Qui Bono.

I wanted to stay away from this Boris Nemtsov assassination, but since the golden boy of rape and pillage of Russia in 1990s got killed (and I am sorry--I hate people dying for any reasons), I have to make some small points. The only thing I have to say here is--Qui Bono. It is MH-17 all over again--a hysteria in the Beltway, better chances for all kinds of bizarre legislatures passing, including arming Ukraine. But here we have to also go to the OODA Loop and ask ourselves--how are those sanctions working out against Russia? I imply nothing (so far), until the investigation comes up with more or less coherent answers, but I will reiterate one point: the only person who stands between Moscow's "liberal elite" being pitch-forked or hung on the lamp posts all over Russia and this "elite's" Western grants' consumption IS Putin. Plus, United States was boringly predictable in applying its template of "democratic" coups. Do I say that it is West behind this provocation? NO! In fact, this could have been anyone's (wink, wink) "operation" but the truth is, for Russia to kill this boy Nemtsov, while having a moment of national unity not seen since Great Patriotic War and Putin enjoying an overwhelming support of population, come on--be real. The oldest trick in the "regime change" and false flag book. "Heavenly Hundred" anyone?

I have a suspicion that MVD (FSB?) guys following this Navalny guy are there for his protection. As for the United States, which has a glorious tradition of assassinating its own Presidents (forget some second rate hack like Nemtsov), it is really funny to raise a voice on the issue of some........(fill in blanks yourself) being killed for the "greater good" which comes down to Qui Bono, and Russia is, certainly, not in this list. 

   

Well, Duh....

I write about the utter incompetence of US foreign policy institutions constantly. Now, Britons enter the picture. This is not to say that it wasn't known--it was. But still....

The British government was left in the dark during the Ukraine crisis because its diplomats can’t understand Russian  

Well, it took The Independent  about a year to figure this out. We knew it all along. American foremost Russian "scholar", Ambassador Michael McFaul was so "good" in Russian language that he created one of the most memorable snafus in the history of diplomacy. Obviously it was difficult to use Google Translate for figuring out the translation of the word "Reset" into Russian. As Forest Gump used to say: "Stupid is as stupid does."(c)  

As noted in The Independent:

The revelations came to light in a report by Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee, which has been scrutinising the Foreign Office’s performance. The committee's MPs found that only 27 per cent of Russian “speaker slots” at Britain’s foreign ministry were filled by someone who could speak the language to the specified level.

Well, Duh.... The situation in the State Department is hardly better. Long gone are the times of Ambassador Matlock, who, apart from being a compliment to the art of diplomacy, spoke an exquisite Russian, knows Russian culture in depth and still can recite the whole Evgenii Onegin by Pushkin--a feat very few Russians can accomplish. It is all gone. We all are treated to the parade of the Western foreign policy (and political) nomenclature, which, under normal conditions, wouldn't be allowed to clean toilets. Yet, those people are in charge of the Observation and Orientation parts of OODA Loop. Needless to say, the results are disastrous. They don't understand the subject, they don't speak subject's language, they cannot make even simple correct conclusions, they are forced to rely on the native clones of themselves (Russian "liberals" anyone) and then they wonder what went wrong.  They also begin to despise the culture of the subject because it reflects their own incompetence and lack of the abilities. 

Meanwhile, those "economic" rags begin to suspect something. I don't know who this Leonid Bershidsky is, but the person who considers Gaidar Institute to be "respected", definitely has some issues with the reality. Still, the fact that such piece appeared in Bloomberg is note-worthy. 

No, Obama, Russia's Economy Isn't 'in Tatters' 

Writes Bershidsky:

 

 It's time to bury the expectation that Russia will fall apart economically under pressure from falling oil prices and economic sanctions, and that Russians, angered by a drop in their living standards, will rise up and sweep Putin out of office. Western powers face a tough choice: Settle for a lengthy siege and ratchet up the sanctions despite the progress in Ukraine, or start looking for ways to restart dialogue with Russia, a country that just won't go away.

