No_one
Underemployed Slav. Likes playing Factorio.
User ID: 1042
No_one
1yr ago
**A quick poll.. do we have a poll mechanism ? ** We should.
**Were you aware **that Woodward of Watergate fame was, before his journalistic career an officer in the Navy, one trusted enough to handle nuclear codes?
After Yale, Woodward began a five-year tour of duty in the United States Navy.[8] During his service in the Navy, Woodward served aboard the USS Wright, and was one of two officers assigned to move or handle nuclear launch codes the Wright carried in its capacity as a National Emergency Command Post Afloat (NECPA).[9] At one time, he was close to Admiral Robert O. Welander, being communications officer on the USS Fox under Welander's command.[
Were you aware 'Deep Throat' of Watergate was deputy director of FBI, someone who had many reasons to hate Nixon ?
I was aware of the latter, but not of the former. I thought he was just a young journalist, not a young journalist fresh off from fed-land with a top secret clearance.
There's this incredible segment by Tucker Carlson that basically lays out a theory Nixon was not as big a crook as we think, and that he was set up because he tried to keep the government subordinate to its notional head.
To sum it up, the claim is that Watergate was a palace coup, where the secret services overthrew the US government, and have kept it under control ever since through influence operations.
It does look persuasive to me. Too persuasive, if you were pulling a coup of this sort, would you make one of the protagonists a retired naval officer with that kind of background ? Ok, I'm done expressing my confusion and astonishment with what I've learned today. If this isn't content fit for themotte, please let me know!
Supplementary viewing: Interview with 'Kay Griggs' , talking about deep state influence ops and what the military gets up to in secret. Was allegedly filmed during her divorce as a 'dead man' measure. Her husband was involved with it and drank / talked too much to her.
It's eight hours, I mean, anyone wants a rabbit hole to fall down through. I feel like I should watch it at some point, though there's probably an analysis somewhere.
It seems to be fairly tame conspiracy stuff: some classic secret societies, homosexuals, political murder, drug running, saudis, etc. However, the nice lady talking about is, if she says who she is, in a position where she may have actually learned something. If she made it up, it's a great performance, if she hasn't, it's not very surprising.
No_one
1mo ago
It's a scam because you don't have magic energy storage.
Sufficient Battery storage - and you can verify this yourself - would require metropolitan area sized battery arrays. (I did some basic calcs for flow batteries)
So you either have to be content for closing down the country for a few random weeks in a year, or maintain an entire parallel mostly idle power system to pick up the slack.
That's what the Germans did. That's why after spending enough to fully decarbonize their grid via nuclear, they have the world's highest energy price and carbon intensity way worse than France.
No_one
1yr ago
I'm pro choice, and also pro-infanticide (of disabled children). Not as prescriptive policy, but something that ought to available as an option to parents.
However, I feel extremely disgusted and strongly about abortion activists, and think there need to be limits. Generally EU seems to have fairly sensible legislation.
Abortion and any similar killing is an extremely serious affair, and should be treated as such. Being proud of having an abortion seems completely perverse.
Hard to express what I hate about them. It's the same sort of disgust I have to people who treat dead enemy combatans with disrespect.
They (some e.g. former US commander of European provinces) claim they'd to start hitting them with conventional weapons everywhere and destroy all their units in Ukraine, that's counting Crimea too.
That is, a real war would start. I'm not sure about that. By most accounts Russians have killed at least fifty thousand Ukrainians troops so far, if they nuke several thousand would that change anything? Russia is not losing this war, the stakes are too high, so it's going to keep going on. They cannot afford to give up.
Americans must surely know this. We've seen America talk about red lines and then do nothing repeatedly, so what's crossing one more red line for a desperate state ?
US should also be aware that it's far less in american interest to fight a war over Ukraine than it is in Russia's interests. Completely lopsided importance.
And in any case, even a real air war and some cross-border raids by NATO would not be very impressive to the mayfly attention span of cosmopolitan consumers.
