these are my views on history or current affairs

chronological order of entry is the most recent at the top of the page

when you follow the detail through, you can come up with surprising conclusions, often quite different to what the common consensus is, giving you a very strong edge in prediction

an example would be the october the 7th war between israel and hamas, that the real driver that made conflict of that scale inevitable was the increasing targeting sophistication of rocketry at a level implementable by hamas, that within five years hamas could have developed a "first strike" capability against israel

gaza is an enclave, enclaves don’t start wars and win

c-drama is the real china

its hard to find a culture more fixated on status and material wealth with an undertow of irrational violence

the CCP can’t be what it claims to be

the real leaders of hamas are comfortably in dubai sacrificing the gazans to generate the need for arab and iranian funding which they can then conscript a significant portion of for themselves

the israelis’ are faced with hamas and allied groups getting drones and rockets of sufficient guidance sophistication in the next year or so as to present an existential threat

it is a case of the hamas leadership following a policy of short term gain for long term loss

“ we are the last generation ”

china’s interesting  demographical  problem, its not just the CCP, south korea has it similar

noam chomsky is an interesting thinker, a contrarian who is in many respects right and in other respects not so right, certainly his insights on language are correct and fundamental despite prevailing counter-currents in academia

politically however i suspect an underlying utopianism or naivety about human self-interest and variance in competence which is the usual rock so many have been wrecked on, but he is an effective counterweight to  marxism

chomsky is strongly, but not completely in the area of adequate weighing of the information encoded in our genes whereas marx doesn’t weigh that at all, rather promoting complete malleability of humans and their societies in terms of education, training and cultural engineering/ control, something today that looks dystopian and akin the relgio-philosophical tradition of "tabula rasa"

if you think about it, you can see how "woke" has its orgins in marxism, this belief in social, personal and biological plasticity

“ i’m looking for novels about plastic surgery and beauty standards in korea ”

watch some k-dramas, 50% of the actors and actresses have had plastic surgery

the beauty ideal is say a mix of 60% korean and 40% european, some mixed marriage children come pretty close

there’s quite a few good youtubes that cover contemporary south korea

type in "korea plastic surgery" to the youtube search

books are passé

the strange things about war

its better to be a POW than a combatant on the side that captured you

cowards live longer

what would get you a jail sentence in peacetime gets you a medal

death is random

what was right in the war can be wrong eighty years later

fifty years later, no-one knows anything

all the ostentatious virtue signalling over what is happening in gaza ?

what were these maladroits doing to help free the gazans from the cruel and crazy yoke of hamas which, when all is said and done is the usual brutal ideological dictatorship of an elite with an autopilot set for disaster ?

the opposite of nothing, rather enabling its rule by acting as the propaganda mouthpieces for it, what we see happening now is the result of years of permission for hamas to use their subject population as a "shield" or hostages

the problem now is that advances in drone and missile technology mean that israel faces an existential threat from hamas in the near future so from the israeli point of view hamas can no longer be tolerated in gaza and hamas’s long held policy of exposing the local population to danger to protect themselves is now creating an awful humanitarian disaster, the scene was set many years ago and the ukraine’s successful "asymmetric" response to russia has opened many eyes to a new wave of potential sovereign hazard

at least people used to do something once, now its just all talk and posture, they didn’t do anything then and they don’t do anything now except dissemble probity and foresight

the problem israel faces and why it has reacted so strongly to hamas’s rather pathetic  (in military terms)  "offensive" is what the russo-ukraine war teaches the world, that relatively unsophisticated drones like the shahed in sufficient quantity can destroy a countries infrastructure, i.e. what is now known as "asymmetric warfare" ,  a strategy taiwan is also adopting where a militarily inferior opponent can still inflict sufficient damage on its enemy to deter it from invading

hamas missiles have been at least two generations behind the sabat, but there is no reason to expect they will not move two to four generations ahead over the next year or so and as a consequence israel will be in serious peril and so it has no choice but to destroy hamas and similarly ideologically fixated groups in gaza

actually the civil war in syria was worse in terms of human casualites and mindless brutal destruction, but media attention is selective

the very deep problem with the middle east is that islam is a religion of conquest and doesn’t fit the modern world and that poor fit is creating high richter earthquake levels of trauma

by contrast christianity is a religion for the maintenance of an empire and historically has always outshone other religions in this respect, though a more intelligent and tolerant version of isalm did create a great and wonderful muslim medieval empire for a while

you may think the russo-ukraine war contradicts this, but in fact christianity these days lacks anything like the cohesive and pervasive social control it once had

netflix

narcotic

the opiate of the masses

to keep them

subservient

marx got it wrong

this subservience

is a good thing

keep the idiots fed

at the trough of fantasy

and catharsis

is russia showing early indications of going into a reset ?

ed.  24th october 2023

the russian media is showing signs of confusion and lack of central control, turning in on itself, maybe putin really has had a heart attack ? the level of recent casualties and no prospect of an end to the war is starting to shake some of the complacency out of the general populace ?

putin’s very public assassination of yevgeny prigozhin was a big mistake, a signal of deep discord in the elite

i think south korea is always going to be a bit weird, its still technically at war with north korea which has real nazi style concentration camps for dissidents, these are korean people and the bodo league massacre was in 1950, only 73 years ago, these things must leave a deep imprint

however much south koreans may pretend things are "normal" they are in a war zone with its standards

the weirdest thing about chinese soaps/melodramas is the way subtle CCP propaganda permeates through them, the main one being a glorification of work and personal industry over any other life goals which is not what you would quite expect

however in a politically constrained society like china with still a huge state ownership of commercial institutions, personal incentives for most can be lacking so i would say this "propaganda" is deliberate

another insight is the background of a high degree of health problems which i would say is due to pollution, especially air pollution

international politics

war

inherently amoral

because

the bottom line

is

death

which knows nothing

of

ethics

damascus, aleppo, gaza

sophisticated cultural urban centers for three millennia

squashed by the footprint of modernity and crazy destructive wars and dictatorships

if you ask "is there any harm in believing the untruths of a religion ?" hamas has to be a clear example of extreme harm

their belief system forces gaza into constant conflict with a much more militarily powerful contiguous neighbour whereas a rational co-operative approach, though with certain penalties, would have been much more to their advantage

there’s plenty of examples of enclaves getting by, even with the russo-ukraine war, kaliningrad is in a satisfactory situation

hamas’s actions can only be described as political schizophrenia

basically the gaza strip is a war economy funded by iran, syria and to a declining extent, qatar and in return for that funding hamas has to make a show of force occasionally, hamas know they don’t have a hope in hell, that’s why they are taking hostages to create some negotiating power

attitudes are changing, i notice even hezbollah didn’t outright support hamas

when hamas starts to get precision missiles and drones, that will up the ante, in fact the ukraine war may spook the israelis in terms of what may lie ahead into taking control of gaza and expelling hamas, a much longer operation than a week, the numerical strength of the missile attack is an eyeopener, that was a miscalculation by hamas

the most  horrific thing  i have heard of in the russo-ukraine war is wagner dismembering deserters alive to teach medics and soldiers about how to treat wounds

when i thought about it, it probably occurred in WW2 as well on the eastern front and the 1917 to 1923 civil war

wagner was always doomed in the ukraine, it needed a combined services operation, particularly air power to be successful in the ukraine, they never adjusted what had worked for them in africa, yevgeny prigozhin had a hubris that was ultimately devastating to himself personally

an interesting  take  on germany’s V2 program during WW2 is that it was a catastrophic misallocation of resources and for the same cost they could have developed the atomic bomb

if germany had worked with japan on developing nuclear weapons we could have faced a  high castle  scenario

an interesting video about nazi gold, there really was  a gold heist

some sense on  gallipoli ,  it wasn’t necessarily doomed, but lacked the support required, especially in artillery and men

fighting between equally balanced sides is always a disaster, one side needs a very large advantage to make the costs and risks worthwhile

the russian orthodox church is a key "enabler" of the russo-ukraine war, yet there’s almost zero criticism by other christian churches of its "war criminal" behavior

from watching a few of the "chinese drama" youtubes, i can tell you the chinese are obsessed with

food

status

money

health

the last they really need to be concerned with, all that air pollution i guess, high rates of mental health problems as well, won’t be different from the west in this respect

interestingly you get subtle propaganda messages very typical of communist regimes, like a glorification of work since there is no incentive to work in a communist system, an attitude of permission or expectation of the use of violence by power elites and acceptance of subjectation by the proletariat to unreasonable decisions and behavior

traumatic encephalopathy   :   you see it all through the contact sports world, personality change  =  brain damage

why does russia have so many immigrants ?

between WW2 and stalin’s purges the country was depopulated and now

brother kills brother in the ukraine

its like pete seeger’s song

when will they ever learn ?

there’s something very disturbing about chinese culture and its the the right of the powerful  to inflict injury  without retribution

straight stockhausen syndrome, it permeates everywhere

a good talk  on why the current situation with china is not a cold war

i wonder if the dramatically increased lifespan in recent decades in china and russia has created a power imbalance between the young and old with the old now driving a political ship the young are forced to crew on ?

its hard to get to grips with  the scale  of what is happening in the ukraine, brothers killing each other

civil wars, being foundationally irrational can be the most vicious

its interesting how things really work, as i understand it, what stopped yevgeny prigozhin’s march on moscow was putin threatening the families of the wagner leaders through the FSB, so when putin offered his condolences to the bereaved families after what was effectively his assassination of them, it wasn’t purely bad taste, rather he was telegraphing to any future coup participants that he would go after their nearest and dearest

you can see how difficult it is to wrest power from putin and the russo-ukraine war will be decided militarily for the foreseeable future

the serendipitous beneficiaries of this war are australia, new zealand and other pacific nations since it is making the chinese think twice about invading taiwan while remilitarizing NATO and allies, its no mean feat to have shaken japan and germany out of their pacifism, thank-you validimir putin

we now know that any war is going to result in massive infrastructure destruction on both sides without necessarily escalating to nuclear

the contradiction between CCP doctrine

and the chinese obsession with money

can only be resolved

by corruption

russian history is full of  the stupidities  of its population going right back to shockingly bad defenses against the mongols

its not good, if in any conflict, the opponents are too evenly matched, like WW1, WW2 and now the russo-ukraine war

because of the evenness you get a long knock-down and drag-out affair extremely destructive to both parties

russia’s material failure was when it had become obvious it couldn’t take kyiv and the ukrainians weren’t a pushover that it didn’t withdraw from the war and this is putin’s dereliction of duty

china and russia are gigantic cases of stockhausen syndrome, subject populations held hostage by the ruling elite

well, north korea would have to be the best example of that

one of the interesting features of the russo-ukraine war is the importance of the vulnerability of infrastructure to drone attacks, interestingly positive in terms of limiting china’s expansionist aims since it has an extraordinary vulnerability in this respect, you don’t just need offensive military capability but a massive coverage of high technology air defense

russia is a culture i think permanently marked by the outright terror of having gone through the stalinist years though the younger generation are showing signs of shaking free, in a sense putin has been free carried by this fear and political apathy of the general population, but now with the war not going so well, this self imposed "social control" will start to break down

china has so much continuous history, its hard for us to conceive

the central tenet of marxism is that people can be trained and coerced to ignore self-interest in favour of communal benefit

you can see echoes of this today in various "woke" doctrines

all this is in complete denial of one of the main scientific advances in the last twenty years

genes are a form of knowledge carried forward

how genetically determined everything is

wow,   the real reason  john key  (ed. new zealand prime minister 2008-2016 )  resigned

china has a long history of beautiful women being involved in politics, the higher ranking concubines of emperors were effectively agents for their respective clans and you can actually argue that henry the eight’s wives were part of a similar system

china like russia has slipped back into its imperial mode pretty damn quick

lei gives a fascinating insight into how chinese politics really works, it sounds like there is some internal division within the CCP over the anti-western direction that xi jinping is taking

unilateral disarmament

proves one thing

the effectiveness

of the other’s armament

it was the combination of high velocity  (compound bows)  and accurate archery  from horseback that made the mongols an undefeatable force before gunpowder and then as the use of gunpowder became more common they switched to using the skills of subject nations with gunpowder to be able to implement fast effective sieges

china’s history is a soap opera/melodrama

the problem with these is the level of trauma

slavs killing slavs, its just mind blowing what putin is doing, writing a blank cheque for china !

i had always thought of  cocaine  as one of the milder ones in terms of harm, but its not

i’ll never forget a neighbour who was having a party and being invited inside and seeing the white powder in lines across the table

the only problem with drugs in my view, is do they do permanent damage ?

however the answer is always yes, though of course there are questions of degree and of course medical drugs etc can also be analysed in terms of this

the thought  of mao se tung which xi jin ping is so keen to emulate

i wouldn’t say its all rubbish, but it has the lethality of some-one who is sure he is right and will brook no compromise

“ the correct handling  of contradictions  among the people ”

interestingly, there is no theoretical basis for the forcible conscription of taiwan into mainland china

russia is what happens after a 35 year period of selectively killing its best people (1920 to 1955 ?)

if you read about the mongol invasions, they were horrific, but there was a rationality to their slaughter which certainly was on a scale equivalent to the holocaust and WW2 losses in general, however what is unique about the holocaust is its stupidity, how could germany ever win a war preoccupied as it was with annihilating the most productive portion of its middle class ?

