Alastair Crooke And Gaius Baltar. A Selection Of Sorts.

Excellent pieces. But before I proceed, here is me more than seven years ago, namely the end of 2016, warning: 

But the truth remained unchanged no matter how one would try to obfuscate it, and I quote myself: "For COIN crowd, yet again--Combined Arms Operations remain a principal method of the Continental Warfare".   No, not the warfare designed to fight some backward Afghani dekhans in the environment of a complete firepower dominance, not some large Arab military designed to mostly march on the parades, but the warfare which would put serious armed forces on the opposite sides of a conflict and it was here where the main pillar of Pax Americana could hardly put anything as a shining example of a success.

After that I wrote my first book. I was repeating this, essentially truism, ad nauseam even before 2016. Thanks Per Norway (classyglasses), for pointing to Crooke's piece The Fabric of Reality. Crooke makes a critical observation: 

It is a significant point: Ideas, conceptualisations and history may be shut down and cancelled by the command of the ‘masters of dogma’, but the space these intellectual vessels once occupied is still ethereally there -- to rise again in challenge to dogma. The massive polarization occurring today in the world is not simply geopolitical. It is not simply a competition over resources, or even simply a rivalry based on trade relationships. The conflict between Western élites and the rest of humanity, as Emmanuel Todd has suggested in La Défaite, is the result of the West “falling into nihilism and the deification of nothing”. Todd defined this nihilism as “the desire for destruction, but also of the negation of reality. There are no longer any traces of religion, but the human being is still there.”

As you all know, I always look at the world through military prism, but I also am on record that the conflict is metaphysical in nature, it transcends pure politics or even economics. Yet, as Bronislaw Malinowski stated “Another interesting point in the study of aggression is that, like charity, it begins at home.” We can say today that even here West failed, since Vietnam substituting the meaning of war with semantic equivalent of beating the crap from brown people with impunity. But they never read Tolstoy:

On the twelfth of June, 1812, the forces of Western Europe crossed the Russian frontier and war began, that is, an event took place opposed to human reason and to human nature. Millions of men perpetrated against one another such innumerable crimes, frauds, treacheries, thefts, forgeries, issues of false money, burglaries, incendiarisms, and murders as in whole centuries are not recorded in the annals of all the law courts of the world, but which those who committed them did not at the time regard as being crimes. 

War, real war, not blowing up Afghan weddings from the sky, is a horror and it is conventionally a combined arms, or its earlier iteration, that is how it has been for the last three centuries. But Western "elites" have no grasp of it, albeit this is slowly changing. I plan tomorrow to talk about how they maybe are nearing realization that they cannot stop anything if it comes to the ultimate outcome. They have no reason and their nature is that of an animal. They do, however, feel the fear and that is how they will live their days out--in fear. The man they would rather not talk about yesterday issued a warning to them. They have a barrel at their temple. 

Which brings us to an excellent piece by Gaius Baltar at Larry's Blog:

Things are bleak in Europe these days. European leaders are caught in a “fight or flight” response, deciding whether they should run and hide or send troops into Ukraine to fight the Menace from the East. However, the existential terror of Emmanuel Macron and his toxic-narcissist accomplices in the EU will have to wait for a dedicated article because this one will focus on the European economy. It has puzzled many how the EU has been managing its economy since the beginning of the Ukraine war. There have been two distinct shocks inflicted upon the Eurozone economy since then. The third shock, which may be the worst, is on the way. All of them are direct results of European policies.

Read it, it is a good reminder of reality being a bitch. Europe is over. It is in panic, but no one is coming to save it and it must be quarantined. The US? 

CNN  —Nearly a third, or 28%, of Gen Z adults in the United States identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer, a larger share than older generations, according to a new report by PRRI, a nonprofit that conducts research on religion, values and public policy. The report, titled “A political and cultural glimpse into America’s future,” sought to highlight the cultural and political views of Gen Z adults, compared with older Americans. Researchers surveyed more than 6,600 people ages 13 to over 65, with oversamples of Gen Z adults and teens between August 21 to September 15, 2023. The report found about 16% of Millennials and 7% of Baby Boomers identify as LGBTQ. But among Gen Z adults ages 18–25, 72% identified as straight, 15% as bisexual, 5% as gay or lesbian and 8% as “something else,” according to the report. About 20% of Americans are Gen Z, according to PRRI. 

This is how the end looks like. Combined arms you say?