The strategic air defense network they have is expected to require weeks to months of reducing till bombing can proceed in earnest with conventional assets. Unconventional assets (stealth) are rather scarce and whether they're truly stealthy to a peer adversary is a rather open question..
Also, escalation wise,it's not clear at all whether China would let Russia lose; they have a very serious interest in not acquiring any more unfriendly nations on its borders, which would be the result of 'decolonising' of Russia.
Arms shipments by the world's biggest industrial power or even 'volunteer' units could make a lot of difference. After all, why should only Ukraine have large volunteer formations? There's a rather amusing precedent for China there.
Russians has a more attractive option of evening out the odds though - closing the skies, destroying all satellites by launching kinetic anti-satellite weapons at their own satellites or just releasing lots of crap in a reverse orbit. That'd prevent Americans from tattling to Ukrainians locations of objects of strategic interests, and make any subsequent war against the hegemony that much easier, as American military uses satellites more than anyone else.
Wouldn't kill a person, no pesky radiation, and will negate most of US advantages in this and the upcoming Taiwan war. Also it's going to make astronomers happy because it'd kill Starlink too and a decades long pause in space launches would mean they won't have to stop being lazy and start designing huge orbital telescopes.
Project Veritas published another video that has gone on to have millions of views, but no media is willing to touch it - even Daily Mail deleted its article about it within hours.
I thought there'd be some coverage here, but apparently... ? It's a very CW event I believe.
Gist of it is, some affirmative action double minority hire (both gay and black) MD working for Pfizer under the lofty sounding but probably not that important position of "Pfizer Director, Research & Development Strategic Operations for mRNA scientific planning"
got slightlyy drunk with his Grindr date and said a good bunch of plausible seeming stuff, ranging from gosh, the revolving door between regulators and Pfizer is kinda unethical, but good for us to saying Pfizer is considering doing its own gain-of-function research to come up with better vaccines via either serial passage or something else. Give it a watch if you're interested, I think he wasn't making it up.
Then PV met up with him again, and showed him a tablet with the captured video. He said he had made all of that up to impress his date. (doubtful).
The second video is probably more interested for people who like "public freakouts" as the guy first acts like a bad gay stereotype, and later as a black one, at one point trying to destroy PV's tablet.
Interesting is that people like Majid Nawaaz were seen coming up with 12d chess theories about how this is an op to discredit Veritas and that the guy was a plant.
People have saved his Linked in before it got deleted and videos of him from schools he had attended according to his linked in, so if it's an op, it's an improbably good one.
EDIT: youtube took down the videos, still up on twitter.
1st vid: https://twitter.com/Project_Veritas/status/1618420826986123265 (the date one)
2nd vid: https://twitter.com/Project_Veritas/status/1618748408982040576 (confrontation in someone's restaurant and the freakout)
EDIT:
pfizer responds: https://www.pfizer.com/news/announcements/pfizer-responds-research-claims
They say they aren't doing serial passage / gain of function but are merely putting new spikes on the original virus in vitro, in an effort to see whether the vaccine still does something against new variants. I feel normies won't like this one bit.
They also say that they're doing "in vitro resistance selection experiments are undertaken in cells incubated with SARS-CoV-2 and nirmatrelvir in our secure Biosafety level 3 (BSL3) laboratory".
So, it does seem like the guy is an idiot who talked about stuff they admit they were doing, of which he doesn't know enough about and which seems mostly reasonable, and then completely fucked up by adding in his own speculation about what they could do.
I'd say the video is most notable for seeing how absolutely blasé insiders can be about corruption and conflicts of interest. I guess if you have med school debts to pay off, chortling about how 'covid and covid vaccines are going to be great for the company' comes naturally ?
No_one
1yr ago
Strategic nuclear balance between US and China has apparently changed, and this has been publicly acknowledged by elected US representatives.
