Ukraine is firing thousands of artillery shells each day in its battle to defend the Donbas city of Bakhmut, a pace that US and European officials don’t think is sustainable, The New York Times reported Thursday.
Two unnamed US officials told the Times that the Pentagon has raised the issue of Ukraine’s ammunition use in Bakhmut after a few days of non-stop firing. Ukraine’s war effort is entirely reliant on support from the US, as the Pentagon has shipped millions of artillery shells to the country.
The report is the latest example of Ukraine’s Western backers expressing doubt about Kyiv’s war strategy. The US wants Ukraine to launch a spring counteroffensive, but Western officials think those plans could be jeopardized by the amount of resources Ukraine is using in Bakhmut.
The US and Britain are preparing to ship thousands more artillery rounds and rockets to Ukraine to shore up its supplies for a counteroffensive. A senior Pentagon official described these shipments to the Times as a “last ditch effort” because Ukraine’s Western backers don’t have enough to keep up with Ukraine’s pace.
Graham told Fox News host Sean Hannity that the US should tell Russia if “you ever get near another US asset flying in international waters, your airplane will be shot down.”
“What would Ronald Reagan do right now? He would start shooting Russian planes down if they were threatening our assets. American foreign policy is in freefall,” Graham added.
The Russian military said the US drone was intercepted near Crimea in airspace Moscow restricted, while the US insists it was on a “routine” surveillance flight conducted in international airspace.
The WMV is the perfect nihilist philosophy for kludge and decline. It’s a circus being put on by the least accountable people and institutions on Earth.
Universities, growing on the back of guaranteed student loans, have departments in the dozens, even hundreds, working to stoke this virus. Almost none of these people are qualified to do anything that society would pay for absent the temporarily “free” money doled out by the state.
NB: a couple of weeks ago I received my first notice from google about one of my posts being barred. I didn’t protest or anything. The post already had its run, and was even picked up at LRC. So, it was out there. Strangely, a few days later, it magically re-appeared. As of this writing, it is still up.
Why do I bring this up now? Well, this might be number two in the series.
The section I will focus on is entitled Unaccountable, Declining Institutions Prefer Wokey (link). Lonsdale’s argument is that the woke mind virus (WMV) is “the perfect philosophy for unaccountable power.”
The WMV is the perfect nihilist philosophy for kludge and decline. It’s a circus being put on by the least accountable people and institutions on Earth.
Universities, growing on the back of guaranteed student loans, have departments in the dozens, even hundreds, working to stoke this virus. Almost none of these people are qualified to do anything that society would pay for absent the temporarily “free” money doled out by the state. Governments have countless tens-of-thousands of employees doing the same – and I expect the market demand for those individuals qualified to perform such WMV services also approaches zero.
But it isn’t that they aren’t qualified to even find their way out of a paper bag. They are not even held accountable for the success or failure of the virtually useless task to which they are assigned. Every failure is merely an opportunity for a bigger budget, a promotion, a new program.
Lonsdale notes the French radicals of the 1960s as providing philosophical cover for the WMV, but it is the unaccountable institutions that are the main driving force behind the movement in our societies.
So, “fighting wokeness” is the wrong strategy. We ought not spend time and energy fighting battles at the surface level while losing an institutional war underneath. The first step is to identify where it prospers most. Here’s a non-exhaustive list:
E Verify is designed to assist the DHS in tracking whether people are eligible to work? What could possibly cause someone to support this program? Or at least, what could possibly cause a conservative or libertarian minded person, someone on the right, to support this nonsense?
Is it really a stretch to think these E Verify IDs will not contain medical data? Let’s say, C19 bioweapon injection status?
Creating and enhancing the police state apparatus is not the way to stop illegal immigration. Securing the borders is.
The systemic attack and unrestricted warfare designed to abolish the United States and diminish the human population has many facets. Biological warfare, computer elections, supply chain attacks, dismantling energy supplies, food shortages, inflation, the surveillance police state, and a centralized digital bank currency, are just a few aspects of this all out assault. A virtual invasion via unfettered illegal immigration is also an important element to this campaign of asymmetrical warfare.
Let’s hone in on the illegal immigration issue. Of course, this issue can simply be addressed by protecting our borders. Red flags went off shortly after the 911 attacks because instead of policing the borders of the country, an effort was made to create a police state instead.
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This included creating the Transportation Security Agency (TSA), which is a perverted institution designed to instill fear and dehumanize the public. This also included the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) whose title came right out of the NAZI Germany playbook. The DHS is an enemy of the people and should be disbanded immediately. The DHS has collaborated with media and big tech companies to censor medical information about potential harms from C19 injections. These are violations of the Nuremberg Code and clear crimes against humanity. These actions by DHS also of course violate basic First Amendment rights and are a criminal enterprise.
