Here’s some articles that you just will not find in any American media. But they are very descriptive and pretty accurate regarding what the rest of the world thinks about America today. No, you won’t find Rush Limbaugh quoting from these articles, nor will you find a reference to them in Politco or MSNBC. These are the type of articles that the oligarchy; the rulers of the American government do not want the tax-serfs to read.

It’s not so hard to find articles in the American media. They run the gambit from “America is great and the best”, to fear-mongering “the world outside of America looks like a save the children commercial”. But you won’t find anything really critical or persuasive about what America is going through right now. That is the kind of information that Americans MUST NOT SEE.

Well, surprise! You are going to read some of these articles right here and right now, and they are (for the most part) not very flattering.

It’s not that America or Americans are bad. They are not. It is that the entire nation is run by evil psychopaths.

Psychopathy, sometimes considered synonymous with sociopathy, is traditionally a personality disorder characterized by persistent antisocial behavior, impaired empathy and remorse, and bold, disinhibited, and egotistical traits. Different conceptions of psychopathy have been used throughout history that are only partly overlapping and may sometimes be contradictory.

-Wikipedia

These leaders possess behaviors are dangerous and will will end up destroying the entire world if they are not suppressed. It’s like the drunk friend who is trying to pick a fight with everyone in the bar, and you and your friends just roll your eyes, and after a spell, you all need to leave early before some “shit goes down”. Damn!

Have any of you been in that situation?

Well, that is America today. And it’s pretty bad, and very dangerous.

That’s why the articles outside of the USA are not finding their way into the “approved” American media.

Yes. The reason why these negative articles about America are not cropping up inside of any of the “approved” American media outlets is because they are more than just unflattering. The psychopaths that run America do not want the serf-slaves to revolt against them. So they deliberately suppress any contrary news related to them or their true personalities.

Psychopathy is a condition characterized by the absence of empathy  and the blunting of other affective states. Callousness, detachment and  a lack of empathy enable psychopaths to be highly manipulative.  Nevertheless, psychopathy is among the most difficult disorders to spot. 
 
Psychopaths can appear normal, even charming. Underneath, they lack any semblance of conscience. Their antisocial nature inclines them often (but by no means always) to criminality.
 
Psychopaths spark popular fascination and clinical anguish:  Adult psychopathy is largely resistant to treatment, though programs  exist to treat callous, unemotional youth in hopes of preventing them  from maturing into psychopaths.
 
Brain anatomy, genetics,  and a person’s environment may all contribute to the development of  psychopathic traits. For more on causes, symptoms, and treatments of the  related condition called antisocial personality disorder, see our Diagnosis Dictionary.                  

Ol’ Busted Knucke’s said it best when he said that Russia and the USA have a lot to offer each other. Why not work together and concentrate on our similarities, instead of threatening each other about some imaginary differences. And he’s right, but you and I know that that is not going to happen as the USA is run by a bunch of maniacal evil villains.

What are we dealing with here…

Well, what are we dealing with? Am I being glib concerning who is actually running the American nations, or am I being painfully accurate?

The term “con artist” or “conman” comes from one of  American history’s earliest scammers, a man by the name of William  Thompson. In 1849, Thompson was arrested in New York City for a slew of  successful scams during which he duped unassuming passersby on the  street into lending him their valuables before vanishing with them. 

Thompson was consequently known  among local authorities as “the confidence man,” which was eventually  shortened to “con man.” But Thompson was hardly alone in his clever  grifts. According to historian Karen Halttunen, approximately 10 percent  of all criminals in New York City in the 1860s were con artists.
 
Nearly all “confidence men” or scam artists are charming. Take Victor  Lustig, for example. This conman managed to “sell” the Eiffel Tower and  allegedly even swindled notorious mobster Al Capone. He was fittingly dubbed “the Count” by authorities because he was so debonair. 
 
Beyond the smooth talkers, there are also those conmen who play on  people’s biases like Anna Sorokin, who cheated her way into the ranks of  New York City’s elite by pretending to be a rich heiress named Anna  Delvey. The scam artist’s former friends, nearly all of them wealthy  socialites, alleged that she had convinced them to loan her cash for  lavish vacations abroad only to never be repaid.

Today, the term “Ponzi scheme” is used to describe an illegitimate operation. But the term actually came from the real-life Charles Ponzi, whose $15 million investment scheme claimed to turn the average American working man into a multimillionaire overnight. 

-All that's interesting

The Signs of a Psychopath

The following is from Psychology Today.

Psychopathy is a spectrum disorder and can be diagnosed using the 20-item Hare Psychopathy Checklist, which features traits such as lack of empathy, pathological lying, and impulsivity, each scored on a three-point scale based on whether the item does not apply (0), applies to a certain extent (1), or fully applies (2) to the individual. The bar for clinical psychopathy is a score of 30 or higher; serial killer Ted Bundy scored 39.

The checklist was developed in the 1970s by the Canadian researcher Robert Hare. A true assessment should be conducted by a mental health professional.

The revised version of the checklist includes the following characteristics:

The first group really describes Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Mike Pompeo and Barrack Obama, don’t you all think?

• glibness/superficial charm
• grandiose sense of self-worth
• need for stimulation/proneness to boredom
• pathological lying
• conning/manipulative
• lack of remorse or guilt

And these other traits can be applied to the American leadership just as well.

• shallow affect (i.e., reduced emotional responses)
• callous/lack of empathy
• parasitic lifestyle
• poor behavioral controls
• promiscuous sexual behavior

The sexual exploits of Bill Clinton are legendary. And do you really think that being a member of the Senate for 60 years isn’t a “parasitic lifestyle”? What about banning coal and sending the citizenry of five states into poverty? Doesn’t that count as a “lack of empathy”?

The list continues…

• early behavioral problems
• lack of realistic, long-term goals
• impulsivity
• irresponsibility
• failure to accept responsibility for one’s own actions

And what about Donald Trump. It’s always someone else’s fault isn’t it? And those 70+ tweets per night, isn’t that a sign of impulsivity?

• many short-term marital relationships
• juvenile delinquency
• revocation of conditional release (from prison)
• criminal versatility (i.e., commits diverse types of crimes)

If this does not describe American leadership, Congressmen and Senators, then I don't know what does.

What percentage of people are psychopaths?

Psychopaths exist across cultures and ethnic groups. It has been estimated that approximately 1 percent of males and 0.3–0.7 percent of females could be classified as psychopaths. An individual may show elevated levels of multiple traits associated with psychopathy without qualifying as a psychopath according to a measure such as the Hare checklist.

When we refer to the oligarchy or the PTB, we often refer to them as the 1%. I find it curious that this is also the same percentage of psychopaths in society. Could it be the natural inclination of psychopaths to rise over others and seize the levers of control of a society, and if so, isn’t that a very, very dangerous situation?

Let’s learn about the American Leadership

From ThoughtCo…

Psychopaths  are incapable of feeling guilt, remorse, or empathy for their actions  or the objects of their actions. They are generally cunning and  manipulative. They know the difference between right and wrong but don't  believe the rules apply to them. 
 
First Encounter With a Psychopath  
On first impression, psychopaths generally appear charming, engaged,  caring, friendly, logical, and reasonable, with well thought-out goals.  They give the impression that they can reason, that they know the  consequences for antisocial and unlawful behavior and will react appropriately. They appear capable of self-examination and will criticize themselves for mistakes. 
 
Under clinical evaluation, psychopaths don't show common symptoms  associated with neurotic behavior: nervousness, high anxiety, hysteria,  mood swings, extreme fatigue, and headaches. In situations that most  normal people would find upsetting, psychopaths appear calm and void of  fear and anxiety. 
 
An About-Face  
Initially, psychopaths appear reliable, devoted, and trustworthy, but,  suddenly and without provocation, become unreliable, with no regard for  how their actions affect the situation, regardless of its importance.  Once viewed as honest and sincere, they do a sudden about-face and begin  lying without concern, even in small matters when there is no benefit  in lying. 
 
Because psychopaths have mastered the art of deception, those around  them are slow to accept the abrupt change. When psychopaths are  confronted with their lack of responsibility, honesty or loyalty, it  generally has no impact on their attitude or future performance. They  are unable to perceive that other people value truthfulness and  integrity. 
 
Can't Accept Responsibility for Failure  
Psychopaths turn into performers who can mimic normal human emotions  that they have never felt. This holds true when they're faced with  failure. If they appear to be humble and own up to their mistakes, their  true goal is to be perceived as the martyr or sacrificial lamb willing  to accept blame so others don't have to. 
 
If the ploy fails and they are blamed, they will emphatically deny any  responsibility and, without feeling shame, turn to lies, manipulation,  and finger-pointing. When psychopaths can't convince others that they  are innocent, they fume and obsess over it, often murmuring sarcastic  comments and plotting revenge. 
 
Risky Behavior With No Gain  
Antisocial behavior—cheating, lying, robbing, stealing, agitating,  fighting, committing adultery, killing—appeals to psychopaths, whether  or not they reap any rewards. They appear drawn to high-risk antisocial  behavior that has no apparent goal. Some experts theorize that  psychopaths like to put themselves into dangerous situations because of  the adrenaline rush they experience. Because psychopaths generally don't  feel many emotions that normal people do, any extreme sensation feels  good. Others believe that they do it to reinforce their sense of  superiority and to prove that they are smarter than everyone, including  the police. 
 
Horrible Judgment  
Although psychopaths are logical thinkers and view themselves as highly  intelligent, they consistently exhibit bad judgment. Faced with two  paths, one to gold and the other to ashes, the psychopath will take the  latter. Because psychopaths can't learn from their experiences, they are  prone to taking the same path again and again. 
 
Egocentric and Unable to Love  
Psychopaths are highly egomaniacal, to the point that a normal person  has difficulty comprehending it. Their self-centeredness is so deeply  rooted that it renders them incapable of loving others, including  parents, spouses, and their own children. 
 