Apart from it making a US led escalation of a Taiwan war somewhat less likely, I'm not sure what this means. A ploy to get more money for defense ?
I've been seeing rumors from nuclear experts about a Chinese nuclear build-up, but now US house & senate claim it's real.
Would welcome some discussion of this, as I'm sure this is going to have real world implications.
Interesting development concerning ChatGPT related to CW.
People observed that ChatGPT talks like a midwit liberal after all the 'fixes' it's been subjected to.
So, it speaks in the jargon of the ingroup.
So, someone figured out you can 'weaponize' ChatGPT to engage in 'debates' with midwit liberals without actually having to learn to ape their slang and thought patterns.
Apparently, this is quite effective as a debating tactic.
This is going to end badly- I can feel it, and if this takes off, I feel that within a few weeks a number of very smart people will be trying their damnedest to figure out how to prevent doing something like this.
However, I feel that various spook contractors outfits are almost certainly going to use the AI to control discourse by literally moving into 'creating a guy' type of activity in the next years. Any and every place where you'll want to debate anything online that will allow free entry will be swamped by very good bots intended to get people chasing their tails and believing the right things.
That's an obvious brute force fix for the problem of social media fracturing the consent manufacturing machine.
They'll probably settle for making a ML model spot this sort of activity and then ban people who're doing it, that's my guess.
No_one
1yr ago
In my view, 50/50 he has committed criminal sexual acts. He posted a lot of very edgy jokes on Twitter.
And logic dictates when you put someone somewhere to censor content, you want someone who will be easy to handle, hence, a guy whom you know to be a nonce is the logical choice.
Meanwhile, FBI has about 16 ex* employees working at Twitter in various senior positions.
*I'm not sure people ever 'leave' such agencies, same way as people never really leave the Mob without disappearing entirely.
No_one
1yr ago
"Europe is a garden. We have built a garden. Everything works.
Do these people really think so, or was it a conscious lie ?
Australia has a minor scandal involving some SAS troopers, who are accused of 'war crimes' over shooting some 'civilians' during the Afghanistan war.
The media is all over it, and one of the bigger figures in it - a former SAS corporal Ben Roberts-Smith turned media exec, one of the real life closest approximations of gigachad meme I've seen - has seen fit to file a defamation suit against a bunch of journalists over the 'war crimes' allegations in media. (see attached picture to get a sense of dude's sheer size)
Now, Ben Roberts-Smith is a fairly impressive guy with some notable flaws. From what I gather, he's a brave and competent warrior, a demanding boss, perhaps a bit of a glory hound and about as rough as you'd expect from reputation of SAS.
Some dark triad traits, but that's nothing unexpected in special forces. Probably 'guilty' of what he's accused of - he's going to be on trial for that any year now. The big deal is that his patrol is alleged to have shot a captive during clearing of a compound, and also extrajudicially executed some other captives (up to 30 allegedly) during its deployment.
Now, special forces are .. special kinds of people. Aggressive guys who just won't quit despite punishing training, expected to go into the hairiest situations in small groups, typically against far more numerous opposition, without much support.
Anyway, during the defamation suit, the attorney for the journalists saw fit to read a social media post liked by the plaintiff in court. [audio unsafe for work, small children and delicate old ladies]
I can't decide whether Roberts-Smith 'liking' a post written by one of his army buddies to provoke the attorney for the opposition was a genius or bad move , but the whole bit of situational comedy nevertheless made me day when it crossed my twitter timeline.
I'm quite sure it was some army guy - when I was reading various allegations about Roberts-Smith the eloquence, profanity and threatening nature of SAS communicationg among each other was of exactly the same tone and style as the post in question.
No_one
1yr ago
What changed in Western societies during the last century that lead to wide scale acceptance of non-white people?
It was imposed by law. You haven't seen photos of 101st Airborne escorting blacks into a white school ?
The US constitution was replaced by the Civil Rights Act, and over the next fifty years, activists were busily using state power to browbeat anyone opposed into compliance.