E-Verify is an Internet-based system that compares information entered by an employer from an employee’s Form I-9, Employment Eligibility Verification, to records available to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration to confirm employment eligibility.
E Verify is designed to assist the DHS in tracking whether people are eligible to work? What could possibly cause someone to support this program? Or at least, what could possibly cause a conservative or libertarian minded person, someone on the right, to support this nonsense?
The government should have nothing to do with your business operations. The conservative position (I am using the term conservative loosely to include libertarians and anybody on the ‘right’ too) is to limit government and protect freedom. The conservative view point should be to dismantle the police state, not enhance it.
It is painfully obvious that the problem of unfettered illegal immigration is deliberately created so as to herd unthinking conservatives into the knee jerk reaction of going along with E Verify. Creating and enhancing the police state apparatus is not the way to stop illegal immigration. Securing the borders is.
David Frum and Max Boot, two neoconservatives who helped grease the wheels for the invasion of Iraq, have some thoughts they’d like to share with us as we approach the 20th anniversary of that horrific and unforgivable war. Both of these perspectives can be read in widely esteemed mainstream publications, because everyone who was responsible for inflicting that war upon our species has enjoyed mainstream influence and esteem to this very day.
Both men concede in their own ways that the war was a mistake, while simultaneously cheerleading the US proxy war in Ukraine that has brought humanity closer to nuclear armageddon than it has been at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Both men mix their Iraq War retrospectives with war apologia, historical revisionism, and outright lies. And both men should shut the fuck up. About everything. Forever.
Frum’s article is posted in The Atlantic, where he is a senior editor, and it is titled “The Iraq War Reconsidered“. Frum is credited with authoring George W Bush’s infamous “Axis of Evil” speech, which marked the beginning of an unprecedented era of US military expansionism and “humanitarian interventions” in geostrategically valuable nations after 9/11.
In just the second sentence of his article Frum opens with an absolute scorcher of a lie, saying “an arsenal of chemical-warfare shells and warheads” were discovered in Iraq to suggest that the weapons of mass destruction narrative had been proven at least somewhat true. As The Intercept’s Jon Schwartz explained back in 2015, the only chemical weapons in Iraq were either (A) munitions sealed in bunkers at an Iraqi weapons complex by UN inspectors in the nineties and left there because they were too dangerous to move, and (B) some old munitions that had been lost and forgotten after the Iran-Iraq War. In neither of these cases is it true that Saddam Hussein was hiding any weapons of mass destruction.
Frum hilariously claims that “What the U.S. did in Iraq was not an act of unprovoked aggression,” and shows that he has learned absolutely nothing about anything by criticizing the Obama administration for not invading Syria to enforce “its own declared red lines” on chemical weapons allegations.
Frum begins the article by calling the war “a grave and costly error,” but by the end he has completely walked this back by gushing about how much better it made things for Iraqis.
Never before has it been clearer how useless ESG investing has become than in the case of Silicon Valley Bank. The bank, which donated to Black Lives Matter causes and frequently touted its virtuous diversity and equity policies, has blown a hole directly through “woke” capital allocators who sought it out for this appeal.
…as opposed to…you know…the quality of the bank’s assets and its ability to generate cash.
“Hundreds” of ESG managers have been stung by the Silicon Valley Bank collapse, Bloomberg has reported. A new report says that “915 funds registered under European Union regulations as either ‘promoting’ ESG or declaring it as their ‘objective’ had exposure” to the bank.
The bank “tick[ed] several boxes” for these managers, including a low carbon footprint. However, the “G” in ESG – which stands for governance – seemed to take a back seat to the “E” and the “S”.
Sasja Beslik, a sustainable finance veteran who’s now the chief investment officer at NextGen ESG told Bloomberg: “There are a lot of lazy asset managers taking ESG scores for granted. The bank’s failure was a sign that managers who go “all in on carbon are not necessarily managing other risks.”
Former senior banker at HSBC Rebecca Self said that focusing on just one component of the ESG moniker was the problem. But Rebecca – what ever happened to good ole’ ‘investing for returns’, we have to ask?
At a moment Western officials and even some mainstream media are beginning to express doubt over Ukraine’s ability to push Russian forces back, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who will likely enter the race for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, has issued his sharpest criticisms yet of America’s role in the Ukraine war, calling it fundamentally a “territorial dispute” which the US should stay out of.
The statements came as part of his response to a questionnaire issued to possible 2024 presidential candidates by Fox News’s Tucker Carlson. The questionnaire asked whether protecting Ukraine should be part of US “vital national interests”. DeSantis ripped Biden’s policy as a virtual “blank check” which serves to erode US interests and “distracts” from what should be more pressing priorities.
