Somebody Must Tell This Guy...

... to fucking fade into the posterity and stop embarrassing already embarrassed  US forces and country. 

The Ukrainian government needs to look at what Germany did in WWII to stand a chance against Russia, according to Ben Hodges, former commander of US Army forces stationed in Europe. Hodges, who retired as a lieutenant-general in 2017, has long been an outspoken supporter of Ukraine. In an interview with the Australian YouTuber Perun, published over the weekend, he repeatedly cited examples from the Second World War to argue that Kiev can defeat Moscow on the battlefield. “They are gonna have to increase production of ammunition and weapons in Ukraine,” Hodges said. “Some of these things are already happening, but it is possible when you are at war to increase production, even with Russian missiles raining down on your cities.” “I mean, think about what Germany did in 1944. Aircraft production for the Luftwaffe peaked in 1944. That's after more than two years of steady bombing by the Royal Air Force and the US Army Air Corps bombing the hell out of German cities. But yet German aircraft production increased. So I think Ukraine can do that with some improving efficiency. Some Western companies are already there helping,” he concluded.

You see, here is a classic example of a person (I spoke about him in one of my last videos) who drank the Kool Aid of military history as it is taught in the USMA at West Point and US Army War College, much of which, as we all know, is built around Wehrmacht's fairy tales and a-historical BS by Russian dissidents. Akin to a "million Red Army soldiers executed at the front"--a BS made up and promoted by Victor Astafiev at the end of his career because he wanted to get Nobel Prize for literature. Akin to the same idea of 2.5 million raped by the Red Army German women. For people who graduated Sandhurst, such as Anthony Beavor, where they don't teach mathematics above middle school level. That is why Beavor became a main perpetuator of this BS inveneted by a couple of German feminists who started this propaganda--difficult to explain the statistical impossibility to a person of the same intellectual level as Ben Hodges. Whatever remaining reputation of the US military which existed before has been completely destroyed by US generals who paraded themselves ignorant, uncultured and uneducated hacks.

Larry Reacted.

To Robert English piece which I touched upon in my post yesterday. Here is what Larry especially focuses on:

The unanswered question implicit in English’s observations about Russia outproducing, not just the United States, but NATO as a whole is this — why are Western intelligence analysts so ignorant of Russia’s industrial capability? Early on in the Special Military Operation I was writing pieces about Russia’s rich supply of natural resources and minerals essential for producing bombs, drones, tanks, artillery and missiles. Russia, unlike the United States and Europe, was not dependent on imports to sustain its military industrial capability. It is self-sufficient and has trained workers who can do the job required to manufacture such items. Robert English fails to pinpoint the real weakness of the West — it has stripped itself of steel and manufacturing plants and shipped those overseas. The United States and Europe do not have the ability, at least in the mid-term, to ramp up production and match the Russians shell-for-shell and tank-for-tank. The United States is like an aging boxer who decided to fight a rejuvenated contender in a 15 round Heavyweight match, but only trained to last two rounds. That is why Russia is battering the hell out of Ukraine and, by proxy, the United States.

Larry basically gives a rundown of a whole piece, unlike me who went ballistic with WW II statistics primarily.  Read it in full--it is excellent. The significance of all that is the fact that it is a pronounced trend right now with more and more people turning to alternative media and Quincy Institute, naturally, tries to occupy such a niche with, often, same ol' exceptionalist corporate media and "history" crap from which people try to escape. 

Per Ireland--if you think that riots in Ireland are some kind of an exception, they, actually, are not. Right now, as I type this, you should see a dramatic tightening of the screws in Russia on labor migrants and I mean dramatic, it is also being made public. And even the success of Geert Wilders in Holland shouldn't be dismissed as just another European Zionist getting to power. This is THE issue--many people still cannot grasp, the issue I commented upon very often: Israeli lobby in Europe and especially in the US monopolized a legitimate serious issue of relations between West and Islam by inserting Israel into this problem as some kind West's "outpost" defending the West. Israel certainly does not do such a thing and uses this agenda to merely advance her interests. 

