Another One Bites The Dust...

... figuratively speaking.  

The Senior Director for Europe at the US National Security Council, Amanda Sloat, is about to vacate her position after three years in office, Politico reported on Friday. Sloat played a major role in coordinating the efforts of the US and its Western allies in aiding Kiev and countering Moscow amid the conflict between Ukraine and Russia, the media outlet reported. “It has been an amazing three years, but it’s time. I’m tired,” the official herself told Politico this week as she confirmed her impending resignation. Amanda Sloat has been a “quiet but key figure” behind the White House's efforts to improve relations with its European allies and oppose Moscow, the outlet said. She reportedly “spent months” coordinating a Western response to the Russian military campaign in Ukraine, which particularly translated into billions of dollars in military and economic assistance for Kiev, the report said. 

Well, what can I say, after looking at this young lady's background. 

Amanda Sloat currently serves on the National Security Council as the Senior Director for Europe. Previously, she was the Robert Bosch senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. She was also a fellow with the Project on Europe and the Transatlantic Relationship at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. Sloat served in the U.S. government for nearly a decade. She was deputy assistant secretary for Southern Europe and Eastern Mediterranean Affairs at the State Department, where she was responsible for U.S. relations with Cyprus, Greece, and Turkey as well as for coordinating European engagement on Middle East issues. She also served as senior advisor to the White House coordinator for the Middle East, North Africa and Gulf region and as senior advisor to the assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs. She previously worked as senior professional staff on the U.S. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, with responsibility for European policy.

Prior to her government service, Sloat was a senior program officer with the National Democratic Institute, including work in Iraq with the Council of Representatives. She was also a post-doctoral research fellow with the Institute of Governance at Queen's University Belfast. During this time, she held visiting fellowships at the Academy of Sciences in the Czech Republic, United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, and the Jean Monnet Center at New York University Law School. She also served as a special advisor to the Scottish Parliament, Northern Ireland Assembly, and European Commission. Sloat holds a doctorate in politics from the University of Edinburgh and a bachelor's in political theory from James Madison College at Michigan State University. She has published a book, "Scotland in Europe: A Study of Multi-Level Governance" (Peter Lang Pub Inc, 2002). She has written widely on European politics in academic and foreign policy outlets.

The only conclusion I made was that she is not an ugly woman. But in terms of her competencies or rather lack thereof, she is a classic "product" of Western degree mills in what is known as "soft degrees" designed to teach academically credentialed Bullshit for good ol' boys and girls to get their degrees in order to be promoted into the all kinds of think-tank and government jobs in the West. So, she is an exhibit A of that. She may, however, qualify for barista position in Starbucks. I am on record--you see a Ph.D degree in political "science", international relations or "political theory" from Harvard, Oxford or Yale, and other degree mills with similar pseudo-academic courses--treat those as the red flags, since most of the time you will be communicating with utterly incompetent people. 

And here comes this issue--what this academic fraud could "coordinate", as Politico puts it:

Sloat’s tenure at the NSC was dominated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. She spent months on little sleep coordinating a response with European allies and warning Ukrainian counterparts that Russian President Vladimir Putin planned for a full-scale assault. U.S. officials have said Sloat ensured the transatlantic response was aligned and robust, leading to billions in military and economic support for Kyiv. Not everyone is happy with the administration’s policy. They contend more advanced weaponry should have been sent to Kyiv in the war’s earliest days, pointing to Ukraine’s sputtering counteroffensive this year as evidence. And they also questioned the wisdom of the U.S. allowing the construction of the Russia-to-Germany Nord Stream 2 pipeline to finish, a decision that Germany reversed after the war started.

No, I really want to see itemization of this ensuring by this post-doctoral barista of this robust "transatlantic response". Of course, we will not get this itemization because any "ensuring" of anything in the transatlantic community is merely a single action of conveying the message from Washington--fall in line, or else. So, the whole idea that some relatively attractive bimbo who has zero professional skills in anything can "coordinate" something is down right preposterous. Starting from W's Administration after 9/11 US military-political top didn't present a single decent, forget about world class, diplomat, military leader or statesman. General Tommy Franks once clearly described what he had to deal with when communicating with Douglas Feith: "I have to deal with the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth almost every day."   

