The plan for the war makes less sense every year.

The US navy doesn't have the capacity to close the Taiwan straight anymore, so the idea now is to blockade the Singapore straight, 3000 kilometers to the south, and cut off Chinese shipping from the world markets... that is to say, the nation that doesn't produce anything but excel spreadsheets thinks it can win a war by blocking the source of all the cheap goods that keep their consumer economies running.

This feels like a serious fuck up for the western media. They handwave the existence of their billionaire owners by saying that they don't determine what gets printed , even though that's an obvious lie , but now they're on record with the billionaire owner putting his foot down for Trump.

Did Kamala's crowd sizes really put the fear in Trump or what? His only rally this week is in fucking Montana tomorrow, with none scheduled for the rest of the month. He's just doing unhinged press conferences.

Imagine if the Democrats had brought this kind of competence and energy to 2016 by running LITERALLY ANY OTHER CANDIDATE!

Well, violence was already normalized in every other sphere of American life, I guess it was only a matter of time. Look at the Trump shooter, by American standards, the only weird thing about him is that he went after someone important instead of just shooting up his local school or walmart.

Yeah, people did start to figure this out two years ago, once Russia pulled back and settled in for a long war. NATO governments spent billions more to procure shells and artillery pieces, and on incentives to get the arms industry to build more factory lines and supply lines.

But decades of neoliberalism have gutted the states ability to do anything itself, or to compel a corporation to do anything, even something as simple as build an artillery shell that was designed in the 1870s. The end result is that the incentive money was used to streamline and automate the existing, privately owned, factories, allowing them to fire workers and run more cheaply , but not to actually expand production. And with billions more dollars chasing the same supply of shells, the cost of an artillery shell has now skyrocketed to ~$9,000 a shell.

Yeah, turns out all of this high tech satellite guided shit can be easily defeated by electronic warfare if its used against an enemy that has the time and resources to adapt to it. This is the first time anyone had a chance to figure that out though, because the US has only ever used it against unarmed farmers and goat herders.

Well, at least it's not as bad as the F-35, the multi trillion dollar jet that fails to both electronic warfare and rain.

pre-covid, It used to be a fairly chill place for people who had reached the "acceptance" stage of grief to look at graphs of ice sheet coverage and talk about maybe learning to grow potatoes.

I hadn't checked it in years, but it looks like the depressed climate scientists have been replaced by full blown survivalists and scared normies who think that collapse will be something fast, like a disaster movie, instead of the ongoing grind of people watching prices going up as wages stay the same, needing to hang on to clothing longer, no longer being able to see a doctor, or knowing their children will probably be unable to buy homes and start their own families.

We were saying 6 months ago that there would be a crackdown, simply because the US can't support a genocidal colonial project if the victims can livestream their suffering to the world.

But what's really weird here, and I think no one could have predicted, is the mass suppression and arrest of Ivy League student protestors. They're protesting peacefully, which they've been told is the only moral and acceptable way. They're not making any material demands, and they're not tied into a workers movement that could strike and threaten capital. Anyone with knowledge of previous college protests and the academic year could have told them that this is harmless, and that it would fizzle out as summer started, but instead they've violently cracked down in a way that's causing the protests to spread, while also radicalizing and blackballing the children of privilege , the people that are supposed to carry on the ideological future of liberalism and sign up to be the next generation of the imperial bureaucracy and the NGOs.

Yeah , I'm not surprised. If you're constantly online the way an 18-24 year old is, then for the past few months you've been exposed to thousands of images and videos of very relatable kids, teens and twenty somethings being put through unimaginable horror.

There's probably going to be some kind of crackdown on the internet soon. The US can't support a genocidal colonial project if the victims can livestream their suffering to the world.

The Israeli security state has a reputation for competence. I wonder, were they also hollowed out be decades of neoliberal policies'?

Probably doesn't help that the political leadership consists of a bunch of guys who had to pull every dirty trick to keep themselves and their friends in office, because otherwise they'd be in prison for corruption.

They must be getting spooked by all the public admiration and sympathy for the assassin, which doesn't seem to be fading away at all.

The weirdest part of all this is watching those daily casualty updates by the OSINT guys.

Every day they claim that another 500+ Russians were killed and one Ukrainian stubbed his toe, and they've kept on claiming that all summer, even as Ukraine was doing WW1 style assaults into minefields and trench lines, without air support, and with a severe disadvantage in artillery. Those guys must be getting fucking slaughtered.