Until the separation and disassociation between Israel and her Zionist agenda and the West (not to be mistaken for many Jewish communities many of who are not Zionists) happens, this will continue to exist jointly in the West, unlike it is the case, as an example, in Russia. Law is the law, Moscow's Mufti may express concern about Russia deporting masses of Middle Asian migrants who commit crimes, but here is what Russian Patriarch tells him a month ago:

Москва. 25 октября. INTERFAX.RU - Патриарх Московский и всея Руси Кирилл выразил обеспокоенность долгосрочными последствиями привлечения в Россию дешевой рабочей силы из-за рубежа. "Такого рода люди не становятся нам близки ни по вере, ни по культуре. У них своя вера и своя культура. Образованный, интеллигентный русский человек должен с уважением относиться и к вере, и к культуре других людей, но если иная вера, иная культура будут так распространяться, что в какой-то момент они сравняются или, не дай Бог, станут доминировать, то мы потеряем страну, мы потеряем свою идентичность", - сказал патриарх на встрече со студентами МПГУ. Не входя в тонкости миграционной политики, он подчеркнул, что "стремление заполучить дешевую рабочую силу в городе Москве не должно привлекать огромное количество людей, принадлежащих к иной культуре, к иной вере, часто не знающих русский язык и не имеющих, простите, уважения к России и к ее народу".

Translation: Moscow. the 25th of October. INTERFAX.RU - Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Rus' expressed concern about the long-term consequences of attracting cheap labor to Russia from abroad. “This kind of people do not become close to us either in faith or in culture. They have their own faith and their own culture. An educated, intelligent Russian person must respect both the faith and the culture of other people, but if the faith is different, the culture is different will spread so much that at some point they become equal or, God forbid, begin to dominate, then we will lose the country, we will lose our identity,” the patriarch said at a meeting with MSGU students. Without going into the intricacies of migration policy, he emphasized that “the desire to get cheap labor in the city of Moscow should not attract a huge number of people belonging to a different culture, to a different faith, who often do not know the Russian language and who do not have, excuse me, respect for Russia and to her people."

The reaction from all kinds of lobbyists and migrant labor migrants was hysterical and boorish, but here is the issue--Russian Muslims DO differ dramatically from the stream of Middle Asia guest laborers and number of steps of dealing with this issue are already being undertaken. In the end, Patriarch is hugely important and powerful figure in Russia. When he speaks, people listen and we all know that Vladimir Putin, Medvedev, Mishustin, Patrushev and others are keenly aware of the problem and it is being solved. You come to Russia--you live by Russia's laws, period. If not--bye, bye, often through prison terms before final goodbye.

A Short Note On Covid-19-2.0

Let's recall what I wrote exactly one month ago on this Covid-19 pandemic. Let me remind you:

We have currently: 7,537 deaths out of "recorded" 199,122 cases globally. This is 3.94% mortality rate. But the main question remains unanswered: HOW MANY people with virus are not in this statistics? I am going out on a limb here and propose hundreds of thousands who already went through illness or are in the process and are not counted. Deaths are EASIER to count than infection cases, for obvious reasons. Thus I propose: deaths statistics is much more accurate than the overall count of cases of coronavirus. But this assumption will dramatically drive mortality rate down. Considering the fact that MOST cases pass either asymptomatically or as light cold (or flu)--make your own conclusions.

I am former military--I cannot act on unverified data, hell, I am presently (well, standby layoff) in aerospace and I cannot act on unverified data, because I am the one who decides what materials and parts are good and which are not, because people's lives depend on that. For that I ran a lab which has a shitload of funny technology which deals with uncertainties. So, if to put it into the most primitive form--I spent most of my adult life, from military to civilian capacity, dealing with the issues of metrology, statistical analysis and developing information into knowledge. Well, Stanford University has a world class medical school and look what they say:

Stanford researchers said they took blood samples from 3,300 volunteers recruited them from social media from all over Santa Clara County. They were recently tested over the course of two days at three different test sites. Researchers said that, while many who took the test were in fact concerned they had the the virus, it turned out that many of them did not carry the antibodies. The study also showed that the death rate may be lower than once projected — .12 to 0.2% compared to the state’s projection of 3%. Researchers said they hope to use the study to project death and hospitalization rates as the pandemic continues. Stanford’s research comes as state leaders begin to discuss the next phase of the stay-at-home orders and restarting the economy.

Guess what, the death rate is NOT lower, it is ORDER OF MAGNITUDE lower. Moreover, Russian Vzglyad today comes out with a piece titled symptomatically:  

Китай подставился в информационной битве с Америкой

       China framed herself in Informational battle with the US. 