He stressed that the United States government “cannot prioritize intervention in an escalating foreign war over the defense of our own homeland” – which also echoes the scathing critiques of a small cadre of GOP Congressional members like Matt Gaetz, Thomas Massie, and Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Via Reuters
“While the U.S. has many vital national interests — securing our borders, addressing the crisis of readiness within our military, achieving energy security and independence, and checking the economic, cultural, and military power of the Chinese Communist Party — becoming further entangled in a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia is not one of them,” DeSantis said. Likely the reference is to the civil war which predates the Feb.24, 2022 Russian invasion by many years: the conflict in Donbas which went back to 2014 and by many estimates took over 14,000 lives on both sides.
“The Biden administration’s virtual ‘blank check’ funding of this conflict for ‘as long as it takes,’ without any defined objectives or accountability, distracts from our country’s most pressing challenges,” he added.
Crucially, he also used the questionnaire as an opportunity to point out that the Biden White House’s irresponsible escalation of involvement in supporting Kiev has ultimately pushed Moscow into “a de facto alliance” with China.
“Because China has not and will not abide by the embargo, Russia has increased its foreign revenues while China benefits from cheaper fuel. Coupled with his intentional depletion of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and support for the Left’s Green New Deal, Biden has further empowered Russia’s energy-dominated economy and Putin’s war machine at Americans’ expense,” the Florida governor said.
And on the question of F-16s, which is currently being pushed by some Congressional hawks and reportedly being mulled over by the administration…
DeSantis said F-16s and long-range missiles should be “off the table” because the moves could risk “drawing the United States into the conflict and drawing us closer to a hot war between the world’s two largest nuclear powers.”
Artificial intelligence software development firm OpenAI released GPT-4, its latest AI language model, with a massive array of new capabilities.
In a press release announcing the rollout of GPT-4 on Tuesday, OpenAI claimed that while GPT-4 still lags behind human beings in real-world scenarios, the AI can excel at theoretical and academic applications. In a developer livestream, the company showcased the software’s powerful problem-solving and image recognition, describing images, creating a working website, and even doing simulated taxes.
The first thing OpenAI discussed in its release was the problem-solving improvements made between GPT-4 and its predecessor, GPT-3.5. To illustrate these new capabilities, OpenAI showed a table of academic and professional exams, and the scores the software garnered. The AI scored:
A 298/400 on the Unified Bar Exam, which was in the 90th percentile of results.
A 163 on the LSAT, in the 88th percentile.
A 710 on the reading and writing SAT, the 93rd percentile
A 700 on the math SAT, the 89th percentile
A 169 on the verbal GRE, in the 99th percentile
A 5 on the AP Art History, Biology, Macro- and Microeconomics, Psychology, Statistics, US Government, and US History exams
In the developer livestream, OpenAI President Greg Brockman discussed several new features the updated software has. First, GPT-4 has a new system prompt in the user interface that allows the user to input new parameters for the AI to work with so that it can refine its model. Brockman demonstrated this capability with some basic prompts, including summarizing the OpenAI press release into a sentence where each word begins with G. While GPT-3.5 effectively gave up on the assignment, GPT-4 synthesized the article into the sentence: “GPT-4 generates groundbreaking, grandiose gains, greatly galvanizing generalized AI goals.”
Undersecretary of State George W. Ball in the White House Cabinet Room, 1966. / Lyndon Baines Johnson Library.
This is an account of another American who, like Daniel Ellsberg, did the right thing at the right time in the middle of a war. But unlike Ellsberg’s, his act of courage did not make the headlines, and he suffered little for it. His name is George W. Ball. He was a Midwestern lawyer who did not politically support John F. Kennedy in his 1960 presidential campaign and did not serve bravely or endure violence during World War II. But he had played a key role in the American postwar rebuilding of Europe and was appointed early in 1961 as an undersecretary of state in the Kennedy Administration. His main task was to deal with international economic and agricultural affairs.
Ball had directed the American postwar bombing survey in London at the end of the war. He understood, as the survey had shown, that the intense daytime bombing of German cities had not destroyed morale, as had been assumed, but had increased citizen support for the Nazi regime—and perhaps extended the duration of the war. Ball would later be the only senior Kennedy Administration official who directly warned the president of the dangers of committing American soldiers to the Vietnam War, as had been recommended by his generals. In his 2000 book Our Vietnam: The War 1954-1975, A.J. Langguth, who covered the war for the New York Times, recounted Ball’s gutsy warning in late 1961 to the president: “If we go down that road we might have, within five years, 300,000 men in the rice paddies of the jungles of Vietnam and never be able to find them.”
In a 1982 memoir, Ball recalled Kennedy’s irritated response: “George, you’re just crazier than hell. That just isn’t going to happen.” Back in his office, Ball told an aide, “We’re heading hell-bent into a mess and there’s not a goddamn thing I can do about it. Either everybody else is crazy or I am.”…
I don’t subscribe to Hersch’s site so you can’t see the rest. That may change.
MCViewPoint 