The government decided people can't segregate themselves by law, so they're now doing it financially. Federal government is disappointed, and has now resorted to mandating better loan conditions for people with worse credit scores.
I think these changes have been very positive on the whole
You think these changes have been very positive.
Ask whites in London or Paris how happy they're about these 'changes'.
The 'elites' in Europe are so braindead and so feckless in face of 'human rights activists' the continent is no doubt going to be taking in expected Bantu immigration waves by tens of millions, and within thirty years, the benefits of black bodies is going to be felt in every city from Madrid to Moscow.
No_one
1yr ago
Few things work in Europe. Let's name them: public order, generally okayish. Not too much serious crime. Infrastructure is mostly fine, iirc, with not much 'debt'. Businesses don't get stolen by corrupt officials too often.
But energy policies - the bulwark of prosperity, are absolute shambles. Shale gas is not exploited at all. Nuclear is barely supported.
Renewables are still pushed despite the abysmal track record.
Germany faces deindustrialisation; Americans are talking about inviting in German companies. I'm thinking nothing will come out of that, as the black-worshipping managerial classes are unlikely to start rubber stamping tens of thousands of green cards for German immigrants and families. Can you imagine the racial equity optics of that?
Educational policies are .. risible and a failure. Few now remember the 'Lisbon strategy' which was supposed to make EU the world's most competitive economy.
Youth unemployment is high in many places, particularly southern half.
EU, as a bloc, is mostly unable to deport criminal migrants with no right of being here. The consequence is worst hit places like Italy are leaning very much right.
I don't understand what ECB is doing, but a lot of people whom I follow and who made good predictions re: markets are outraged at the incompetence.
No_one
11mo ago
Details aside (the situation of Germany between the wars wasn't as dire, your portrayal is very hyperbolic), I believe you are onto something with your observation.
It's also not that original - that European civilization doesn't really want to live, has lost confidence and vitality has been said many times before.
The reason our society is so reflexively disgusted by Hitler is because we have mostly internalized the notion that our children should die that others might live, and the man with the tiny moustache represents the polar opposite of that.
I believe that's secondary to the main cause of his really bad rep which is IMO this:
-) The suffering caused by Hitler was severe and in some cases (death camps) novel.
-) his unabashed nationalism means he doesn't even have Lenin's / Stalin's / Mao's etc 'fig leaf' of "I'm just building utopia bro".
To sum it up: he has no prestigious apologists, he wasn't deceptive about his intentions (german self-interest) and thus he is seen as a monster, while people who plotted world conquest but cloaked it in "utopia" are still often seen as heroes.
Also:
Or imagine that I’m the chieftain of one of two small tribes on a small island. Resources are getting scarce and everyone knows that at some point soon it’s going to be us or them. Does a good leader, a good father, wait for the threat to ripen, for the enemy to choose the place and time for battle? Or does he strike preemptively? It will be either our children or theirs who die. We will eat their babies or they will eat ours. Shouldn’t a father make sure of which it is? Isn’t that what a good father does?
That's pretty much the logic national socialists used when it came to economic policy, hunger plans etc. (I recently read a book on the economic aspects of WW2)
The only hope for Germany to retain sovereignty into future lay in striking fast and conquering the entirety of Europe, including the Soviet Union.
Only then it'd have the food, the minerals and the industrial base to be competitive to the US. A theoretical alliance would have worked too, but it was simply not possible due to WW1, etc.
Also, Sneerclub is going to have a collective orgasm no doubt about your post. It has everything - religious belief, autism, rational behavior, Hitler.
It's only flaw is that it's too long.
No_one
27d ago
It is not as if NATO will fire nukes in face of conventional assault - so what will they do?
If NATO, with cca what, 900 million population, GDP (ppp adjusted) maybe 4x of Russia, cannot somehow manage to have conventional forces supremacy in Eastern Europe to prevent Russia from attacking, what use is NATO?