Why, you may ask? Very simple--the issue is not that China under-reported the number of deaths from Covid-19, as it turned out by 1290, total number being 3,869. Those 1200+ Covid-19 related deaths were not included initially into statistics. But that is not what is a wowser. As it turned out, the Chairman of the National Health Commission Me Fen reported that only 20% of tested had symptoms while other 80% (five times more) were asymptomatic and were not reported initially, which makes the scale of pandemic much larger. It also makes it dramatically less deadly. Multiply those confirmed 82,000 with symptoms by five and you get 410,000 infected, and even this number can be grossly understated, but which also makes death rate from virus is 3,869/410,000 x 100 = 0.94%, more than 3 times lower than initially was projected. And this is, mind you, in an extremely dense population center in China. Many Russians are not happy. Understandably so. Initial numbers were in the foundation of many (not all) decisions which were made on state level. What are the sources of this virus is a whole other story, but as I stated, I concluded for myself that the Covid-19 is not a biological weapon. Evidently in Stanford statistics this "weapon" is less deadly than seasonal flu.    

As I stated earlier, I will still reserve my opinion on the origin of this Covid-19 situation but, if your read my comments, I was in no way distraught over the fact that Trump defunded WHO. Even RT gave the tribune to such an opinion. 

While Trump’s cut-off of the WHO was mainly to save his skin, the health watchdog is surely not above criticism. To repair its reputation, it should stop meddling in lifestyles & focus on health issues, and tackling pandemics.     

So, we may face ahead even larger adjustments which will change statistics of Covid-19 and social outlook dramatically. I don't think China necessarily lied, I think Chinese were simply trying to feed info as it was unfolding  and WHO did "cry wolf" before. Swine flu, remember? So, take it anywhere you want but do not forget which US political party is tightly connected to supranational structures under UN auspices and represents radically globalist.... Oops, I misspoke, never mind, never mind, wink, wink.   

OO From OODA In Relation To GIGO.

As in Colonel Boyd's Loop: Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. Our brilliant artist Veritas Semper Vincit summarized two "Os" (Observe and Orient) brilliantly in one painting: 

We observe the financial Black Hole which consumes the United States, and huge parts of the world tied directly to US "finances", and the information from the fronts is getting, as is expected, even worse:

The U.S. Labor Department released fresh data on Thursday morning that showed the effect of the novel coronavirus on employment in the U.S. The number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits spiked to a record-breaking 6.648 million for the week ending March 28. Consensus expectations were for 3.76 million claims. The prior week’s figure was revised higher to 3.307 million claims from 3.283 million. Prior to the week ending March 21, the previous record was 695,000 claims filed the week ended October 2, 1982. 

My only question is this: how the heck did they manage to miscalculate that badly? What is consensus, anyway? Economics is not a precise science, nor is statistics related to such issues as unemployment, pandemic, political preferences or, for that matter, climate change. The attempts to stick all those processes into some mathematical models are merely feeble attempts to move beyond Observe into the Orient stage in the Boyd's Loop, aka the intelligent decision making framework. In this particular case, transition from Observe to Orient is very difficult, because most of those "models" do not really work. In fact, they never did. E.g. how many people in this statistics are really unemployed? Did anyone count people who simply dropped out of job search even BEFORE this shitstorm, and who never were counted in order to create an illusion that unemployment was relatively low. Here is how the dry percentage numbers of people who simply gave up on jobs translates into a number of actual human lives BEFORE the shitstorm, in 2019:

From about the late 1980s until 2008, the participation rate fluctuated around 66% to 67%. But after the Great Recession, the rate dropped more 3 percentage points over the next seven years and has barely budged since. The latest jobs report shows it’s at 62.8%.The 3 percentage points decline in participation translates to over 6 million people no longer in the labor force. 

When taken into consideration, the actual unemployment rate before Covid-19 was very high, but corrupt US media wouldn't even try to communicate in facts in order to cover for Obama's disastrous economic and social policies. But when OODA is substituted with GIGO (Garbage In-Garbage Out) one would expect a disastrous outcome . In a statistical alternative universe of US exceptionalism across the board, from "low" unemployment numbers, to Trump losing out to Hillary in most "opinion" polls, to America's defeating Nazism almost single-handedly, there is a constant flavor of Voodoo about American statistical reality. This Voodoo constantly keeps people off balance, because they begin to exist simultaneously in several realities, akin to a bizarre and, I admit, addictive world of David Lynch's 3rd Season of Twin Peaks. I will yet to write on this cinematographic masterpiece. 