the jews made a huge contribution to the stamina of germany in WW1 which hitler knew of course because he served under a jewish officer whom he respected

its always interesting to see unconnected dots, something internal politics and international "relations" have in abundance, though its encouraging to see the positive effect modern communications have had in creating a united front from the west in terms of russia and china, the war is being anticipated, it doesn’t have to occur before everyone wakes up like in WW1 and 2

noh theater ,  unique if you have not experienced it before and the stories give a great insight into pre-meiji japan and its off the wall level of superstition

curiously addictive

a "1420"   interview

"i’m glad how our guys act"/ would you go there ? /"i would but i’m not healthy enough" !

i think WW2 and the stalin era left a permanent cultural imprint in russia where they were forced to watch everyone around them be killed or imprisoned, self-preservation became paramount

i remember reading an account of a english "tanker" in an attack on the germans at tobruk and a tank next to him was hit by an 88 shell and he said his only thought was, thank god its not us

if china were a person, its diagnosis would be "borderline personality disorder"

what young people need to know and often get a contrary cultural message on is drugs and alcohol irreversibly damage the brain and cause reverse development

3 out of 4 boats lost, all those young men  dead  !

while japan had the most advanced torpedoes, their operational submarines were very below par, the country just wasn’t large enough to support the design and manufacturing effort necessary, like their war effort in general

if they don’t want to be a chinese colony, they need to take a leaf out of north korea’s book and to get nuclear missiles and the subs capable of launching them

as a side note, when you look at what goes into building  a nuclear submarine , no wonder the usa has decided the future has to be a multinational effort

likewise the mismatch between the economic power of nato and its allies so outweighs that of russia, the ukraine war has to end badly for it

the problem with the education system is it is too geared to the needs of the universities and this hold they have has to be broken for progress to be made

the internet has turned what is optimal to be taught on its head, what the internet enables is a higher , more "meta" skill level, that of self-skilling based on the ability to search and use information on the net

its a toxic, deceiving world, education should be part of the solution of navigating it, not amplifying the problem itself

the link with identity politics, trans whatever, social justice, intersectionalism, woke and marxism is they place category above individual worth, one has no existence as an individual except as a place holder for categories which are assumed to be entitled to some form of repair, that the native condition of the category is disrepair and the more intersections of the categories, the greater the intrinsic entitlement

its most easily seen in marxism where communal ownership of the means of production repairs income inequality

the flaw is it is all "ceteris paribus" ie "all things being equal" so you just take one variable out, change it and assume all the other variables are unchanged, again easy to see with marxism in that it assumes that productive efficiency is unchanged with the control and ownership change, but history shows that in fact the productive efficiency and target alignment fail chronically with states that implement marxism in its various forms

i think the crux of the problem of woke is its transfer of concerns about communal benefit from the state to specific signals an individual has or may acquire, however in fact individuals have a very limited concern for communal benefit or even communal identity acting only to maximise their own gain and the various woke ideologies are simply smoke screens or decoys within which to operate in a deceptive manner

so to me "woke" and its similars are in fact anarchist and in conflict with the state and its always this way even if they become the state, there is a perpetual undercurrent of anarchy, repression and brutal social and economic misalignment

stephen kotkin on china   :    unpacking  the ccp, communism, and us-chinese relations !

he gives an understanding of how the CCP works which is alien to western democracies, you can’t look at the ccp through western eyes to form projections about what it will do

some russian women seem only too happy to toss men to  the wolves of war

take a leaf out of north korea’s book, half a nuclear missile keeps china at bay, don’t be fooled by their anti-western paranoia, china is their problem and they know it

young and dumb , they have no idea how far their lives get permanently changed once they fight on the front line, injuries, psychological damage/ PTSD, severely disrupted personal relationships; they won’t fit in "normal society" when and if they come back

now i think about it, price harry has an unrecognised PTSD problem from his service in afghanistan, he killed a huge number of men even by historical standards, basically due to a mismatch in technology between the taliban and british military helicopters, a lack of self-reflection there, it doesn’t take much thinking about it not to do that, he had plenty of options, and i think if his mother had been alive he would have got the feedback not to have done it

the western involvement in afghanistan always seemed extraordinary to me, they can’t have read a single thing on the history of the area

bet this opinion doesn’t make the gossip columns

a political system has to allow extremes to occur, be perceived and corrected, i think australia and new zealand are going through something like this with the explosion of underage criminality

that is, the system itself has no dogma except in the long term, the experiential, unlike beliefs like marxism-leninism which in their own terms are "right" and therefore do not allow anything except what in its view is correct

i think that’s because politics is an emergent outcome and there’s just no way the effect of anything can be predicted reliably

political clichés

the very substance of the business

of saying nothing

heavy cannabis use linked  to schizophrenia  especially among young men

you can see how toxic the media are, so selective in what they publicize, this study of course doesn’t get mentioned

russia is getting angsted by the increasing level of illegal immigrant workers

this gets to the core of the problem with wars, you lose your best men, a fair portion permanently and illegal immigrants flood in to fill the gaps in industry and service

also men who have been on the front line get permanently traumatized and dysfunctional and never can go back to "normal life"

the best argument against modern wars is they "suicide" their own populations to the advantage of outside, uninvolved populations, the immigrant "problem" europe faces today is the inevitable consequence of population loss in WW1 and WW2

communism is a generic term and while marxism can be communist, communism is not necessarily marxist

interestingly karl marx disagreed with popular contemporary ideas as to what marxism was, stating "i am not a marxist"

perhaps he foresaw the blood baths that would follow ?

an interesting lecture  on the function of a monarch today

that the monarch as in the UK today is in fact a neutered or faux dictator and if you don’t have one then you run the risk or even likelihood of a real dictator, historically oliver cromwell in this case, but you can see in even america without this protection of an institutionalised declawed monarch that with trump's attempt to usurp congress you have the potential for a putin style dictatorship and there is a definite political undercurrent for that supported by all the thugs who would fill the various petty official positions for enforcing the dictatorship

it would be a big mistake for australia or new zealand to become republics, the currrent implementation of the monarchy is an essential base of the present parlimentary system, an propitious effigy to the dictatorship potentially around the corner

putin is an egregious example of what goes wrong with real dictatorships, they don’t step down when they start to lose the plot and you can only remove them with assassination or civil war and the russo-ukraine war is a civil war

the russian invasion of the ukraine

its the old story

what was supposed to make them richer has made them poorer

there is a view that war is really about countries gathering information about each other and if they act rationally they will conclude a treaty of sorts according to that information when things become clear enough

the russo-ukriane war still has many unknowns so i suspect a treaty is a long ways off

actually its a bit weird when you think about, commodore matthew perry’s forcing of the opening up of japan in 1853 back-fired in spades with the russo-japansese war and WW2, they would have been far better to let japan find its own pace, the significance of this misjudgement is hugely underrated

the problem with gaming is its limited intellectual horizons

the question would be "how to give it greater horizons ?"

the dalai lama was a political appointment and the wrong person for the job given tibet’s abysmal military performance against the chinese invaders, the tibetans were in with a good chance had they done any sort of the necessary preparatory work

the whole religion is just a crazy house of cards with various hidden sexual agendas

my view is its all so stupid because of the low iodine levels on the tibetan plateau

only those who have  been here  will understand

propaganda is so simple in concept, though of course its implementation requires a very substantial state or communal effort

its the creation of a consensus illusion backing the state’s or whatever ideology’s policies

interestingly i think "woke" falls into this category with certain subcultures in western society pushing it and its the irrationality of the doctrine that makes for the necessity of it being "propaganda" since otherwise it would never stick

i knew someone whose parents had been friends of barry humphries when she was a child, she claimed to have been sexually abused by him, i can’t comment on the veracity of the accusation, it may not be true at all, but he certainly was in with a very rum and autistic lot

well, they are all dead now

the health revolution enhancing functional life span has huge positives with great thinkers like  roger penrose  getting a longer lease on life and literally being able to further develop radical new thinking

the negative side is very experienced but paradigmatically dated politicians like vladimir putin and xi jinping also getting a new lease of life to their neighbours and own countrymen’s detriment, their skills keeping them in power and preventing the needed change in outlook

there is a science fiction meme about people living forever and what happens, well this is not living forever, but certainly has unforeseen consequences

if you  read this , you will see why the CCP is dangerous, any institution concerned to mimic "marxism–leninism and mao zedong thought" is off its head

like that "stalin-lite"   —  vladimir putin, you might hope it just fades, but they don’t seem to

"woke" in the australasian context is a belief in the inherent primacy of indigenous cultures over the colonizing culture, mixed with a bit of marxism, post-modernism, fan fiction and let’s face it, plain graft

however its just a belief, in fact cultures are cultures, you don’t have to weigh one against another, they are all a bit of a mixed bag, each has strengths and weaknesses, so i take a "utilitarian approach"

what offers the most utility in today’s context ?

one anti-utilitarian aspect of "woke" is its fixation on the supposed higher value of indigenous languages which works to the mixed culture’s disadvantage burdening people with the neurologically costly facility of two languages, sense is sense, what does the language matter, so go for what facilitates communication best without the hidden costs of multi-lingualism

maybe woke is an overreaction to the devaluation of the indigenous culture or at least plays on that since one of its hallmarks is "insincerity", but actually in some instances there was never a devaluation of the indigenous culture, i think that is the case with new zealand which has always incorporated a lot of maori ways of looking at things in the general attitudinal mix, if you travel overseas you can see this

unnecessary bilingualism is culturally divisive and creates structural rifts and the phoniness of "woke-speak" bends the mind with its 1984 overtones

vladimir putin is a very strange thing

a time capsule or pandora’s box from soviet russia that has got opened releasing the plagues

xi jinping was only born a year later and he is reigniting a long forgotten war with chiang kai-shek

the past resurrecting in the future

i would take dugin’s  missive  as a sign of increasing political instability in russia, stress cracks showing that something has to give

the basic problem is the russian and ukrainian casualty rates, its not WW2 where entire generations of young men were obliterated

something’s starting to happen

alexander dugin’s mad rambling cost him his daughter’s life

i wonder if he will ever make that connection ?

we are now in a cold war with china

i quite like stephen kotkin’s view that  this is necessary  and very much preferable to being in a "hot war"

actually the russo-ukraine war, while not nominally involved with nato is edging very close to a hot war ?

hopefully the situation with china will remain more distanced and ambiguous, perhaps the newly coined phrase "hybrid war" does cover the present situation adequately ?

a way of looking at north korea is its the world’s last functioning true monarchy

its the ukriane’s decommissioning of its nuclear weapons after the breakup of the soviet union that made it vulnerable to invasion by russia, we are living with a concrete example of unilateral disarmament

new zealand may think its "out of the blow", but historically china has picked off islands first

had the chinese succeeded in their attempted invasion of java in 1292, the history of australia and new zealand would have likely been one of the chinese colonialism

fortunately, the javanese were too wily for them

its not difficult to imagine a non nuclear australia and new zealand being threatened by a china now in control of taiwan moving in first on new zealand then forcing surrender by australia with the nuclear threat from china without risk of retaliation

i think people have trouble understanding china is a millennium old empire constantly at war with neighbours and the 19th and twentieth centuries when it was weak and torn apart by warlords is historically anomalous, for long long periods it has been the greatest empire in the world, at one stage they were even able to ship a giraffe back from africa

the depth of  cyber warfare ,  disinformation and surveillance with state actors who unlike criminals can perform and execute effectively is just staggering

the web can take you into spaces that previously you could not have conceived of

maria mayer, a russian spy living in solvenia  recently arrested  had an online gallery to cover her movements around the EC

you can still  see it  on instagram, she had appalling taste !

to understand bitcoin, compare it to the art market which is basically about establishing provenance for unique objects, that is they are unforgeable with aesthetic value a secondary consideration

where you have an unforgeable object with a limited supply then it has value  (think gold)  and in addition with bitcoin you have the ability for rapid and consistent electronic transfer

why nft’s didn’t work is there was an unlimited supply

of course the weakness of bitcoin is competing coins that work better, but until they turn up bitcoin will remain dominant

the weirdness of russia

the way it preferentially kills its own

in comparison to any enemy

the weirdness of russia

the way it preferentially kills its own

compared to an enemy

if you love your country you must love its kin, why then are you killing ukrainians and kowtowing to the chinese ?

this is the giant discontinuity that will bring down putin

politicians and diplomats wouldn’t last a minute if they said what they really thought

the way of the world

putin is selling out russia to china and killing his own ethnic kin, its really bizarre