The realization, that Russia IS already inside the West's (and US in particular) OODA Loop (if it does have any at all--the conclusion to which I begin to lean) should settle in by now. Getting inside one's OODA Loop was a highest priority for Colonel Boyd. It did already happen. It is so simple, if to put in into famous (and correct)  slogan--You Are What You Know. And it goes without saying that combined West knows shit about Russia. It always did.   

 

Announcement

It seems that I will be busy for the next month or so. I was asked to help (to the best of my limited Runglish abilities) with translation of my friend's book about the veterans of the Great Patriotic War. So, I may not be too active in my blog, since the volume of work is fairly large, while time is fairly limited. So, no expansive posts. I want, however, to make a several points on the present situation in and around Donbass. 

1. It is clear that Kiev can not win militarily in Donbass, even if the United States will decide to provide weapons. Some sources say that some of those weapons are already being delivered by proxies. Well, doesn't matter. The madness in Washington, however, continues being lead by whom else--Senator McCain and his pal  Lindsey Graham. Throw in here a new SecDef Ash Carter whose Physics Ph.D. and being defense bureaucrat for years, evidently, didn't add him any geopolitical wisdom and you get the picture. Those guys simply refuse to live in the real world and study real history of the 20th century. They also refuse to understand real war. 

2. It is clear that, yet another, military humiliation of the US' stooges in Kiev directly  humiliates D.C. "elite" too. But as I said many times in this blog--the incompetence of this so called "elite" in fundamental issues of war, peace, geopolitics, history etc. is appalling. The recycling of the Ivy League "educated" neocon hawks, which is a euphemism for ignorant sociopaths, continues unabated and goes contrary to the real American national interests. But in culture dominated by media appearances, skewed public opinion polls and looks without substance, admitting a mistake is not an option. So, the United States will continue to foment a trouble in Ukraine and will continue to waste its greatly diminished political capital and refusing to call a spade a spade. It is a fact that US, in the last 15 years, basically lost a huge chunk of this capital. Even Stephen Walt in his "The Way We Were" piece in September 12, 2014 issue of Foreign Policy admits that.

3.  Kiev, now, wants to blockade Russian peacekeepers in Trans-Dniester area, who are there legally. Well, Kiev, certainly, can do that. It shows how desperate both Washington and its puppets in the region (Moldova, for once) are to start a really big war there. Can Russia respond? It can and responses could be multi-prongue, including a purely military ones. In the end, Russia can simply play Kolomoyski game and help this disgusting crook achieve his desire to topple present Kiev cabal of crooks. After all, "he is our SOB" principle is as old as humanity. US had no problems supporting Nazis in Ukraine. But, in the end, Russia holds the cards with Novorossia, which does have an army (as in organized military force) and whose mobilization reserve is significant, in fact--very significant. Most likely, the response, if Kiev goes through with its threat, will, yet again, be something unexpected and very swift.

4. Last point--the West has committed a cultural suicide in Russia and so did so called Russian "liberals" who today are despised by the overwhelming majority of Russians. Until Western media clowns and the hordes of those BS spewing "analysts" will not get that Putin is not leading but is being led by Russian national consensus and that is why he, as shrewd politician and statesman, has an overwhelming support of population--the media circus will continue. That is why sanctions do not work and that is why Russia "elite" is nationalizing itself so fast--many of them understood that the only thing which separates them from being hung on the lamp posts all over Russia is Putin. 

"Despite news of the capture of the fleches, Napoleon saw that this was not the same, not at all the same, as what had happened in his former battles. He saw that what he was feeling was felt by all the men about him experienced in the art of war. All their faces looked dejected, and they all shunned one another's eyes- only a de Beausset could fail to grasp the meaning of what was happening.

But Napoleon with his long experience of war well knew the meaning of a battle not gained by the attacking side in eight hours, after all efforts had been expended. He knew that it was a lost battle and that the least accident might now- with the fight balanced on such a strained center- destroy him and his army.