The only time psychopaths show an ordinary response to kindness or  special treatment by others is when it can be used to their advantage.  For example, a psychopathic father still loved by his children despite  the deep suffering he has caused them may put on a show of appreciation  so that they continue to put money into his prison account or pay his  legal fees. 
 
Conventional Treatment Empowers Psychopaths  
Most studies indicate that there are no conventional methods to cure  psychopathic behavior. When conventional methods have been used,  psychopaths become empowered and react by improving their cunning,  manipulative methods and their ability to conceal their true  personality, even from trained eyes. 
 
Difference Between Psychopaths and Sociopaths  
Psychopaths and sociopaths  share a diagnosis as having antisocial personality disorder and similar  traits, but there are significant differences. Psychopaths are more  deceptive and manipulative and maintain more control over their outward  personas. They are able to lead what appear to be normal lives,  sometimes throughout their lifetime. When psychopaths become criminals  they believe they are smarter than the average person and invincible. 
 
Sociopaths often let their inner rage surface with violent episodes,  verbally and physically. They become reckless and spontaneous and have  little control over what they say or how they act. Because they are  impulse driven, they rarely consider the consequences of their actions.  It is difficult for sociopaths to live normal lives, and because of  their imprudence many of them drop out of school, can't hold jobs, turn  to crime, and end up in prison. 
 
Which Is More Dangerous?  
Sociopaths have a difficult time hiding their disorder, while  psychopaths pride themselves on their manipulative abilities.  Psychopaths are masters of disassociation and less likely to feel guilt  or remorse for their actions or for the pain that they cause others.  Because of this, psychopaths are considered to be more dangerous than  sociopaths. 

Well, we know that the USA is run by a bunch of crazed lunatics with some severely dangerous tendencies…

What now? Americans, for the most part are unaware of this. And they follow them in the belief that the leaders represent them and their beliefs. But the rest of the world does not see this, and are frankly aghast at the United States for “electing” these people to the levers of power.

And they write articles about this.

The more “mainstream” articles tend to be rather sanitized. But the alternative articles tend to be very spot-on and even vicious. Here we are going to look at some of the articles. It’s a venting of what the world thinks of what America has become and exists as it sits today, in the closing months of 2020.

The US Has Lost Global Power, and Is Now Just Faking It

This article from the Russian Insider archives was first published on RI in April 2018 by Dmitry Orlov . It was republished on Sun, Dec 13 2020 | 1510 words 26,694 Comments

Orlov is one of our favorite essayists on Russia and all sorts of other things. He moved to the US as a child, and lives in the Boston area.
 


He is one of the better-known thinkers The New Yorker has dubbed 'The Dystopians' in an excellent 2009 profile, along with James Howard Kunstler, another regular contributor to RI (archive). These theorists believe that modern society is headed for a jarring and painful crack-up.

He is best known for his 2011 book comparing Soviet and American collapse (he thinks America's will be worse). He is a prolific author on a wide array of subjects, and you can see his work by searching him on Amazon. He has a large following on the web, and on Patreon, and we urge you to support him there, as Russia Insider does.
 
If you haven't discovered his work yet, please take a look at his archive of articles on RI. They are a real treasure, full of invaluable insight into both the US and Russia and how they are related.

The US Has Lost Global Power, and Is Now Just Faking It
 
"If the US manages to convince enough people, at home and around the world, that it is still dangerous, then it will be able to hide its increasing enfeeblement for a while longer."
 
It’s a hard job being a global hegemon and the world’s sole superpower.
 
You have to keep the entire planet in line. Every country needs to be taught its place, and kept there, by force if need be. Now and again a country or two has to be conquered or destroyed, just to teach others a lesson. Plus you have to relentlessly meddle in other countries’ politics, rigging elections so that only US-friendly candidates can win, run regime change operations and organize colored revolutions. Stop doing this, and some countries will start ignoring you. And then the rest will quickly realize that you are losing control and go their separate ways while ignoring you.

 
 
Is the United States still the world’s greatest power, in control of the entire planet, or has that moment in history already come and gone? We are constantly hearing how the situation is becoming dire: relations between the US and NATO countries and Russia are going from bad to worse; there is a trade war going on with China; North Korea remains an intractable problem and an embarrassment.
 
Many people maintain that we are very close to a world war. But does “very close” actually mean anything? It is quite possible to stand for hours with your toes hanging over the edge of a cliff and never jump. Suicide is a big decision: big even for a person, much bigger for a large country.

 
 
On March 1, 2018 president Putin unveiled Russia’s new weapons systems against which the United States is defenseless and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Previously, the plan was to surround Russia with military bases and missile batteries, then launch a preemptive first strike, destroying its ability to retaliate and forcing it to capitulate.
 
This plan has now conclusively failed, and a US/NATO attack on Russia is once again assured to be an act of suicide. Worse than that, even limited military confrontations are now mostly unthinkable, because Russia can now inflict unacceptable damage on US/NATO forces from a safe distance and without putting any of its own assets at risk. If Russia won’t attack and the US/NATO can’t attack, then how likely is a war?
 
The new weapons systems have made it possible to start ignoring the US. It is still important to maintain a credible military posture, but politically the US is no longer in control, and neither are the global institutions on which it has relied. Instead, what we are seeing is the reemergence of nation states, and even of empires.
 
The political future of Syria is being decided by Russia, Turkey and Iran, with no useful input from the United States at all. 

Significantly, whereas Russia and Iran are in categories of their own as far as the US is concerned, Turkey has been a US ally and the second-largest armed force in NATO. The fact that Turkey is no longer eager to please the Americans is quite telling.
 
Except during the strange and tumultuous twentieth century during which the US briefly flashed across the world stage, these three countries went by different names, which all ended in “empire”: the Russian Empire, the Ottoman Empire and the Persian Empire. Of these three, the Russian and the Ottoman empires were heirs to the Holy Roman Empire, whose eastern half, with its capital Constantinople, went on for centuries after Rome had turned into a depopulated ruin and a dark age had descended on Europe.
 
After Constantinople fell to the Turks and Islam took over the region, the center of Orthodox Christianity migrated north to Moscow. Now add China, or the Chinese Empire if you like, which is now aligned with Russia, and complete the picture: all of the greatest and most ancient Eurasian empires have come back and are talking and cooperating, while the has-been upstart on the other side of the planet isn’t even invited.
 
Given this situation, what is the US to do? 

It has three choices. 

The first is to start a major war, thus committing national suicide (while taking other countries with it). It lacks the political will to make this decision, although it could blunder into a major war by accident.
 
The second choice is to basically just fold: give up trying to project power around the world, retreat into its own borders and lick its wounds. It lacks the political will to do this as well; all that remains in the realm of possibility is to pretend that everything is still fine for as long as possible.
 
But how is it possible to pretend that everything is still fine even as everything is falling apart? The answer is to start faking it. 

If the US manages to convince enough people, at home and around the world, that it is still dangerous, then it will be able to hide its increasing enfeeblement for a while longer. It may no longer be capable of achieving any of its aims, but it is still very much capable of mass murder, as was recently demonstrated by the US “coalition” bombings of Mosul and Raqqa, which now lay in ruins. Similar wanton acts of mass murder have been committed America’s Saudi-Arabian proxy in Yemen, and by their Ukrainian proxies in the Donbass.
 
But even the opportunities to commit mindless mass murder with impunity are now becoming fewer and farther between, forcing the US to resort to more boutique acts of violence. To justify these acts, the US (and much of Europe) curtains itself off from the rest of the world using an elaborately constructed wall of complete nonsense.
 
A favorite trope has to do with dreamed-up chemical weapons as the main frightener. Take a look at the recent Israeli rocket attack on Syria. It was justified using obviously fake video footage produced by the White Helmets—a group known for staging fake terror events. At this point, they don’t even care how fake their product looks: this time around, they didn’t bother editing out the clapper (used to sync up video with sound). The setting was obviously a movie set, but production values were rather missing. Instead, we had actors, some wearing white helmets, but no protective gear whatsoever, dumping buckets of water over shivering children. How is that even supposed to make any sense?
 
And then note that the rockets (five which got shot down by the Syrians, with only three making it through) came from Israel. Why Israel? Because the Russians had warned the US that they knew the fake chemical weapons provocation was being organized as a pretext to launch a rocket attack, and that they were going to shoot not just at the rockets but also at those who launch them. Therefore, Americans decided that it would be too risky to launch the attack from navy ships, and instead asked the Israelis to do the honor of lobbing a few missiles at a remote airbase in Syria, correctly thinking that the Russians wouldn’t immediately retaliate against Israel if no Russians would hurt, and knowing that there would be no Russians at that airbase during their attack. This is, on the one hand, quite pathetic, but on the other it shows that the Americans are still capable of a modicum of rational thought.
 
This, then is the strange period of history we are going through. The US is lying nonstop (since truth is not on its side) while pretending to still be dangerous by committing wanton acts of mass murder (small-scale ones, which it can be sure to carry out with impunity).
 
Meanwhile, both national suicide (via large-scale war) and the decision to shut down the whole imperial project both remain politically impossible. How long this strange, unstable period of murderous nonsense can persist isn’t known—your guess is as good as mine—but it obviously can’t go on for ages.
 
Give it a few years, or less. 

Perhaps you can understand why Rush Limbaugh is not talking about this kind of analysis, or why Alex Jones isn’t. Or why Politico or the Huffington Post isn’t. Or why MSNBC isn’t.

• Their calculus uses examples of news articles that are not well-promoted in the USA.
• Their conclusions are based on unflattering narratives.
• The key players involved in the decision making process are not glorified.

Thus this kind of opinion will not be promoted in any of the “approved” American media. Neither the mainstream, the Alt-Right or the Alt-Left.

Times have changed all across the board. America is nothing like it was intended to be. Instead it is a prison-nation that enslaves citizens under a service-for-self oligarchy run by psychopaths. And us “Joe Averages” haven’t any say in the matter.

