Zelensky Grabs Whatever Office Supplies He Can Get Hands On In Capitol, Saying He Needs It For War

People got really mad on twitter over this one lmao

https://nationalinterest.org/feature/us-military-unequipped-high-intensity-combat-206817 (archived, is anyone else having trouble with archive.is / archive.ph? they seem to just not load at all for me)

The U.S. Military is Unequipped for High-Intensity Combat

The U.S. military’s system was for uncontested logistics, with the ability to conduct depot-level maintenance after evacuating vehicles from the front lines and heavy reliance on a contractor workforce for highly technical repairs. It also relies upon air superiority on the battlefield, which is not a given in combat against a peer competitor.

Former Commandant Gen. David Berger stated that in a great power war in the Pacific, “It’s just fuel and bullets, that’s what I’m going to resupply. The rest you’re going to have to forage.” These logistical limitations will be acute when repairing damaged military equipment. Absent repairs, it may be impossible for Marines to get back into the fight.

Besides the astronomical costs of many of America’s boutique and exquisite systems, the trade-off between the price of these systems and the systems that can kill them is becoming unsustainable

U.S. adversaries will not allow it to build up the proverbial iron mountain of logistics, nor will it be easy to evacuate vehicles or bring forward parts via “just in time” (JIT) delivery by ship or aircraft.

One of the reasons that the Afghan air force collapsed was the withdrawal of U.S. contractors. With the air force collapsing, ground units also gave up as they were no longer assured of resupply, medevac, or close air support. The U.S. military made the situation worse by having the Afghans move away from Soviet-era helicopters such as the Mi-17 and transition to the more technical and maintenance-heavy U.S. airframes. The U.S. military may face its own issues in high-intensity conflict, as defense contractors have withheld the intellectual property behind some of the newest systems, such as the F-35, effectively turning them into black boxes that only the contractors themselves can fully understand. American farmers can tell horror stories of the problems encountered with high-tech tractors and their fights with manufacturers such as John Deere over the “right to repair.”

that bit about the Afghan Air Force was something I hadn't heard before, absolutely amazing imagine having all of your military equipment be dependent on maintenance by foreign private contractors

> I storm into the room, flinging the doors open

> "The Poles! They've stopped sending weapons to Ukraine because of their stupid little trade war over grain; the cracks are forming, the united coalition is splintering! How long can this last? Once the spigot dries up, how fast will Ukraine fold? What new horrors will be wrought in this new multipolar world?"

> my gf turns to me," what the fuck are you talking about, go make some tea"

> I go stare at a screen for eight hours pretending to care about "action items" as I mutter on about Lviv/Lwów

> Work Slack Channel: "Has anybody heard about this really old documentary called 'Tiger King'?"

Pondering the orb of global misery with y'all is fine but god damn do I sometimes feel insane.

Communists and conservatives coincidentally not supporting Ukraine (nominally for the latter): proof that communism and fascism are the same

Liberals and conservatives systemically and deliberately supporting and funding every war, invasion, and occupation by domestic forces: mature, bipartisan, proof that democracy works

So it's confirmed that the "WW2 Ukrainian freedom fighter" that got a standing ovation in Canadian parlaiment yesterday was in fact part of the 14th Division of the Waffen-SS (aka 1st Galician Division). Who do I need to talk to to get the Canadian Polish and Jewish communities on the cuck rankings?

I hate losers so much, there's huge ass thread on republicans holding up pentagon funding (why are they actually able to damage/slow down the US war machine more than the US left y'all this is so fucking embarrasing...) and the comments saying that's a good thing are downvoted to the bottom of the thread. Blue maga never changes I guess

Canadian Parliament gives a standing ovation to a literal nazi soldier

Brazilian Pres. Lula, a former lathe operator, and former Volkswagen assembly line worker/Labor Minister Luiz Marinho met with UAW leaders in New York yesterday, with a delegation of Brazilian union leaders. There, they announced solidarity actions with striking US autoworkers.

China’s healthcare tycoons lose US$17 billion as crackdown spreads

The combined fortune of the top 15 Chinese healthcare billionaires has fallen 17 per cent to US$84.1 billion from US$101.4 billion at the end of last year, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

The drop comes as the country’s top regulators started a sweeping anti-corruption campaign across the nation’s healthcare sector about two months ago. It has resulted in hundreds of hospital chiefs and pharmaceutical executives being probed, sparking a sectorwide share slump as investors chose to sell instead of guessing which companies will be hit by the clampdown.