When he ran his mind over the whole of this strange Russian campaign in which not one battle had been won, and in which not a flag, or cannon, or army corps had been captured in two months, when he looked at the concealed depression on the faces around him and heard reports of the Russians still holding their ground- a terrible feeling like a nightmare took possession of him, and all the unlucky accidents that might destroy him occurred to his mind. The Russians might fall on his left wing, might break through his center, he himself might be killed by a stray cannon ball. All this was possible. In former battles he had only considered the possibilities of success, but now innumerable unlucky chances presented themselves, and he expected them all. Yes, it was like a dream in which a man fancies that a ruffian is coming to attack him, and raises his arm to strike that ruffian a terrible blow which he knows should annihilate him, but then feels that his arm drops powerless and limp like a rag, and the horror of unavoidable destruction seizes him in his helplessness"

Leo Tolstoy, War And Peace, Book 10, Chapter XXXIV.

     

A Brief Thought On The Fate Of Debaltsevo.

1. Even the brief review of the real info sources this morning allows to conclude that Debaltsevo cauldron, where, by different estimates, between 3,000 and 7,000 Ukrainian troops could be trapped, is being reduced successfully by the VSN (Armed Forces Of Novorossia).  This was expected even against the background of Minsk-2 agreement, which was the last attempt of Europe to face the consequences of its own idiocy and being a geopolitical midget at the service of its US master. 

2. Now, even THEY (and they are US mainstream presstitudes) begin to suspect something.    

With Ukrainian Troops Trapped, a Cease-Fire Grows More Fragile

The only reaction to that could be expressed by the good ole' "Duh!" and "Haven't I told you so?"

3. Operations around, and now inside, Debaltsevo cauldron showed yet again:

a) no matter who trains you--some Battalion Tactical Groups of VSU were trained to the NATO "standards" at Yavorsky Proving Grounds by US and Polish instructors--it takes more than just some shiny military toys and COIN to plan and conduct a real combined arms operations in peer-to-peer or peer-to-near-peer environment. How "well" US "trained" troops performed had been demonstrated with the lightning speed by the Georgian Army, which disintegrated in 72 hours after facing the elements of the Russian 58th Army in 2008. 

b) The competence of staffs, their ability to plan operations and employ all available C4ISR complex in order to "run" battlefield is a decisive factor. Ukrainian staff structures from bottom up are guided by everything BUT the real military competence, even when they have all necessary informational and advising support from NATO;

c) Factor of morale and clear understanding of the meaning of war remains as relevant as ever;

d) For COIN crowd, yet again--Combined Arms Operations remain a principal method of the Continental Warfare;

4. The ferocity of battles, the scale of casualties of the Civil War in Ukraine are such, that even Russian VSN volunteers, veterans of two Chechen campaigns and even Afghanistan, were forced to admit that they never saw anything like this. It is a meat-grinder.  

5. This war, at this stage, is being prosecuted by Kiev junta mostly for a punitive and, to put it mildly, even irrational reasons. It is also is driven by a chaos in the political snake pit in Kiev;  

6. The consequences of yet another defeat of VSU in Donbass can have a serious political fallout for Kiev junta and its US and European curators. In fact, some gangsters in Kiev may not even live to see themselves in a front of a jury for their war crimes. But the moment of truth is coming. Somebody has to answer for atrocity being committed against the people of Novorossia. They will answer.

 

 

Planet Of The New Orleans

We all know that New Orleans is a shithole. But it took Mark Knopfler's genius to leave it to us to wonder about desperation, love and something which breaks our hearts. After watching this cretin Kanye West's pathetic attempt to produce something remotely reminiscent of a music on SNL's 40th Anniversary, I have to say, Blues which is the music of a good black man, when he feels bad, and the music of a trash who have no talent, it takes a Briton to create a masterpiece. What is left for the posterity.......

If you cannot make your guitar cry.....And then there is this Dire Straits' sax........

Oooops...

Didn't US know what it was getting itself into with Ukrainian "democracy" Maidan? Did anyone tell Senator Inhofe that US main stream media has become long ago a Minitrue and a collection of both human and "information" trash? I guess knowledge about Ukrainian "sources" wouldn't hurt either but what do I know? Obviously virtues of OODA loop are not appreciated in a delusional Beltway.  As Bugs Bunny used to say: "What a maroons!"  Meanwhile Russian regular troops attack Ukraine with the help of the First Martian Corps, and use against VSU liquid vacuum and zero-point energy weapons. I am pretty sure the photographs of that will appear in US Senate very soon. 