America Has Traded God for Empire, Narcissism, Militarism, Usury, Sodomy

Fr. Joseph Gleason, is editor of the website titled “Russian Faith” . In this article he explains America’s current predicament. This article comes from the Russian Insider archives and was first published on RI in February 2019. It is written by Mark Dankof on Wed, Oct 21 2020 | 1120 words 8,438 Comments . All credit to the author.

America Has Traded God for Empire, Narcissism, Militarism, Usury, Sodomy 
                                                                                                   

It goes without saying that Father Joseph Gleason of Russian Faith is making his mark in the world for the Kingdom of God in Jesus Christ. His theological journey has finally taken him into the priesthood of the  Russian Orthodox Church. Geographically, the journey he and his family  have embarked upon has taken them from the United States to Russia and a place called Rostov-The-Great.  His is a story worth following on an ongoing basis. I sense his personal odyssey may prove larger in history than he or anyone else imagines right now.

His most recent entry on the Russian Faith website is entitled, “Homosexuals Persecuting Christians in America:  Do You Feel The Walls Closing In?”  

This marvelous piece is 5,050 words long.  My succinct initial response  to his labors before even reading the essay itself was–and is–a simple “Yes.”

I  do not come to this conclusion quickly or without study and  engagement.  Since 9-11, I have set aside most of the rest of my life to  attempt to bring the people of America to an awareness of how late the  hour is, and the perilous state of both individual souls and a  collective people that has turned its back on God in favor of an Empire  built on narcissism, militarism, usury, and sodomy. 
 
But the painful truth is that I have failed.  

I have lost 17  years of my life in the process. I admitted as much some years ago in a  well publicized essay entitled, “Why We’re Finished.”  Later, I found myself being pilloried by the Jerusalem Post and the international Jewish press for telling Press TV Iran the truth after the infamous Obergefell Supreme Court decision of 2015 about who played a pivotally disproportionate  role in bringing this latest advance of Cultural Marxism to pass in the  United States, as was the case in the Roe v Wade decision of January of 1973.  

Joseph Biden said the same thing I did,  only he hailed the development as a new dawning in America. 

I didn’t.   

Thus, I was in the cross-hairs of the usual suspects.  Not one of my  Lutheran colleagues in the United States came to my public defense.  I  was on my own and I knew it, just as I have been for years in these  circles for discussing 9-11, Empire foreign and military policy, the  Kennedy Assassination, and the abortion and LGBTQ issues among many others.
   
Nothing in the last 4 years has changed the equation.  

I said as much in an essay entitled, “A ‘Communist’s’ Thoughts on the 4th of July,” appropriately retitled, “Russia is a Beacon of Promise for a Christian Future” for Russia Faith and Russian Insider readers.   

The thousands of hits on those sites revealed I had struck a chord or a  raw nerve depending on the perspective of the reader, which is why  editors like Charles Bausman and Father Joseph Gleason have increasingly  come under attack by MSM rags in the United States like The Daily Beast as agents of the Kremlin, which assaulted me well before it did these fine people.  I wore that as a badge of honor. I still do.
 
Which brings me back to Father Gleason’s latest post.  His  conclusions about what the LGBTQ movement and the power elite’s goals  are in both the United States and globally in regard to authentic  Christianity and its adherents are no different than what Rod Dreher  wrote in Time Magazine after the Obergefell decision,  only sharper in focus in the implications.  This sharpening of focus  leads the American Christian who prayerfully contemplates the reality of  the homeland advances of the New World Order to examine his or her  position very carefully as the Holy Spirit of God leads and directs.
 
For the record, after examination over time, I humbly conclude personally that:
 
1) Father Joseph Gleason has made the right decision for himself and his family in moving to Russia;
 
2) Recent developments in that country and  elsewhere make it clear to me that Orthodoxy is especially being used of  God in the proclamation of the Gospel in an age of advancing heresy and  apostasy–not declining Lutheranism, Catholicism, or a Protestant  Evangelical movement overcome with worship of Zionism and increasing pop  accommodation to cancerous American and European cultures headed for  absolute shipwreck; 
 
3) For young believers around the world including a  couple I have recently read about in Brazil, and young American  Christians feeling bewildered and embattled as they Feel the Walls Closing In,  examine the Lord’s will very closely in regard to the beckoning of  Father Gleason and his migrating minions to the place that the Triune  God is restoring at this eschatological hour in history to counter the  evil plans of a Western Globalist and Zionist movement bent on using  moral and sexual perversion, mass media manipulation, consumerism,  economic sanctions, and overt military aggression to achieve Satan’s  final victory in this present realm; 
 
4) The latest actions of the United States in the Ukraine in  sewing discord in the Orthodox Church only underscore the depths to  which the political leadership in America will go on behalf the  objectives of the New World Order, along with the entire spectrum of  moves being made by The Empire against Iran, Syria, Russia, and  Venezuela;  

5) When all of this is understood in discernment by the  Christian believer in the West in terms of prophetic developments, those  of us whose circumstances mandate remaining in our earthly homeland in  exile must do so only in the clear understanding that the outcome is not  merely an exilic experience of alienation and marginalization, but one  which promises martyrdom itself.
   
My last public address to  a Lutheran group discussed this.  

I’m still not sure those in the  lecture hall in upstate Wisconsin last year really had the foggiest  notion of what I was trying to say in the Lord to them.  But Father  Joseph Gleason knows of what I speak, and so do most of his readers at Russian Faith. 

There are a few Christian homeschoolers in Texas who  certainly understand. For those in the United States and the West in a  position to make choices for themselves and their families on the basis  of their individual circumstances and Christian witness for the truth in  history, follow him to higher ground.  

Get out of Dodge while you can.
 
I believe God has truly raised this man up at this most  critical and final hour in world and redemptive history. Consider his  witness and his words carefully. That is my best advice to you. The clock is ticking to midnight.
             

Wholesome tradition or degenerate empire, take your pick             

His opinion is dire and gloomy. He does not feel that he is free to practice his religious freedom, nor raise his family safely or properly in the United States. There was a time, don’t you know, where this was the measurement by which the “freedom” and “liberty” offered by the United States was measured. But it no longer exists.

You will note that none of the American government controlled media; the mainstream, the Alt-Left and the Alt-Right will cover this subject it’s all the same nonsense. Over and over.

American Collapse – Great Podcast About How and When – with James Howard Kunstler

Now, we go to James Howard Kunstler.

“Personally, I expect our collapse to be as sudden and unexpected as the USSR’s … and to express itself first in the financial markets …”

This article from our archives was first published on Russian Insider in April 2018. Written by Mr James Howard Kunstler on Mon, Dec 14 2020 | 1000 words 11,640 Comments . All credit to the author.

The author is a prominent American social critic, blogger, and podcaster, and one of our all-time favorite pessimists. We carry his articles regularly on RI. His writing on Russia-gate has been highly entertaining.
 
He is one of the better-known thinkers The New Yorker has dubbed 'The Dystopians' in an excellent 2009 profile, along with the brilliant Dmitry Orlov, another regular contributor to RI (archive). These theorists believe that modern society is headed for a jarring and painful crack-up.
 
You can find his popular fiction and novels on this subject, here. To get a sense of how entertaining he is, watch this 2004 TED talk about the cruel misery of American urban design - it is one of the most-viewed on TED. Here is a recent audio interview with him which gives a good overview of his work.

And the article in question…

American Collapse - Great Podcast About How and When - with James Howard Kunstler
                                                                                                   

I had a fellow on my latest podcast, released  Sunday, who insists that the world population will crash 90-plus  percent from the current 7.6 billion to 600 million by the end of this  century. Jack Alpert heads an outfit called the Stanford Knowledge Integration Lab (SKIL) which he started at Stanford University in 1978 and now runs as a private research foundation. Alpert is primarily an engineer.
   
At 600 million, the living standard in the USA would be on a level  with the post-Roman peasantry of Fifth century Europe, but without the  charm, since many of the planet’s linked systems — soils, oceans,  climate, mineral resources — will be in much greater disarray than was  the case 1,500 years ago. 

Anyway, that state-of-life may be a way-station so something more dire. 

Alpert’s optimal case would be a  world human population of 50 million, deployed in three “city-states,”  in the Pacific Northwest, the Uruguay / Paraguay border region, and  China, that could support something close to today’s living standards  for a tiny population, along with science and advanced technology, run  on hydropower. 

The rest of world, he says, would just go back to nature,  or what’s left of it. Alpert’s project aims to engineer a path to that  optimal outcome.
 
I hadn’t encountered quite such an extreme view of the future before,  except for some fictional exercises like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.  (Alpert, too, sees cannibalism as one likely byproduct of the journey  ahead.) 

Obviously, my own venture into the fictionalized future of the World Made by Hand books  depicted a much kinder and gentler re-set to life at the circa-1800  level of living, at least in the USA. Apparently, I’m a sentimental  softie.
 
Both of us are at odds with the more generic techno-optimists who are  waiting patiently for miracle rescue remedies like cold fusion while  enjoying re-runs of The Big Bang Theory. (Alpert doesn’t  completely rule out as-yet-undeveloped energy sources, though he  acknowledges that they’re a low-percentage prospect.) We do agree with  basic premise that the energy supply is mainly what supports the way we  live now, and that it shows every evidence of entering a deep and  destabilizing decline that will halt the activities necessary to keep  our networks of dynamic systems running.
 
A  question of interest to many readers is how soon or how rapid the  unraveling of these systems might be. 

When civilizations crumble, it  tends to fast-track. 

The Roman empire seems to be an exception, but in  many ways it was far more resilient than ours, being a sort of advanced  Flintstones economy, with even its giant-scale activities (e.g. building  the Coliseum) being accomplished by human-powered work. 

In any case,  the outfit really fell apart steadily after the reign of emperor Marcus  Aurelius (180 AD).
 