That's almost exactly the disparity in population, GDP between Russia and Ukraine. In any reasonable war, conventional war between Russia and NATO should go far, far better than between Russia and Ukraine alone. After all, the developed West has much better everything. It has rule of law, human rights, less corruption, much better R&D sector, better education. One could go on.
So why am I now hearing this defeatism ? Eastern European countries joined NATO because they were told it'd make them 'safe' against Russia ? Was that just a bluff ?
It is not as if NATO countries will ever muster courage to actually wage full fledged war with the aim to physically oust Putin from Kremlin
I'm pretty sure that's what Oppenheimer meant when he said "lot of boys not yet born will owe their life to the bomb". You know well from history how "waging full scale war to oust the despot in Moscow" usually goes. Especially when he has the support of world's biggest industrial power.
I doubt Putin would try to take Baltics unless there's a WW3 going on. There's nothing there, they barely have any forces worth speaking about, it's not defensible at all (or so was the usual expert talk) and all the forces there are just tripwire forces.
What use is NATO if it's unwilling to use nuclear weapons to defend the territory of its members? Was it all a big bluff or what ?
No_one
4mo ago
re trans furry military members in some bunker in Nevada piloting drones or other military gear,
This is untrue. Military does not produce or design weapons. Yes, furries can operate weapon system, but they won't have them because the US military and industry contracting system is broken.
The 'war' with China is already lost, if we go by statements of a former foreign minister of Singapore, who says both militaries understand US cannot win a conventional war, which is why the Chinese are now building a more robust nuclear force that'd deter the US from escalating in case of a conventional war.
and it's regularly getting shredded by missiles that are largely being guided by a they/them army.
Which is why Ukraine army is advancing, their offensive has succeeded and Russians do not have fire or aerial superiority over the front line. Because 'they/them' army has destroyed their ability to make things go boom. Yes, very true.
No_one
1yr ago
List of alleged ex-FBI people working for Twitter.
Quite a lot of names. 16 directors or managers. All hired since the '16 debacle.
Reminds one of the Chinese demand for CPC members being in company management.
Is it random ? Or does this support the claim Twitter is uniquely important in the information landscape as a place where journalists get their stories and hang out.
No_one
1yr ago
What are you looking for? What are you hoping to find?
You can't tolerate corruption like that.
... you think it's normal that Biden bragged about having Ukrainian prosecuted fired for investigating Burisma, the company that was paying off Hunter Biden ?
This is just corruption. In any western European country, that'd cause the government to resign. Ministers there resign over some piddly plagiarism nonsense, or minor oversights. Even in eastern Europe it'd be a major scandal and probably require new elections.
No_one
25d ago
Plus the reality check of actual efficacy of all that GDP put into military. Fucking North Korea who is economical dwarf was able to send 3 million shells to Russia. US production is around 30,000 a month so North Korea was able to send years of production to Russia. And we are not even talking about what Russia was able to do since the war started - triple the production of artillery shells to 300,000 a month.
Now you're getting it. People have been talking about how a green service economy with little actual industry isn't actually useful when you need to like, blow stuff up or build it.
when their soldiers will return in cardboxes by thousands in peer-to-peer warfare
You know, it does takes years to build up big armies and industries. Germany was cheating in 1930s because their entire army was designed around re-expanding. They hired the best, they had WW1 veterans, everyone was trained on things a couple levels above him. And even then it took them like 6 years to build up. In a militaristic regime with relatively high approval rates, plenty of young people and so on.
Look at Biden or von der Leyen. Look at the green energy 20 year shamble.
Not gonna happen. It's late stage regime, the best it can do is suppress political opposition
Russia meanwhile doesn't have enough people to occupy Ukraine. It's not the world-conquering totalitarian state of scare propaganda. If they were, they'd not be hiring Nepalis, but everyone youngish but essential workers would be in the army and it'd be 4 million strong.