 Ooops......

 The 'exclusive' photos of 'Russian invasion in Ukraine' in 2014 turned out to be easily found in the Web, with at least one of them dating back to 2008. Now, US senator James Inhofe is furious with the Ukrainian delegation for setting him up with the 'evidence'.

Questions have been raised about the veracity of reports that claim Russian troops have invaded Ukraine after US Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe confessed that several photos of Russian convoys he obtained from a Ukrainian parliamentary group were taken during the 2008 Georgia conflict, the Washington Free Beacon said.

On Tuesday, the Washington Free Beacon ran a story that unveiled "exclusive" photos of victims of militia bombs and Russian armed vehicles seemingly rolling into Ukraine.

The photos were provided to Inhofe's office in print by an obscure Ukrainian delegation, led by a Georgetown professor, who said the images were taken at the height of Russia's alleged military incursion between August 24 and September 5, 2014.

Inhofe's spokeswoman Donelle Harder was cited as saying they had checked back with their sources - none of them high-level Ukrainian officials - before releasing the photos. She said they had been quite confident about their authenticity since the imagery allegedly matched reports about the Ukraine conflict.

But speaking to The Mirror on Thursday, Sen. Inhofe confessed he was "furious" to learn that at least one of the photos was taken by Associated Press during Russia's military operation in Georgia back in 2008. Several other images are readily available elsewhere online and can be found using a Google Images search.

Among the Ukrainian delegation was Semen Semenchenko, the commander of the "Donbas" volunteer battalion and a newly elected member of the Verkhovna Rada. Earlier, he was known as Konstantin Grishin and was reportedly suspected of fraud in Crimea. 

I, meanwhile, would suggest Inhofe to continue his contacts with Ukrainian sources, high and low, it will not hurt his career in any way.

Can US Still Save Itself?

                     

Late Samuel Huntington in Chapter 4 of his seminal The Clash Of Civilizations And The Remaking Of World Order, while describing the reasons for why West dominates (the book was published 20 years ago) global order, gave 14 reasons for this domination. Here they are:

1. Owns and operates the international banking system;

2. Controls all hard currencies;

3. Is the world's principal customer;

4. Provides the majority of the worlds finished goods;

5. Dominates international capital markets;

6. Exerts considerable moral leadership within many societies;

7. Is capable of massive military intervention;

8. Controls the sea lanes;

9. Conducts most advanced technical research and development;

10. Controls leading edge technical education;

11. Dominates access to space;

12. Dominates aerospace industry;

13. Dominates international communications;

14. Dominates the high-tech weapons industry.  

There is no denial by any common sense person that, with some possible minor additions to that lists, it is generally correct in identifying key positions which make civilization, or a specific nation, strong and, in many cases, dominant. Now let's fast rewind to 1960s and 70s. The term Post-Industrial Economy is coined by Daniel Bell or whomever else--makes no difference. The hell of sociological and economic theories  after that breaks loose and the world, throughout coming decades, is being swept with the avalanche of the social and economic views which have no....relation to the reality. With Post-Industrial Economy concept later came derivatives such as Information Society or Knowledge Economy and other totally chimeral concepts. So you get the drift. The whole school of social and economic thought emerged which, to put it crudely, did everything as to avoid looking at what really makes, say, a nation powerful--a manufacturing capacity.  That is real productive labor! 

Looking attentively at the pps. 4, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 and 14, from Huntington's list above, one can easily notice that all of them are the result and the consequence of manufacturing. We will push it even further--they are the result of a highly developed  machine-building complex. One needs machines to produce high-tech weaponry, machines also produce other machines, there is no modern agriculture without advanced machinery and, obviously, most modern consumer goods are impossible without machines. Some of those machines are immensely complex and require level of mathematical, physics, technological expertise to operate them which is simply beyond the level of expertise required from office manager or graduate with BA in, say, communications (public relations) to do their jobs.  Now, enter all those Free Trade fundamentalists, global-economy and post-industrialism (and knowledge economy) aficionados, who dominate and shape US  economic debate and policies and what do you get? You get a steady DE-industrialization of the United States. Obviously, most (not all)  people who promote those policies never spent a day on the production floor, never made anything useful in their life, but sure as hell most of them got their "economic" degrees from Ivy League madras and many went to work into the place of the uber-concentrated  economic wisdom and reputation--The Wall Street.   