The Romans had their own version of a financialized economy:  they simply devalued their coins by mixing in less and less silver at  the mint, so they could pretend to pay for the same luxuries they had  grown accustomed to as resources stretched thin. 

Our financialized  economy — like everything else we do — operates at levels of complexity  so baffling that even its supposed managers at the central banks are flying blind through fogs of debt, deception, and moral hazard. When  that vessel of pretense slams into a mountain top, the effects are  likely to be quick and lethal to the economies on the ground below.
 
In our time, the most recent crash of a major socioeconomic system  was the fall of the Soviet Union in 1990-91. 

Of course, it happened  against the backdrop of a global system that was still revving pretty  well outside the USSR, and that softened the blow. Ultimately, the  Russians still had plenty of oil to sell, which allowed them to re-set  well above the Fifth Century peasant level of existence. 

At least for  now. 

The Soviet Union collapsed because it was a thoroughly dishonest  system that ran on pretense and coercion. Apparently, the US Intel  Community completely missed the signs that political collapse was  underway.
 
They seem to be pretty clueless about the fate of the USA these days,  too. 

If you consider the preoccupations of two very recent Intel chiefs  — John Brennan of CIA and James Clapper, DNI — who now inveigh  full-time on CNN as avatars of the Deep State against the wicked Golden  Golem of Greatness.
 
Personally, I expect our collapse to be as sudden and unexpected as  the USSR’s, but probably bloodier because there’s simply more stuff just  lying around to fight over.
 
Of  course, I expect the collapse to express itself first in banking,  finance, and markets — being so deeply faith-based and so subject to  simple failures of faith. But it will become political and social soon  enough, maybe all-at once. And when it happens in the USA, it will  spread through the financial systems the whole world round.          

It’s heavy dose of “doom and gloom”, but you know, I am much more optimistic about the future.

There will be an American collapse, and systems are in place to keep it localized to the North American hemisphere. There will be economic global ramifications of course, and no nation will really remain unscathed, but the vast amount of damage and hurt will be in America. And of that, it will be localized. If you are prudent and a member of a local community, you should be able to weather “the storm”, and you and yours will survive to carry on through the 2030’s and 2040’s.

Perhaps is best if Americans believe that the rest of the world is a “shit hole”.

AMERICA: A Gigantic Clown Car Being Driven Into a Ditch

And another article from James Howard Kunstler. This article from the Russia Insider archives and was first published on RI in September 2017, with a reprint on Sunday, Dec 13 2020 | 900 words 18,995 Comments.

“This homework assignment should be given to the Democratic members of congress, since they are otherwise preoccupied only with hunting for Russian gremlins and discovering new sexual abnormalities to protect and defend.”

AMERICA: A Gigantic Clown Car Being Driven Into a Ditch
                                                                                                                   
Poor old Karl Marx, tortured by boils and phantoms, was right about one thing: History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.  Thus, I give you the Roman Empire and now the United States of America.  Rome surrendered to time and entropy. Our method is to drive a gigantic clown car into a ditch.
 
Is anyone out there interested in redemption? 

I have an idea for the political party out of power, the Democrats, sunk in its special  Okefenokee Swamp of identity politics and Russia paranoia: make an  effort to legislate the Citizens United calamity out of  existence. 

Who knows, a handful of Republicans may be shamed into going along with it. 

For those of you who have been mentally vacationing on  Mars with Elon Musk, Citizens United was a Supreme Court decision — Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission 558  U.S. 310 (2010) — which determined that corporations had the right, as  hypothetical “persons,” to give as much money as they liked to political candidates.
             
...

We've made important contributions to world culture   
 
This “right” devolved from the First Amendment of the constitution,  the 5-4 majority opinion said — giving money to political candidates and  causes amounts to “freedom of speech.” The Citizens United ruling  opened the door for unlimited election spending by corporations and  enormous mischief in our national life. Then-President Obama — a  constitutional law professor before his career in politics — complained  bitterly about the opinion days later in his State of the Union address,  saying that the court had “reversed a century of law to open the  floodgates, including foreign corporations, to spend without limit in  our elections.”
 
And for the next seven years he did absolutely nothing about it, nor  did the Democratic Party majority in congress. Rather, they vacuumed in  as much corporate campaign money as possible from every hokey political  action committee (PAC) from sea to shining sea, especially in the 2016  presidential election starring Hillary “It’s My Turn” Clinton. It turned  out to not be her turn in large part because the voters noticed the  stench of corruption wafting off this toxic flow of corporate money,  which Hillary was using to vastly outspend her billionaire opponent,  troll that he was.
             
It's been a heck of a ride, and it's coming to an end ...   
 
Of course, corporations have not always been what they are deemed to  be today. They evolved with the increasingly complex activities of  industrial economies. Along the way — in Great Britain first, actually —  they were deemed to exist as the equivalent of legal persons,  to establish that the liabilities of the company were separate and  distinct from those of its owners. In the USA, forming a corporation  usually required an act of legislation until the late 19th century.  After that, they merely had to register with the states. Then congress  had to sort out the additional problems of giant “trusts” and holding  companies (hence, anti-trust laws, now generally ignored).
 
In short, the definition of what a corporation is and what it  has a right to do is in a pretty constant state of change as economies  evolve. And insofar as the current economy is sinking like the USS  Titanic — and our republic as a mode of governance with it — surely the  time has come to redefine in legislation the role and existential nature  of a corporation in this polity. This homework assignment should be  given to the Democratic members of congress, since they are otherwise  preoccupied only with hunting for Russian gremlins and discovering new sexual abnormalities to protect and defend.
 
The crux of the argument is that corporations cannot be said  to be entirely and altogether the equivalent of persons for all legal  purposes. In law, corporations have duties, obligations, and  responsibilities to their shareholders first, and only after that to the  public interest or the common good, and only then by pretty strict  legal prescription. It may be assumed that the interests of corporations and their shareholders are in opposition to, and in conflict with, the  public interest. And insofar as elections are fundamentally matters of the public interest, corporations must be prohibited from efforts to  influence the outcome of elections.
 
That’s your assignment Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, and the rest of  the Democratic Party leadership. Get serious. Show a little initiative.  Do something useful. Draw up some legislation. Get behind something real that might make a difference in this decrepitating country.
 
Or get out of the way and let a new party do the job.

Politics are a pin in the ass, but even those outside of the USA can see that the United State is wholly out of control. “What planet do they live on” is a common phrase that I am starting to hear in day to day conversation.

For the rest of us, the craziness of Washington DC doesn’t resemble anything in our normal day-to-day lives…

Dear America – You Are Delusional, and Failing at Everything You Undertake

Ukraine, Syria, Afghanistan, Russia sanctions –  “All of these harebrained schemes, hatched in Washington, have backfired grandly.” 

“Those who have pushed for them are now reduced to just two face-saving maneuvers: blaming their political opponents; and blaming Russia. And these two maneuvers are set to backfire as well.”

This article from the Russia Insider archives and was first published on RI in November 2017. Written by Dmitry Orlov Fri, Dec 11 2020 | 1610 words 43,193 Comments .

Dear America - You Are Delusional, and Failing at Everything You Undertake  
                                                                                                                 

Back in the days when I was still trying to do the corporate thing, I  regularly found myself in a bit of a tight spot simply by failing to  keep my mouth shut.
 
I seem to carry some sort of gene that makes me naturally  irrepressible. I can keep my mouth shut for only so long before I have  to blurt out what I really think, and in a corporate setting, where  thinking isn’t really allowed, this causes no end of trouble. It didn’t  matter that I often turned out to be right. It didn’t matter what I thought; it only mattered that I thought.
 
American involvement in the  middle-eastern project is now limited to Putin’s sporadic courtesy calls  to Trump, to keep him updated. 
 
Of all the thoughts you aren’t allowed to think, perhaps the  most offensive one is adequately expressed by a single short phrase:  

“That’s not gonna work.”
             
...

The end is near ...   
 
Suppose there is a meeting to unveil a great new initiative,  with PowerPoint presentations complete with fancy graphics, org charts,  timelines, proposed budgets, yada-yada, and everything is going great  until this curmudgeonly Russian opens his mouth and says “That’s not  gonna work.”

And when it is patiently explained to him (doing one’s best to hide one’s extreme irritation) that it absolutely has to work because Senior Management would like it to, that furthermore it is his job  to make it work and that failure is not an option, he opens his mouth  again and says “That’s not gonna work either.” And then it’s time to  avoid acting flustered while ignoring him and to think up some  face-saving excuse to adjourn the meeting early and regroup.
 
I lasted for as long as I did in that world because once in a while I  would instead say “Sure, that’ll work, let’s do it.” And then, sure  enough, it did work, the company had a banner year or two, with lots of  bonuses and atta-boy (and atta-girl) certificates handed out to those  not at all responsible for any of it. Flushed with victory, they, in  turn, would think up more harebrained schemes for me to rain on, and the  cycle would repeat.
             
America seems to be blissfully unaware of how it comes across to the rest of the world   
 
It is probably one of the main saving graces of corporations that  they do sometimes (mainly by mistake) allow some thought to leak  through. The mistake in question is a staffing error in promoting those  constitutionally incapable of keeping their mouths shut or shutting off  their brains. Such errors create chinks in the monolithic phalanxes of  corporate yes-men and yes-women.
 
Trump is too old to be a reformer or a  revolutionary. He is of an age when men are generally mostly concerned  about the quantity and consistency of their stool and how it interacts  with their enlarged prostates. 
 
The likelihood of such mistakes increases with the agony of  defeat, which causes attrition among the ranks of qualified yes-sayers,  creating holes that can only be plugged by promoting a few  non-yes-sayers. However, this only seems to work in the smaller,  hungrier corporations; the larger, better-fed ones seem to be able to  avoid experiencing the agony of defeat for a very long time by moving  the goal posts, outlawing any discussion of said defeat or other similar  tactics. Eventually the entire organization goes over the cliff, but by  then it is of no benefit to anyone to attempt to inform them of their  folly.
 