“ politics focuses character ”

stephen kotkin on how to explain murderous disasters like stalinist russia, that is, political beliefs shaping normative behaviour into something cruel and destructive

the belief in a right to russian hegemony being behind their invasion of the ukraine

china has the same belief, historical echoes hitting a resonance of capability

Slavoj Zizek and Stephen Kotkin  in discussion

one of the problems with wars is the way others get drawn in

if china attacked taiwan, it would also have to attack australia as australia would not stand by and if australia got attacked then the peacenik of the south pacific would also be drawn in

this actually has been recognised by new zealand’s military with its purchase of four Boeing P8-A Poseidons which for the first time for decades give the country a real modern wartime capability to sink ships or submarines

unfortunately being a "peacenik" has never worked, the mongol massacres of pretty much the entire populations of comfy middle class cities in persia that never gave a serious thought for their defence is one of the egregious historical examples

an interesting view of war is that it is an information gathering exercise to ascertain the relative position and strength of two opponents which is why the russo-ukrainian war is continuing, each side is continuing to assess the other and update its views and peace will come when the best benefit of the long term projections of both sides coincide

what the russians cannot see and is quite apparent to an outsider is that since they are in effect at war with nato, they are up against a combined economy 40 times greater than theirs and the longer the war goes on, the more this difference shows

the last time they were in this situation was the crimean war of 1854, which did not turn out well for them despite a lack of military competence by the alliance that opposed them

the soviets prevented the british dropping supplies to the polish resistance in warsaw so they could be  killed by the germans

stalin was an insane mass murderer

why people defend him, i don’t know

these promoters of stalin can have no acquaintance with his personal life, how he killed off or imprisoned his wife’s family after her suicide

not sane by any measure

and actually putin has a similar problem, early stage dementia

the problem with the russian political system is it can’t get rid of crazies running the place

the past

seen through cultural fictions

just another of life’s absurdities

but more dangerous

than most

as they move

the stupid masses

in ways

that defy logic

ask

putin

history is just wars by princes, stalin and beria made war on russians just like putin makes war on slavs

the problem with "communism" is in simple terms its based on the premise "from each according to his ability to each according to his needs"

only a psychotic will think this is going to work

its not just putin that’s the problem, its half the russian population

“ as long as i don’t have to go to the front line i don’t feel any need to do anything except talk  vacuous nonsense ”

chat GPT

more intelligent than the average liberal arts undergraduate

no wonder they need woke

to differentiate them

i think prince harry was traumatised much more than he realizes by killing all those men in afghanhistan, especially since the western military intervention there has been shown to be so wrong minded

it amazes me how many wars were obviously problematic at the outset if you looked at a map

this is one of the most  unbelievable  things i have seen, 2013 and volodymyr zelenskyy is performing in a russian new year’s eve show with vladimir solovyov applauding  (both ashkenazi jews btw)

solovyov is now a particularly virulent mouthpiece for kremlin propaganda on his prime time chat show

no wonder the russians underestimated zelensky

happier days for everyone, but the ruling clique in russia was getting caught up in a grandiose delusion and couldn’t let things be

slavs killing slavs, how can there be any winners, just the dead on both sides and a destroyed slav country

crazy

gangs are in effect territorial militias, if your legislation is pandering to their legality, you are making a rod for your own back

queensland is leading the way in making proactive legislation to defeat this threat to social order

militias are in effect, governments in waiting

putin’s big mistake was to allow the separatists in the donbas in 2014 to hijack the russian agenda and create a festering sore of conflict that poisoned relations with the ukraine as well as taking a significant russian population out of the ukraine hence increasing nationalist influence there

his other big mistake was not to annex belarus so its economy and military could be strengthened and provide a much more material support to russia and increase russia’s protrusion into europe

anybody can see this, the lesson is autocracies with incompetent leaders may give an illusory stability for a while, but egregiously bad decisions lie around the corner making populaces suffer

i’m just viewing things from what would have worked for russia and putin, not condoning it, what they actually did is a blind probing by idiots !

the key lesson napoleon took from the  battle of zunta  (which if had been lost would completely have changed european history making it much more ottoman) was that you should force a split or wait until the enemy forces are split themselves for whatever reason and cannot help each other and attack their reduced forces

basically the battle was won by the superior tactical skills of  prince eugene  of savoy

interestingly, this is why the duke of wellington said the result of the battle of waterloo was a close call since it was the arrival of von blücher’s army that changed the battle in the seventh coalition’s favour and was napoleon’s greatest fear

from this you can see that putin’s strategy in the ukraine was fundamentally flawed, he cannot stop the resupply of the ukraine through poland, and belarus, while a client state of russia refuses to join the war, putin years ago needed to have annexed belarus so its army operated under russian command and this would have made the russian attack more fully on two fronts which would have put the ukraine is a very difficult situation despite russia being a generation behind in its weaponry

lukashenko has a reputation for being wily as a fox and NATO has a lot to thank him for

instead, russia is having to deal with the ukraine on a single front and cannot stop resupply through poland

being attacked on two or more fronts being a certain signal of eventual defeat is a lesson that germany only seems to have learnt after two world wars

russia’s recent escalation of drone attacks on ukrainian infrastructure can be looked at as the successful opening up of a new front against the urkaine, interestingly the drones had to come from a country outside russia’s own military infrastructure which says a lot about the state of russian weaponry

this is one of the problems of russia going on nuclear alert, the "governance" of the top echelons of command over the lower are so poor that an unintended initiation of a first strike attempt by russia would be on the cards which was why, even at the height of the cuban missile crisis russia never went on the alert level for its missiles, but had them all stood down

this is one of the hard facts about MAD, bluffs have to be called and so the risk of a weapons exchange happening is not zero, but the prize is a nuclear peace, so preferable to our human history of constant warfare

putin is suffering a form of subtle dementia or late onset schizophrenia and the russian federation has no mechanism for his replacement

its really like science fiction, the appearance of democracy ie some matrix like simulation decoying the population from the fact of autocracy

even the usual mutineers aiming to replace the autocrat with another autocrat are decoyed

putin is very like stalin, in fact there’s been no leader so like stalin and i guess his fate will be the same

one day it will be announced that putin has died from a health condition but in fact executed like stalin and after a bit of infighting a new autocrat will emerge

president xi jinping has completely changed the game for russia by saying in effect that if russia uses the nuclear bomb on the ukraine, it may move on some of their disputed boundary

you can argue as to responsibility for the background to the russo-ukraine war, but its all water under the bridge, russia is now too exposed to potential chinese aggression and other border issues because of over-investment in the ukraine war, putin must be demented to have got into this situation, that’s the trouble with autocracy, things are only as good as sanity at the top

the problem with tsar nicholas the second was you couldn’t find a person less competent to lead russia and there was no system for getting rid of him

the same with putin, no person less competent to run russian foreign policy with his mid twentieth century KGB ideas and no system to get rid of him

russia seems to bounce through extremes and its break up is not in the interests of the west a way of looking at the russo-ukraine war is the absurdity of two russian speaking nations fighting each other, like there are too many russian speakers in the world

the problem of the ukrainian war is the same problem since WW1, you selectively kill your best people, alcoholics and drug addicts have more sense than to enlist or be conscripted

war for most of human history was quite different, death was much more uniform across the entire population and young men could get fortunes to settle down with

the selective killing of modern war was the driver for the various euthanasia of "defectives" movements after world war 1

one of the weird things as you get older and i am talking post-60 is the way people your age start to fall away through health problems and losing their grip on things mentally which is what i think has happened in russia, putin doesn’t have dementia but there is some significant cognitive impairment, what he has already worked out he still has some competence at but with something new like invading a country he is completely at sea while retaining his ability to keep "social control", a bad combination for everybody as it turns out

china appears to be on the same road

a riveting  account  by a recently mobilized russian soldier from sakhalin of how he was put on the front line without adequate training and is now wounded

what amazes me is how its not perceived as civil war which is what it really is, similar culture and races focused on nothing but killing each other

the only beneficiary is us in the pacific being forewarned against china

basically one man is bringing two countries to ruin, how can he stay in power ?

there must be others who think as mistakenly as him

the chinese can be as crazy or crazier than anyone else if you look at their current political system and history

tattoo inks are unregulated and contain nano-particles, carcinogens and toxins

heavily tattooed people always have mental and physical health issues, its a form of self injury

also i count the usually extraordinarily bad art as toxic

why be a billboard for an idiot forever ?

north korea with a very limited nuclear strike capability has kept china from invading

the russo-ukrainian war is giving a superb example of how it works with an invading power that has nuclear weapons against a country that does not

basically the threat of using nuclear weapons keeps any allies of the country being invaded out and restricted to indirect help

taiwan needs its own nuclear weapons as matter of urgency, there’s no getting around it, and longer term so does australia

its funny how the main lesson of the cold war has been lost, that the russian high command doesn’t have complete control of launching, that lower levels of command or in the case of cuba, that fidel castro could hijack the command makes any escalation by russia very fraught, the politburo appreciated this because over the whole of the cuba crisis russia never went onto nuclear standby

it was so disturbing to russia that nikita khrushchev was eventually sacked because of it

what is unusual about putin is he is really the leader with the most power/control since stalin and i would say at this point he doesn’t seem in sound mind, maybe a degree of dementia, who knows

the russians got it all wrong from the start, they should have never permitted the separatists to rebel against ukraine in the donetsk and the real low hanging fruit was belarus which they could have annexed without complaint and from a strategic point of view would have greatly strenghtened their hand against the ukraine forcing a much better possible deal for them over the crimea

i think putin is if he is able to will drop a nuclear bomb on the ukraine, he’s pretty much a dead man if he doesn’t, the question is whether he will be able to stay in power long enough to do this and just russia going on nuclear standby means things get very scary

the nuclear drill he has ordered is the first step to that, can we look forward to more strontium-90 in the atmosphere ?

there is an irrationality to the russian foreign policy and war aims that is disturbing

slavs killing slavs, histories old old story

lenin was a theoretician for mass murder, stalin wasn’t something new, he was lenin’s faithful pupil

i have only read lenin recently, he’s really interesting, not at all like i thought, he’s very intelligent but absolutely brutal in what you have to do to get to the "final goal", a literal "we had to destroy them to save them" and actually he’s not a particular fan of the "working class"

socialism runs the span from the mass murder of the population to today’s "social democracies"

the problem in its more extreme form is the state cannot competently control the economy so everyone ends up very poor except the ruling clique and total repression is need to stop the population rebelling

lenin really wrote the  textbook  on how an unpopular minority group takes and holds power

some of it highly intelligent, but you can see he was aware of the necessity to kill people on an industrial scale

he also comes across as schizophrenic and as it turned out, criminally insane

peter greenham’s  portrait  of queen elizabeth, its her best i think, touching on the surreal, no wonder it didn’t go down well with the commissioners

when i look at these  quotes  by vladimir lenin, much more than marx he provided the axioms for stalinism and dictatorship within soviet russia and the union, they are not unintelligent ,  but no holds barred "brutal" ,  its power without any moral compass which of course is what happened

“ One man with a gun can control 100 without one ”

“ There are no morals in politics;  there is only expedience.  A scoundrel may be of use to us just because he is a scoundrel ”

yet another pope  has become senile ,  the catholic church doesn’t shoot itself in the foot so much as in the head in its constant discrediting of itself

well he’s the first one for a while who isn’t gay

brad warner "on tour" in finland was saying the place a weird vibe compared to when he had been there before

my  comment

you are in a country that shares a very long border with a country that nato  (finland will be a nato member in a month)  is in a very real proxy war with, its gotta have a weird vibe, its actually a very big change for finland, basically the country is about to become a protagonist in a war compared to its previous policy of appeasement

it is looking increasingly like the assassination of darya dugina was the work of a ukrainian undercover group

from a pragmatic viewpoint it will be startlingly successful as a propaganda weapon in bring home to the russians there is a war going on and russia will have to mobilize to win it

this means russia will become a very different and uncomfortable country to live in, and actually putin mightn’t be in power in that, more like some sort of military junta

it was even more successful in missing its possibly primary target alexander dugin, discrediting him as man who sacrificed his daughter for some ill thought-out and dated ideas

drug dealers effectively run robbery and burglary operations because that is how they are funded

i suppose drugs are in effect, a currency

russian casualties are more in the area of WW2 than the usual modern warfare, nobody  (at least on the russian youtube  videos )  seems to mention this or have any concern about it

probably its too dangerous for them

putin is the leader most like stalin since him, but a watered down version without the social control that stalin had, so lacking that and the "war" dragging on i would say his days are numbered

russia has never recovered from stalin and beria; the gulags and WW2

its best men lost and taken out of the genetic pool

the effects of war are never controllable

the history of the middle east, eastern europe and northern africa is one of constant war and armies and enslavement shifting populations around and some of it pretty extreme like scandinavian mercenaries serving as bodyguards for the byzantium emperors so the populations are going to be exceptionally  racially mixed

i always find it the most amazing thing about war, once a victor is sorted out the dead and injured are written off and everything settles back to normal, just with a new controlling hierarchy class if the defender lost

my observation of the american foreign service is its inability to understand different cultures, the middle east, iraq/syria and afgahnistan being prime examples and getting overinvolved in cot-case situations and being behind the eight ball in situations that are more productive of involvement

the usa’s major issue currently is the need for japan, taiwan and australia to have nuclear weapons because "the cold war" doctrine of "mutually assured destruction" is the only thing that’s going to work to keep the peace in tomorrow's world, politically unpalatable as it is in some quarters

kleptocracy is the worst of all political worlds, it lacks the adaptability of democracy and the competence of a so shall we say bonapartian dictatorship

russia and north korea are today’s outstanding kelptocracies and in fact china has also become one, a consequence of which is it is internally facing the same expansionist pressures as russia

the invasion of the ukraine was really the consequence of a political dialogue in previous years in which russia opted for kleptocracy rather than democracy and was clearly lacking the economic mass to sustain itself militarily and economically with the inefficiencies of the kleptocratic system

an interesting way to think about the ukraine conflict is to personify russia and ask how it looks at things