What is true today is that the types Tommy Franks described are the ONLY types required for work in the US Administrations. They are the ultimate product of pseudo-academic courses in Western humanities degree mills. The fact that this, obvious, affirmative action lowly bureaucrat is bowing out is merely an indication of the rats running from the sinking ship which is not just Biden Administration but the whole governance structure of the US. Of course, one shouldn't forget that the roles of many people in Biden Admin and US "academe" and media in unleashing a largest war crime since the WW II in what is now former Ukraine are well known, as are their identities and functional responsibilities in what amounts to killing and maiming of around 2 million people, primarily VSU personnel, not to mention atrocities committed by Kiev Nazi regime. 

So, this bimbo runs away because she may well be, most likely will be, identified as one of the "coordinators" of this atrocity, however not the main one, and she could be charged with war crimes as an active part of Administration which is fully responsible for war crimes of the scale not seen in Europe in almost 80 years. In this case, one has to almost envy Kamala Harris, because she is so stupid and unqualified for anything that her being a part of Biden Administration will be attributed to her mental feebleness and she will be left alone. Not the case with this "coordinator". Then the question arises, will the United States reach this phase which is described so aptly by James Kunstler:

So far, the collapse of suburbia has happened in slow motion, but the pace is quickening now and it’ll get supercharged when the bond markets go down, as they must, considering the country’s catastrophic fiscal circumstances. That will produce exactly the zombie apocalypse telegraphed in all those movies and TV series over recent years: normality overrun by demonic hungry ghosts. Every day in suburbia will be Halloween, and not in a fun way. All this is apprehended to some degree by the increasingly frightened public, though they have a hard time articulating it within any of the popular frameworks presented by politics, religion, or what appears lately to be extremely corrupt science. The people see what’s coming but they can’t make sense of it, and the stress makes a great many of them insane. Without a way to construct a coherent view of reality, or tell the difference between what’s real and what’s not, they behave accordingly: anything goes and nothing matters.

The US is already half-way there, and once the center refuses to hold anymore--this is in the progress as I type this--the inevitable question of who brought the United States to utter collapse will arise. Well, it is arising now, actually, and many who brought this about are well known. We just learned the identity of yet another one who helped America on her way out of normality. But then again, what do you expect from post-doctoral barista.

Fifteen Years Ago...

... on this date: 080808.  

The date Russia has made first statement about her arriving back from the near death. I recall all those "military experts", especially a bunch of shysters from Russia, promising that Russians will be defeated because US "trained" Georgian Army. US learned absolutely nothing since then. We all know thee result of that 5-day war. US "trained" Army disintegrated when faced with real combined arms. 

This is the type of human trash the US views as its "allies". 

But today something begins to trickle down even into the sewer of American media and clueless politicos:

Read my lips, you also may quote me on that: there is NO understanding of modern war in the US across the board, including most of American military. There is also NO serious strategist in the US who has a clear view of the formation of balance of power and how serious militaries write their doctrines. That is why I see sincere attempts by Daniel Larison to challenge one of the leading American "strategists" as misplaced and having all signs of the Sisyphus Labor.

Walter Russell Mead sells a pack of lies:

President Barack Obama was the Great Denialist in geopolitics, temporizing and tap dancing, appeasing and apologizing as an axis of anti-American revisionist powers consisting of China, Russia, Iran and their satellites stepped up their resistance and began to coordinate policies.

If anyone is being a revisionist here, it’s Mead with his wildly distorted description of Obama’s foreign policy record. Obama got many things wrong as president from Libya to Yemen, but the idea that he spent his eight years “appeasing and apologizing” while an “axis” of revisionists emerged is nothing but lazy propaganda from a bad analyst. The old lie of Obama’s imaginary “apology tour” is still with us almost fifteen years later, and it is even more ridiculous now than it was then. 

