Rebane's Ruminations

The Great Reset

“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.” ― George Orwell, 1984

George Rebane

Given that the world will always have at least one hegemon, it is therefore imperative that America should always remain a hegemon - Rebane Doctrine.

A prime objective of RR over its now considerable lifespan has been the discovery, discussion, and dissemination of the resurgence of global collectivism under its various guises.  This enterprise has been promoted under various names and transnational programs, possibly the earliest organized launch occurred thirty years ago during a UN conference in Brazil.  There we heard about Agenda 21 (A21) and read its manifesto for a brave new world populated by a much smaller and tightly controlled population of humans.  It was a plan for a ‘sustainable world’ under an overarching collectivist government run by elite technocrats.

The road to A21 was admittedly long and had to be carefully planned and implemented so as not to awaken any early ire to the admitted loss of freedoms, wealth, and quality of life in general in order to redistribute resources to a radically reducing population.  The provisions and policies for A21 were to be installed bit by piece at all levels of government, first and foremost at the local level.  The cadres to do this would be the local electeds, bureaucrats, and civil servants trained by a global network of A21 offshoots called International Councils for Local Environmental Initiatives (which is now known as ‘ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability’).  These government cadres would quietly attend and study the ideological and operational principles of bringing what eventually came to be called neo-Marxist thought to shape and control local societies and economics.

Locally in Nevada County, almost all county staff at the managerial level have attended our regional ICLEI.  This is replicated state and nationwide.  California leads America in the number of ICLEIs, and America leads the world.  Managed from over 20 offices around the globe, more than 1,750 cities, towns, counties, and their associations in 126 countries are a part of the ICLEI network.  These many trails and tributaries to socialism are purposely ignored and unreported by leftwing media, and surprisingly also ignored by right-leaning outlets.

Today the US is being reconfigured (“fundamentally transformed”) socio-politically to prepare for its place in the new global order under a central power structure run by a cadre of elites immune from the policies they will mandate for the population at large.

A large literature has come in place to promote, analyze, and oppose what was introduced as the ‘Great Reset’ at the 2020 World Economic Forum (WEF) held in Davos.  The Great Reset is now the latest refinement of what began as the UN’s Agenda 21 lately renamed Agenda 2030.  As long documented here, on the surface these ‘agendas’ are lists of “Sustainable Development Goals” re-adopted in 2015 to reduce world population to a more controllable level that can be corralled into high-density population centers connected by a limited number of transportation corridors.

Scattershots – 27mar22 (updated 1apr22)

George Rebane

Unmitigated media bullshit.  This afternoon watching a news program, I was again reminded that most programming on the air that is advertised as news is nothing but third person rehash.  What fills most of the ‘content time’ on news programs is the anchor or reporters interviewing each other, patronizing politicians, and third party has-beens.  An example called on to give us his reflections on the Ukrainian war was a former CIA station chief from somewhere, who was asked as to his assessment of what was going on in the war.  Now what a former CIA station chief would know that is special is a mystery to me – he neither established such credentials nor did he enlighten the audience with something new we had not heard of or some new insight as to what was happening.  No, the gentleman regurgitated what everyone who tries to keep up has already known for a week or longer.  Unmitigated dated pap was all that came forth.  And when you consider the contribution of other such ‘guests’, they all say essentially the same thing – yesterday’s news or simply sidestepping what would be a telling question.  Literally 80% of content is such a rehash or doing the sidestepping two-step – bottom line, the information rate is dismally low.  And when you consider that the content factor of all news programs is at most about 60%, you get an idea of what a gross waste of time watching a live news program is.  You get a little improvement when you use your DVR, but not much.  A vast wasteland indeed.

Towards scale and controlled networks.  A regular reader/commenter (@ 746am) argues that "it's essentially impossible to avoid economies of scale, which centralizes the beast, plus network effects tend to drive towards gigantism."

Yes, there is always the push toward economies of scale, but that vicious cycle is abetted only by corporatism. A liberal government's role is to maintain minimally regulated markets which allow the entry of more nimble and efficient smaller competitors, thereby creating virtuous (self-correcting) cycles. That is not possible under Democrats and today's limp-wristed Republicans.

Actually, network effects support efficiently operating complex systems (e.g. economies and societies) structured with distributed control and knowledge. For an open network (i.e. a complete graph) to become the handmaiden of autocracy will require massive pruning of links and the elimination of politically incorrect nodes. We witness this today in autocratic countries, and with Dems in charge, will no doubt see the process gain ground in America.