$84 billion left to go

Haven't seen many people talking about the new Hersh article, he has some interesting claims:

Major portions of the Ukrainian army have stopped going on the offensive at all

The CIA is becoming very skeptical of the possibility of a Ukrainian victory, and a significant rift between intelligence agencies is forming

Quote from an intelligence official: “The war is over. Russia has won. There is no Ukrainian offensive anymore, but the White House and the American media have to keep the lie going. The truth is if the Ukrainian army is ordered to continue the offensive, the army would mutiny. The soldiers aren’t willing to die any more, but this doesn’t fit the B.S. that is being authored by the Biden White House.”

https://archive.is/2023.09.21-111210/https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/zelenskys-bad-moment

Anyone have a link to the article a month ago when zelensky warned europe what would happen if they lose, basically that the neo nazis would be let loose on them?

omg,.. this Poland ukraine Diva fight has extrem potential .. both nations have the same national victimhood psychosis and they are now locked into an escalation spiral their national psychosis prevents them from getting out from..

poland apperently will Deny all benefits to Ukraine refugees from 2024 onward..

literally the land next to you , at war , at full mobilization .. and you try to use those under your protection as a kollectiv Punshball because what ... Ukraine has sued you in a non functioning court.. ? ...

F-35 fighter jets can only fly 55% of time, US watchdog says

The fleet’s mission-capable rate — or the percentage of time a plane can perform one of its assigned missions — was 55 per cent as of March 2023, far below the Pentagon’s goal of 85 per cent to 90 per cent, the Government Accountability Office said on Thursday.

...

The F-35’s share of the US’s overall tactical aviation fleet is expected to keep growing, providing a boon to its manufacturer Lockheed Martin. Each of the fighter jets costs the government about $160mn.

There are 450 F-35s in the US military’s arsenal — variants are used by the air force, navy and Marine Corps — and the Pentagon plans to buy roughly 2,000 more by the mid-2040s, costing $1.7tn over the programme’s life cycle, including $1.3tn for maintaining the aircraft.

...

The Pentagon is years behind in establishing enough maintenance depot capacity, resulting in repair delays and a 10 per cent reduction in the jet’s mission-capable rate. Part of the challenges stem from a heavy reliance on contractors for maintenance that limits the Pentagon’s ability to control depot maintenance decisions. Delays also arise from spare parts shortages, inadequate maintenance training, insufficient support equipment, and a lack of technical data needed to make repairs.

Ukraine’s worst enemies are those who demand Russia’s strategic defeat

The article covers the counteroffensive and why it failed, which we largely already know about. There's an interesting section on Ukrainian mobilization that I actually wasn't aware of, in the spoiler tags below.

But the main point is here:

Ukraine’s situation has become so dire that former British Army Colonel Richard Kemp—previously one of Ukraine’s most vociferous boosters—recently authored an op-ed in The Telegraph in which he warned that the West “must prepare for humiliation.”

With all due respect to Mr. Kemp, this is not the time for Western leaders to worry about humiliation. Ukrainian solders are dying on an industrial scale. We must do all we can to stop the killing. Western leaders can massage their bruised egos later.

At this stage, the humane and rational thing to do is to oppose the escalation of this war, and to advocate for reasonable, mutual compromises to achieve a lasting peace. This is a war that Ukraine cannot win in any meaningful sense of the word. The best that Ukraine can hope for is a bloody, horrific stalemate that will gradually sap the state’s remaining lifeblood.

With each passing minute, more Ukrainians become permanently disabled. More become displaced. More Ukrainian children become fatherless. More Ukrainian infrastructure is destroyed. More landmines, other unexploded munitions and long-lasting contaminants proliferate among Ukraine’s rich agricultural lands, and more towns and cities become uninhabitable.

The hole out of which Ukraine must eventually dig itself is becoming only deeper. At some point, that hole will become so deep that Ukraine will never come out of it. We are rapidly approaching that point, if we have not passed it already.

By insisting upon Russia’s strategic defeat and excluding any possibility of meaningful compromise with Russia, we doom Ukraine to destruction. To save Ukraine, we must stop this war.

The Indian government seems very inclined to break down relations with Canada for a pathetic separatist movement which has near zero support in India itself.

America Can’t Stop China’s Rise - And it should stop trying.

...

All these actions confirm that the American government is trying to stop China’s growth. Yet, the big question is whether America can succeed in this campaign—and the answer is probably not. Fortunately, it is not too late for the United States to reorient its China policy toward an approach that would better serve Americans—and the rest of the world.

America’s decision to slow China’s technological development is akin to the folly revealed by the old cliché: closing the barn door after the horse has bolted. Modern China has shown many times that China’s technological development can’t be halted.