It is much the same with governments, except here the  situation is even worse. While the smaller, hungrier governments, and  those blessed with a fresh institutional memory of extreme pain, do not  have the luxury of lying to themselves, the larger political  agglomerations—the USSR, the EU, the USA—have the ability to keep  themselves completely immunized against the truth for historically  significant periods of time.
   
The USSR clung to the fiction of great socialist progress even when  it was clear to all that the cupboard was bare and there were rats  gnawing through the rafters. The EU has been able to ignore the fact  that its entire scheme is one of enriching Germany while impoverishing  and depopulating eastern and southern Europe, neglecting the interests  of the native populations throughout. And the amount of self-delusion  that is still currently in effect in the USA makes it a rather large  subject.
 
Regardless of how great the lies are and how forcefully they are  defended, a moment always comes when the phalanx of truth-blocking  yes-men and yes-women stops marching, turns and runs. This event results  in a tremendous loss of face and confidence for all involved.
 
It is the crisis of confidence, more than anything else, that  precipitates the going-off-a-cliff phenomenon that we could so readily  observe in the collapse of the USSR in the early 1990s. I have a very  strong hunch that similar cliff-diving exercises are coming up for the  EU and the USA.
 
But for the time being I am just another disembodied voice on  the internet, watching from the sidelines and periodically saying the  unfashionable thing, which is: “This isn’t gonna work.” However, I’ve  said this a number of times over the years, on the record and more or  less forcefully, and I feel vindicated most of the time.
 
Internationally, for example:

 • Carving the Ukraine away from Russia, having it  join the EU and NATO and building a NATO naval base in Crimea “wasn’t  gonna work.” The Ukraine is a part of Russia, the Ukrainians are  Russian, and the Ukrainian ethnic identity is a Bolshevik concoction.  Look for a reversion to norm in a decade or two.

 • Destroying and partitioning Syria with the help of  Wahhabi extremists and foreign mercenaries supported by the US, Saudi  Arabia and Israel while Russia, Iran, Turkey and China stand idly by  “wasn’t gonna work”; and so it hasn’t.

 • Giving Afghanistan “freedom and democracy” and  turning it into a stable pro-Western regime with the help of invading  NATO troops “wasn’t gonna work,” and hasn’t. Western involvement in  Afghanistan can go on, but the results it can achieve are limited to  further enhancing the heroin trade. 

• Destroying the Russian economy using sanctions  “wasn’t gonna work,” and hasn’t. The sanctions have helped Russia  regroup internally and achieve a great deal of self-sufficiency in  energy production and other forms of technology, in food and in numerous  other sectors.
 
All of these harebrained schemes, hatched in Washington, have  backfired grandly. Those who have pushed for them are now reduced to  just two face-saving maneuvers: blaming their political opponents; and  blaming Russia. And these two maneuvers are set to backfire as well.
 
In the meantime, the world isn’t waiting for the US to shake itself out of its stupor.

The fulcrum of American influence in the Middle East is Saudi Arabia  and the petrodollar. In turn, Saudi Arabia rests on three pillars: the  Saudi monarchy, Wahhabi Islam and the petrodollar. As I write this, the  next king, Mohammed bin Salman, is busy hacking away at all three:  robbing, imprisoning and torturing his fellow-princes, working to  replace the Wahhabi clerics with moderate ones and embracing the  petro-yuan instead of the now very tired petrodollar.
 
Not that any of these three pillars were in good shape in any case:  the defeat of ISIS in Syria was a defeat for the Saudi monarchy which  supported it, for the Wahhabi clerics who inspired it and, consequently,  for the petrodollar as well, because Saudi Arabia was until now its  greatest defender.
 
The new guarantors of peace in the region are Russia, Iran and  Turkey, with China watching carefully in the wings. American  involvement in the middle-eastern project is now limited to Putin’s  sporadic courtesy calls to Trump, to keep him updated.
 
And so here’s my latest prediction: Trump’s goal of “making America great” “isn’t gonna work” either.
 
The country is so far gone that just taking the first step—of  allowing the truth of its condition to leak through the media  filters—will undermine public confidence to such an extent that a  subsequent cliff-dive will become unavoidable. It’s a nice slogan as  slogans go, but Trump is too old to be a reformer or a revolutionary. He  is of an age when men are generally mostly concerned about the quantity  and consistency of their stool and how it interacts with their enlarged  prostates.
 
Perhaps he will succeed in making America great… big piles of feces, but I wouldn’t expect much more than that.

And time has proven him to be correct.

Now that it is official, and Biden is President, I scan the “news”…

Suddenly all the anti-China narrative has collapsed. the only anti-China article (15DEC20) that I can find is this one…

• REVEALED: China spying on Americans via Caribbean phone networks…
• China’s Combative Nationalists See a World Turning Their Way…

And this is just “only” a lite narrative with some segmented Chinese political infighting. Nothing about how horrible and awful China is. Not like before. But compared to the average of five to twelve articles per day about how terrible China is, this is really nothing.

But on Russia…

• U.S. Govt Agencies Hit by ‘Russian Hackers’…
• ‘Homeland’ scrambles…
• Worst in years…
• ‘Classic espionage’ with stealthy, targeted tactics…
• Hunt for malware…
• UPDATE: Hacker group ‘Cozy Bear’ behind U.S. Govt Breach…
• Pentagon, State Dept among agencies hit…
• ‘Classic espionage’ with stealthy, targeted tactics…
• America sitting duck…
• Russia suffers economic woes despite shunning new lockdown…

Imagine that! Who would figure?

Russian Missile Tech has Made America’s Trillion Dollar Navy Obsolete

“Times have changed and America can no longer project its military power like it did in Iraq. Those days are over. ”

This article from the archives was first published on RI in April 2018. Written by Dmitry Orlov Fri, Dec 11 2020 | 1400 words 52,084 Comments

Russian Missile Tech has Made America's Trillion Dollar Navy Obsolete
                                                                                                   
For the past 500 years European nations—Portugal, the Netherlands,  Spain, Britain, France and, briefly, Germany—were able to plunder much  of the planet by projecting their naval power overseas. Since much of  the world’s population lives along the coasts, and much of it trades  over water, armed ships that arrived suddenly out of nowhere were able  to put local populations at their mercy.
             
A financially crippling military brontosaurus   

The armadas could plunder, impose tribute, punish the disobedient,  and then use that plunder and tribute to build more ships, enlarging the  scope of their naval empires. This allowed a small region with few  natural resources and few native advantages beyond extreme orneriness  and a wealth of communicable diseases to dominate the globe for half a  millennium.
 
The ultimate inheritor of this naval imperial project is the  United States, which, with the new addition of air power, and with its  large aircraft carrier fleet and huge network of military bases  throughout the planet, is supposedly able to impose Pax Americana on the  entire world. Or, rather, was able to do so—during the brief  period between the collapse of the USSR and the emergence of Russia and  China as new global powers and their development of new anti-ship and  antiaircraft technologies. But now this imperial project is at an end.
 
Prior to the Soviet collapse, the US military generally did  not dare to directly threaten those countries to which the USSR had  extended its protection. Nevertheless, by using its naval power to  dominate the sea lanes that carried crude oil, and by insisting that oil  be traded in US dollars, it was able to live beyond its means by  issuing dollar-denominated debt instruments and forcing countries around  the world to invest in them. 

It imported whatever it wanted using  borrowed money while exporting inflation, expropriating the savings of  people across the world. In the process, the US has accumulated  absolutely stunning levels of national debt—beyond anything seen before  in either absolute or relative terms. When this debt bomb finally  explodes, it will spread economic devastation far beyond US borders. And  it will explode, once the petrodollar wealth pump, imposed on the world  through American naval and air superiority, stops working.
 
New missile technology has made a naval empire cheap to defeat.  Previously, to fight a naval battle, one had to have ships that  outmatched those of the enemy in their speed and artillery power. The  Spanish Armada was sunk by the British armada. More recently, this meant  that only those countries whose industrial might matched that of the  United States could ever dream of opposing it militarily. 

But this has  now changed: 

Russia’s new missiles can be launched from thousands of  kilometers away, are unstoppable, and it takes just one to sink a  destroyer and just two to sink an aircraft carrier. The American armada  can now be sunk without having an armada of one’s own. The relative  sizes of American and Russian economies or defense budgets are  irrelevant: the Russians can build more hypersonic missiles much more  quickly and cheaply than the Americans would be able to build more  aircraft carriers.  
 
Equally significant is the development of new Russian air defense  capabilities: the S-300 and S-400 systems.  These systems can essentially seal  off a country’s airspace. Wherever these systems are deployed, such as  in Syria, US forces are now forced to stay out of their range. 

With its  naval and air superiority rapidly evaporating, all that the US can fall  back on militarily is the use of large expeditionary forces—an option  that is politically unpalatable and has proven to be ineffective in Iraq  and Afghanistan. 

There is also the nuclear option.

And while its  nuclear arsenal is not likely to be neutralized any time soon, nuclear  weapons are only useful as deterrents. Their special value is in  preventing wars from escalating beyond a certain point.  But that point lies beyond the elimination of their global naval and air dominance.  

Nuclear weapons are much worse than useless in augmenting one’s  aggressive behavior against a nuclear-armed opponent; invariably, it  would be a suicidal move. 

What the US now faces is essentially a  financial problem of unrepayable debt and a failing wealth pump.

It  should be a stunningly obvious point that setting off nuclear explosions  anywhere in the world would not fix the problems of an empire that is  going broke.
 
Events that signal vast, epochal changes in the world often appear minor when viewed in isolation. 

Julius Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon  was just one river crossing. Soviet and American troops meeting and  fraternizing at the Elbe was, relatively speaking, a minor event—nowhere  near the scale of the siege of Leningrad, the battle of Stalingrad or  the fall of Berlin. Yet they signaled a tectonic shift in the historical  landscape. 