[30mar22 update]  Freedom in the 50 states.  “California is a classic left-wing state on social issues, (and) one of the least free states in the country, largely because of its long-standing poor performance on economic freedom.”  So states the Cato Institute in its latest exhaustively researched annual report (summarized here and pdf download here).  The freedom index is based on the attributes of fiscal, regulatory, and personal freedoms sliced and diced into many different components.  California ranks 48^th overall, miserably surpassed only by Hawaii (49) and New York (50).

[1apr22 update] Another perspective might be helpful.  So, we have this from the comment stream of an FN story about the Smith/Rock slapping imbroglio by someone calling himself ‘fuzzy12’ - "Maybe now would be a good time to give thanks for the great contributions of the Black community to our society. Their peaceful and generous nature make them ideal neighbors, lending testimony to their exceptional family values and parenting skills unrivaled by any other culture. Their commitment to academic excellence enriches our schools and serves as an example to all who hope to achieve prominence as a people. Real estate values are fueled by the mix of African-Americans into an area due to their caring and respectful nature of these communities, an example of all they have achieved through their enthusiasm for self-improvement by hard work and a self-reliant can-do nature. We must not forget their abhorrence for crime and their dedication to observing the law. Without their industrious and creative drive, we would be poorer as a nation." (H/T to correspondent)

SEC gets into the climate change business

George Rebane

There is a serious proposal (here) for Congress to get the SEC into creating additional friction in the conduct of the nation’s businesses, especially in an area where it has no established expertise and needs to set up additional bureaus/departments to monitor and adjudicate newly mandated company reports, all for the putative reason of reducing investor risk, is a bad idea (Ramirez says it all). To begin, there is no consensus science that we are suffering from preventable man-made global warming (PMGW), which is the climate controllers’ fundamental thesis – science does not speak with a single voice.  Most certainly, the series of IPCC reports, including the most recent one, make no such claim.  While most knowledgeable people admit that human activities can contribute to global warming, the quantitative sources and scopes of such activities impacting the earth’s temperature record (itself a very fuzzy concept) is totally unknown.

An important concept not reported on the heavily propagandized interpretations of the IPCC report is that the GCMs (general circulation models) have not gotten more reliable in either describing or predicting temperatures (among their other output parameters).  This science has made little or no progress and the output variance measures of the tens of competing GCMs currently in vogue/use have not declined over the last thirty years.  One reason is that the earth’s complete carbon cycle is not known – there are huge gaps in the cycle that today are still filled with various brown numbers. The transfer function for the earth’s atmosphere is unknown; the GCMs are based on heuristics – cobbled together submodels with constants adjusted to fit dubious temperature etc records from various epochs.  As we know from estimation theory, such fittings to past data give no guarantee of the predictive power of (heuristic) models based on limited science.

A litmus test of a maturing science/technology is that the models which embody and express the underlying theory continue to improve as witnessed by their diminishing output covariance matrices developed from experiment and field data.  The GCMs, on which both climate hysteria and public policies are based, have not satisfied this requirement, and about which the media, politicians, and the grant-consuming academics have been silent.  Perhaps a more dismal outlook for confirming the existence of PMGW is that the factors affecting climate are not sufficiently known, and that they also compose an amalgam of chaotic processes, the predictive modeling of which is something humans don’t know how to do, and which may well be that part of our universe that will not succumb to our level of intelligence and mathematics (there are a number of other such processes known to science where human knowledge appears to have hit an impenetrable boundary).

In the final analysis, even if we postulate that some day soon we’ll overcome all these unknowns about climate dynamics, we will most likely discover that global warming may not be feasibly preventable, even if mankind does contribute to it.  We are capable of putting in place draconian public policies that can pauper the world, but there is not a whit of science that says any of it will impact global temperatures, let alone allow us to control them to desired levels.  And here is where the politics and corporatist enterprises come to bear.  Corporatists, by their definition, partner with government to foster laws and regulations designed to limit competition by raising the cost of doing business to such prohibitive entry levels that smaller companies are stifled and venture capital takes a pass in investing in new enterprises wanting to take on the established Goliaths.  This is why you will see corporatists endorsing this new extension of SEC power to become yet one more arm of government’s expanding control.

