledge can be only finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite.”
It is an odd, unsettling thought that the culmination of the scientific quest - the long slow gathering of reliable empirical knowledge of the world- should be confirmation of how little we understand about the universe we live in. A willingness to say “I don’t know” is a prerequisite of scientific discovery. Only in the silence of acknowledged ignorance can we hear - half hear - the thing that calls us to attend."
"At this point, virtually all of us over the age of forty have encountered enough "snowflakes" (those Millennials who have a meltdown if anything they say or believe is challenged) to understand that, increasingly, young people are being systemically coddled to the point that they cannot cope with their "reality" being questioned.
The post-war baby boomers were the first "spoiled" generation, with tens of millions of children raised under the concept that, "I don’t want my children to have to experience the hardships that I faced growing up."
Those jurisdictions that prospered most (the EU, US, Canada, etc.) were, not coincidentally, the ones where this form of childrearing became most prevalent. The net result was the ’60s generation – young adults who could be praised for their idealism in pursuing the peace movement, the civil rights movement, and equal rights for women. But those same young adults were spoiled to the degree that many felt that it made perfect sense that they should attend expensive colleges but spend much of their study time pursuing sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Flunking out or dropping out was not seen as a major issue and very few of them felt any particular guilt about having squandered their parents’ life savings in the process.
The boomer generation then became the yuppies as they hit middle age, and not surprisingly, many coddled their own children even more than they themselves had been coddled. As a result of ever-greater indulgence with each new generation of children, tens of millions of Millennials now display the result of parents doing all they can to remove every possible hardship from their children’s experience, no matter how small.
Many in their generation never had to do chores, have a paper route, or get good grades in order to be given an exceptional reward, such as a cell phone. They grew to adulthood without any understanding of cause and effect, effort and reward.
Theoretically, the outcome was to be a generation that was free from troubles, free from stress, who would have only happy thoughts. The trouble with this ideal was that, by the time they reached adulthood, many of the critical life’s lessons had been missing from their upbringing. In the years during which their brains were biologically expanding and developing, they had been hardwired to expect continued indulgence throughout their lives. Any thought that they had was treated as valid, even if it was insupportable in logic.
And, today, we’re witnessing the fruits of this upbringing. Tens of millions of Millennials have never learned the concept of humility. They’re often unable to cope with their thoughts and perceptions being questioned and, in fact, often cannot think outside of themselves to understand the thoughts and perceptions of others.
They tend to be offended extremely easily and, worse, don’t know what to do when this occurs. They have such a high perception of their own self-importance that they can’t cope with being confronted, regardless of the validity of the other person’s reasoning. How they feel is far more important than logic or fact.
Hypersensitive vulnerability is a major consequence, but a greater casualty is Truth. Truth has gone from being fundamental to being something "optional" – subjective or relative and of lesser importance than someone being offended or hurt.
Of course, it would be easy to simply fob these young adults off as emotional mutants – spiteful narcissists – who cannot survive school without the school’s provision of safe spaces, cookies, puppies, and hug sessions. Previous generations of students (my own included) were often intimidated when presented with course books that had titles like Elements of Calculus and Analytic Geometry. But such books had their purpose. They were part of what had to be dealt with in order to be prepared for the adult world of ever-expanding technology.
In addition, it was expected that any student be prepared to learn (at university, if he had not already done so at home), to consider all points of view, including those less palatable. In debating classes, he’d be expected to take any side of any argument and argue it as best he could. In large measure, these requirements have disappeared from institutions of higher learning, and in their place, colleges provide coloring books, Play-Doh, and cry closets.
At the same time as a generation of "snowflakes" is being created, the same jurisdictions that are most prominently creating them (the above-mentioned EU, US, Canada, etc.) are facing, not just a generation of young adults who have a meltdown when challenged in some small way. They’re facing an international economic and political meltdown of epic proportions. Several generations of business and political leaders have created the greatest "kick the can" bubble that the world has ever witnessed.