it wouldn’t know anything of putin but might say it was too small to support itself adequately and needed to be larger

the make-up team has created a  model in looks  who sounds like helen clark, dissonant

its that highly skilled "evasion" helen was such a master of

well, arden is a protege of clark and this is what makes her such a formidably successful politician, clark’s mentoring accelerated arden’s political development by thirty years so what you see is an illusory make-over, a younger woman of 42 years who is in fact a very seasoned and experienced politician of about sixty in terms of political skill, supercompetent in that respect and almost impossible to defeat give the rest of new zealand’s very run of the mill "political talent"

i’m not really political, what is interesting is the profound impact quality mentoring can have, parallels in history are aristotle’s tutoring of alexander the great and socrates of critias, i think its the association of socrates with critias  (a leader of the thirty tyrants)  that was the underlying reason for his execution

history and these people would be different if not for the power of what you might call "supernormal" mentoring

of course the flip side can be seen in some aspects of the education system with what in effect amounts to "malign mentoring"

the problem with afghanistan and all the billions of wasted military money is it was surrounded by countries unfriendly to the usa, that includes pakistan which is crazy ambiguous at best

interestingly this is why russia has such a problem with the ukraine which is able to be resupplied through poland, that should have been a big alarm bell for the russians but their leadership is too old and has lost the plot, its just a question of time before putin is removed from power as the russian casualties mount

intervention in afghanistan should have only ever been at the level of intelligence and foreign services

down here in the pacific there's no question that china is becoming a "hegemon" and the only thing that will stop it is australia, taiwan and japan getting nuclear weapons, australia is on the road to getting them, but could be 10 or fifteen years away

history shows empires always feel the need to expand so russia and china as a problem are here to stay

the real reason russia invaded the ukraine is they needed the larger economic mass an annexation of the ukraine would give them, but of course they are so stupid they are destroying all the infrastructure

when there is a lack of rational consideration by one of the parties in international politics, things can get very brutal for the populations involved and actually NATO and the USA’s involvement at a military level in afghanistan was not rational and its not like history wasn’t shouting, "don’t go there"

macdonalds

a subtle malnutrition

slavs killing slavs, stalin and beria at least were georgian, but putin ?

the new zealand ACT MP david seymour has a good point about using the tax department to investigate "gangs", al capone was eventually imprisoned for failing to file tax returns, it was the only way they could get him

seymour is showing labour’s "gang friendly" biases up which actually has deep leftish ideological roots going back to the early soviet era with its persecution of the "kulaks" and glorification of criminality

he really has them over a barrel on this, i hope he’s not put off by the response as the media tries to freeze him out

"gangs" are a new government "in waiting"

moscow  in summer

you’d hardly believe

it is a country at war

only the death

of friends and relatives

can break the façade

highly precise long range rockets have changed the nature of warfare as profoundly as aircraft did

the highly intelligent insane

stalin, hitler, mao, genghis khan

a scourge like no other

large states always require more territory and resources, this  study  fits well with russia’s attempt to annex the whole of the ukraine to bolster its food supply, population, technology and industry so as provide the strength to resist NATO and china

though the invasion was born in hubris, it was also a sign of the desperation of russia’s current position as no longer a superpower yet hemmed on two sides by more formidable opponents

big gods , one of the discounted models, hypothesis 14, 3/5 down the page

the core problem of marxism is that the disenfranchisement of the self-organization of economic life cannot be adequately replaced

that economic activity "self-organises" if not interfered with is in effect what adam smith calls "the invisible hand"

i prefer "self-organising" as the way to express this because it fits with modern ideas of adaptive complex systems and is biological rather than the laws of physics, it just doesn’t happen "to be", but has internal feedback loops to keep things on track

as it turns out ,  in practice the replacement is always some form of state control that is so perverse and woefully inadequate that the most brutal suppression of a rebelling populace suffering from scarcities is necessary

i think what he was attempting to remedy were the working and social conditions of the working class in victorian england, problems that to large extent new technologies and improved education and health knowledge eventually solved

one can compare marxism as a sort off the shelf tool for making apocalyptic dystopias compared to the more organic idiosyncratic nationalist tailored nazism, different roads to the same end

the problem  with modern war is you kill the able-bodied young on who the future rests, while the alcoholics, drug addicts, criminal element and otherwise problematic all survive ,  russia lost entire generations of the young in world war two, has nobody learnt anything ?

i guess you can view russia’s current government as "the criminal element" being thieves and murderers, interestingly stalin had no trouble with that view of himself

they  do have a basic point, that social attitudes to gender have a normative reproductive basis, which is just one possible attitude amongst many from an existential point of view, and even the notion of gender itself is constructed, of course reifying into its various existential forms amongst which we have normative and trans.

the problem is its elevation into the overriding ethical concern when especially in the context of social work there is so much extreme harm in other areas already occurring that are not being remedied

basically it seems like the elevation of a relatively trivial matter and a denial of much more substantive issues.

the other point is that if society loses its reproductive focus on gender identity that at an extreme it will depopulate and in the human evolutionary context any "tribe" that this happened to was likely to be decimated by more numerous neighbours

i think the central issue is not the imposition of a different definition of sexual identity, though that definition is, in my view no less flawed than what it replaces, but the avoidant nature of the implicit denial of hugely larger harm constantly occurring in the arena that social work attempts to remedy

what i would predict is such attitudes will go nowhere because they are so directly in conflict with a societies need for continued reproductive success, which of necessity must triumph, this is not say this view has more philosophical validity, rather its an existential necessity

i have to say that the declamatory redefinition of "gender" espoused by these people is a miracle of sanity compared to some of the society-wide historical religious attitudes that have occurred

the outstanding military weakness of china is the very high population density of its eastern seaboard

a few nuclear bombs would cause untold destruction, this the leadership of north korea have realised to their credit and have already created an effective deterrent, limited as it is

it seem the western world has forgotten what it worked out in the cold war, that its only "mutually assured destruction" that stops wars like the ukraine

australasia has about five or six years to get a nuclear deterrent in place, let’s see how uncomfortable things have to get before that’s done

if china takes taiwan it gives it an unparalleled degree of geopolitical and economic hegemony

a rather fascinating look at the way world war 2 was fought in europe ,  the movements  of controlled territory

the tide of the war clearly turned in the allies favour by december 1942 and if hitler had the slightest sense should have attempted to consolidate their russian position into something defensible and sue for peace, but war has its own inertia as the russians are finding out now in the ukraine

snatching defeat from the jaws of victory

the  battle of keresztes

there’s several things disturbing about new zealand at the moment beyond the imminent alpine fault cracking with wellington experimentally about to be a testimony to building code effectiveness

the most important one is the failure of the education system to create employment skills from a very young age, in medieval england, boys aged eleven used to leave home and go and live with a craft master to develop their trade, children mature much earlier now so really the ball has to be set rolling much younger, the current education system only develops skills for academia

there is a very limited time window for children to take on the necessary employment skills for life and 15 is way too late to start, the academic world is different, but most people are not academically inclined nor is it useful for anything except a tiny minority to be so

a more abstract concern is a governmental /political attempt to alter the use of the english language, historically this has been associated with periods of outright political and social insanity

interestingly stalin was well aware that sergei eisenstein’s film  ivan the terrible  was a direct criticism of him, but in a way it also glorified him, he did respect eisenstein’s ability as a director and did intervene to protect some writers like bulgakov, sholokov and pasternak, even osip mandelstham

you just have to read about  ivan’s life  to see the russian thinking behind their invasion of the ukraine and putin in fact has scripted a surprising amount of things from ivan and joseph, but the soviet world with its complete control of information and the bloody mailed fist of the secret police isn’t there to the same extent any more and i think basically he has lost control of the situation

a good  youtube  on ivan

dima fedotof

last day of the war

disturbingly  prescient  of russian cluster and thermobaric bombing in the ukraine

the bomber used in the animation is very russian, with the contrarotating propellers and pseudo ground effect wings

the problem with russia is the way it sets on its own

i have a theory that when you redefine a meaning away from common usage, its a sign of "mental illness"

like redefining "war" as "special operation"

of course that would make soviet-era russia, nothing but a hotbed of mental illness which proved to be the case

the problem with the texas shooting of 19 children and the tardy action by the police is that the police are not trained militarily, they are a right to be cautious about their own lives, the use by the shooter of a military grade assault rifle means you are basically faced with needing a response by militarily trained troops or equivalent

machine guns are banned as an obvious problem, but it doesn’t seem to be understood that semi-automatic assault rifles are in school shooting situations more lethal because they don’t require belts of ammunition to be carried by the shooter

interestingly, its possible to understanding the cultural reluctance of texas to ban assault rifles because of its historical indian and mexican wars where the citizenry needed guns

however this is politics, things have to go through extremes before anything is done, australia and new zealand are the hidden beneficiaries of the ukraine war, it now being obvious the direction china’s expansionism is heading and in my view nothing short of australasia having a nuclear deterrent will stop china, the ukraine’s fatal mistake was giving up the nuclear missiles it inherited when the soviet union broke up, russia kept its missiles and the ukraine didn’t, its that simple

russia, where its foreign policy is run by a female  tv presenter

she’s a murderous bitch in make-up

you can bet your bottom rouble that no children of the "elite" are fighting in the ukraine

what drugs and alcohol do to the brain

johnny depp is making an idiot of himself in front of the entire world at his own cost

a very interesting  interview  with henry kissinger, who i know from the failure of the vietnam war which was always a lost cause, however he talks a lot of sense and in particular raises the question about russia’s inability as a nuclear power to walk away from defeat by the non-nuclear ukraine, actually as the usa did in vietman and afghanistan

we could yet see a low megatonnage bomb dropped in the ukraine which would effectively end the war in russia’s favour, which would create a huge "earthquake" in the modern geopolitical landscape

international politics is pretty brutal, it always has been, you can’t have fluffy ideas about making the world "a better place", the best you can do is look after your own security and get some degree of "win-win" interaction with your adversaries, which actually is, i think, kissinger’s viewpoint

new zealand thinks it is well away from any potential conflict, but i would pick australia as being able to deliver nuclear warheads within ten years, new zealand’s problem is if china attempted to annex new zealand, would australia be prepared to risk its own annihilation in the defence of new zealand ?

if this seems far fetched, please understand china’s strategic interest has always been to pick off "islands" first, easy to see actually with current events, however i feel kissinger’s advice about keeping up with various forms of economic and cultural engagement with the "adversary" while increasing defence and offensive capability moderates more extreme dangers

the australasian/pacific security situation is necessarily "a mixed bag", don’t expect it to be any other, oversimplified views go down the traumatic path of "correction"

the west, intent on demonising north korea has completely overlooked what it has right, which is, limited though its nuclear capability is, its enough to keep china from annexing it, which given the preoccupation of russia and the west in the ukraine has created an opportune window for china

charles dicken’s  people

the victorian developmental crisis

short of vitamin D

another interesting  video  by stasha gominak

why putin stopped the inevitable massacre of the ukranian defenders  trapped  in the underground tunnels of the azovstal steel plant

the publicity couldn’t get any worse, its what the nazis did to the soviets in  adzhimushkay  in 1942

a ray of light must be getting through to him

the surprising beneficiaries of the russia-ukraine war are new zealand, australia, taiwan, japan and south korea because the war shows that against a nuclear hegemonic power, if you don’t have nuclear weapons you can deliver yourself, its no show

and actually you don’t need a lot in the way of nuclear weapons and a delivery system which is what north korea shows

the populations of new zealand and australia have to get their heads around this, though of course new zealand sneaks by under the protection of australia

the ukraine’s mistake was made after the break-up of the soviet union when it let the usa and russia remove the nuclear weapons it inherited and its paying a terrible price

the unusual aspect of the current conflict is it is less like the implementation of foreign policy and more like a civil war, putin’s mother nearly starved to death and his brother died during the siege of st. petersburg, you would think he would be more sensitive to what is happening in the ukraine

china must be royally pissed with russia invading the ukraine because now everybody knows what their invasion of taiwan would look like and china has only to raise their nuclear weapons alert status to sideline any help in the form of troops

nobody seem to notice what north korea does well and that is prevent an invasion by china with very limited, but actual nuclear weapons capability

japan, taiwan and australia must necessarily have their own nuclear capability with 5 years or there will be trouble like being on the losing end of a war, if the usa has any sense it will facilitate this transfer

new zealand of course drifts along under australian protection

putin has done everyone except the ukraine and possibly china a big favour by his precipitate action, i think the world had forgotten how nuclear weapons are fundamental to the relative "warlessness" of recent decades

you only have to read medieval history to see how bad things can be, i think its in our genes and its all to do with territorial competition between groups within a species at the top of the food chain, lions are a good example, their major enemies are other prides and they kill each other regularly, females and cubs are not excluded from this

tension

is a dimension

that war

tests

expands

and consumes

mainland china has become a police state dictatorship, no wonder taiwan doesn’t want any part of that

the problem russia has is between the various terrors and its casualness with lives during WW2 is it destroyed the most productive portion of its population and cretinized the gene pool

stalin and beria, those two demons of murderous competence

america

obsessed with the ghislaine maxwell trial

another school shooting 4 killed and seven injured

ho hum

the story of "noah’s ark" is  babylonian mythology  picked up by jewish scribes in the captivity and stems from the many disastrous floods of the euphrates

judaism , like christianity is a patchwork of "the borrowed" fashioned into the supposedly "incontrovertible"

the thing is there’s only an ocean between china, the usa and australia

if you ignore the ocean, they are all next door neighbours

it will take an powerful military alliance to contain china and that’s what’s happening

in its hey day the  yuan dynasty  got as far as java

it was only stopped by losing in battle and i think that also applies now, only the battles are different, cyberwarfare and control of strategic islands, interestingly i think new zealand can be included as an easy island target except for the strong cultural bond with australia

i don't think the chinese are in any position militarily to launch an invasion of taiwan yet, but in five years ?