Long story short, the DE-industrialization of the United States started not yesterday. It is still a long and arduous process of ridding off manufacturing and turning US labor force in that of the third world. Some results are already in. In 2011 none other than WSJ published a very remarkable piece. In the middle of the economic calamity this was revealing.

Help Wanted on Factory Floor 

There, WSJ makes a sad admission, that among several core causes for the lack of qualified labor force in US--that is the people who can actually operate complex machinery and make useful things--one, certainly, stood out:

Third, the U.S. education system isn't turning out enough people with the math and science skills needed to operate and repair sophisticated computer-controlled factory equipment, jobs that often pay $50,000 to $80,000 a year, plus benefits. Manufacturers say parents and guidance counselors discourage bright kids from even considering careers in manufacturing. "We get people coming in here all the time who say, 'I can weld,'" says Denis Gimbel, human-resources manager at Lehigh Heavy Forge Corp., of Bethlehem, Pa., whose products include parts for ships. "Well, my grandmother could weld." He needs people who understand the intricacies of $1 million lathes and other metal-shaping equipment.

A discrediting of the productive labor in US is complete. Average American kid would rather resort to life of "creative" labor--such as writing useless apps for iPhone or trying to break into the hordes of the mediocre "future" musicians, artists, photographers or, future social workers (who, actually, will be needed to provide for welfare checks once those hordes of the "creative" people and office plankton will be kicked out on the street), than seriously consider such jobs as specialists in composites, CNC operators or any other complex machinery specialists. And those jobs are available today. No, those kids  would rather smoke pot (a first no-no on the manufacturing floor) while complaining about how tough life is on their creative aspirations, than start learning actual skills which are in the foundation of  the pps. 4, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 and 14, from Huntington's list above and which constitute around 65 (in reality it is even more) percent of the power of the nation. 

There are no such things as Post-Industrial Economy or Information Society or Knowledge Economy--those are all figments of imagination of hacks who live in their own delusion while the geopolitical and economic reality of the world remains unchanged for centuries--only nations that produce and can provide a maximum number of the complete (enclosed) technological cycles are the real players in the global arena. It is very difficult to understand for all those banksters and financiers that (made in China) iPhones, which they consider a high-tech,  do not grow on the trees--they are the result of technological cycle which starts from extracting resources to producing parts and, eventually, assembling  their toys, be it their furniture or BMWs. 

I generally do not take an overly grim view of the American future for a number of reasons. Obviously, US global political and economic weight is diminishing--how about pp.6--but this is the objective process. American financial bubble or, rather, the set  of colossal parallel monetary universes is, of course, a very serious issue and we are facing a type A US Dollar supenova down the road.  But as of now, United States still retains a considerable manufacturing capacity across all Huntington's points and this, in the future, should play a crucial role in inevitable re-industrialization and reformatting of US economy away from service economy to a productive one. How this process will go I don't know and, as I mentioned before, I hate to speculate and give forecasts. Having said that--the US is steadily losing its lead and competence in a number of  crucial fields and it has a lot to do with what WSJ piece points out (follow the link above). A steady loss of the competence across the whole of the American society has everything to do with the process of DE-industrialization and turning US into the country of shopping malls and Walmarts, packed with products made NOT in USA, yoga studious, espresso stands, law offices and shiny office buildings where hip and young toil writing the code for a another virtual product which has no real value, no real serious applications for bettering of  human life and turns people into exhibitionist zombies. Facebook anyone? Or F-35, for that matter?

Meanwhile, the rest of the world begins to beat US at what used to be its game--manufacturing. And then there are weapons....

To be continued.....