Military Affairs

Ukraine ‘Just a Warmup’ for ‘Very Long’ Struggle With Russia, China

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by Fantine Gardinier via Sputnik News


Since 2018, the US has seen its primary strategic focus as preparing for so-called “great power competition” with Russia and China. It claims the two nations are spearheading an effort to overturn the US-run global order established at the end of the Cold War.

US Navy Adm. Charles Richard, the head of US Strategic Command, recently warned the US would soon face a protracted conflict with China unlike anything it’s faced before. Stratcom is responsible for handling the country’s nuclear weapons, as well as the suite of defensive and offensive information capabilities termed C4ISR.

“We have to do some rapid, fundamental change in the way we approach the defense of this nation,” Richard said at a Navy symposium last week.

“This Ukraine crisis that we’re in right now, this is just the warmup,” he said. “The ‘big one’ is coming. And it isn’t going to be very long before we’re going to get tested in ways that we haven’t been tested in a long time.”

Richard warned “the ship is slowly sinking” because China is fielding new capabilities faster than the United States, which will soon find itself outnumbered and outclassed on the battlefield.

“[I]t isn’t going to matter how good our [operating plan] is or how good our commanders are, or how good our horses are – we’re not going to have enough of them. And that is a very near-term problem,” Richard asserted.

Richard also criticized US stagnation, saying it had “lost the art” of delivering new systems quickly.

“The Air Force went from a request, almost written on a napkin … when they figured out in the late 1950s that the Soviet integrated air defense systems were getting to the point that the B-52 just wasn’t going to make it in, and we needed a thing called a ‘cruise missile,’” Richard recalled. “And so, they envisioned what a standoff weapon looks like.”

The US is already behind China in the key field of missiles, with China fielding a generation of ultra-long-range cruise missiles, a bevy of ballistic missile varieties, and several varieties of hypersonic weaponsfor which the US has no equal and no answer.

Making their debut in the general public for the first time, DF-17 hypersonic missiles join China's National Day parade held in Beijing on October 1, 2019 - Sputnik International, 1920, 07.11.2022

Making their debut in the general public for the first time, DF-17 hypersonic missiles join China’s National Day parade held in Beijing on October 1, 2019 © Fan Lingzhi; Global Times

Beijing has also developed a radar capable of detecting stealth aircraft and begun equipping its newest warships with it, putting the US’ vaunted F-22 and F-35 fleets at risk.

However, the Pentagon is especially worried about what it fears was a fractional orbital bombardment system China tested last year, saying it is a part of China’s militarization of space. The US formed a separate Space Force in 2019, although its foundational doctrinal documents made clear that its goal was defending US space supremacy, not preventing the militarization of space.

Comparisons between Russia’s special operation in Ukraine and a presumed Chinese invasion of Taiwan have been made by American leaders since the operation was launched in February, despite Chinese protests otherwise. However, the US has been preparing for a conflict with China since at least late 2017, when the Trump administration began introducing a series of new strategic documents outlining a shift in US foreign policy.

The latest National Defense Strategy, published by the Pentagon last month, continues planning for what it calls “great power competition” with Russia and China, specifying that it sees Russia as an “acute threat” and China as the long-term competitor. In it, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin refers to Beijing as Washington’s “most consequential strategic competitor for the coming decades.”

La Resistance - One by One

Jeffrey Sachs On Nord Stream & Wuhan Lab

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Here is the conversation with Professor Jeffery Sachs, while discussing many controversial topics like Ukraine war, Media Lies & Wuhan Lab Leak. If you want to see more click the link below… on Rumble.

The actual interview starts at minute 24:50. Highly recommended. Worthwhile your time.

Or, Watch it on YouTube.

Saving Ukrainians from Themselves

A Republican Winter May Be Coming for Ukraine

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If the Republican Party’s representatives succeed in the midterm congressional elections on November 8, the United States may reduce or even stop helping Kiev, arranging a “republican winter” for it. This opinion was expressed on Monday by the columnist of the American newspaper The Washington Post and an expert on international relations Ishaan Tarur.

The publication cites the statement of Republican Marjorie Taylor Green, who said that Ukraine under the Republicans “will not receive a penny.” “Her party is expected to make significant gains in the midterm elections on Tuesday and may correct the entire approach of the United States on the issue of supporting the resistance of Ukraine,” the newspaper columnist writes.

According to him, there is no consensus in the Republican Party on the degree of support for Ukraine. Green represents the point of view of a part of the Republican electorate, the opposite position is expressed by more prominent representatives of the party, like Mitch McConnell, the Republican minority leader in the Senate, who advocates increasing military assistance to Kiev, the publication says.