there is an achilles heels with china’s need to build nuclear powerstations, they are very vulnerable targets to missile attack

for all their lauding of wagner’s opera "the ring"

the nazis paid no attention to the ending

below is my reply to brad’s vlog about a  hatchet job  being done on him at a conference

you are dealing with a form of  woke

i get pestered here  (ed.  brad’s vlog)  by "belligerent man" because i don’t conform to whatever "woke" views he has  (which are obscure) ,  as far as i can work out his goal is to save the "zen world" from me

there’s something wrong with their heads because they are utterly unable to dialogue or negotiate

everybody here has very different views, but most people can discuss differences at least, "woke" weaponizes viewpoints which are not negotiable and you can see this in political extremes like nazism and marxist-leninism

the mistake is to try to understand it in the everyday context of constant negotiation, but in fact they just use "negotiation" to try to harm you because the reality is the weaponization of opinion and in different sorts of societies especially historically, you would run the risk of being assassinated

"true mysticism" is always in conflict with the overt semantic vehicles of religion

the "supposed" chinese propaganda film  battle at lake changjin  is actually subtly "anti-war" in that you would never want to be part of what occurred on either side

if you dig  a bit deeper ,  it was in a fact a pivotal battle that so weakened the chinese military that the south was able to maintain its territorial integrity in the longer term

i bet its not being shown in north korea, whose missile program is not to antagonise the west, but keep out the chinese who considered invading it around the year 2000

the CCP is basically a "bolshevik" party

if you understand the implications of that, you would run a  mile

the russian bolsheviks took one of europe’s most vibrant economies and trashed it

the CCP went through a menshevik phase with deng xiaoping and now its going more "bolshevik" again

north korea is a good example of what total "bolshevikism" does, what path china treads will be interesting to see

one of the interesting things about foreign policy is its binary nature, its usually done very wrong or very right

when its done right there is a huge amplification of positive consequences, but when done wrong  (vietnam, iraq, afghanistan)  its very destructive

in recent years it has amazed me the number of times the west has ened up fighting what in geopolitical terms were its true friends  (which would include saddam hussein)

international politics is brutal and not necessarily rational, sentimentality has no place in it

if you don’t think china’s territorial aggression is a problem, the reason the US and allies are vacating afghanistan is to focus on china, though of course it was just crazy them being there in the first place, just how crazy the next couple of years will show when they become buddies with the taliban since that’s where the geopolitical interest lies

politics is so imperfect a beast, it can never be got right

well, history does  repeat itself

foreign policy advisers never seem to bone up on a countries’ history before going to war do they ?

china’s 9 dash line and designs on taiwan make a lot of sense if you can see it has re-entered one of its many imperial phases and has only ever been stopped by defeat in battle, though the "battles" may have a different character today, a more subtle use of force like conscripting reefs as military bases and cyberwarfare

because duelling has been banned for a few centuries now, we don’t understand what a menace it was, the best and brightest killed

pushkin and lermantov are egregious examples, there are many others

the big deals today for the usa and allies are protecting taiwan from china and the usa needs to drastically upgrade its cybersecurity, it should be a huge deal that the russians penetrated the usa's nuclear missile control as they did a little while back

the major powers are already in a sort of cyberwar and business is being dragged into it, the usa needs to import more programmers and fund a major defense software effort

this is  a good video explaining what went wrong in vietnam and actually its also what went wrong in afghanistan

julius caesar should never have invaded spain, but should have let his enemies  (the optimates)  remain there out in the open, rather than get stabbed to death by them a year later

the battle of thapsus

5000 years of mother’s  with sons at war

there is quite a different scenario where germany and japan could have won WW2

they would have combined their weapons programs and produced the atomic bomb

they would have worked together strategically in the invasion of russia and japan, probably with germany’s advice would never have taken on the americans directly

this "synchronising" would have to have started in the early 1930’s, but fortunately the advantages and necessity were not realised until about 1943, way too late

after watching quite a few holocaust survivor videos, i really am in agreement with hannah arendt and martin heidegger, the holocaust was created as much by the passivity of judaism as anti-semitism, particularly in eastern europe where people were much more religiously jewish

the religion had been moulded around survival during "mild" pogroms, the passivity may have been survival oriented in the face of what occurred historically and it must be remembered that the aristocratic rulers usually stepped in to stop the harassment of a very productive portion of their subjects, but with democracy that changed, the brutality of working class sentiment emerged as a hugely potent force with the consequences we now know as the holocaust

the destruction of the most productive portion of their population who fought loyally during world war one doomed germany from the start, just like japan’s problems with incompetent seniority running its war

there’s an interesting contrast between hitler who was not personally sadistic and the people implementing his ideas at the lower levels who were

neither was stalin, but beria was

theoreticians versus implementers

the botez sisters have   never taken drugs

so much of the net is deadhead drug takers its unbelievable

super entitled and in your face

selling their pathetic validity

some-one i know in the usa is involved in the political unrest and protest movement

my view given the lack of ideological coherence is that this is anarchist and history shows that anarchists always come off worse

this has been the case for him, its interesting that history shows such a consistent pattern

the problem with anarchism is its too unstable socially so is always going to fall victim to a more organised socially stable ideology which would then view anarchism as a competitor or threatening its own existance

by socially stable, i don’t exclude incredibly brutal regimes like stalinism or maoism since they do maintain social order of a type, i’m not saying all socially stable systems are desirable, its just they punch with more weight than anarchism

in western society the threat to the existing social order is not anarchism or any ideology but organised criminals who would quickly evolve into warlords if given the chance, i guess mexico is partly down this road

gangs are actually nascent armies under potential warlords, the police and law are all that’s between a stable society and a murderous mayhem

when you look at the battleship yamato, just be thankful the japanese imperial navy put $16 billion into that and her sister ship the musashi and not their nascent nuclear weapons program

trench warfare was not introduced in WW1, the sieges of vienna  and  candia were based on ottoman strengths in that form of warfare

diplomacy is interesting because of its lack of moral judgment, there really is no right or wrong, its the view of history

hamas is a police state like iran, under the control of militias

it survives financially because it is a proxy paid to wage war against israel on behalf of funding arab states and iran

every five years it gets its infrastructure partially destroyed by israel and then the donor funding is used to rebuild

more like scicnce fiction than reality

“ US warns China it will  fight  for the Philippines ”

reading coded diplomatic language

diplomatic language is very indirect

what they are saying here is not that they will go to war over the philippines, since nobody, not even the philippines will go to war over such a poor and difficult to manage country, but that the US will to go war if china attempts to invade taiwan

so the philippines becomes the arguing point, but the invasion of taiwan is always the backdrop

since australia and new zealand will be dragged in, it should be of interest, i don’t think come to the crunch that australia is at all reluctant to fight

nz less so but would still join in

marxism in all its various forms, doesn’t and can’t work because it tries to turn the vectors of competence and self interest against their natural directions

this is why the political entities trying to enforce it as doctrine have to resort to extreme brutality

you can see similar thematic mistakes being made with today’s "neo-marxism" and its prioritizing or sanctifying human emotional realities over "objective"

history always has the same theme, the "oppressed" when "enabled" ,  go on to become the "oppressors" ,  human nature is territorial and group oriented and in those contexts, exceedingly brutal and it will never be any different

the most utopian of any political system, marxism, ended up the most brutal, if that doesn’t tell you something then you are not wanting to see my conclusion

results always subvert intention

china’s history is periods of internal division interspersed with periods of imperial expansion

we are seeing the second phase emerge again

historically it has only been stopped by force, hopefully the modern world is sufficently different that it doesn’t come to that

stalin and hitler both killed more of their countrymen by bad strategical and tactical errors in world war two than was possible by intentional means

i don’t know why south korea, japan, taiwan and australia don’t take the obvious lesson from north korea, that they are developing the atomic bomb to keep china out, and the limited success they have had to date has been enough to stop them being invaded

its certainly the way china and north korea perceive it for all the bru-ha about the south

china’s huge coastal population densities make it very vulnerable to atomic warfare

if you look at history, china as an empire  (which it hasn’t been for two centuries but is now again) ,  has always been territorially expansionist, stopped only by defeat in battle

interestingly the yuan dynasty got as far as  java , while china’s south sea claims are not reasonable in today’s world, they are thinking back to historical glory

the country most like george orwell’s  1984 ,  didn’t exist when he wrote it, its like he called north korea into being

israel has emerged the clear winner in the current gaza conflict  (ed.  may 2021),  this time it has inflicted enough damage to cause major repercussions for hamas, yet no doubt hamas with its arab and iranian funding will hang on, and police states like gaza and north korea only go when invaded, oppression is a wonder worker for remaining in power and really the general population has no effective defence against organised cruelty

the big benefit to israel of hamas and the gaza strip situation remaining as it is, is the continued adverserial separation of the two palestinian nations, why do you think israel has not invaded the gaza strip and put in place a more popular and democratic government ?

hamas to have any chance requires missiles with larger warheads (nuclear of course would be a game changer and why there is such concern about iran being able to make them) ,  pinhead accuracy and the ability to avoid anti-missile defences, which is at least four or five generations of development away and anyway, faced with that the israelis would just invade

another war torn day in the middle east, highly intelligent aggressive peoples still stuck in the paradigms of centuries ago

when i think about it, the big problem is iran gaining the ability to make nuclear weaposn, its effectively a government by multiple militias and even if the government intended to not use them, they would not be able to keep them out of the hands of the terrorist organisations they sponser, so a possible future senario is hamas or hezebollah getting hold of nuclear weapons, using them and israel responding to any strike by nuking tehran, gaza and lebanon and that would probably be about it, a lot of radioactive ruins in certain areas of the middle east, though i think saudi arabia has cause for concern which is why the whole anti-israeli dynamic has changed in the middle east, the media are of course at least ten years behind the times, just a bunch of posturing fools

the big problem with nuclear weapons is not their existence since in effect they force and enforce peace, but where the states lose control of them and in fact this was a big lesson for the soviets in the cuba missile crisis, the politbureau were at risk of losing control of missle launching to local forces in cuba as well as the soviet navy and its very telling that during the entire crisis the russian missiles were stood down to the lowest level of rediness to signal to the americans they didn’t want to engage at the nuclear level and the trauma of it all eventually lead to khruschev being "sacked", too close for comfort

the difference between stalin and lenin

is lenin hung by the handful

while stalin killed by the bucketload

when execution is not enough

there’s always a mismanaged war

to really clock up those numbers

jason writes that america is volatile right now as well he might, travelling in support of a "fringe activist"

my  comment

there’s no ideology around now to unite people, in riots they just raid upmarket stores which shows where the value system lies

history teaches that revolution comes from the top, there’s no sign of that

you might be mixing it with some  anarchists  which has a long if unsuccessful history in europe

anarchism  in russia

where radical political theorists always go off the rails is they have no sense of history, which when you look at what has happened previously is a denial of static systems and creeds

what people don’t realise about napoleon and why he was so successful was the way he built up military infrastructure

unfortunately he couldn’t bring the same competence to bear in the  naval area  and they were well outclassed in admiralship and hardware by the british

he could never beat them, why he didn’t make peace with them is beyond me, better to have evacuated spain to, he seems to have this flaw of not getting out of doomed situations, despite his undoubted military brilliance

interestingly a year after trafalgar where  villeneuve  took the fleet to battle despite being told he was about to be replaced, napoleon had him murdered

jason is disturbed by the level of increasing "lawlessness" in new york, you can see that if covid continues at present levels, things will get pretty rough, however i am sure the americans super fast and comprehensive vaccination coverage will be effective

his phrase was "a warzone of protests"

interestingly a breakdown in law and order happened with the historicial plagues, of course covid is not in that area, not even slightly comparable to TB and syphilis