(Corporatism is the desirable natural endpoint to a corporate growth cycle vs bankruptcy, acquisition, … .  Corporations that grow beyond an efficient organizational size cannot compete with smaller, more nimble, companies in minimally regulated markets.  They need to team up with the government gun to gain the level of regulatory security required by large inefficient organizations to stay in business.  And membership in the corporatist club is relatively easy, all it requires is money to buy politicians and unionists.)

Coda.  From my perch as a schooled technologist, sophisticated investor of some means, and a successful professional in assessing and quantifying risk, I have no idea how to evaluate the information in the SEC’s contemplated ‘climate-risk’ reports.  I doubt that the SEC will make available their ‘methodology’ that supports the new regulations companies will have to follow.  And retail investors, institutional investment advisors, and corporate CFOs will have no clue about the then reported climate risks.  All of them will learn to operate on the basis of a handful of slogans and shibboleths handed down from on high through an enthusiastically cooperating media.

Sandbox – 23mar22

[With the sans-mea-culpa discovery of Hunter Biden’s emails by the leftwing media, we now have a widely available example of how the Dems impacted the 2020 election without necessarily messing with the ballot stuffing and vote counting itself.  As Bryan Caplan (Myth of the Rational Voter) showed some years back, the media can readily impact the outcome through the mass swaying of votes by how it covers and covers up news that shape voters’ attitudes.  You cannot censor lies without also censoring truth – it was ever thus.  gjr]

A Promising New Tactic Against the Fearful

George Rebane

Russia’s new tactic is the use of long-range missiles, many of which can be fired from Russia proper, to overcome the demonstrated ineptness of its land units and manned aircraft over Ukrainian air space.  Putin needs to reorganize his conventional forces because they most certainly have not performed as previously advertised to the Kremlin.  So the approach in the interval is to bombard the crap out of Ukrainian cities with missiles that are hard to intercept, and hope that President Zelensky will call for a favorable cease fire in order to stop the wholesale slaughter of the country’s civilian population. (more here)

With modern precision-guided missiles, this tactic is a movable feast for thugs like Putin whose saber-rattling has caused a comprehensive cowering by western leaders in the name of not willing to risk WW3 by striking Russia with any of several available and effective military responses.  He and Xi can use this approach from their own landmass to their heart’s content in future territorial conquests.  As long as western leaders continue to promise that they will not respond in any way that would (heaven forbid) irritate the international gangsters, they can assemble their land forces at the border and then proceed to slaughter the target country’s civilian population from afar.

As we now know, this will do the trick against any fearful opponent who openly declares from the gitgo that they’ll do nothing “reckless” to rile the attacker.  I challenge anyone to come up with a reason why such a tactic will not be used repeatedly until the west says ‘Enough!’ and demonstrates that we too are willing to return to MAD and risk WW3 to protect our interests.  Without the will to use force, non-military sanctions will not work to stay the hand of a tyrant; the planet is already too interconnected commercially and financially so that surgical sanctions have little effect, and the more comprehensive sanctions spill over and also hurt us and our allies.

In desperation, today we have learned to redefine our interests in favor of international criminals like those who run Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, … .  We learned long ago that the ONLY way to defend, let alone expand, liberal governance on this planet is to always be ready to go to the mat with the world’s tyrants, and appear willing to do that sooner than later with the big thugs.  This principle applies at all scales when we look at what our cities have become as we constrained law enforcement and started nurturing criminals.

The Ukraine War – 19mar22

George Rebane

The ongoing Ukraine war is a complex affair with many dynamic factors that influence events and the state (attitudes/assessments) of the involved parties.  These pages are home to a lively discussion and debate about the goings on in Ukraine and their worldwide impact.  I’ve made an attempt to simplify and explicate my take on how the whole mish-mash comes together from what is known, claimed, and propagandized today.  This assessment is reduced into an influence factors diagram shown below.

To understand the above IFD, I recommend a quick read of one or more tutorial pieces I posted some years ago (here, here, and here).  The main thing to recall in looking at how the factors relate is that the connecting lines show the direction of influence by their arrowheads, and the plus (+) sign means that the influencer and influenced are in sync (i.e. as one goes up/down, so does the other), while the minus (-) sign means that they are out of sync (i.e. as one goes up/down, the other goes down/up).  The factors labeled L{ } are likelihoods of the events in the curly brackets coming to pass.