“The Republican-led House of Representatives, among other things, is expected to increase pressure on the administration of [US President Joe] Biden in connection with its actions to withdraw American troops from Afghanistan, as well as increase political pressure on Iran,” the newspaper columnist writes. In his opinion, Ukraine should not count on support either, given that Congress has already approved the allocation of aid in the amount of up to $ 60 billion, and Kiev is persistently asking the West to increase the amount of aid. On the eve of the elections, various candidates and legislators from the Republican Party indicated that funding should be stopped, the author of the material reminds.

In European countries, he added, they fear a reduction in aid to Kiev, since European politicians may not be able to show “the political will to fill the gap.” They are also concerned about the prospects of assistance from the United States in Kiev, the newspaper writes.

Washington Post

Capitalism in Decay

US Godfather Makes a Chip Offer You Can’t Understand

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‘I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse’ – Don Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando), The Godfather (1972), one of the most paused scenes in movie history. Screenshot via INF News
A baffled group of chip industry experts, in a symposium discussion published November 4 by the ChinaTalk newsletter, tried and failed to explain Washington’s new export curbs on chip tech to China.
A close reading of the Commerce Department’s specifications shows ignorance about the technologies involved and confusion – if not duplicity – about the ban’s implications for China’s military. The experts’ group concluded that the new policy was rushed into effect in panic mode, without weighing its civilian or military implications.
The new export controls “will restrict the People’s Republic of China’s ability to both purchase and manufacture certain high-end chips used in military applications,” the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security wrote October 7.
That makes no sense, according to the experts, who included Jay Goldberg of Digits to Dollars, Doug O’Laughlin of Fabricated Knowledge, ChinaTalk’s Jordan Schneider and Martin Chorzempa of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. At the laboratory level, they observed, China can make enough advanced chips to power its key weapons systems.

Jay Goldberg:

I think there is an important distinction here between technical capability and commercial capabilities. I’m sure that there is some research lab in China somewhere that has a small EUV system and can produce 5nm chips, but they can’t do it at scale. They can do a wafer a day as opposed to 30,000 a month.

Doug O’Laughlin:

It’s one thing to make one wafer, but it’s another thing to make thousands of wafers with 99.999% accuracy over and over and over again. That’s the real problem: this is a cumulative benefit. If this is all you’ve ever been doing since the 1980s, all that cumulative knowledge and experience comes with you.

Jordan Schneider:

If you can do a wafer a day in a lab, you can probably make enough for your missile systems, no? And if so, then it really is just an economic competition.

In fact, China has had missiles that can destroy US aircraft carriers hundreds of miles from its coast since 2015, as Office of Net Assessment Director Andrew Marshall told me at the time.
The 5-nanometer chips that contain 57 billion transistors in Apple’s latest incarnation are powering 5G handsets and Big Data/AI applications, but the computer that guided Apollo 11 to the moon had just 36,000 transistors. Military systems use older chips that China makes at home, according to a 2022 RAND Corporationreport.
But if China requires the most advanced 5nm chips for AI-driven military applications – for example, drone swarms controlled by a 5G broadband network and guided by artificial intelligence – China can make enough of them, although at high cost.
The US ban won’t affect weapons systems, but it will delay China’s rollout of autonomous vehicles, data centers and other civilian applications.
Yes, “it really is just an economic competition,” as ChinaTalk’s Schneider concluded.

Chinese swarm drones. Photo: Twitter

Martin Chorzempa:

I think there’s been a shift away from trying to freeze or hold back China’s advances in chips. I see this as an attempt to roll back and degrade China’s existing capabilities. China can produce 14-16nm logic chips. Biren can produce GPUs at these thresholds. YMTC can produce NAND at this threshold too. What’s very interesting is that [Washington officials] did not set the thresholds at an aspirational level for China. They set them at levels that China already is able to do, and it’s cutting off their ability to do it.

If the Austro-Hungarian Empire was a tyranny tempered by incompetence, as the old joke goes, the BIS export controls are an economic blockade mitigated by ineptitude. In the rush to publish the new guidelines, the BIS produced an incomprehensible jumble of half-baked tech criteria.

Jay Goldberg:

I would love to hear from the people who wrote the regulations: In crafting these rules, which agencies showed up and really did their homework? And who phoned it in? Because it feels like some people did more work than others. Some things are incredibly specific, like the rules around AI performance. [In] other areas, it’s just like, “supercomputers.”

Doug O’Laughlin:

They go ham on metals deposition. They talk about 14 different types of metals, different types of processes, ALD.… And then they don’t talk about etch once. Whoever did the etch part mailed it in, and whoever did the deposition became an industry expert. The metals deposition part was mind-blowingly specific, and then they talk about ion implantation, which is something that I know a little bit about, and it’s so vague it could mean the entire set of tools that have ever been made.