"life will generally be how it will be" ,  a partial truth and lie i feel and unsurprisingly a bedrock of a very militarily aggressive religion, (historically at least) islam

so many people in cities with large dogs who don’t care adequately for them, they need a lot of exercise which they don’t get and nutritionally lacking food to boot

mistreatment of pets is one of today’s paradigms

japan really lost the war well before pearl harbour with the rape of nanking

apart from the humanitarian aspect, it signaled japan’s inability to integrate subject populations into its own war effort

by contrast the roman empire was extremely successful at this, even to the extent of having ethnically non-roman emperors

neither germany nor napoleon need have failed in russia had they also done this

is there a paradigm of excessive religiosity whereby the state becomes too weak to defend itself as in the case of tibet and possibly the byzantine empire

interestingly, i wonder if that was a deep structure reason for the  english reformation

i have been looking at videos of russian orthodox ceremonies and the occasional "patriarch" missive, its very off-putting and the failure of the church to have any sort of contact with everyday reality was part of the reason for the revolution

the church is now just empty formality, a freak of subsidy created by the current russian government and armed services

how russian politics really works ,  fascinating

i think putin is doomed, he can’t control the dissemination of this video and he can’t kill or imprison people like stalin/ aka "the butcher" was able to

however the preoccupation of this top "clique" with wealth and good living is in effect a saving grace, there is no return to the unspeakable brutality of the soviet years with the "ascetic joe"

if putin had any sense he would quietly turn his "palace" into a high class hotel/country club, it looks a nightmare/ madman’s folly and when he loses power, its one of several options of what will happen to it, another being a sort of state residence

i don’t think he’s mad, at least no more that a lot of power and money makes men, he is in reality a product of the years  of deprivation  induced by the soviet union and WW2 ,  an illuminating personal example of why communism is always doomed in the long run, personal material wealth is a central focus of human existence

it seemed to me donald trump’s personality changed after covid and the “experimental” monoclonal antibody cocktail he was given

personality change from covid induced brain damage is possible and not an unreasonable inference given his “advanced ” age

biden had given a public opinion about his not supporting continued legal action against trump, its just insane what happened from trump’s own view, he was already out of the frying pan and fire and just jumped in again

the russian orthodox church has never recovered from the revolution, just an empty form, it lacks the rich cultural context it once had

russia has never recovered from yeshov, beria and stalin, three pieces of work you never want to see in your lifetime, though of course they exist today in lesser scope in various places

so many of its best people were taken out of the genetic pool

the "monolith" craze i think is ideologically indebted to the kaaba, a rather crazy, empty idea

the  battle of midway was surprisingly evenly matched, both sides with very deep deficits and strengths

however midway itself was of no strategic significance, all that mattered was the destruction of carriers

the japanese made a fatal mistake which cost them three of their carriers  (ultimately all)  and that was to have all their fighters sortied against a wave of american TBD devastator torpedo bombers leaving the japanese carriers without protection from three dive bomber attacks coming from other directions

one of the artifacts of the meiji era was the replacement of aristocratic competence with bureaucratic seniority to the huge detriment of any able military leadership which japan paid dearly for in WW2 and the problem still persists today, the fukushima disaster is another example and was actually worse than midway when you look at genetic damage to the population

WW1 ,  like WW2 was a forgone conclusion and only nuclear weapons and modern communications have prevented WW3

war is an interesting extreme, because it takes everything to the limit which is death and maiming

the genetic constructs that impel human territoriality expect and require this

there’s murderous sons of bitches out there

they just want to kill

without regard to the consequences for themselves

you have to give credit where credit is due, the catholic church keeps shooting itself through the head, the foot and the groin

this is what happens when you have an organisation run by enfeebled greying/whitening men

900 years ago european country boundaries were moved and armies raised by popes and heretics burnt alive

theologically it was always pretty vacuous, but that’s irrelevant when you have the coercive power of the state behind you

nowadays just the vacuity is left and it is starting to show in spades

they got an extra four hundred years of validity from those jews, teresa of avila and john of the cross

i think mother teresa was an exemplar of today’s religious paradigm, riddled with inconsistencies that are ultimately invalidating

i have a feeling she realised this, she was caught in some sort of transition she had no control over and was too old to make the necessary changes in her life

new zealand

add a maori word

and its a done deal

the ocean was not crossed

by this nonsense

my  comment

its interesting that this emphasis on each language having intrinsically different "values" or authenticity has its roots in a dispute about what language is going back to the 1950’s

noam chomsky’s  view of langauge is as an organic development springing from genetic constructs being the "a priori" condition with no particular "priority" on the external form, eg japanese compared to english

the other view is more of language as a system of philosophy that has developed and hence is amenable to a ranking of order in terms of quality, eg maori being supposed somehow to be more "authentic" than english

new zealand bureaucracy with its characteristic wrong mindedness has of course plumbed for the latter view burdening the population with a neurolgically very costly and futile multilingual burden, when plainly the interests of social cohesivenss and utllity are best served by monolingualism

i will point out that nothing is lost by only having one language even in terms of other cultures since all langauages are basically  (though not quite)  interchangable, indeed the preservation of a culture will be enhanced by monolingualism since members of the culture are no longer labouring under the high neurological costs of multilingailism, nor having constant defections of younger generations out of the minority subculture since they are forced to make a choice in terms of the benefit of the dominant language

different cultures are in effect social stories which do represent different philsosphies and therefore, unlike language have prioriites of value

you might contrast pacifist versus "war mongering" subcultural differences in germany prior to WW1, clearly, from any point of view in the light of what happened, the pacifist subculture had a higher "value" than the other

interestingly the effect of the internet has been to enforce the dominance of english and form a "uni-western" culture to such an extent that the englsih speaking countries are starting to meld political and defence systesm creating the dominant geo-political grouping, just as well for australasia i’d say in its over-vulnerable exposure to china

"brexit" can be seen in this light

its interesting to consider that the disasterous politics of central europe may spring at its root from the high degree of multilingualism that just living there enforces to communicate, that the neurological cost of "multi-lingualism" there, while havihg an obvious benefit also has a pentalty of a lack of objective thinking about what are more optimal solutions to the cultural and racial mish-mash

i always find the way the post communist russian government brought back the imperial symbolism "lock stock and barrel" quite amusing, like the soviet years and communist ideology never existed

mao tse-tung

history’s bloodiest hyperlexic

stalin had a good piece of advice

if they are not for you, they are against you

interestingly, after his wife comitted suicide he took the view this applied to his wife’s family and he had them killed or imprisoned

he can’t have been too abnormal emotionally because his wife’s death deeply affected him, more so than just about anything else i think

if there was one thing that catalysed the murderous demonism of the rule of lenin and stalin, it was the execution of the children of the tsar

there were now no boundaries

innocents killed

russia lost its innocence

bloody diamonds

foreran

the toxic  lead-up  to the meiji era

not science fiction but the  real mars ,  a planet with not enough gravity, no liquid water, unbreathable atmosphere and no magnetosphere to protect against cosmic rays and energetic particles from the sun

sergei korolev  who spent several months in a gulag gold mine in the kolyma area, lucky to come alive out of there i would say

soviet russia suffered from the same problems as nazi germany, the destruction of the most productive portion of its middle class

a knowledge of history gives

a relaxed perspective

about current events

stability follows turmoil

and turmoil follows stability

you don’t need to know much more

hannibal is accounted a military genius, but he wasn’t, only a fool takes on an unbeatable enemy on their own terms which was all his invasion of italy could ever be

and missed the key feature of the problem, rome’s supremacy at sea

surely seafaring cultures like the phoenicians and carthaginians were could have risen to the challenge with the appropriate resources and redeveloped their galleys ?

i suppose the financial and organisational might of the roman empire made the prognosis certain, better to have sued for peace despite the necessary concessions

war

where old men

chuck away the lives

of young men

without too much thought

the problem with martin heidegger as a philosopher is he was a believing nazi who never changed his views and was in fact a subtle war criminal who should have been executed at the nuremberg trials, but as i say the scale and type of offence is too subtle for the world to grasp

the usa made no attempt to indoctrinate japan after WW2 in the way they did to germany and courted one of its biggest  war criminals   (the emperor was another)  to meet its own political ends of gaining the countries support in the cold war

it explains a lot about how japan is today and yukio mishima was not entirely a crazy anomaly, though dated

unbelievable, rommel wasn't such a great general, what he had was the advantage of detailed tactical information on what the british were doing because the italians and germans could read the code transmissions by the US military attaché  bonner fellers

adolf hitler  rocking  at the 1936 olympics

that was before he got  into drugs ,  more like an "autistic rock"

pervertin wasn’t developed until a year after the 1936 olympics

bill gates rocks too

a salutary lesson about ezra’s pound’s later life is the extreme extent to which he manufactured his troubles

the italians weren’t keen on him broadcasting, nor was wartime italy friendly to him, and yet he stepped out against the current into what ruined his reputation and put him in danger of the death penalty

his fame worked against him, yet also saved him because of his supporters who were able to get him incarcerated in a mental asylum rather than face charges of treachery

how much simpler to have made a rational assessment of his beliefs and the likely outcome of any war, but of course he was quite schizophrenic by that point and had made the mistake of migrating from the much more interesting "literary schizophrenia" into the dull moronacy of "state and politcal belief sanctioned schizophrenia"

writers, poets and philosophers engage with politics at their peril, its too strong a brew

we have the genetic coding for the deep structure of language, we don’t have it for a specfic implementation, wars are born from this, i won’t call it a failure

one of the primary reasons for a religion which is no longer understood in the western world because of the separation of state and church was a belief in the afterlife making men ready to die for their country or cause

this goes right back to the ancient egyptians

its interesting that the soviet union was so brutal to retreating soldiers in the battlefield or even just their own men being taken prisoner and returning was necessary because of this lack of belief in the afterlife and extreme force was required to coerce men to put their own lives in danger

ISIS plays up the afterlife  (one particularly appealing to young men)  heavily, but its dissonant in today’s world and a reason it only exists as a fringe minority

we are less than rational creatures, underlying beliefs, however wrong still can have strong influences on behavior

the heft of hollywood was the emigration of  jewish artistic  talent from europe fleeing the nazis, it created an intense pool of talent not seen before or after and still has echoes today

greta garbo and marie dressler in  anna christie

garbo’s friend  salka viertel  plays marthy owens in the german language version

greta garbo’s  letters  to salka viertel

for those that remember the shah and the revolution ,  this article  offers some interesting perspectives

i think the situation of the mafia is all changed compared to twenty or thirty years ago and modern technology actually favours the FBI so the mafia are on a backfoot somewhat, the day of the large crime organisations is over, at least in places like the usa

there’s an interesting contrast between the marvellous engineering of the  gun turrets  of the yamoto and the incompetence of the politics and naval command that it was in service of

how can these gun turrets have been got so right yet the strategic management of the war been so wrong minded ?

i think its that you have a very defined function and closed feedback loops with respect to its performance whereas strategy involves predicting the future and that’s a very fraught area

the severely depressed captain of flight MH370, Zaharie Shah, killed the passengers and co-pilot by locking the co-pilot out of the cockpit, depressurizing the cabin and flying to a higher altitude

a well planned suicide and not such  a mystery  now

typical japan, hounding carlos ghosn for doing nothing remarkable in the way of graft by japanese standards, but not a single person responsble for the fukushima disaster has been touched

religion now is nothing compared to what it was in the middle ages

even soviet level social control wasn’t a patch on religion because everybody believed the religion ,  but nobody believed the soviet nonsense

when you look at religion now, you are just looking at the smoking wreck of some grand human marvel

elizabeth the first  hit the ground running, becoming queen at age twenty-five, it was some feat to have survived to that point and she went on to become a brutal and effective monarch, skilled enough to die at the late age of 69, possibly of lead poisoning from her make-up

the question is how was she able to steer with such a skillful hand, one that really required several lifetimes to have been lived

well  she read tacitus  and so lived through the lessons of a particularly murderous period of rome’s political history

i think actually it was the combination of stalin and beria that made their rule so lethal, without their combined and mutually compensatory competence the regime would have fallen apart

bad luck for russia of course

when stalin started to threaten beria and the politburo, they were forced to have him killed

the most amazing thing about the japanese effort in WW2, was that such a small country was so  well prepared  to fight the russo-japanese war again

that’s a lot of hardware and lives at the bottom of the ocean

interestingly russia was the same problem for hitler as napoleon and their  “ solution ”  ie invasion, worked for neither of them

the most glaring deficiency of the german airforce in WW2 was the lack of a four engined long ranged bomber capable of reaching the soviet union’s armaments manufacturing plants, yet the first flight of the american B-17  “ flying fortress ”  was in 1935

the senior levels of the luftwaffe were startlingly incompetent

both germany and japan failed to surrender when it was apparent all was lost, this is in contrast to the usual pragmatism of losing and winning sides throughout history

i think this was due to communications technology enabling a degree of social control that resulted in the war going far beyond what was reasonable

russia’s disaster with its nuclear powered cruise missile shows that a new treaty is needed to stop the development of these weapons which literally spew significant amounts of radioactive material in their exhausts, so much so that you could design one to do just that and it would be a very effective threat and likely to be used

i think there’s an underlying social issue with china and other asian countries not charging for the environmental cost of their labour and this has created an anti-repair attitude

china has to become a democracy to address its future of enviromental devasation

from mishima to mitsurugi the only thing the japanese seem to have learnt from world war two is to want more of the same

well they got it in part in fukushima, the usual incompetent hierarchies

no wonder the relation between saudi arabia and isis is so ambiguous, isis is wahhabi

islam is a form of nestorian christianity and a now long defunct form of christanity called   “ tritheism ”  which was competing with islam at the time has earnt the ire of the koran

once you understand the position of the koran as a polemic against  “ the father, son and holy ghost ”  christian schema, it makes much more sense

i don’t usually post what might be construed as a political oponion but i was looking at this interview of  roman polanski  and it opened up an aspect i hadn’t previously considered which is closure for the relatives affected

i am now in favour of the death penalty because its not possible for the relatives of the victim to have closure while the perpetrators are still living

i suspect this is hardwired into our brains given what history says in this area

also society needs to make a reference point in touch with what really happens and the imposition of effective consequences

traitors like julian assange should face the death penalty too

the above opinons do not make me right wing, its an objective look at how a society functions and of course opinions go into the sea of nothingness

if you read history and the endless circuses and mock and real tragedies that occur, you wouldn’t have the slightest concern with contemporary politics except in so much as it affects you

unsurprisingly this is how most people operate, even without the historical insight

people who don’t look at history

are imprisoned   by the present

a relative has just been in vietnam saying she had a wonderful time, but vietnam always sounds weird to me being brought up during its war

angkor wat failed because it got drier, rather like what happened to the aztecs at their peak, not enough rainfall to support the irrigated agriculture those sorts of hierarchical  “ temple ”  societies depended on

when stalin got to hell the devil brought up ivan the terrible and genghis khan so they could all bow down before stalin

as the three bowed to him, stalin raised an eyebrow and asked

where’s hitler ?