They could, if Putin was feeling insane enough try to take over Baltics and maybe (I give this low probability) Russian missile attack could wreck enough of NATO airbases (which I'm not even sure have solid air defenses against maneuvering, fast missile salvos) and then if NATO wasn't resolute enough to H-bomb Russian formations on the wrong side of the border in Baltics, then yeah, maybe they'll get taken over.
Which would be a net benefit to EU because 60-90% of working age non-Russians will just move away.
It'd matter quite a bit.
Maybe 20-30%. Shells are very hard to intercept and potent, when aimed properly. Artillery caused like 50% of casualties when used with ground spotting with line of sight or plane directed. (was nowhere near universal, iirc only Americans did it)
Missile systems like HIMARS and Smerch and Tornado allow hitting targets up to 100 km in. Tactical missiles, for which Russia is characteristically making with huge warheads of up to 800 kg, [can accurately hit targets at 400 km.] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9K720_Iskander#Iskander-M). Unless you can prevent enemy from sneaking drones all over your airspace, there's no such thing as a 'front line'. There's just a region of pain where the slightest mistake can result in getting the equivalent of a 3-4 ton bomb falling at you with a 1-2 minute warning. Fuel-air explosives are more potent than high explosives.
But what about the NATO air forces? Well, even if missiles strikes disabling airbases are avoided, the expectation is reducing air defense to allow combat missions that aren't suicidal would take weeks to months. Yeah, you could whittle that down fast if you had thousands of AI-guided small drones outranging big SAMs ready to go, but NATO doesn't have that. And i've seen no indication they want to procure such. What's going on is they're buying Israeli 'stand-off' munitions at outrageous cost (something like $500k per one drone). That's probably, not gonna cut it unless cost goes down by a factor of 10-50x.
Modern war is just a whole different beast than what it used to be.
Let's remember that western military doesn't have a stealthy drone with ~100 km range and hours of loiter capacity per each howitzer. Even though it very well could. At some point, we're going to get a whole ecosystem of autonomous drones patrolling the airspace to prevent enemy recon, laser dazzlers to prevent satellite recon. But we're not there. Even if SV won over the MIC and started making these air-defense drones in bulk, it'd take 5 years to build up enough to matter for NATO. And they won't win. Billions in stock valuations are at stake here!
More important stuff:
-anti-aircraft missile production (US Patriot production is expected to go up to 600 a year. A year!). I've never seen figures on Russia but they seem well aware of the utility so it was likely a lot higher.
US has nothing like the Pantsir system, which is designed to be economical, with cheap, high performance missiles. No expensive seeker, basically a fast missile guided by impossible to jam commands from the radar and a proximity fuze).
-whether stealth actually works (unclear. You can detect stealth aircraft using bounces to places other than the radar, so called 'multilateration. With satellite comms, you don't even need to set up microwave relays between these sites.)
-degree of dysfunction in western militaries. Oppressing sand people doesn't translate well to contending with an enemy who can't wait but put a small, tiny drone above your unit and blow your entire headquarters section up with a 300mm missile. (Himars, Tornado-U?, beats me what Chinese call theirs). You need completely different tactics, weapons to kill and detect small drones etc. Winning at such a conflict would be hard even if you had an infinite budget and enough competent, serious people.
-whether China gets involved (imo a certainty, China allowing Russia to fall due to a lost conventional war would put more enemy bases on their borders. And allow yanks to embargo them almost totally on gas and oil).
No_one
11mo ago
Resettlement was actually resettlement
One of the justifications for Holocaust was that Jews were implacable and treacherous, hence exacerbating the partisan problem on the eastern front by shipping in a million+ Jews there in 1942... yeah, pretty funny suggestion.
What's a next suggestion, that Stalin somehow accepted ~ 2 million assorted European Jews who didn't speak Russian in some sort of very sneaky prisoner transfer ?
The almost openly genocidal EFF?
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