And perhaps we have just witnessed something similar with  the recent pathetically tiny Battle of East Gouta in Syria.

Where the US  used a make-believe chemical weapons incident as a pretense to launch  an equally make-believe attack on some airfields and buildings in Syria.  The US foreign policy establishment wanted to show that it still  matters and has a role to play, but what really happened was that US  naval and air power were demonstrated to be almost entirely beside the point.
 
Of course, all of this is terrible news to the US military and foreign policy establishments, as well as to the many US Congressmen (in whose districts military contractors operate or military bases are situated). 

Obviously, this is also bad news for the defense contractors,  for personnel at the military bases, and for many others as well. 

It is  also simply awful news economically, since defense spending is about the  only effective means of economic stimulus of which the US government is  politically capable. 

Obama’s “shovel-ready jobs,” if you recall, did  nothing to forestall the dramatic slide in the labor participation rate,  which is a euphemism for the inverse of the real unemployment rate.  There is also the wonderful plan to throw lots of money at Elon Musk’s  SpaceX (while continuing to buy vitally important rocket engines from the Russians—who are currently discussing blocking their export to the  US in retaliation for more US sanctions). 

In short, take away the  defense stimulus, and the US economy will make a loud popping sound followed by a gradually diminishing hissing noise.
 
Needless to say, all those involved will do their best to deny  or hide for as long as possible the fact that the US foreign policy and  defense establishments have now been neutralized. 

My prediction is that  America’s naval and air empire will not fail because it will be  defeated militarily, nor will it be dismantled once the news sinks in  that it is useless; instead, it will be forced to curtail its operations  due to lack of funds. 

There may still be a few loud bangs before it  gives up, but mostly what we will hear is a whole lot of whimpering.  

That’s how the USSR went; that’s how the USA will go too.

Things are in the process of change. It is my hope that the changes will be calm and peaceful, but those that live off the old systems will fight “tooth and nail” against change.

The United States fields some very impressive and advanced military systems. But [1] are they sustainable against a large and peer-capable, aggressive nations? And if they are, [2] is it worth the risk of mutual global annihilation for the egos of the psychopathic American leadership?

.

But you know, I fear that I am not making my point clear. War is not something that you read about in your daily feed. It is something that you endure with heartache and sadness. It is something that destroys relationships, cultures and societies. It destroys civilizations. But the psychopaths don’t care. But you and I should…

.

War is a horror.

Things are dire.

From my email feed…

We are in a situation bleaker than during the last Cold War, and similar to the Cuban Missile Crisis.
And  US media is not reporting on any of it.  Most of you know this. But I'm  posting it because it points out things that most people don't know,  because it's suppressed.
 
This interview with Ray  McGovern, who advised US presidents and briefed them daily for many  years talks about the very precarious state of US Russia relations.  Frankly this dwarfs controversy about the election.
 
Please watch this. And share with friends and family.
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHaBjdRI-DU   

EPIC FAIL: Why Most US Weapons Systems Are Worse than Russia’s

“Two reasons: complexity, and too much money .”

This article from the Russia Insider archives was first published on RI in April 2018. It was written by Jacob Dreizin Wed, Dec 9 2020 | 2300 words 52,407 Comments

EPIC FAIL: Why Most US Weapons Systems Are Worse than Russia's
                                                                                                   

The F-35: Insanely expensive, its costs keep soaring - and it's worse than Russian planes which cost 20 times less
Lately  we have seen some good analysis on the limits and vulnerabilities of  the American military in light of events in the former Ukraine and  especially Russia’s demonstrated competence in Syria.  
 
So we have the “what” of the issue, but how about the “why”?  
 
As a U.S. Army veteran and a longtime resident of the  Beltway—including four-and-a-half years living on Crystal Drive in  Arlington, Virginia, which has probably the densest concentration of  “defense” contractors anywhere in America — I think I understand what is  fundamentally wrong with the U.S. military-industrial complex (MIC.)
 
First and foremost, the MIC has long been incapable of producing durable, efficient, versatile weapons.  
 
We don’t even have to look to the F-35 on this one.  
 
(America's latest fighter which has turned into a spectacular technical failure and massive  ($1.5 trillion!) expense  - see our super-popular article about how this plane stacks up against the Russian competition- edit)   
 Just consider the most basic item, the M-16. 
 
The M-16 Assault Rifle
 
My field experience with this piece of junk is that it runs into problems in the presence of even a small amount of sand. When  enough sand gets in to the chamber and mixes with the lube oil on the  bolt assembly, the grit thus formed results in up to every second round misloading.
 
God forbid you should brush an oiled open breach against the side of  your foxhole—you are out of commission.  In the absence of air or  artillery support or sheer overwhelming numbers on your side, you are  dead meat against anyone with a gun that functions in a sandy  environment.  

And why?  

Because, as I was told in boot camp (whether  it’s true or not), this thing is perfectly built to have zero fault  tolerance.  
 
Supposedly, just about every metal component in the M-16 is cast and/or machined to perfection rather than stamped.  Contrast this with  Russian or Chinese weapons that are said to be built like can-openers to spray lead under any conditions.  In other words, the M-16 is so  sophisticated that it doesn't work well.
 
It is now acknowledged that the M-16 with its 5.56mm rounds  is insufficiently lethal beyond a couple of hundred meters, making  it unsuited to long-distance firefights over open terrain (again those  deserts, or perhaps shootouts between mountain ridges.)
 
The M-1 Abrams tank

Another great example - this can be a real dog.  The engine is a gas  turbine, like with an aircraft, except that it is being driven around in  deserts and even sandstorms, making it extremely finicky and  high-maintenance.  (Would you fly your Boeing into a sandstorm?)  Of  course, the Abrams was designed to fight in Germany where sand is not an  issue.  But during the Iraq adventure, sand so tore up the turbine fans  (or whatever) that over 1000 of these million-dollar "power packs" had  to be removed and sent up for depot-level maintenance or refurbishment  stateside.  
 
Yes, that’s right—these things cannot even be fixed in the  field.  All you can do is pull them out with a crane and ship them back  to the civilians at enormous expense.  At the height of the Iraq  adventure, around 2007, the maintenance backlog was so bad that even the  national media got wind of it.  
 
Of course, when you have the world’s reserve currency, you can afford  all that and more—the entire world is paying for your wars.  
 
But the waste and inefficiency are a fact.
 
The Basic Problem :  Excessive Complexity
 
I think the problem here is that American war planners and  logisticians prefer originality, complexity, and/or  expense-for-the-hell-of-it over versatility and ease of use and  maintenance.  This is no surprise given America’s wealth and the  longtime generous funding of its armed forces.  After all, every  military reflects its own society. 
 
Unfortunately for Uncle Sam, what he gets is equipment that may work very well in one environment but not another.
 
But so much for American equipment per se.  Let’s talk about  Crystal Drive (a neighborhood in suburban Washington where many defense  contractors have offices - edit.) —or more broadly, the MIC.
 
The Military Industrial Complex (MIC) is failing on a massive scale
 
It is clear now that the MIC cannot build anything for less  than 200 percent of its original planned budget (and that’s  being extremely conservative.)  Nor can anything it cranks out nowadays  meet performance or survivability expectations.  Besides the  never-ending supersonic train wreck known as the F-35, we have other  boondoggle failures such as the Littoral Combat Ship, which by all  accounts is less capable and more vulnerable than the 20 to 30  year-old vessels it was supposed to replace.
 
Or, going back a few years, we see the Army’s “Commanche” helicopter,  an intended replacement for the Apache, which blew through $6.9  billion—in 1983-2004 dollars, probably over $10 billion today—before the  entire program was scrapped.  That’s right, over $10 billion  for nothing—not one Commanche was ever delivered for permanent use to an  Army operational unit!  
 
Where did that money go, if they didn’t actually manufacture anything  besides a few prototypes?  Did they spend $10 billion on PowerPoint  presentations?  
 
My brain cannot even wrap around this.  Can you imagine what Russia or China could do for $10 billion?  
 
However, even that pales before the Army's cancelled Future  Combat Systems program, which burned through an estimated (no one knows  exactly) $20 billion from 2003 to somewhere between 2012 and 2014  (depending on what termination milestone you go by), with almost nothing  to show beyond a few prototypes, a lot of concept art, and a 29-pound toy robot made by iRobot of "Roomba" vacuum cleaner fame.   In fact, I can’t think of one big new U.S. weapons system that has  succeeded in the last 25 years, other than perhaps the Stryker armored  car (though some have argued that point, and I just don’t know enough  about it.)
 
As pointed out by many other observers, part of the blame lies  with our political system, where MIC corporations buy politicians and  then receive favors in the form of contracts, whether or not the  contracts make any sense. However, I think this is not the only problem,  nor even necessarily the biggest.  
 
Fundamentally what I think we have is systemic over-complexity resulting in nothing getting done, or done well anyway.
 
US intelligence agencies have the same problem
 
This is akin to the deep systemic crisis in Uncle Sam’s intelligence  agencies, where from 9/11 to the Arab Spring to Crimea to the ISIS  conquest of Mosul to Russia in Syria, the word is always “we didn’t  expect…”  In this case, we have numerous agencies—some of them with  overlapping functions—that are drowning in paperwork and garbage data  (or too much data) and are almost totally useless.  
 
As some readers will remember, it got so bad that in April 2014 the  State Department released a photo collage aiming to prove that (among  other things) a bearded Chechen battalion commander going by the name  Hamza, who appeared in Russian TV footage of the 2008 Olympic War, was  none other than the bearded, overweight Slaviansk militiaman going by  the call-sign “Babai”—in other words, Russian special forces have  invaded the Donbass.  (The New York Times ran with this and was then  oh-so-vaguely and gently reproached by its own ombudsman.)  
 