i have a feeling donald trump  stepping across  the DMZ into north korea is way more significant than appears, i’m not quite sure why

the real problem of iran having nuclear weapons is not actually having them, but keeping them out of the hands of  “ terrorists ”  since the so called government is in fact a temporary alliance of competing militia

you can imagine the chaos and destruction the possession of several atomic bombs could wreak with a single minded ideologically driven militia

trump is uneven, but he has this one right, at least in identifiying a real problem

sepehr  replies

why don’t you mention the fact that israel has illegal nukes.  i believe israel is more destabilizing than even iran

my  reply

the israel nukes are government controlled, the problem with iran is that it still doesn’t really have an all powerful central government

mutually assured destruction works, provided the parties involved have a sane perception of self-interest

the disaster of world war two for russia, is having perfected a killing machine like no other before the war, the war then offered a human mincer that could never be filled

the killing machine shovelled so many russian lives into it that russia has never recovered

inadvertent genocide

london was significantly bombed during world war one

zeppelins

gothas

the british must have been blind in the approach to world war two as to what was about to happen

oddly the germans obviously had the potential to develop what was a huge deficit in their world war two arsenal, the   long range  bomber

its intrinsic to any form of public health system or subsidy that a strong degree of triage occurs that does not favour the patient

conversely there is not enough triage for the wealthy who can get saddled with problematic or not necessarily useful interventions

there’s a lot of these homemade  war films  on the web made by germans

they are very depressing and not very accurate depictions of combat, but the one lesson the germans seem to have taken from two disasterous world wars of their own making is a lot of their own young men get killed

they don’t seem to question the why or benefit of the fighting

you would think one world war was enough

interestingly the iranians and iraqs seem to have gone through the same learning curve

interestingly japan had the most advanced atomic bomb program at the start of the war, if they had combined their efforts with the germans  “ high castle ”  could have been a reality and we would all now be talking about the brave and courageous efforts of the japanese and germans during the war and how mistaken the west and russia were in going to war against these   “ superior ”  peoples

however the japanese naval command who the atomic bomb project worked for starved it of resources and instead built huge waste of time gigantic battleships and submarines because in their minds they were still fighting the russo-japanese war

george c. marshall is the unsung hero of organising the allied war effort

all the insanity of the third reich was  condensed  in the last weeks/days in the bunker, i notice the neo-nazis are quite and i guess knowingly ignorant of what went on

given the role of religion in japan in WW2, its no wonder the japanese are now so cynical about shinto and buddhism, they used to be highly superstitious

same thing happened with christianity with the disaster area of the crusades

islam has always been more or less successful and so the cynicism is not there

the most fascinating fact i find about adolf hitler is he was deliberately childless and it wasn’t as though he disliked them

murdering millions including germans, yet deliberately childless

something wrong in heaven and earth i’d say

the next most fascinating fact is how he had eva braun’s brother-in-law shot in the last days in the bunker and eva’s preoccupation in her last hours was trying to keep this information from her sister

these neo-nazis are oblivious to any in depth research on their hero

going back in time and killing hitler is a common science fiction scenario, its assumed to be a good thing, but you should ask, how could things be worse without him ?

a germany that didn’t discrimate against jews and with a more functional leadership could have developed an atomic bomb and you have the possibility of the usa, germany, russia and japan all developing the atomic bomb around the same time and given the sorts of mindsets going on then, a widespread atomic war could have been a possibility

martin heidegger’s weakness was he never studied history so he had to find out the hard way philosophy and political ideas don’t mix

philosophy is the abnegation of life, not its twisting into gain

the central problem of nuclear weapons that the cuban missile crisis revealed was the loss of central control over the firing of the weapons, the soviets were so scared of what might happen in cuba they kept all their russian territory based missiles stood down to send an unmistakable message to the americans

this problem is what drives current policies and the problem with iran getting nuclear weapons is their lack of central control over them

modern china has some interesting characteristics, the recreation and obliteration of the past

the  restoration  of the qianlong emperor’s retirement lodge

the qianlong emperor governed when  ‘ the dream of red mansions ’  was written and he was a patron of giuseppe castiglione

cetainly a time of the flowering of chinese culture

the problem with fighting in a war is death  is too random

religion is a conversion of the true strangeness of infinity into the dull moronacy of mediocracy

religion is the conversion of the true strangeness of infinity into the dull moronacy of mediocracy

stalin’s problem wasn’t just his brutality, but that it was co-joined to a religious adherence to an economic philosophy so contrary to millennia of human experience as to what works that  “ brutality ”  as a platonic  (plutonic!)  ideal was allowed to   “ flower ”

so much of human  “ disaster ”  can be attributed to its running roughshod over areas that are strange to its ways and thinking

theresa may is not margaret thatcher, a failed image

there is some mythologizing of vladimir lenin as  “ saintly ”  and it all went wrong after him, but he was not  a nice person

murder is the origin of socialism

honestly, the american public education system is just turning out a very low reading age, they are taught to dislike anything intelligent or  “ stretches ”  them

i don’t know why the japanese are so obsessed with  reliving  world war 2 in their entertainment and unfortunately with real life disasters like fukushima

a society in distinct need of cartharsis

monoculture is a disease

i never realised the  battle of gaza  was so destructive to the british, the incompetent generalmanship was the background to lawrence of arabia’s efforts

you can see  the seeds  of disaster of two world wars here, a maelstrom gathering strength, militarism, an insane social hierarchy and the stupidity of crowds

is the public school system in the u.s.a. self destructing ?

a reddit  post

“ A few things to consider about public versus private schools

You cannot control for the parenting received by the other children.  Public school batches together peacefully-raised children with children who are physically and verbally abused.  This is the source of most bullying: abused children are  “ paying forward ”  their abuse onto more peaceful kids.  Even worse, if your kid defends him/herself, they are punished equally due to stupid SJW disciplinary policies.

Unless you get into a magnet school, the quality is pretty meh.  Class curriculum is calibrated to the mean of the IQ curve.  If your kid is smarter than average, then they are bored and miserable. This is even worse if your child is a boy, as boys don't do well with the dominant  “ sit still and shut up ”  model

Neo-Liberal/SJW/radical egalitarian ideas are baked into the curriculum at this point. Here is a quote taken directly from the AP English Language guidelines:

The assigned Reading facilitates informed citizenship and thus increases students' capacity to enter into consequential conversations with others about meaningful issues.

Rather than, say, training English skills, the education establishment sees it as their JOB to train the next generation of Social Justice Footsoldiers... oh, sorry  —   “ facilitate informed citizenship ”  according to their own definition of  “ informed ”

This all happened within the past 10 years; the neo-Marxist politicization of school is accelerating. If your child is young, like under 12, do you think this trend is going to magically reverse as they move towards high school ?

Please take this seriously :  I worked in education for six years, and quit in disgust over what I was seeing.  In America, unlike Europe, you still retain the freedom to opt-out... for now.  I highly, highly suggest you use that freedom ”

“ in both rats and humans, the cannabis affected many different sperm genes involved in two different pathways

ed.  think of pathways as another set of instructions, this time for regulating various bodily functions

one is important for organs to reach  full size , and one plays a role in cancer and suppressing tumors ”

the odd thing is ,  japan had the most advanced nuclear bomb program at the start of the war, if they had joined forces with the germans, together they could have well developed one at the same time as the americans, but instead, the opportunity was only minimally resourced and the navy instead built huge inappropriate warships and submarines

japan had and still has a deep cultural problem of seniority overriding competence at the highest levels

anders breivik was seeking to impose his view of how the world should be rather than change his thinking

this is such a human thing

the reason for our constantly trying to impose on the world is that the minimal degree it can be imposed upon still has an orders of magnitude better energy benefit than structural change in ourselves

mental illness and international politics can be defined by their total inability to garner any energy benefit from structural neurological change

hitler wasn’t personally cruel, gentle even, he just had these ideas others implemented for him

throughout history there have been women rulers, they were really good at the mechanisms of power, rulers don’t rule for your benefit but their own

that they stay in power is due to some compromises made for the general public benefit

basically hitler and the nazis rose to power because they forcibly took a license to rob then destroy the most productive part of the population, they had always lost the war before they even started

hitler was more of  a mixed bag  than the way he is painted today

fukushima is illustrative of why the japanese lost world war two, incompetence at the highest levels

napoléon was a victor by virtue of running a meritocracy, only he couldn’t quite pick 100% and  villneuve  was one and it doomed him, the french and spanish failure at  trafalgar  was the long term loss of the control of continental europe

a very  interesting  series on the napoléonic wars

napoléon was off his rocker fighting the battle of waterloo, he was well outnumbered and then crazily moved into a situation where he could be exposed to two armies on two flanks

one of the miracles of the roman empire was the way it encompassed different language groups in relative harmony

its the culture that must have been the cement

nazism was a product of a combination of technologies that permitted a huge concentration of power in the hands of one man or a small group

the flawed decision making that resulted from this was to the detriment of everyone

the technogy  “ flux ”  today has the permissive empowerment of dissent that will not permit the empowerment of doctrines like nazism again

islam, is quite simply, a social control theology designed to keep the reins tight on subjected populations

the problem the catholic church has, is its so much rubbish why would you be a priest except you have some hidden agenda

we all know what the hidden agenda is !

the american world war two effort was incredibly intelligent, from the outset of the war, even though they were not yet at war they were gearing up for war production and actually the efficiency of this was faciliated by not being at war yet

george c. marshall  is one of the unsung heroes of world war 2  !

bismark can have never anticipated the disasters to follow his successful work in unifying germany

his work was used by idiots to their supposed advantage

he gave them good advice they always ignored

‘ english speaking countries will act together in war ’

i really take an historical view, people don’t understand how life and institutions work without being knowledgeable about history

any army is so many clones

marxism denies the role of competence in the accumulation of wealth and its proposal that fiat can replace it is as wrong a call as you can get

no horror story can match medieval torture and no dystopia can match stalin’s rule

nicholas the second would have to be the most useless person possible to have become czar ,  99% of the population of russia would have done a much better job than him

well, i suppose history is full of incompetent rulers whose failures lead to disaster

though theoretically the succession was hereditary, there was always a lot of wiggle room as to who actually gained the reins of power and its an interesting question as to why an obvious incompetent was never challenged ?

it must have been that the system despite its obvious flaws peaked in the degree of social control, an unfortunate example the bolsheviks were to follow with their own cruel twists

technology had delivered a degree of quietude as to who was actually czar to a degree nicholas’s predecessors can have only marvelled at and an ominous rumbling heralding the twentieth centuries many great governmental failures where the madness of various insane social control tableaus triumphed over common sense

basically the rise of nazi germany and communisim was due to technology creating an opportunity for extreme social control to prosper at the expense of a more hard edged rationalism

today with the internet things have changed again with strong technological biases against any ideological/theological social control and local and international poltics are slowly following suit

strong fragmented polticial groupings within what used to be socially controlled homogenity is now the order of the day, a trend which can only be expected to accelerate

heidegger was a better historian than philosopher ,  this view of technologically driven social shapes of governement is his

not everyone  is a bastard

christianity predated st. paul and interestingly, islam may be descended from that early christianity

religion is gaslighting on a cultural scale

stalin and lennin were social philosophers, they picked the one that works least and had to embark on a campaign of wholesale murder to enforce it

the moment you take the pressure off, things spring back to what they were, at least to the extent possible

there’s a lot of crazy sides to the holocaust, one of which is the damage done to germany’s middle class ensured it could never win the war and another is judaism still survives, yet such an event definitively invalidates the religion in its own terms

go figure

history teaches scepticism about social attitudes and politics, i’m with thomas hobbes !

history teaches scepticism about social attitudes and politics

the  strangeness  of being kim jong-un

he is caught in a cleft stick, for military strength and survival of the country, he and others of the ruling clique need to open up the country economically

but to do so will mean a loss of control that will hold them accountable for their what are in effect war crimes against their own populus

they can’t  “ denuclearise ”  because their primary purpose is to hold off the chinese who are a more likely invader than south korea !

we are in for changes in a long running drama about why stalinism doesn’t work !

i think  cocaine  is everywhere now, its epidemic !

war in the congo, this  shakes you  up !

its like vietnam, the ground cover reduces the effectiveness of air strikes  so local militias are hugely empowered against the state !

in the ambush at the end the insurgents targeted the colonel specifically, how did they know ?