We can’t pinpoint the day on which this bubble will pop, but it would appear that we may now be quite close, as those who have been kicking the can have been running out of the means to continue. The approach of a crisis is doubly concerning, as, historically, whenever generations of older people destroy their economy from within, it invariably falls to the younger generation to dig the country out of the resultant rubble.
Never in history has a crisis of such great proportions loomed and yet, never in history has the unfortunate generation that will inherit the damage been so unequivocally incapable of coping with that damage. As unpleasant as it may be to accept, there’s no solution for idiocy. Any society that has hardwired a generation of its children to be unable to cope will find that that generation will be a lost one. It will, in fact, be the following generation – the one that has grown up during the aftermath of the collapse – that will, of necessity, develop the skills needed to cope with an actual recovery.
So, does that mean that the world will be in chaos for more than a generation before the next batch of people can be raised to cope? Well, no. Actually, that’s already happening. In Europe, where the Millennial trend exists, western Europeans have been growing up coddled and incapable, whilst eastern Europeans, who have experienced war and hardship, are growing up to be quite capable of handling whatever hardships come their way. Likewise, in Asia, the percentage of young people who are being raised to understand that they must soon shoulder the responsibility of the future is quite high.
And elsewhere in the world – outside the sphere of the EU, US, Canada, etc. – the same is largely true. As has been forever true throughout history, civilization does not come to a halt. It’s a "movable feast" that merely changes geographic locations from one era to another. Always, as one star burns out, another takes its place. What’s of paramount importance is to read the tea leaves – to see the future coming and adjust for it."
"Ukrainian Counteroffensive Runs Into Defensive Wall"
By Scott Ritter
"Over the course of the past few days, Ukraine has thrown two of its best-trained, best-equipped mechanized brigades into offensive operations against entrenched Russian defenders in the Zaporozhye sector of the front lines. These two brigades had been hand-picked for this job, having been equipped with modern Western tanks and infantry fighting vehicles, supported by Western-supplied artillery, and using NATO-specific tactics shaped by NATO-provided intelligence and NATO operational planning. In short, these two brigades represented a top-level NATO-level capability, the epitome of the nexus between Ukraine and the Collective West in their ongoing war to destroy Russia.
As the world comes to grips with the imagery of destroyed US-manufactured M-2 Bradley infantry fighting vehicles and German-made Leopard 2A6 tanks abandoned and burning on the Ukrainian steppe, the harsh truth regarding the futility of its larger designs - the strategic defeat of Russia - is starting to sink in.
The reality, however, is that Ukraine was never going to achieve its stated objective of punching through the Russian defenses to sever the land bridge connecting Crimea with Russia proper. This was pie-in-the-sky thinking promulgated by Ukraine’s Western supporters to motivate the Ukrainians into committing the equivalent of mass suicide to inflict similarly prohibitive casualties among the Russian defenders. The Western hope was that Russia would become demoralized by these casualties and accept a negotiated end to the conflict on terms acceptable to both Ukraine and its Western allies.
The genesis of this failure can be traced to two things. First, the low-opinion Ukraine and their NATO allies had regarding the combat capabilities of the Russian army, and in particular those forces deployed in the Zaporozhye region, and second, the unrealistic expectations assigned to NATO training and equipment that had been provided to the Ukrainian forces assigned the task of breaking through the Russian defenses.
The area selected by Ukraine and its NATO partners as the focus of effort for the counteroffensive was held by the 42nd Guards Motorized Rifle Division, part of the 58th Combined Arms Army. The Institute for the Study of War, a US-based think tank with close ties to US and NATO, claimed that the troops of the 42nd Guards Motorized Rifle Division “are predominantly comprised of mobilized recruits and volunteers and are therefore likely to face some problems with poor training and discipline.” Moreover, it accused at least one of the subordinate regiments - the 70th motorized rifle regiment - of performing poorly during the initial phases of the Special Military Operation in 2022.