Shouldn’t this awful joke have been prevented by the Office of the  Director of National Intelligence, which is supposed to promote  info-sharing among agencies and centrally vet all claims and  conclusions—especially those being trumpeted on the State Department’s  website or at its briefings?  Apparently not!
 
Bureaucratic bloat
 
On the other hand, what the U.S. lack-of-intelligence complex is very  good at—besides hiring way too many buxom, flirty young things straight  out of college and with no language skills or any experience at  all (DIA and NGA, you know your ex-military managers like to beautify  their offices)—is providing employment for tens of thousands of its own  staff as well as tens of thousands of grotesquely-overpaid contractors,  including those who build and run billion-dollar eavesdropping centers  that have proven incapable of picking up anything useful, perhaps  because when you try to listen to everything, you end up hearing  nothing. 
 
The lesson here is that the more offices and agencies, the more  managers and political appointees who will seek to justify and expand  their turf and budgets by shoveling out as much money on as many  contracts as possible, as quickly as possible, in many cases even paying  contractors to do little more than just sit around (sometimes at home)  waiting for the next contract.  (I have seen this many times in  Washington.)  
 
Then you get so big that people simply trip over each other and the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.
 
The US MIC worked great 50 years ago because less money and people were involved
 
So I think this is what’s going on not only in the intelligence  apparatus, but in the MIC as a whole.  We have hundreds of thousands of  staff and contractors as well as military officers assigned to liaise  with them, all kinds of project managers and “six-sigma black belts” and  other buzzwords, juggling millions of PowerPoints across the river from  Washington and throughout the country, and they can’t field a  helicopter after spending $10 billion on it. 
 
Really?  How did this great country ever defeat the Japanese Empire?
 
Go to the National Air and Space Museum in Washington; you will see  the most amazing things—e.g. generators designed to operate on the  surface of the Moon, drawing electricity from the heat of plutonium  decay—that were developed when there was no Crystal Drive, no Tysons  Corner, etc.  
 
Then go to the museum’s extension near Dulles airport and check out  the SR-71 “Blackbird”, the fastest and highest-flying airplane ever  built (this was about 50 years ago.)  
 
How did they do it?  
 
Although there were more men in uniform back then, the MIC itself (or  should I say the  Military-Industrial-Intelligence-Homeland-Insecurity-Complex (MIIHIC)) -  had but a fraction of today’s civilian workforce.  Luckily, most of  those paper-pushing “systems integrators” and PowerPoint rangers did not  exist.  Blueprints were drafted with pencil and paper.  
 
Today, Uncle Sam can’t even build a heavy rocket engine, not to mention a good helmet or ejection seat for his F-35.
 
No hope for change going forward
 
So it seems that as a technical civilization we are degenerating.  
 
Sure, there are constant advancements in microelectronics (a.k.a.  integrated circuits) and the programs they allow, but in terms of heavy  engineering—of which the MIIHIC and other government initiatives like  the space program were at the forefront since WWII—it seems that the  U.S. is tapped out.  
 
And you know what?  Throwing more money at it is just going to make it worse. 
 
The organizations with their budgets and their perfectly  reasonable-sounding arguments for ever-greater budgets will grow, their  workforces will grow, the contracting sector will grow, more shiny  office buildings will go up, but the result will be an  ever-increasingly-negative marginal return.  
 
John McCain and all the other broken records in and out of the  Pentagon will say we still don't have enough funds to counter a  pointless Russian invasion of parasitic, inconsequential Lithuania  (currently headed by a longtime communist) or any other 1990s-era  speculative wargame training scenario that somehow carried over into the  public consciousness and morphed into the Greatest Threat to World  Peace.
 
Of course, as long as the U.S. has the money to send gazillion-dollar  armies and armadas against illiterate natives armed with sharp sticks  and coconuts, this may not visibly threaten its hegemony.  Almost any  problem or mistake can be papered over with money, for a long time  anyway.  
 
But eventually, even if the money spigot does not constrict, we will  get to the point where the military really can’t be used as anything  more than a façade or a gunboat road-show, hoping no one calls the  bluff, because the stuff just doesn’t work like it’s supposed to, or  else is too vulnerable (witness the evacuation of the U.S. aircraft  carrier from the Persian Gulf after Uncle Sam found out that Russia has  cruise missiles with a range of at least 1500km, or the ridiculous  sail-around of China's little islands which had the sense to infringe  only very slightly and briefly on that country's imaginary territorial  waters), or the natives can devise their own countermeasures. 
 
In fact, I would say we are at that point already.  Not to mention,  the U.S. Army and the Department of Veterans Affairs are still so  tapped-out after Iraq and Afghanistan that another major ground  operation is unthinkable.  (At this point, Washington is more  likely to launch nukes at somebody than risk another ground war.)
 
So you can anticipate a lot of hand-wringing and a lot more money  being thrown into the breach.  That’s simply what the machine does;  there is no chance to reform it, nor will the Hegemony dissipate  willingly (although lately it’s done a good job of  dissipating unwillingly.)  
 
But all that money may as well be flushed down the can. 
 
The threshold has been reached and it's all downhill from here.   

This is all pretty much standard knowledge within the defense industry. The MIL-STD-810 (whatever revision it is now) is all about this particular issue. But the things is that the money is NOT in making better weapons systems for use, but rather as a system to make a lot of money to the owners of the military-industrial industry.

And that is already very well known.

Russia’s Airborne Forces Differ Greatly from NATO’s (Cool Video)

Many analysts consider them the best in the world and totally unique.  Why?
They are much bigger (50,000 troops fully combat ready)
They are mechanized (they parachute heavy equipment in with troops)
They are constantly innovating and have legendary esprit de corps
Interesting:  They include a saint among their veterans  
 
-This article from our archives was first published on RI in August 2015               

This article originally appeared at The Vineyard of the Saker. The Saker (The Vineyard of the Saker) Wed, Dec 9 2020 | 1100 words 16,197 Comments

Russia's Airborne Forces Differ Greatly from NATO's  (Cool Video)
                                                                                                   

What I want to share with you today is a promo movie by Zvezda TV,  the semi-official TV channel of the Russian Ministry of Defense, at the  occasion of the 85th anniversary of the Russian Airborne Forces.  So  don’t expect a hard-hitting documentary asking the tough questions and  making critical comments. 
 
However, this is nonetheless a very interesting  video and when I saw it, I begged Alena Scarecrow and Tatzhit to  translate and subtitle it, which they very kindly did.  Before letting  you watch the video, I would like to share with you a few thoughts about  the Russian Airborne Forces (called ‘VDV’ in Russian) and about their  military, social, political and even spiritual role in modern Russia.

The Russian Airborne Forces

The Russian VDV are truly an absolutely unique phenomenon and they should not be confused with any other airborne force.

For one thing, the VDV are fully mechanized.   

Firstly. So while they are ‘paratroopers’, these paratroopers are not just light  infantry (like, say, the US 82nd AB), but a very mobile force, fully  mechanized and with a *lot* of firepower.  In the movie you are about to  watch, you will see some of their armored vehicles and artillery pieces  which, uniquely, can also be delivered by parachute.  What the movie  does not show is the artillery of the VDV which includes such systems as  the 2S9 Nona,  the D-30 howitzer or the 2S25 self-propelled tank destroyer.

Second,  the VDV are a numerically huge force which currently totals 50’000 men  and includes 5 Airborne Divisions and 6 Airborne Brigades (including the  45th Special Forces of the VDV Brigade).  All of them air-deployable  and on a top-level or readiness.

Thirdly, the VDV truly are the  embodiment of military valor and tactical skills and they have played an  absolutely crucial role in many Soviet and Russian battles, but  probably never more so than during the worst tragedy in their long  history: the battle for Ulus-Kert in which the entire 6th Airborne  company perished. 

I don’t have the space and time to  recount in detail what happened on that day of early 2000 but to those  interested by this amazing event I would recommend the article “ULUS-KERT: An Airborne Company’s Last Stand” by Sergeant Michael D. Wilmoth, US Army Reserve, and Lieutenant Colonel Peter G. Tsouras, US Army Reserve, Retired, in the Military Review of July-August 1991, pp 91-96 (click here for  this article reposted on this blog).   Keep in mind that this article  was not written by the promotions department of Zvezda TV, but by two US  military experts who are very critical of many aspects of what took  place that day (and rightly so).

What is absolutely crucial for the understanding of the importance of this battle for Hill 776 in  Ulus-Kert is that the year 2000 marked the absolute rock-bottom of the  “democratic experiment” (aka the American colonization) of Russia.  

Yes,  Putin has just come to power, but the country was absolutely devastated  by a decade of Soviet stagnation followed by another decade of  “democratic reforms” and Putin was just making his very first steps as a  new head of state. 

What the 6th company achieved on Hill 776 was  an immense wake-up call to the entire Russian nation saying “enough is  enough” and “not one single step back”.  

The article by Wilmoth and  Tsouras accurately describes all the failures in command and execution  which resulted in the tragedy of the 6th company, but it is precisely these  failures which made the sacrifice of these men so amazing: the country  had essentially abandoned its own military, but the young men of the VDV  did not hesitate to die, all of them, to resist the face of evil (and, in those days, nothing embodied absolute evil as much as the Chechen  Wahabis and their reign of terror and medieval atrocities). 

It is  hard to over-estimate the contribution which the Russian Airborne  Forces have made to the rebirth of Russia.  But this goes even further.

I  strongly believe that it is not a coincidence that the Russian Airborne  Forces have even produced an Orthodox martyr and saint: Evgenii  Aleksandrovich Rodionov.  You can read a short summary of the life and  death of Rodionov in the Wikipedia article under his name.

• 

• 

What  is so important about the case of Rodionov is that died as a martyr  because he refused to abandon his Orthodox faith and that his podvig (spiritual feat) happened away from everybody at a time when, as the sad expression went, “every boy wanted to become a criminal thug and every girl a prostitute” as people used to say in 1996, in the midst of the “democratic hell” Russia had become. 

