A Hectic Activity

In the West, because the outcome is clear and they do not know what to do. I would say they never knew and here is the proof. 

Russia is a "great nation" which is now actively seeking a new "destiny," French President Emmanuel Macron said on Thursday. The conflict between Moscow and Kiev has become part of this search, the French leader believes, adding that the West would only see a lasting peace if it contributed to this process through a dialogue with Russia. "Russia as a power … is searching for a [new] self and [is] looking for a destiny," Macron told Spain’s daily El Pais in a lengthy interview. "Russia is a … great nation, territorially and historically," he pointed out, also calling Russians a "great people." Macron admitted that Russia’s revival in the 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union was a "very difficult" period. Now, Russia is standing in front of another "abyss," with its future "at stake," Macron stated. While accusing Moscow of "imperialist" ambitions and a desire to decide the fate of its neighbors, the French president still maintained that the West should somehow help Russia find its destiny.

How this piece of work is taken seriously by anybody is beyond me. In Russia he is a butt of the jokes, some of them not for the public arena, and that's the difference--majority of Russians laugh at modern Western "elites". Macron already, together with people like Hollande and Merkel, are written in history as pathetic lap-dogs who finished off Europe as a whole, while Macron destroyed what was left of France. It is a panopticon of midgets and their media sycophants, who themselves are human waste. 

Aren't we all yet taken aback by a degree of sheer incompetence of these people? As Alexander Rogers (in Russian) correctly stated (sadly Rogers' beautiful use of Russia's idiomatic treasures is difficult to fully convey in English) in one of his latest: Who the fuck are you to lecture me? He was reacting to a piece in TAC by a dedicated libertarian Reiganite Doug Bandow, who is completely out of his depth when speaking about Russia. He is not exception--he is a rule in the US "intellectual" milieu. My advise to all of them--learn the fucking subject before speaking on it. And Russia is hard to learn, both in language and history. Especially XX century. I can only repeat Margo Simonyan's advice, again:

I’ve been telling you for a long time to find normal advisers on Russia. Sack all those parasites.     

I can only repeat it. The West's Russia Studies field is a field of fraud and academic waste. Most of Russian history, its scale and scope are beyond the grasp of modern crop of America's "diplomats" and security "studies" graduates. There is now also a serious issue of barely contained complex of inferiority, especially a military one, when one considers an ongoing implosion of Pentagon's doctrinal assumptions, not to speak about military technology so advanced that a hectic activity to cover the loss of the arms race due to graft and military incompetence is ongoing as I type this. 

As late Father Robert Tobias wrote:

When of late in this (American) culture we turned our eyes to divine epiphanies, we perceived only two-dimensionality, not great depth. Perhaps that was provisionally inevitable in a culture dominated by two-dimensional television, movies, billboards, cameras and sports events.  

It is a truism, one cannot navigate a complex four-dimensional reality with a two-dimensional vision, but that is what modern West today is. And it cannot be fixed non-surgically anymore. There is a 50,000 grouping of VSU (and NATO "volunteers") around Seversk. It too will be obliterated and those in Pentagon who still can count and see reality know it. I think Larch is correct that this meeting:

The November meeting between the heads of the CIA and the SVR, two prominent foreign intelligence agencies in the US and Russia respectively, happened at the request of US President Joe Biden, Lavrov revealed. The US leader asked Russian President Vladimir Putin for the meeting, he said. CIA Director William Burns and SVR head Sergey Naryshkin met in Türkiye, but the US official didn’t say anything beyond Washington’s public stance, as is typical for “sporadic” US-Russian contacts, Lavrov remarked. Nevertheless, it had some value. It is the US whose policies have ruined bilateral relations with Russia, and it’s up to Washington to fix them, the diplomat added. “We will not be running after them saying ‘Let’s be friends again,’” he said.  

Was about Russia explaining to the US consequences of the US deciding to go nuclear. The United States has no defense. As Larry mentions this periodically, with Russia's development of ABM capabilities which already make US ones like a backwater, the US will find itself increasingly tempted to arrest the widening of the gap and considering serious psychiatric issues with neocon cabal driving what passes in Washington for US foreign policy, we cannot discard a scenario where the US will finally completely corner itself--she is already pretty close--and will be forced to make a suicidal decision. 

I speak about this, and other things, in my today's latest. 