Models in US "economy" do not work, they never did because they failed to account for a stochastic black hole of "irrational exuberance" which sucked into its event horizon last vestiges of common sense and rational behavior which insured that:

“Economic data in the near future will be not just bad, but unrecognizable,” Credit Suisse economists led by James Sweeney wrote last week. “Anomalies will be ubiquitous and old statistical relationships within economic data or between market and macro data might not always hold... There is no blueprint for the current shock, and uncertainty about the extent of contagion and the economic consequences is overwhelming.”

"Might not always hold"? Really? When did they hold? Can this "economist" even grasp the fact that most statistics and "models" Western neo-liberal economists worshiped are in the foundation in the West's dramatic decline? Covid-19 merely lifted the curtain hiding the ugly reality of the financial gang-rape of the productive forces and the wealth transfer from so many in the disappearing middle class into the hands of so few. And we didn't deal with the REAL inflation yet. When this tsunami hits, expect the unexpected...albeit, what am I talking about--"the unexpected", "the sudden", "not anticipated" have been wrecking havoc with US domestic and foreign policies for too long now to expect fast, hopefully, recovery. I do not even want to go into the worst case scenario:

A Dramatic And, Sadly, Expected Data.

Here are the news which we all may have done without. 

U.S. suicide rates are at their highest since World War II, according to federal data—and the opioid crisis, widespread social media use and high rates of stress may be among the myriad contributing factors. In 2017, 14 out of every 100,000 Americans died by suicide, according to a new analysis released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics. That’s a 33% increase since 1999, and the highest age-adjusted suicide rate recorded in the U.S. since 1942. (Rates were even higher during the Great Depression, hitting a century peak of 21.9 in 1932.) “I don’t think there’s a one-size-fits all reason” since there’s almost never a single cause of suicide, says Jill Harkavy-Friedman, vice president of research at the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, a nonprofit that supports suicide prevention research, education and policy. “I don’t think there’s something you can pinpoint, but I do think a period of increased stress and a lack of a sense of security may be contributing.” It’s even more difficult to assign causes to the uptick, Harkavy-Friedman says, because it’s happening across diverse demographic groups. Men have historically died by suicide more frequently than women, and that’s still true: As of 2017, the male suicide rate was more than three times higher than the female rate. But female suicide rates are rising more quickly—by 53% since 1999, compared to 26% for men—and the gap is narrowing. For both genders, suicide rates are highest among American Indians and Alaska natives, compared to other ethnicities, and when the data are broken down by age group, the most suicide deaths are reported among people ages 45 to 64—but nearly every ethnic and age group saw an increase of some size from 1999 to 2017.

The secret? How about I go out on a limb here and name three main causes:

1. Alienation due to lack of meaningful future, hence drugs, among other things;

2. Radical atomization;

3. Mental decline due to social media and degenerate art and culture. 

Here is interesting fact: in Russian, mentally unstable people (and suicide often, not always, is a result of such instability) are still called, even in medical practice as Душевнобольной (Ill with soul, or sick soul), which, I think, is a good description. No amount of material possessions can make one happy unless one's life is filled with purpose and love. Some, revert to religion--this seldom helps, others--they do develop deep faith (I hope you understand why I separate these two: religion and faith). Some have faith in God, whatever God is for them, others have faith in inherent good, beauty and order which must prevail universally, others have faith in dream--but it is always a faith. Even militant atheists have faith, however misguided it is sometimes. Life has to be filled with meaning, without it--no amount of material valuables will suffice. 

Looking at the modern West in general and US in particular  today, one cannot fail to notice this increasing stench of nihilism and depravity which permeates the atmosphere--from mass media to human relations. Moreover, the future for many (in their view) doesn't look bright at all--it is one of signs of a serious crisis in the society. People lose desire to live, they don't see the value in living--their souls die before physical death occurs. How to deal with that? Well, a very serious question. I'll give you a hint, for the sake of discussion--there is a reason that American 1950s seem so appealing today for many youth. It is not just escapism. Idealization, same as it is with Soviet 1960s and 1970s in Russia, has a deep meaning--there still was a great deal of civility then and that mattered a great deal. As Meatloaf sang prophetically: Future Ain't What It Used To Be. One MUST have future to look for in life, otherwise it becomes life not worth living. Your opinions?