Though  I cannot prove it, I am personally deeply convinced that the fact that  Rodionov was a solider of the Airborne Forces is not a coincidence.  I  have met enough Airborne officers and soldiers myself and I know that  their level of patriotism and spiritual awareness is exceptionally high  because they live by an honor code, an ideal, which has it roots in the  most ancient Russian military traditions which have always been immersed  in spiritual and moral values far beyond just winning a battle.

Now, please don’t misunderstand me, I am not saying  that all the soldiers of the VDV are some kind of invincible saints or  anything like that.  Far from it.  It is enough to see the footage of  the kind of silly drunken nonsense these guys display each August 2nd  (the day of the Holy Prophet Elijah, Patron of the Russian Airborne  Forces) to lose any such illusions:

And one reality should not overshadow the other one: they are both equally Russian and equally typical of the VDV.
What  I am trying to illustrate by all of the above is that the Russian  Airborne Forces are an absolutely unique, and uniquely Russian,  phenomenon and that they are a truly formidable force by any measure.   Now for a more US-style promo movie, with lot’s of high-tech hardware  and “cool” shots, please see the following video. 

It will show  you that the Russian VDV are also very modern and forward looking  military forces with over 85 years of development behind their back.   And, having watched that video, ask yourself this simple question: how impressed to you think these guys are with the new multi-national NATO “spearhead” and “rapid reaction” forces?

You know…

Yeah, you know, that it’s a really cold day in Hell when the American news would say anything good about any other military force, whether it is Russian on Chinese. But here, on MM we try to provide insight.

As I have tried to state elsewhere, if you want to hear about what other narrative is being promoted in the American echo chambers (election fraud, political bribes, mind control, etc) you need not come to MM. This is a completely different type of site. We are not a “me too” of the preferred NSA narrative venue cabal.

Here’s a taste of what the echo chambers in the USA report on Chinese and Russian military forces… America is the best! America is the largest, strongest and best trained. China and Russia military are “push overs”. We are undefeated, and the most powerful military in the history of the world!

.

The experts have spoken and Americans are ready to die for “their” country…

Russia

Not So Scary: This Is Why Russia's Military Is a Paper Tiger. Certainly Moscow’s military forces will continue to modernize, but Russian military might—other than its nuclear forces—is an ...

-National Interest

• Russia’s Military Has a Problem: Too Many Paratroopers …
• Russia issues worrying warning to US as military presence …
• Russia Has a Problem With Its Veterans | The National Interest
• Faulty door handle sabotages Putin’s inspection of …
• Why the Russian military has so many serious accidents …
• Not So Scary: This Is Why Russia’s Military Is a Paper …

Russia banned from using its name, flag at next two Olympics
 
Russia will not be able to use its name, flag and  anthem at the next two Olympics or at any world championships for the  next two years after a ruling Thursday by the Court of Arbitration for  Sport.

In other words: this doping scandal never existed; but it was never  about sports: it is all - and always was - about propaganda. Russian  athletes will continue to compete normally - only without the Russian  symbols.
This is a clear attack against Russia.

China

Secretary of Defense Mark Esper said Wednesday that while China has  more ships, it'll be a while before it can match the power of the US  Navy.
 
"I want to make clear that China cannot match the United States when it comes to naval power," Esper explained at a RAND Corporation event.

"Even  if we stopped building new ships, it would take the [People's Republic  of China] years to close the gap when it comes to our capability on the  high seas," he said. "Ship numbers are important, but they don't tell  the whole story."

• Pentagon chief says China is no match for the US Navy …
• China faulty military equipment list defective equipment …
• Faulty military equipment raises questions over China’s …
• China general says his military no match for US | Fox News

And of course, there is the obligatory bullshit reporting on how strange China is. Uh. Sure….

.

Meanwhile…

What does all this mean?

Well, I have been promoting the idea that America as it stands today is not sustainable. But I am NOT a “lone voice in the wilderness”. Many others have also made these observations. For instance…

.

But you all don’t need to be a reader to follow this. All you need to do is take a casual look around you. Just look.

.

The stench of decay permeates America at all levels…

.

Not yet convinced?

.

I guess that if the American leadership are all psychopaths, and that they rigged the elections in their favor so that the serf-slaves serve them, then everything is pretty much following the natural progression of order. It ‘s a stratification of society into a ruler class and a servant class, and that’s just the way it is. If this keeps up, castes will form, and America will resemble the caste system within India.

Any your boys and girls who read this will be in the lower, servant, classes.

If not, then the United States will collapse upon itself. Which is why everyone is writing about this issue, no one wants to face the idea that the USA can continue and be permitted to set up a stratified society. One of the Haves, and the other a “disposable class”.

So, as uncomfortable as it is, let’s all hope for the collapse of the USA.

.

Let’s trust that the global oligarchy have successfully managed to isolate the USA on the global stage to the extent that any damage during the American meltdown will be limited to the North American region. I sincerely hope that this remains the case.

That is my “gut” feeling. And that is what I am betting on.

But others seem to think that if America collapses, then the entire world will collapse as well. In their minds the USA …IS THE WORLD. And thus it’s collapse will destroy the world (more or less). Nope.

Nope.

Not true.

But you can read for yourself and come to your own conclusions…

That Collapse You Ordered…?

 That Collapse You Ordered…? 
 

I had a fellow on my latest podcast, released  Sunday, who insists that the world population will crash 90-plus  percent from the current 7.6 billion to 600 million by the end of this  century. Jack Alpert heads an outfit called the Stanford Knowledge Integration Lab (SKIL) which he started at Stanford University in 1978 and now runs as a private research foundation. Alpert is primarily an engineer.
 
At 600 million, the living standard in the USA would be on a level  with the post-Roman peasantry of Fifth century Europe, but without the  charm, since many of the planet’s linked systems — soils, oceans,  climate, mineral resources — will be in much greater disarray than was  the case 1,500 years ago. Anyway, that state-of-life may be a  way-station to something more dire. Alpert’s optimal case would be a  world human population of 50 million, deployed in three “city-states,”  in the Pacific Northwest, the Uruguay / Paraguay border region, and  China, that could support something close to today’s living standards  for a tiny population, along with science and advanced technology, run  on hydropower. The rest of world, he says, would just go back to nature,  or what’s left of it. Alpert’s project aims to engineer a path to that  optimal outcome.
 
I hadn’t encountered quite such an extreme view of the future before,  except for some fictional exercises like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.  (Alpert, too, sees cannibalism as one likely byproduct of the journey  ahead.) Obviously, my own venture into the fictionalized future of the World Made by Hand  books depicted a much kinder and gentler re-set to life at the  circa-1800 level of living, at least in the USA. Apparently, I’m a  sentimental softie.
 
Both of us are at odds with the more generic techno-optimists who are  waiting patiently for miracle rescue remedies like cold fusion while  enjoying re-runs of The Big Bang Theory. (Alpert doesn’t  completely rule out as-yet-undeveloped energy sources, though he  acknowledges that they’re a low-percentage prospect.) We do agree with  basic premise that the energy supply is mainly what supports the way we  live now, and that it shows every evidence of entering a deep and  destabilizing decline that will halt the activities necessary to keep  our networks of dynamic systems running.
 
A question of interest to many readers is how soon or how rapid the  unraveling of these systems might be. When civilizations crumble, it  tends to fast-track. The Roman empire seems to be an exception, but in  many ways it was far more resilient than ours, being a sort of advanced  Flintstones economy, with even its giant-scale activities (e.g. building  the Coliseum) being accomplished by human-powered work. In any case,  the outfit really fell apart steadily after the reign of emperor Marcus  Aurelius (180 AD).
 
The Romans had their own version of a financialized economy: they  simply devalued their coins by mixing in less and less silver at the  mint, so they could pretend to pay for the same luxuries they had grown  accustomed to as resources stretched thin. Our financialized economy —  like everything else we do — operates at levels of complexity so  baffling that even its supposed managers at the central banks are flying  blind through fogs of debt, deception, and moral hazard. When that  vessel of pretense slams into a mountain top, the effects are likely to  be quick and lethal to the economies on the ground below.
 
In our time, the most recent crash of a major socioeconomic system  was the fall of the Soviet Union in 1990-91. Of course, it happened  against the backdrop of a global system that was still revving pretty  well outside the USSR, and that softened the blow. Ultimately, the  Russians still had plenty of oil to sell, which allowed them to re-set  well above the Fifth Century peasant level of existence. At least for  now. The Soviet Union collapsed because it was a thoroughly dishonest  system that ran on pretense and coercion. Apparently, the US Intel  Community completely missed the signs that political collapse was  underway.
 
They seem to be pretty clueless about the fate of the USA these days,  too. If you consider the preoccupations of two very recent Intel chiefs  — John Brennan of CIA and James Clapper, DNI — who now inveigh  full-time on CNN as avatars of the Deep State against the wicked Golden  Golem of Greatness. Personally, I expect our collapse to be as sudden  and unexpected as the USSR’s, but probably bloodier because there’s  simply more stuff just lying around to fight over. Of course, I expect  the collapse to express itself first in banking, finance, and markets —  being so deeply faith-based and so subject to simple failures of faith.  But it will become political and social soon enough, maybe all-at once.  And when it happens in the USA, it will spread through the financial  systems the whole world round.

Conclusion

I need a beer.

…

[Result 1] So all evidence points to a massive collapse with the inclusion of civil strife, civil war, and global war set up as distractions that quickly get out of hand.

If this does not happen…

[Restult 2] Then evidence points to a fully enslaved nation of dumbed-down slaves that service the wealthy in a forced stratification system that would resemble the caste system in India.

You will not hear any of this in the American “news” because you are not to know of it. Your rulers are all psychopaths that indeed want either of the two outcomes to manifest. They want either result one or two. Nothing else is acceptable to them.

Some John Titor Stuff…

A final Thought

And my thoughts…

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