Jordan Schneider:

There is limited expertise in the US government on this stuff, and I think it’s probably pretty spiky for certain things and not others.

Jay Goldberg:

In last week’s show, Kevin was really clear that the timing between [the] announcement and implementation of the rules was deliberately very, very short. I understand they had valid reasons for keeping that window tight, but it opens up all sorts of unintended consequences. In the rush to get the rules out, there was very little or no consultation with industry.

Goldberg concluded, “I’ve heard that it was deliberate: they wanted to keep certain industry bodies out of the process because they have a lot of lobbying weight.”
US chip equipment makers like LAM Research and Applied Materials, and design tool providers like Synopsis and Cadence, stand to lose the 20% to 30% of revenue they derive from China, with devastating consequences for their CapEx and R&D budgets.
Scott Foster of Asia Times reported October 17 that US semiconductor firms would suffer more damage than China from the new regulations.

US President Joe Biden wants more advanced semiconductors produced in America. Image: Twitter
The shoddiness of the Commerce Department’s technical specifications and the exclusion of US industry from the policy loop suggests a sudden onset of panic in the Biden administration over China’s technological advancement.
In January 2020, by contrast, the Pentagon overruled a Commerce Department plan to block exports of chip technology to just one Chinese company, namely Huawei, because US chip equipment firms would “lose a key source of revenue, depriving them of money for research and development needed to maintain a technological edge,” the Wall Street Journal reported at the time.
The Biden administration has made sure that the industry wouldn’t have the opportunity to object.

Saving Ukrainians from Themselves

Who is Zelenski? A Comedian for Hire!?

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A stand-up comedy performance by Vladimir Zelensky on “Vecherniy Kvartal 95”, 11 october 2014. 

Eastern Europe Awakening

White Russia’s Revival Explained by Putin

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Russian President Vladimir Putin honored the country’s National Unity Day by meeting with historians and dignitaries – including leaders of religious communities – and discussing the role of history in protecting national sovereignty, identity, and culture. Here are some key points from his speech and the subsequent discussion.

Conflict in Ukraine was “inevitable”
“Russia’s clash with the neo-Nazi regime that arose in Ukraine was inevitable, and had our country not undertaken the actions it did in February, nothing would have changed, only our position would have been far worse,” Putin said.

“Our so-called friends brought the situation in Ukraine to the stage where it was a mortal threat to Russia.” Putin compared the situation with what happened in 1941, when the USSR had ample warning about the upcoming Nazi invasion but did not take steps to defend itself, suggesting that this was one of the reasons millions of Soviet citizens died before victory over Nazism was achieved.

The West twisted Ukraine’s history
Western countries meddled in Ukraine’s internal affairs after the fall of the Soviet Union and “managed to instill such pseudo-values ​​into the minds of millions of people, which led to the fact that an anti-Russia was created on this territory, sowing hatred, violating the minds of people, depriving them of true history,” Putin said.

Ukraine has been turned into a grave danger for Russia, but also something suicidal for the Ukrainians themselves, he explained. “It is Ukraine, the Ukrainian people, that is the first and main victim of the deliberate sublimation of hatred towards the Russians and Russia. In Russia, everything is exactly the opposite – you know this very well: we have always treated the Ukrainian people with respect and warmth. It remains so, despite today’s tragic confrontation.”

A civil war, just like 1917 Speaking further about the current conflict in Ukraine, Putin drew parallels with the Russian Revolution over a hundred years ago. “In fact, the confrontation is going on within one people – just like it was after the upheavals of 1917.” Back then, “foreign powers warmed their hands on the tragedy of our people. They did not care about either the Whites or the Reds, they pursued their own interests, weakened and tore historical Russia to pieces.”

The West is doing the same in Ukraine today, Putin said, sacrificing the Ukrainian people to achieve their geopolitical goals, which he described as “weakening, disintegrating and destroying Russia.”

Weaponizing the distortion of history
Russians need to know the full past of their country, the president argued, without repeating the “mistakes of the Soviet period,” where academia worked to fit ideological patterns. “Something similar is happening now in some countries in the West, where much is determined by the current radical-liberal establishment. To please it, key historical events are presented in a completely distorted, inverted form, and the truth is canceled,” Putin said.

“When someone wishes to deprive the state of sovereignty and turn its citizens into vassals, they begin by twisting the country’s history, in order to deprive people of their roots, doom them to unconsciousness,” the Russian president explained, condemning this as a“deliberately perverted attitude to history.”

Pointing to Ukraine as an example of this, Putin said that “there have been similar attempts against Russia, and they do not stop, but we firmly and in time put up a solid barrier against them. “

The colonial era is over
While Russia is absolutely a part of European civilization, there is no denying that many major colonial empires in the West are now “medium-sized or small countries,” Putin said, comparing the population of Portugal with its former colony Brazil, the UK with India, and how China’s Guangdong province alone has 1.5 times the population of Germany. “European capitals were [once] the center of the universe – but this is already in the past,” the Russian president said.