It is therefore reasonable to believe that NATO and Ukrainian military planners, using intelligence assessments that highlighted perceived command and control weaknesses and poor morale among the Russian forces which, when combined with poor past performance, believed that the Russian defenses in the Zaporozhye sector manned by the 42nd Guards Motorized Rifle Division would collapse under the weight of a NATO-style assault, allowing Ukrainian forces to penetrate deep into the Russian defenses.
While the fighting in Zaporozhye is not yet finished, the initial results on the battlefield show that, contrary to the expectations of Ukraine and its NATO partners, the men of the 42nd Guards Rifle Division performed their tasks in a professional manner, decisively defeating the Ukrainian assault forces. The 70th Motorized Rifle Regiment has been singled out as performing very well under difficult circumstances. The same can be said of the 291st Motorized Rifle Regiment and the 71st Motorized Rifles Regiment, along with special forces soldiers from the 22nd Spetsnaz Brigade. Analysts from ISW, in assessing the initial successes of the Russian defenders, noted that “Russian forces appear to have executed their formal tactical defensive doctrine in response to the Ukrainian attacks.”
This, of course, should have taken no one by surprise, since the individual in command of Russian forces in the Zaporozhye area is Colonel General Alexander Romanchuk, the man who is responsible for conceiving modern Russian defensive doctrine. In April 2023 Romanchuk, who at that time was serving as the Rector of the Combined Arms Academy of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation (the equivalent of the United States Army’s Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth), co-authored an article titled “Prospects for Improving the Efficiency of Army Defensive Operations.”
In the article, Romanchuk noted that the main mission of a defending force “is to neutralize the initiative of the advancing enemy, i.e., to bring him to the state of impossibility to continue advancing with deployed forces. Ultimately, this allows you to reduce his activity and seize the initiative by going over to a decisive counter-offensive to defeat the enemy with shock groups.”
This represents a restatement of Soviet-era doctrine. Indeed, Romanchuk draws upon the defeat of German offensive operations in the vicinity of Lake Balaton in March 1945 as representing an ideal implementation of this doctrine, underscoring “a bold maneuver of the reserves…especially artillery, the skillful use of anti-tank reserves, vigilant detachments of obstacles and the arrangement of fire ambushes” by the Russian forces in defeating the German attack.
Romanchuk, however, did not simply reiterate old doctrine in his paper. Instead, he emphasizes the concept of “dispersed forces” in building a defensive scheme capable of prevailing on the modern battlefield. “A dispersed defensive operation should become a logical response to a superior enemy,” Romanchuk writes.
Such an operation “is based on the retention of important areas, objects and transport hubs in separate most important directions,” and is “characterized by an even distribution of forces and resources in areas, and decentralized use of formations and military units of the armed forces and special forces.”
Romanchuk then went on to describe the ideal deployment scheme for these “dispersed forces” - one which focuses on three separate “zones of defense responsibility” separated by distances of between 8 and 12 kilometers. These gaps are covered by Russian artillery. The first “zone” is the “cover” zone, whose task is to define the main axes of the enemy’s advance. The next “zone” is the “main line of defense”, which is designed to halt enemy attacks using obstacle belts and fire power (artillery and air strikes). The last “zone” is the “reserve”, which is responsible for mounting counterattacks designed to push the attacking forces back to their original positions.
Romanchuk’s doctrine was the blueprint for the Russian defensive scheme employed in Zaporozhye. Indeed, Romanchuk was pulled from his teaching position at the Combined Arms Academy and put in command of the Zaporozhye sector. In other words, the place chosen by NATO and Ukrainian intelligence as the “weak spot” in the Russian defensive scheme was designed by Russia’s top specialist in defensive combat and placed under his direct command.
NATO and Ukraine gambled that Russia lacked the military capacity to successfully implement its own military doctrine, believing that Russian command staffs lacked the communications necessary to coordinate the complex operations necessary to implement this doctrine, and that the Russian forces - especially those who were recently mobilized - lacked both the training and morale needed to perform well under stressful combat conditions.