nothing justifies dying on a battlefield in your prime, this is why state supported religions create fictious systems of justification, from ancient egypt to isis

one of winston churchill’s astutest moves was to nix any assassination attempts on hitler, perhaps because of the lesson of his own disasterous interference in the admiralty at the beginning of the war

both stalin and churchill learnt the lesson of not interfering too greatly in the armed services operations, hitler never did dooming german efforts !

interestingly, churchill was a   power user of propaganda !

stalin couldn’t kill his mother or his daughter.  he half killed one of his sons, everybody else was fair game

everybody

surreal ,  another the death  of stalin  !

the chinese communist party had its origins in the boxer rebellion and now the new emperor  ( 2018  —  xi jinping )  has been annointed !

working class or peasant rebellions are always doomed through a lack of intelligent leadership !

a lot of one’s concerns are effete compared to  the reality  in syria

what  dreary  stupid people

upper class england

history makes sense of the world in ways contemporary views can never touch

neo nazis know nothing  of history

i think why the underlying problem of north korea having nuclear weapons is the intense focus and instability of decision making at the senior level due to the kim personality cult !

basically north korea will have to change its system of government and that of course is being strenuously resisted !

over centralization of power was also behind the fiascos of the german and russian war efforts in world war II, though stalin eventually conceded his ineptitude and let the generals run the war !

basically north korea’s development of potentially effective ballistic nuclear weapons is re-igniting the korean war and you can’t pretend its not happening !

hmm   .   .   it was no wonder archimedes  was killed ,  the romans wanted vengance !

his artillery engines and grappling hooks made what should have been a pushover into  a nightmare  !

interestingly archimedes seemed to understand  “ defense in depth ”  !

the interesting thing about carl von clausewitz is he was basically a failure as a military man, his one big success in perusading the prussians to abandon the french grande armée and join the russian - german legion was more of a diplomatic coup

but his insights on war were born of defeat and failure which is really the truest base for understanding, the insight that springs from success is limited !

failure follows success as night follows day !

samurai culture is just some nonsense about  “ honour ”  used to justify mindless banditry and  “ thieves culture ”  !

the nazis, for a goup so keen on white supremacy didn’t see any contradiction apparently for the second time in embarking on a war so depleting of these races finest !

the glaring deficiency in the german invasion of russia was the lack of a four engined long range bomber which mean the germans were unable to target russian factories in the urals

they didn’t need better tanks, indeed the later models were ill suited because of their high maintenance needs and were difficult to service

if they didn’t quickly conquer they were doomed !

learning an unnecessary extra or second language fucks people up !

the internet has turned acting into a volunteer profession, the rash of denunciations of sexual coercion by film directors at the moment (2017/18)  is really about there not being enough money or work to keep the lid on !

acting has gone the way of book writing and publishing and photography, all entirely  “ volunteer ”  activities now !

the  theoretical and historical  origins  of ISIS ?

  “ ibn taymiyyah, a noted theologian of his times, developed his blatantly racist concept of takfir  :  that is to say inferior muslims against whom jihad was permissible, precisely in response to mongol muslims ”

contemporary politics only appears significant because people have no notion of history

one interesting and unintended side effect of the nuremberg race laws was the removal of jews from the wehrmacht resulted in a subtle lack of effective strategic thinking at all levels to the point where any infantryman was a better strategist than what actually happened !

mischlings

to be fair to adolf, operation barbarossa could have possibly succeeded if they had marched rapidly and directly on just moscow while soviet tank production was still low !

even in the very early stages, german troop losses were too high to be sustained !

the writing was on the wall within days of the start of the invasion !

a measure of the intelligence of iosif was that he had nikolai varfolomeev arrested only after he had handed in his draft to the publisher of his famous  ‘ the evolution of operational art ’ ,  foundational for russian strategy in world war II !

he was arrested within days of handing it in and later died in prison in 1941 !

hmm, a stalin  parody

the startling resembance of north korea to george orwell’s novel  1984  is rarely mentioned in media, presumably because of the lack of public familiarity with the book ?

at its extreme is the public execution in 2013 of eleven musicians who were tied to the nozzles of anti-aircraft guns and blown apart for making a pornographic video !

“ The escapee then  recalled  how the guns were fired one by one, saying  :  The musicians just disappeared each time the guns were fired into them

Their bodies were blown to bits, totally destroyed, blood and bits flying everywhere

Afterwards, Hee Yeon said tanks moved in and ran over the pieces of the victims’ bodies

She added  :  The tracks of the tanks were run over the remains and blood repeatedly, over and over again and made to grind the remains, to smash them into the ground until there was nothing left ”

i think the unstoppable immigration in the u.s.a. has made unskilled labour almost worthless !

the anti-rascist confessional meme sweeping through certain sections of american society is just the trauma of the collapse of the white middle class and them getting used to the new poverty

if you are going to say what world war 2 was about, it was the tension between the nazi decimation of its middle classes that ensured its defeat and the victory by more rational parties

while russia had decimated its army leadership and the middle class had long been gone, stalin made a decision after successive disasters from his own decision making to leave the control of the war to his generals, a strategy that basically worked though they had very heavy losses

the monarchy is a british middle class fetish !

kamikaze, each one was the death of a young man while the old ones still lived

reddit seems to be unduly composed of the insane and retarded, how do you get that ?

well  this graph  shows how

in any population .1% are going to be off the wall crazy, on reddit a tenth of a percent post 12% of the comments, so you can see what happens !

it applies particularly to message boards and the net, but perhaps also to politics, small populations of crazy by vociferous and disproportionate input form incredible real world biases !

hitler was the atomic bomb that blew up in germany !

history opens one’s eyes as to the reality of politics !

politics is like some mania of the present but historical studies give perspective !

both kim jong-un and his father kim jong-il could see the problems with the way things were going, but decided to continue the same way anyway !

in fact kim jong-un is creating a situation favouring the west at the expense of china and all the west can do is lie low and see the way things break !

in terms of blackmail by far the largest population within their medium range ballistic missile reach is china !

an interesting  read

my mother and her siblings and mother were evacuated from auckland because of an expected japanese invasion  (my grandfather was fighting in the western desert campaign, it ruined his health)  and a woman who was a family friend had been interned in a camp as a child by the japanese

its not an abstract issue  “ down under ”

i was really shocked having done zen in a hakuun yasutani lineage to see his ultra nationalism, it really opened my eyes as to people in zen being toxic and clueless !

oddly about 15 years ago i met a guy here who spent the war in  changi prison ,  his only comment was a bit mysterious,   ‘ you really only learn about people when you work alongside them ’  !

i had a japanese friend shimpi at primary school in auckland  (it was anglican and i was boarding, king’s school actually) ,  his father was there on business, i remember going to their home once, i fiddled with the shrine they had in the house and couldn’t put it back the way i found it ! : o)

the class bully was getting a bit out of hand hitting people, so shimpi and i waylaid him and gave him a good trashing  .  .   he never touched us again !

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yeah bayoneting pregnant women, the nanking massacre, the thai-burma railway, the zen clergy supported all that, thank-god the imperial navy underfunded their nuclear bomb program or things would have turned out very differently ! !

its like heidegger being as bad as hitler, he and zen provided the supporting ideology for the war, they should all have been hanged !

what was one of the largest mistakes in history ?

the hanging and exile of the decembrists, russia lost its moderate road and we all know what happened !

religion is just endless useless and wrong minded meta !

i would go so far as to say d. t. suzuki was a war criminal, once you start promoting the glory of death for the cause of  “ the greater imperial japan ”  then all else that happens follows !

the japanese management of the war at its top levels was cryingly incompetent, power centralized on idiots, same issues with their invasion of china !

not funding their nuclear bomb program even though it was quite advanced, missing the US aircraft carriers at pearl harbour when they were what really mattered, getting their own carrier fleet sunk by keeping them all together  (go marshal admiral yamamoto) ,  huge resources put into building complete waste of time giant submarines and the failure to integrate china in a productive way into their empire . .

and unbelievably both yamamoto and the emperor  (who had a very significant active role)  thinking they would ultimately lose the war

there is a cultural problem with overdominant hierarchies and power concentration, same issue with fukushima !

you don’t see it in the old ch’an and its there in spades in western zen coming from japanese lineages, just straight militarism really !

most politicians seem to have a degree of borderline personality disorder !

also a lot of wars seem to be entirely pointless, large countries taking on stupid causes that really need quite different resolutions, like afghanistan needs political solutions, not some stupid endless tribal conflict with major powers just getting enmeshed in tribal stuff !

anybody in the armed services kills people one way or another, some direct, others indirectly !

the real danger of warfare today is IEDs and the concussion

there is a huge need for post traumatic stress counsellors/therapists which is basically due to concussive brain damage which because of IEDs is at world war one levels where they used to get all sorts of explosive shit dropped on them in the confined space of the trenches !

an interesting thing about hitler is the allies deliberately didn’t attempt to assassinate him because they valued his leadership incompetence as debilitating to the german/nazi war effort and they weren’t wrong

by killing reinhard heydrich who was devastatingly competent, they showed they could get their man if they wanted to !

my comment in reply to the classic hiroshima photo with the bombed out exhibition hall building dome  (suprisingly designed by the czech architect jan letzel)

just be thankful the japanese spent all their dough on useless giant submarines and gave very little funding to their surprisingly advanced atomic bomb program

if at the start of the war they and the germans had united and given adequate priority to their atomic weapons programs, history would have been changed so much all of us wouldn’t exist

both germany and japan were hobbled by extreme concentration of power and always doomed by the incompetence of their leaders !

“ Nationalist socialism has its own merits ”

yes it killed as many of its own people as others !

its unbelievable what people promote these days !

the way the nazi genocide of the jews disrupted the german and occupied countries middle classes always meant the war was lost for them

the independence struggle of india was relatively benign, but all the violence was in the partition which in hindsight given today’s world might not have been such a bad idea !

the basic thing the net has done is fragment the mass markets

so while everybody is guaranteed an audience  (even me!)  the markets are smaller and less economic and depending on the size don’t support any  (or may permit)  a limited overhead

translation  :  you have to do everything yourself and i must say i have learnt a lot about editing over the years !

linked  without  comment

 one thing that is obvious about international politics is the impossibility of creating limited nice solutions  !

the millennials are an entitled generation

its a strategy born or developmentally acquired in plentitude

why waste energy when the world will deliver all/what you want to your doorstep

the problem arises /problems arise when what you need  (or want!)  is not delivered

you go without, but what i see is the concept of working to gain what is needed  (wanted)  is not there !

 just one man being half right and half wrong and the ability to implement that could have such a big effect !

ed.  on ex - pm kevin rudd attempting to gain australian government endorsement for an attempt by him to become UN secretary general !

when rebuffed, he promptly released to the press his half of the correspondence on the matter with malcom turnbull  (the existing prime minster)  proving his unsuitability for the UN post !

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i was thinking that the cultural roots of  “ hippyism ”  were actually more upper class aesthetes and bohemian

with an intact social structure and middle class, and jewish inclusiveness, would a war have still occurred ?

occurred ?

myself !

i was thinking how stupid the ISIS was/is and inevitably doomed, the root issue is that they have adopted the expansionist islamic paradigm, very successful throughout its history until modernity

but it was originally formulated in the complete absence of air power

“ expansionist islam ”  offers the ready raising of armies, complete control of local populations and even a hierarchical governmental and military leadership competence at its best, but air power defeats all that because of its ability to geographically intrude at will !

it makes the battlefront the whole territory, not just some line of engagement where in front is the enemy’s to be gained and behind is yours to be defended, drones especially amplify the trend !

the strength of islam is complete social control and enough military unity, but these do not avail against an enemy able to intrude and pick targets at will in territory you hold !

in short islam is anti-modernity ,  yet now we have the fact of modernity with its high technological weapons competence and limited social control !

drones have replaced armies !

it's very noticable, how, those who are in effect are absolute rulers have incompetent children and when the ruler dies or gets too old to rule effectively or make needed changes, the state is plunged into bloody chaos

i am thinking of muammar gaddafi  (who actually had one competent son, but that was from his first wife and she and her son were isolated from power which was a pity) ,  saddam hussein and hafez al-assad ,  but history is instructive with endless examples . . .

obviously the genetic lottery that produces children is too random and mixed to give the abilities need to run a country . .

so some  pharaohic lineages  (see  “king tuts family tree” link at the bottom of that page)  of which tutankhamun was one, got around this problem by brothers marrying sisters which keep the ability through must have been comparatively benign rulership and centuries but of course they ran into inbreeding problems with health and deformities in a big way !

it's interesting how a basic genetic principle completely describes and enforces the inherent murderous chaos of human politics, you cannot get healthy politically able offspring from what is usually an able father in the long term !

business empires can be more stable over a generation or two which i think is not an argument for the increased competence of the offspring, but a more stable environment supportive of learned skills compared to the ruthless cutthroatedness and continual unbalance of politics !

the  ISIS's  problem is they have no notion of just fighting a war on one front, they take on  everybody  !

history always varnishes over this aspect  . . !

what stalin and hitler didn't  (and never!)  understood was  ‘ strategic retreat ’  meant you keep your strength to fight another day !

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to war !

a

sensible

person

doesn't

go

to war !

anut !

three generations of government of north korea !

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anut !

three generations of government of north korea !

three?

lovely lyrics, too much for kim jong-un's wife?

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stalin ,

a

georgian

killing

russians  !  : o)

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