The numbers are simply not there for the West, economically as well as militarily. This is your primer.

I Am Getting Tired Writing Posts With "No Shit" Or "Duh" Titles)))

Or, if you wish with "We told you so" titles. I wrote so much about US "intel" and how it is not really an intel that I don't have time to list all those occasions. But numbers of VSU (Nazi) losses during SMO which begin to circulate now give an impression on the progress of Russian operation in 404. Of course, all this info has a massive geopolitical impact, especially on the United States which, as always, came up with absolute BS narrative which is collapsing really fast. 

Well, NYT decided to start steering clear of this whole Russia "lost in Ukraine" BS it promoted together with neocon crazies, and begins this ever familiar tune of the "intel failure". Right. 

U.S. Lacks a Clear Picture of Ukraine's War Strategy, Officials Say

Hm, how about I put it bluntly--the U.S. never had clear picture on anything, especially on Russia, or, as a private case, SMO and completely bought into Ukie propaganda, which shows a complete incompetence of the "intel" in the US. 

Avril D. Haines, the director of national intelligence, testified at a Senate hearing last month that “it was very hard to tell” how much additional aid Ukraine could absorb. She added: “We have, in fact, more insight, probably, on the Russian side than we do on the Ukrainian side.” One key question is what measures Zelenskyy intends to call for in Donbas. Ukraine faces a strategic choice there: withdraw its forces or risk having them encircled by Russia.

Oh no, it is not "hard to tell", any person with a good professional military background and knowledge of Russia would have had no problems whatsoever forecasting the outcome. But those persons in the US are excluded from media and decision making circles and the US has NO serious strategic intelligence, period. Most what numerous US "think-tanks" produce is shit. 

“I’m not sure it’s in the interest of the American public or Ukrainian public to have Ukrainians be upfront about their losses if the result is it strengthens the Russian war effort,” Biddle said. “But that means we don’t really know both sides of the story.” The United States has better estimates of Russian casualties and equipment losses, a senior U.S. official said. The Defense Intelligence Agency, for example, estimates that the number of Ukraine’s soldiers killed in action is similar to Russia’s, but the agency has a far lower level of confidence in its estimate of Ukrainian losses.

No, Mr. Biddle, you don't. You never did, in regards to Russia that is. So this BS posturing about "strategy" is just that, a BS posturing of some "experts" who sense that their BS is about to be called, as usual, and they love their pseudo-academic and "intel" sinecures trying to promote themselves as professionals, which they are not whenever it comes down to real anything: geopolitics, war, economy, what have you. The issue is systemic, it is in the American education system which is completely broken  across the board, from K-12 to Ivy League and military academies, and it is really funny listening to "intel" from people who provided "intel" on Saddam's WMD, Iraq and Afghanistan. The closing paragraph says it all.

“Everything is about Russia’s goals and Russia’s prospects for meeting their goals,” Sanner said. “We do not talk about whether Ukraine might be able to defeat them. And to me, I feel that we are setting ourselves up for another intel failure by not talking about that publicly.”

No shit, pardon my French, but there is a serious doubt now in the competence of the whole governing machine in the US, and the practical results of such a governing provide a massive body of evidence to support such an assertion. Especially so in military-intelligence field where the United States moves from one disaster to another. The narrative on SMO, in reality, is dead and the failure is not being set, it already happened. It is a fait accompli no matter how one wants to put a lipstick on the pig. As per US MSM, it is a human and professional sewer, but, evidently, it is the only thing modern US governing is--shitty PR and propaganda. It is also a distillation of a severe butt-hurt and sore-loserism when seeing how real war is conducted by professionals. The numbers of 51,000 KIA and around 60,000+ of MIA of VSU seem correct (plus-minus) and we are not even talking about sanitary ones which create a grim (for 404) picture of utter rout, as well as a real failure of Western "technology". 

In related news:

Europe could be forced to start rationing energy this winter, starting with industrial uses of natural gas, especially if the winter is cold and China’s economy rebounds, the Executive Director of the International Energy Agency (IEA), Fatih Birol, told the Financial Times in an interview. 

What can I say, maybe the West will learn finally the meaning of cause and effect, as well as the meaning of truly good intel, which, when done properly, would have told them that the combined West doesn't even know what it is dealing with. But not in my life time, I guess, if ever.