NATO and Ukraine’s poor assessment of Russian military capability mirrored their own exaggerated assessments of Ukrainian units tasked with attacking the Russian defenses in Zaporozhye, namely the 33rd and 47th Mechanized Brigades. Both units were the recipients of modern NATO equipment, including Leopard tanks (the 33rd) and Bradley infantry fighting vehicles (the 47th). The officers and men of both units had been provided with the best training NATO could provide regarding modern combined-arms operations, including weeks of specialized training in Germany which focused on platoon, company, and battalion tactics and operations integrating firepower and maneuver while undertaking offensive operations.
The Ukrainian troops, working side by side with their NATO instructors, started by using computer simulations to introduce them to the complexities of the modern battlefield, before moving to the field for realistic hands-on training using the very NATO-provided equipment they would use against the Russians. US “experts” like Mark Hertling, a retired US Army general believed that the combination of advanced western military equipment and superior NATO-style tactics “will allow Ukraine’s emerging combined-arms teams to conduct high-tempo maneuver” capable of overwhelming the Russian defenders in Ukraine.
Hertling and his active-duty NATO brethren would have done well to listen to the words of General Christopher Cavoli, NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe, when speaking before a Swedish defense conference this past January. “The scale of this war [i.e., the Russian-Ukraine conflict] is out of proportion with all of our recent thinking,” Cavoli noted.
The takeaway from this revelation is that NATO is neither trained nor equipped to fight the kind of fight they are demanding Ukraine execute against Russia. The sad truth of the matter is that there are no NATO forces capable of successfully executing the offensive tasks that have been assigned to Ukraine. No one doubts the courage and commitment of the Ukrainian forces which have been thrown against Colonel General Romanchuk’s defensive barrier. But courage and commitment cannot overcome the reality that NATO lacks the ability, both in terms of equipment and doctrine, to successfully defeat Russia in a force-on-force confrontation, especially one which has Russia playing to its doctrinal strength (defensive operations) while NATO seeks to do something (an assault against prepared defenses) that it has no experience in doing.
Moreover, NATO and the Ukrainian high command threw the Ukrainian brigades into the teeth of the Russian defensive buzzsaw without adequate fire support, meaning that the Russians were free to maximize their superiority in artillery and air power to neutralize and destroy the Ukrainian attacking forces before they could generate the momentum expected from “high-tempo maneuver.”
The end result: Russian reality trumped NATO theory on the battlefield, and it is Ukraine’s military that once again paid the heaviest price. Moreover, there is no reason to believe that this situation will change anytime soon, if ever, a fact that bodes poorly for the future of Ukraine and NATO going forward."
Hat tip to The Burning Platform for this material.
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Full screen recommended.
Hindustan Time, 6/11/23
"Russian Forces Crush Zelensky's Soldiers in Donetsk;
Ukrainian Strongholds Pounded, Attacks Foiled"
"Russian troops repelled Ukrainian attacks in the Soledar-Bakhmut direction. Russian Aviation Units reportedly hit Ukrainian strongholds in a number of cities in Donetsk region amid reports that Ukraine has already launched its counteroffensive. Russian Defence Ministry said Ukrainian forces had in the past 24 hours made "unsuccessful" attempts at attacking Southern Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia regions which are the two areas subject to heavy fighting recently. Watch this video for the latest update from the battleground."
Arsenals Being Deployed In War - Pantsir Missiles"
"Also known as SA-22 Greyhound, the Pantsir missile system embodies a combination of advanced technology, mobility, and firepower. Its alternate name, "Carapace," alludes to the impenetrable armor of a turtle, further emphasizing its defensive strength and resilience on the battlefield. Operating on mobile, ground-based platforms, the Pantsir missile system is designed to counter a wide range of threats, including aircraft, helicopters, drones, and precision-guided munitions. It is equipped with both surface-to-air missiles and rapid-fire cannons, providing a layered defense against aerial targets."