Since the creation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, several efforts have been made to limit China’s access to or stop its development in various critical technologies, including nuclear weapons, space, satellite communication, GPS, semiconductors, supercomputers, and artificial intelligence. The United States has also tried to curb China’s market dominance in 5G, commercial drones, and electric vehicles (EVs). Throughout history, unilateral or extraterritorial enforcement efforts to curtail China’s technological rise have failed and, in the current context, are creating irreparable damage to long-standing U.S. geopolitical partnerships. In 1993 the Clinton administration tried to restrict China’s access to satellite technology. Today, China has some 540 satellites in space and is launching a competitor to Starlink.

The same principle played out with GPS. When America restricted China’s access to its geospatial data system in 1999, China simply built its own parallel BeiDou Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) system in one of the first waves of major technological decoupling. In some measures, BeiDou is today better than GPS. It is the largest GNSS in the world, with 45 satellites to GPS’s 31, and is thus able to provide more signals in most global capitals. It is supported by 120 ground stations, resulting in greater accuracy, and has more advanced signal features, such as two-way messaging. Other nations have also previously tried and failed to block China’s technical rise. In the 1950s and 1960s, when the USSR withheld nuclear weapons technology from China, China launched its own “Manhattan Project” in the early 1960s and succeeded in testing its first nuclear weapon by 1964. Russian nuclear leverage over China ended that day.

Many of the measures taken by the Biden administration against China were also executed without factoring in China’s capacity to retaliate. While China does not physically construct many truly irreplaceable components of the American technology stack, they are keenly aware of the importance of their raw materials inputs (rare earths) and demand (revenue generation) in fueling the American innovation ecosystem and are now using them as leverage. In the current tit-for-tat dynamic, China will start squeezing these two critical ends of the value chain in response to American technology and capital export restrictions. China’s July ban of the gallium and germanium exports was merely an opening shot across the bow to remind America (and its aligned allies) of China’s dominance in the rare earths and critical metals space. The country has a near monopoly in the processing of magnesium, bismuth, tungsten, graphite, silicon, vanadium, fluorspar, tellurium, indium, antimony, barite, zinc, and tin. China also dominates in midstream processing for materials essential to most of America’s current and future technology aspirations such as lithium, cobalt, nickel, and copper, which are critical for the rapidly developing EV industry globally.

The article continues, talking about mineral supply chains, semiconductors, Huawei etc, then:

This is why the time has come for America to do a major reevaluation of the methods it uses to secure foreign policy goals. Its go-to tactic of imposing sanctions has failed to either halt China’s technological development or influence China’s behavior in any significant way, and most countries do not find that it is in their interests to go along with them. Are there more effective alternatives to sanctions?

In a statement explaining the Biden administration’s approach to China, Anthony Blinken said in May 2022: “we’ll compete with confidence; we’ll cooperate wherever we can; we’ll contest where we must.” We agree with this approach. Rather than undermining its own interests and fortifying a geopolitical and economic competitor, America should practice a more enlightened technology policy. The focus must be placed on initiatives that sustainably support and extend America’s innovation leadership, while surgically removing specific national security threats.

...

Initially, this great power collaboration could be focused on areas where both sides have common long-term interests (like climate change, pandemic preparedness, global economic stability, education). When basic levels of trust are established, dialogue and cooperation can be expanded step by step. None of these moves will result in a diminution of American power and standing in the world. Indeed, America’s prestige and standing could well rise as the rest of the world sees America pursuing reasonable policies that are serving both American and global interests. America will remain the most admired country in the world, if it pursues a wiser course with China.

CTRL-F "profit" - 0 results. Foreign Policy can write all the articles in the world about being nicer to China, but so long as the American oligarchy fears the fall in profits that China's supremacy in markets will bring, this war must continue.

Western monopolies MUST remain unchallenged. Luckily, the dipshits in charge have no idea how to make this happen.

“I guess we’ve got a pilot in our house, and he says he got ejected.”

That was the 911 call received in Charleston County, South Carolina, after an F-35B Lightning II fighter jet's pilot ejected Sunday, parachuting into a home's backyard, according to audio released by the county government.

In the 911 call, the dispatcher at first appears surprised by the caller: "I'm sorry — what happened?"

"We've got a pilot in the house, and I guess he landed in my backyard, and we're trying to see if we could get an ambulance to the house, please," the caller responds.

The pilot gets on the call a short time later and says he is 47 years old, that he ejected at around 2,000 feet after "an aircraft failure" and had some back pain.

