Some People Continue ...

... to mistake my manner of speaking (and writing) as schadenfreude or me being an outright crass and brute. Nothing even close. Here is the demonstration. I spoke about this for years, not because I don't like Europe or Europeans--I am a Western man, after all--but because my BS meter is extremely sensitive. So, Davos for you ...

I will repeat again what I repeat ad nauseam on this blog for the last 12 years: nobody cares what the capitalization of Tesla is, it produced and continues to produce pseudo-advanced jalopies for the consumption by people who didn't study physics, same goes for anything by Bernard Arnault's empire producing overpriced junk for selling to riff-raff nouveau riches (no, this is not oxymoron) to make them feel rich. But, but ... reality of the planet of ours is such that the only thing which defines the zeitgeist is COFM--Correlation of Forces and Means--which in itself is a direct consequence of the advanced scientific-industrial economy capable to produce the best machines, including, of course, killing ones. 

So, Europe finally has arrived to the status of what I was talking about for many years--decomposing corpse of once great civilization and utter military impotence. COFM is a cruel bitch, it doesn't care how you look like or what kind of pseudo-military show you put on. Here is a demonstration.

An amused Russian cruise missile Kh-101 looks at the Patriot PAC3 trying to acquire it, develop firing solution and then shoot it down. You can see yourself how the whole thing went down. People already mentioned here that the combined West, the US included, is defenseless. Well, it is. COFM, my friends, COFM. 

Well, That Is True ...

 ... to a very large extent, but let's not forget your first term in which arming 404 went into overdrive. 

Trump described the conflict between Russia and Ukraine as “Biden’s war.” “This is not my war. I’ve been here for a very short period of time... He gave them billions and billions of dollars. He should have never allowed – If he had any brain, which he didn’t have and doesn’t have… – that war to start.” “I think frankly he [Russian President Vladimir Putin] had so little respect for Biden that he started it for that reason. And obviously, he didn't get along very well with [Ukraine’s Vladimir] Zelensky or anybody else. And now you have millions of dead people, and those people – every one of them – should be alive right now,” Trump added.

But by the looks of it and by the yet another mess in your national security team still dominated by neocons and warmongers, you learned absolutely nothing in terms of foreign policy the first time around. Now, you are issuing risible "deadlines" being the head of a loser in this war and you are on your way of making this war yours.

Meanwhile, one of the greatest statesmen of our time responds:

MOSCOW, April 14 - RIA Novosti. Russia and the United States have not yet agreed on the key parameters of the agreement on the settlement in Ukraine during the contacts, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said. "No," the minister said, answering a question from the Kommersant newspaper whether it was possible to formulate the main parameters of the agreement during Russian-American contacts. "The key components of the settlement are not easy to agree on... They are being discussed," he stressed.

You see, reality is a bitch and the only thing being discussed today, once all of the layers of diplomatic pigeon speak, pathos, protocols and PR are peeled off, is how much Moscow is willing to save whatever remains of the American face in this conflict which the US lost by a mile. 

James Kunstler gets to the heart of the matter:

Town and country, what human society at its best was composed of, has got to be rearranged. This is something that MAGA is not talking about. MAGA looks like it is seeking a reenactment of the years 1950 to 1964. That isn’t going to happen. What then? The tech broz propose something that looks like an A-I printed robotic future. They are drunk on their own Stanford University brand Kool-Aid, hallucinating a future that is little more than math dressed in spandex.

We live in the now, and no matter how we convulse--it is the COFM (Correlation of Forces and Means) which defines global dynamics. We better learn to live with this. Modern world is nothing but an entangled web of differential equations and probabilities thrown at us and we better grasp its complexity.