"Professor Mark Crispin Miller teaches media studies at New York University (NYU) and is an expert in propaganda. Dr. Miller says just about everything concerning Covid was simply an elaborate exercise in propaganda. Dr. Miller explains, “The propaganda dimension is crucial to our understanding of what went down. Some people like to say this is a result of a number of ‘blunders’ by the health authorities and the government. ‘Blunders.’ No, these are not ‘blunders.’ When everything they recommend is deleterious and destructive of people’s health, when they suppress the truth about life saving remedies in furtherance of this so-called ‘vaccination program,’ and when the so-called ‘vaccines’ have abysmal records for safety and effectiveness and those records are all hidden, we cannot reasonably conclude this is all the result of ‘blunders.’
I have called the period from 2020 through the present a ‘Propaganda Masterpiece.’ Covid and every aspect of that whole crisis was engineered with extreme brilliance and sophistication of a propaganda operation. This was followed by the George Floyd moment. This served a number of purposes quite in line with the Covid crisis, which is to shut down society, cripple the economy and destroy the middle class. Also, another important aspect of this whole propaganda epic has been to divide the American people. No matter what side of the struggle we are on, what matters is the struggle took place at all. It is deeply divisive.
Dr, Miller goes on to say, “I know a lot about propaganda, and this is unprecedented in the history of mass persuasion. There has never been anything like this because this is global. This has never happened before. We had Stalin’s crimes. We had Hitler’s aggression and the Holocaust. We had 911 and the ‘War on Terror.’ None of those actually begin to compare to what we have now because what we have now is planetary. It’s worldwide.”
Dr. Miller does not call the CV19 bioweapon/vax a genocide. He says it is really a global democide. Meaning everyone and anyone is being murdered with the CV19 bioweapon/vax. Dr. Miller says, “My Substack is called ‘Died Suddenly.’ I started it in February of 2022 when I noticed many, many people were dying suddenly for no given reason. In the history of obituaries, certainly in the United States, that is unprecedented. Obituaries always tell you why somebody died. Even if the person is very, very old, you have a cause of death. Now, all kinds of people are dropping dead for no reason and often very young. We do a weekly overview with as many pictures of these people as possible. This is the point. There are many statistical claims of the numbers of people who are dying. But as Stalin said, ‘One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.’ This is brutal, cynical wisdom, and he was absolutely right. If you read 1 million people starved in Ukraine, you say that’s too bad. If you look at page after page after page of people’s faces and names with the names of their survivors, it’s not so easy to shrug off.”
During the so-called “Covid Pandemic” (October 2020), Dr. Miller was teaching a propaganda class at NYU, and one of the subjects covered was the science around wearing masks that show they were ineffective for stopping Covid. We now know wearing masks was more propaganda than any sort of protection from the CV19 infection. More than 2 dozen professors wanted Professor Miller fired for going against the official narrative or propaganda. According to Dr. Miller, they said all sorts of things that are not true. Dr. Miller says, “They made me out to be a monster.” Dr. Miller sued, and so far, the suit has been dismissed by two New York courts. In the last dismissal, the court ruled the lies told about Dr. Miller are simply an opinion.
Dr. Miller is appealing and says, “From now on, the have nots, the dissidents who have good reason and solid ground for suing for liable and those who defame us won’t be able to do it anymore because anything that is said about us can be defended on the grounds that it is just an opinion, and opinion is protected by the First Amendment. This second decision is catastrophic for free speech. The people who have the power and the money will still sue for libel, and they will sue people like us. They will sue people who contradict prevailing narratives.” USAWatchdog.com will be following this important appeal. There is much more in the 1-hour and 7-minute interview.
"The numbers don’t add up in the economy. We are being told that we are now in a “bull market“ for the stock market. Bank of America just stepped forward and said “sell all stocks“ Foreclosures are rising in the United States right now."
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