The US has only a handful of people, who also are the exception to the rule of a wholesale sheer military illiteracy, who are capable of speaking on and understanding how actual strategy is developed and implemented. Walter Russel Mead is not one of them. 99% of America's "strategists" are people with NO systemic military education, knowledge of history and the only skill those people have as the result of their "degrees" in the so called "strategic studies" from Ivy League humanities degree mills is juxtaposing of carefully selected facts. Walter Russel Mead has degree in English Literature from Yale and never served a day in any military or intel capacity. So, the fact that he teaches Clausewitz and Sun Tzu's one-liners in the times of neural networks, space-based ISR and hyper-sonic weapons whose physics and math he cannot possibly understand, tells you everything you need to know about America's "Strategy" academe. It also explains why those are incapable of talking in anything but pseudo-strategic platitudes--a euphemism for BS. 

In other words, Mead has zero qualifications for speaking and writing on modern geopolitics and strategy, because to do so one has to have the tool kit of looking at strategy in conjunction with operational level--two levels at which wars are won or lost and which require the depth. And that's the point I make for years--one cannot continue to merely challenge the BS fountaining from the deep recesses of US "academia" and think-tankdom, one has to challenge qualifications, that is to say start operating in the ad hominem mode, when dealing with a cabal of uncultured, unread, illiterate Ph.D shysters who toil for the benefit of America's homicidal foreign policy and military adventurism. Yes, they lie, but many of them sincerely believe those lies. That is why the ONLY American real strategist of true international repute, Alfred Thayer Mahan, was a graduate of the US Naval Academy, has been a cadre naval officer with combat experience all his life, and retired in the rank of Admiral. 

Military degrees and experiences in and of themselves do not guarantee from stupidity and fraud, enough to look at US generals at the so called ISW, or read US "doctrinal" documents, but it is time to finally start calling all those white board "strategists", who wouldn't know how operations are planned or insulate themselves from inconvenient facts of the America's grossly exaggerated military history, for what they are--frauds and shysters who know only pseudo-military verbiage and have no clue about the real history of the last two centuries. And it was on this date fifteen years ago when they have been taught the first lesson in real continental combined arms warfare. 

Or, as quoting Lieutenant-General Klokotov, at the time of the Gulf War the chief of the Strategy Department of Academy of the General Staff (guess from three times if "strategist" Mead and ilk will be even able to pass entrance exams there): 

“I would like to emphasize here that the Persian Gulf war was taken as the standard in studying the strategic nature of possible war. It would appear that this position, adopted in the draft ‘Fundamentals of Russian Military Doctrine,’ is dangerous. The fact is that this war [was] ‘strange’ in all respects [and] cannot serve as a standard.”

On August 8th, 2008 Russian Armed Forces started their healing and return to their proper shape allowing them to fight and defeat  combined NATO forces. The rest is history, but they don't teach it in the US anymore. 

Yale University "Study".

We start first, though, with the piece of bio of this guy: Jeffrey Sonnenfeld.

Born in Philadelphia on April 1st, 1954 to Jewish parents, Jeffrey Sonnenfeld is the son of Burton Sonnenfeld, a men's clothing retailer, and Rochelle Sonnenfeld, a healthcare and community leader. Sonnenfeld's mother, Rochelle, originally immigrated to the United States from the former Russian Empire in the 1920s. Sonnenfeld earned his AB, MBA, and doctorate at Harvard University. At age 26, he joined the faculty of the Harvard Business School where he taught for 10 years. After a decade at Emory University, Sonnenfeld joined the faculty at Yale, bringing with him the CEO College and launching the Chief Executive Leadership Institute. At Yale, he built a new department of Executive Programs, offering 35 programs a year to roughly 2,000 top leaders with sessions in New Haven, New York City, Beijing, New Delhi, Mumbai, and Shanghai, and opened Yale University's first outpost in Washington, D.C. in 2011. His 2007 book, Firing Back (with Andrew Ward, Harvard Business School Press), studies the paths to resilience for felled CEOs, as well as victims from natural disasters, warfare, and other forms of disruption and adversity. At Yale SOM, Sonnenfeld teaches the popular course "Strategic Leadership Across Sectors", which is consistently the school's most popular and oversubscribed course. Sonnenfeld's previous students from Harvard, Emory, and Yale have gone on to become CEOs and leaders in a wide variety of fields. Sonnenfeld continues to be active in the local community and currently resides in Connecticut with his wife, Clarky, and their two daughters, Sophie and Lauren. 