"We have a military jet crash. I’m the pilot. We need to get rescue rolling. I’m not sure where the airplane is," the pilot tells the dispatcher. "It would have crash-landed somewhere. I ejected."

Canada's house speaker apologizes for honoring a fucking nazi, as if he wasn't aware. https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/anthony-rota-ukrainian-veteran-apology-1.6977117

The recent Insurgents podcast episode is a good update about the UAW strike.

This could have been such a fucking layup for Democrats (Biden). Just show up to the damn picket line, shake hands, yada yada. But in reality, as we all know, he's more indebted to management and doesn't want to offend them by supporting Labour too aggressively. How are you going to let fucking Donald Trump, run to the left of you on Labour issues. Jesus. Paid to fail

Biden Told Zelensky U.S. Is Willing to Provide Long-Range ATACMS Missiles

It will be interesting to see what happens when these and the F-16s arrive in Ukraine. The F-16s can be seen as nuclear-capable (Lavrov has made a big point of this), and ATACMS would be almost indistinguishable from a nuclear missile launch.

Technically, according to launch on warning doctrine, Russia has to launch its own nukes while the enemy's missiles are still in the air - before they can be known to be nuclear or not. Now, for numerous reasons, I don't think Russia or Ukraine is going to nuke anybody, but Russia's nuclear deterrence might be weakened if they let it slide. Though I guess Ukraine has already used potentially nuclear-capable weapons (Tochka-U and cruise missiles come to mind).

Canada is having a normal one

There is a lot to like about America and Americans. But the sheer waste of resources on show everywhere was pretty shocking. In Europe we absolutely aren’t doing enough to protect the environment and avert the impending climate catastrophe [...] In Florida they don’t appear to be even trying.

I posted an article about a vacationer's observation of the shocking amount of waste of resources in Florida in c/earth.

https://hexbear.net/post/652997

Our brick houses and walls are so poorly built in South Africa that just a strong wind was seemingly enough to knock down half of them in the Pretoria area. Okay that's a exaggeration, but seriously, there is no way a 114kph / 70mph strong wind should cause that much damage. It wasn't even a rain storm, it was what meteorologists call a "dry microburst"! What the hell is even going on over there in Pretoria? Did they get the three little piggies from the fairytale to build everything?

Brazil's Indigenous peoples celebrate massive land rights victory

A lopsided majority of Brazil's Supreme Court ruled Thursday against an effort to restrict native peoples' rights to protected reservations on their ancestral lands, in a win for Indigenous activists and climate campaigners.

Indigenous leaders in bright feather headdresses and body paint exploded in celebration outside the high court building in Brasilia as Justice Luiz Fux became the sixth on the 11-member court to side with the native plaintiffs in the landmark case, giving them victory.

will become ?

Honestly, I gotta hand it to elon mungus. Before I used to read the replies and try to dunk on people or annoy some dumbass or look at other profiles for funny posts. But now I just look at the linked post, and close the tab. 10 seconds max. It’s been great. I’m still wasting time, but at least it’s not soul sucking.

UK public support for ‘big government’ hits record high

Some 68 per cent of taxpayers thought government should definitely “be responsible for keeping prices under control”, the annual British Social Attitudes survey found, up from 29 per cent when the question was last asked in 2016 and the highest since records began in 1985.

The large study — conducted between September 7 and October 30 last year, during which time Liz Truss was UK prime minister — found that a record 53 per cent of people thought the government should also definitely “be responsible for reducing income differences between the rich and poor”.

Sir John Curtice, senior research fellow at the National Centre for Social Research, which runs the poll, said: “Both Conservative and Labour voters have changed their minds about the role of government and about taxation and spending over the years.”

smdh my dick head, the virus of authoritarianism has come to the UK, whose citizens now desire the brutal tankie policy of "wanting the government to do literally anything to improve their lives". damn you, Putler!

I've been trying to find decent histories and analysis of Singapore as part of the COTW and it's been extra challenging this time, and until a few hours ago today, I didn't know why. So I plunged into the first book I could find that seemed tolerable, which was Singapore: A Modern History by Michael Barr, published in 2020. He seems pretty lib to me, but has a ton of other work on Singapore. I got through Chapter 1 and I can't say I'm a big fan of how the book is structured and what it focusses on (Chapter 2 is literally called "The Idea of Singapore", going into what the elites think about Singapore - I want more nitty gritty stuff on the actual people, which the article posted by @thethirdgracchi@hexbear.net very helpfully provides) and it doesn't really go in chronological order either, so I don't plan on finishing it.