Batman, or historical heroes?
Putin also opted to broach a slightly less political issue. During the question-and-answer session, he noted that academic work won’t be enough without teaming up with popular culture and merchandising.

Russian children “know of Batman but not of our own heroes,” Putin said, noting that historical education starts from an early age. “There should be cartoons, films, children’s literature… All of these things are needed. That’s why we’re here today, to nudge this process forward.”

Military Affairs

The “Times of Troubles” and the Birth of a Nation – Interesting History

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Saving Ukrainians from Themselves, Uncategorized

Planning the Partition of Ukraine

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❗️Polish military analyst shares plans for the partition of western Ukraine 

Polish military analyst and former UN staff officer Colonel Ryszard Wozniak has posted a plan for the partition of western Ukraine on his Facebook page. 

It turns out that Romania, Hungary, and Poland are having consultations at the level of state secretaries ( it’s kind of a first deputy foreign minister) on how to “divide” Western Ukraine. Meanwhile, possible disputes over border demarcation will be dealt with by a tripartite commission. 

Earlier it was reported that both Poland and Hungary, whose relations have improved considerably, are gradually mobilizing. 

The worst thing for Kiev here is that Ukraine is already a”thing of the past ” and everyone is plotting its partition. This includes Ukraine’s immediate neighbours and allies

Democracy as Mob Rule

Laptop From Hell: 459 Legal Violations

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by Ekaterina Blinova

Marco Polo, a non-profit founded by former Trump White House aide Garrett Ziegler, has released a 630-page analysis of Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell.” The report provides a roadmap for GOP Congress deputies and prosecutors to pursue charges against President Joe Biden’s son and his business partners.

However, it was not only censorship of conservatives, but also suppression of damning information concerning prominent Democratic figures, most notably, former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter. Starting from October 14, 2020, the New York Post published a series of exposés stemming from Hunter Biden’s laptop, later branded the “laptop from hell,” which shed light on his murky deals with foreign moneybags and alleged trading of his father’s political influence for cold, hard cash.

Almost immediately, Twitter and Facebook stepped in to limit the circulation of the bombshell article. However, Twitter went even further, completely banning the sharing of the newspaper’s Biden story. For their part, 51 ex-top intelligence officials on October 19, 2020 issued a letter titled “Public Statement on the Hunter Biden Emails,” in which they claimed that Hunter’s “laptop from hell” had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” The letter was widely cited by US Democratic politicians and mainstream media to downplay and marginalize the bombshell.

As it turned out later, the suppression of the Hunter story had all the earmarks of the classic damage control operation, which involved Big Tech, mainstream media, the US intelligence establishment, and Democratic officials. The content of Hunter Biden’s hard disk has been proven to be genuine by forensic analysts.

COVID, ‘Big Lie’ & ‘Domestic Terrorists’

Under Joe Biden, the attacks on dissenters under the guise of the fight against “disinformation” have gone further. In July 2021, then-White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki prompted a wave of criticism from the GOP over supposed collusion between the White House and Big Tech. She specifically told journalists that “it shouldn’t come as any surprise that we’re regularly in touch with social media platforms.”

Social media giants stepped up flagging and banning dissenters over questioning the origins and the government’s handling of the COVID pandemic or discussing supposed voting irregularities and election fraud branded by the Biden administration as “Big Lie.” Thus, in July 2021, Twitter permanently suspended several accounts dedicated to audits of the 2020 elections in Arizona, Wisconsin, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Georgia.

Earlier, in May 2021, it was reported that the Biden administration planned to task private firms with infiltrating private social media groups to monitor so-called “domestic terrorists” after the January 6, 2021 Capitol protests. These private contractors were meant to work for US federal agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which are limited in how they can spy on US citizens online without a warrant.

Democracy as Mob Rule

Beware! If You Are Supporting Russia

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Update: Today, 20 November, Russian citizen Yuliya Prokhorova was deported from Germany.

A Russian girl who danced “Kalinka” on May 9 in front of Ukrainian protesters in Berlin, disappeared after raids on her home.

Yulia Prokhorova, who became famous after May 9, when she danced Kalinka with the Russian flag at a pro-Ukrainian rally in Berlin, has stopped contacting her family and friends since October 14. On that day, police raided her home.

3 days later, the chat-admin of her Kremlin Valley channel wrote that Yulia was facing 10 years in prison, and The Landshut Prosecutor’s Office website posted a note that Prokhorova was accused of “supporting the aggressive Russian war.” 

Her relatives suggest that Yulia may have been in custody .