So, basically, the guy is a glorified accountant who teaches a BS course in Yale and who, together with few of his brainwashed students studying BS he preaches, have commissioned a report about catastrophic sanctions on Russia. So, "vigilant" as ever, Euro mediahacks invited this creep to comment on how sanctions "work on Russia". 

And pay attention to the shot of Russia's empty shelves. The report concocted by those ignoramuses from Yale is hilarious. Enough to read this piece of "analysis" and data handling, LOL. 

Russia’s strategic positioning as a commodities exporter has irrevocably deteriorated, as it now deals from a position of weakness with the loss of its erstwhile main markets, and faces steep challenges executing a “pivot to Asia” with non-fungible exports such as piped gas – as we explain further in Section II of this paper.

And other desperate impotent rage BS which passes in Yale for "scientific research", but among American "scholars" it is normal--to sublimate their childhood complexes and lack of culture, of which Sonnenfeld is exhibit A, into all kinds of wet dreams despite facts showing this research being a hack work, as it is a pretty normal MO of most of Western economists and economic "analysts". So read the whole "paper" which is filled with American "economics" and "extrapolations" by academic frauds--it is hilarious. 

So a simple guy, who visits typical Russian stores can easily out the whole Yale University "leadership" and "economics" programs as frauds, which they are.

But, as was stated not for once by me--Western "Russia Studies" field is occupied by academic frauds who pretend to do a real research and are gladly engaged by Western propaganda machine headed by media. 

But to demonstrate what fraud, academically and ideologically, this cabal in Yale is, take a look at this:
   

So, while reporting on ONLY Chinese imports of Russian oil, which grows, this fraudster posts a "dramatic" graph of the discounts Russia uses in selling its Urals which she... always did. Moreover, this snake oil peddler forgets to mention:

1. Russia's costs of oil extraction are between $10-15 per barrel, while Russian budget is based on $40-45 price of barrel of Urals. Which, when we consider the base price of Brent as $95, even with $35 discount, still gets us to (I know, Sonnenfeld, obviously has issues with arithmetic) gives us 95-35=60. Yes, Russia still makes a killing selling to China with such a discount. 

2. Russia already has in works own benchmark and the rubles for oil is coming, whether fraudsters at Yale want it or not. They also miss this news:

Poor, poor dears. It is so much more difficult to package and sell BS in a form of analysis, nowadays. Except for their own brainwashed and ignorant students, but that is the main function of the modern American education from kindergarten to Ivy League--to mentally and emotionally damage students and turn them into nothing more than biomass and consumers. In fact, Sonnenfeld is so dramatically unaware of the BS he spews, especially when speaking about Russian-Chinese trade relations that he provides a terminal illness of the US as a... proof of... Russia's damage from sanctions. 

The question is not that Russian-Chinese trade grows, nope, the question is that the US will cease economically in case China stops being US main supplier of a huge variety of products, and the fact that China exports more than half-a-trillion dollars worth of stuff ranging from socks to machinery to the US is, evidently, presented by Sonnenfeld as the advantage, when in reality being a curse both for the US and China. Plus, of course, Sonnenfeld, being a product of fake "economic science" has little understanding of the fact that China cannot meet her national security needs without Russia, especially against unified West, while Russia is not only can do it without China, but effectively is already doing it, and doing it well. But then again, trying to explain all this to American Ivy League "economist" is an exercise in futility. 

And so it goes, 118 pages of utter delirium, detached from reality, concocted by people who wouldn't be able to run a paid restroom inside Chevron gas station without bankrupting it, is presented as "analysis". These, my friends, are people who pass in the West for "elites" and these are precisely the people who practically wrecked the United States, let alone Europe, based on their sheer arrogance, ignorance, lack of culture and desperate desire to settle scores, which assumes at least a brief acquaintance with warfare and national security issues, but as they addressed Apollo 13 Flight Control Center:"Houston, we've had a problem here."(c) And it grows bigger. With "academicians" like this bunch from Yale, they will never be fixed and they will lead to final collapse. And don't worry about them feeling shame while lying--honor, academic integrity and class left Western political and educational establishment long time ago. It is gone.