But now I understand a little better about the situation, so here are my notes I made while reading the first chapter, which is called "Let’s Talk About 1819: Reorienting the National Narrative":

It’s a country, and a city, consisting of less than 6 million on an island of about 700 square kilometers. It is a city-state in an age of nation-states, which is quite odd. There are few like it in the world nowadays - Vatican City and Monaco, for example (though one could argue that Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Hong Kong are quasi-citystates). In a world where capitalism has very almost won, it’s interesting that you don’t see more city-states. Smallness, as Foreign Affairs writers like Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Gregory Treverton have said, brings strengths, and largeness can have its weaknesses.

Singapore wins many Best Countries At X awards, such as “ease of doing business”, and “one of the best healthcare systems”. It even gives out its own awards, like the Global City Prize, awarded by the Urban Redevelopment Authority. It also happens to be one of - if not the - most expensive places in the world to live. The city government attempts to redistribute enough social goods to its ordinary citizenry to benefit - the author points out that few cities do anything similar.

‘The Singapore Story’ is a nationalist narrative, or perhaps mythology, invented by the country’s political leaders in the 1980s and 1990s. It is the template of how the history of the island is taught in schools, colleges, and universities in Singapore, ever since the National Education programme was introduced in 1997. It has been described as “a triumphal narrative of deliverance from political, economic, and social despair … through the ruling regime’s scientific approaches to solving the problems faced by a developing and industrialising society,” and even a “biblical narrative of deliverance,” in which the demons are communal discord (from Malay ‘ultras’ and Chinese ‘chauvinists’); the pull of loyalties to other nearby countries, and those countries’ overbearingness; communism, in the form of students and unionists; and poverty. Recently, Western decadence/liberalism, and religious extremists have found themselves on the list of demons too. The angels are, in contrast, Sir Stamford Raffles and Lee Kuan Yew, who singlehandedly elevated an island from the Third World to the First.

The mother of Singaporean history is Mary Turnbull, who, in her book, began Singapore’s history on the 30th of January 1819, when the local chieftain, the Temenggong of Johor, signed a treaty with Raffles, agent of the East India Company, allowing them to set up a trading post. Let there be light! Her 1977 book was so well-researched, digging through so much archival material, that her book is still a fundamental text for historians of the region. It was consciously national, separated from the histories of the countries around Singapore (’if it’s across the water, it’s not our history!’) and also from the pre-colonial past. That being said, she began writing it when the government was actively discouraging the teaching of history, instead wanting to focus on the future. A few years after publication, in 1980, wouldn’t you know it, the government thought, gee, perhaps history is important after all, and her book became the foundation of history education to this day. The reason why it survives to this day is precisely because it is teleological, and thus allows the ruling elite to have a national myth that reinforces their current positions.

It was a career-killing exercise for a Singaporean scholar to question that orthodoxy, and even recently, scholars that do try to disrupt this view of history - is it actually true that literally everybody who opposed the government was a godless commie? - are known as “revisionists” or “Alternates”. As such, critiques of The Singapore Story tended to come from abroad, such as from the French scholar Philippe Regnier, American scholar Carl Trocki, and Australian scholar James Warren, among others - and not all of them even “historians of Singapore”, with others like Peter Borschberg and John Miksic being Southeast Asian archaeologists, who brought up evidence that, what do you know, the Singaporean universe did not begin in 1819, which is something that was ignored until the 1990s. In addition to these figures, certain events in The Singapore Story - like the 1963 sweep of over 100 alleged communists in Operation Coldstore, and the 1987 sweep of 22 alleged Marxist conspirators in Operation Spectrum - were challenged by some scholars and victims of the repression.

By the mid-2000s, there was general acknowledgement of and even classes in pre-1819 Singaporean history. In 2014, the Singaporean history textbooks were updated to go back all the way to the 1300s. The government got the last laugh, however, by stating that the birth of the Singaporean nation-state was in the 1300s - the national myth must continue one way or another. The Singapore Story remains dominant in pedagogy, publishing, and global consciousness, despite all the “revisionist” history and evidence arrayed against it. It is a war of power and politics that merely appears to be two old bow-tied historians arguing about Singaporean history.

The author, as stated before, is a self-described revisionist, rejecting the idea that Singapore can be isolated and examined separately from the region it inhabits, at least until it gained independence in 1965. Singapore was formed by geographical factors as much as, if not more so, than the people who led it and the capitalists who invested in it. It benefited from regional partnerships which made its achievements possible. The author rejects the notion that 1819 was the all-important pivot point and explicitly structures the book to show that it need not be regarded as such.