IFDs usually contain ‘virtuous’ and ‘vicious’ cycles.  A cycle is made by any directed path that returns to its selected point of origin.  A cycle is usually taken as virtuous if the cycled feedback seeks to stabilize (self-correct) the involved factors, and is usually understood as vicious if the feedback causes a runaway state in one or more of involved factors.  An easy way to identify such cycles is by counting the number of minus (-) signs in the cycle.  Virtuous cycles have an odd number of minuses, while vicious cycles tally an even number of minuses.  In the above IFD trace out some cycles starting with ‘US Display of Strength’.

Before you dismiss the IFD as just some idle technical doodling, you might consider that this tool (in its various formats) is used by the big kids as a starting point to discuss and communicate ALL complex processes about which critical decisions must be taken, and most certainly when it is required to formally ‘game the process’ using one of several simulation development environments – pricey software systems used in industry, by the military, and in statecraft.  The IFD lets you see the big picture in its entirety and then drill down to whatever level of detail is required.  It is the epitome graphic for communication in multi-party discussions of complex affairs.  (BTW, people who can generate clear, complete, and concise IFDs for complex issues get paid big bucks.)

Liberal Hypocrisy Fuels American Inequality

George Rebane

What do Dems actually do when they have all the power?  The short answer is that they have created the worst states in the Union with regard to housing, education, taxation, homelessness, … .   And first and foremost, they turn on their political and media lying machines to deny what horrible messes in governance they create when voters unwittingly hand them all the levers of power in a state.  This has gotten so bad that even the NYT now runs op-eds decrying the Democrats’ hypocracies, illustrating in chapter and verse the 180 differences between the nation’s progressive talk and walk.

Today Democrats control the legislative and the executive branches, or else have veto-proof majorities in the legislatures of 18 states – Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico, Illinois, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Vermont, Maine, Hawaii.  And these are the worst governed states in which progressives promote and maintain the greatest inequalities between their rich and their poor.  In these states there is no possibility for any Republicans to stand in the way of Democrat public policies – the Left owns these states lock, stock, and barrel.

Noted author and NYT editorial board writer Binya Appelbaum has zeroed in on these states to discover the nature and magnitude of leftwing travesties in operation.  He teams up with video journalist Johnny Harris to report on the details in this NYT Opinion video.  Here they present the data that forms the basis for the fabric of Big Lies on which our Left has based its access to power by buying the votes of the less-read, and keeping them on urban plantations for decades during which millions of American lives have been destroyed and/or stunted.

To me the information presented here is yet another confirmation that the Democrat Party is fundamentally evil, especially in how it has bamboozled the poor, and succored its rich into believing they have the moral high ground on the nation’s conservatives.  The Great Divide cannot happen soon enough.  (H/T to reader and correspondent)

Ukrainian no-fly zone (addended and updated 16mar22)

George Rebane

Allowing Russia to exercise asymmetric control of Ukraine’s airspace during its unwarranted, illegal, and rapacious invasion of the country is a big mistake.  At every turn in this war and the lead-up to it, the west, led from behind by Biden, has been visibly and overly concerned about how Putin may respond to this or that initiative designed to dissuade or delay the conquest of Ukraine.  Even politicians ignorant of history have now seen how such behavior does nothing to stay the hand of the tyrant.  Does no one on our side counsel that we too should demonstrate our strength against tyranny by actions that would concern Putin as to how we may react to his next atrocities?  At what point do we say ‘Enough!’?  No dictator with territorial ambitions has ever stopped on his own; they have all had to be stopped by nations allied with a common purpose to restore a humanitarian and peaceful world order.

My own strong opinion is that were we to populate Ukrainian skies with F-22s and F-35s (inviting other NATO nations to join), thousands of lives would be saved and the war would soon be over.  As Joe Lieberman also argues (here), in doing so we would be implementing “responsibility to protect”, the international norm that was unanimously adopted by the United Nations World Summit in 2005.  As I argued in the 12mar22 Scattershots (here), there is no natural stopping point for Putin before he controls the Eurasian continent.  And the more of his successes we continue to tolerate, the bigger will be the resulting war required to put an end to such conquests both in Europe and Asia.  If we don’t start Putin worrying about his own survival now, then when will there come a better time to re-establish the Westphalian world order?

[Addendum]  A longtime reader (@502pm below) contested the wisdom of NATO allies imposing a no-fly zone over Ukraine with the now widely accepted prognostication that such a tactic would immediately cause Putin to escalate his invasion into a cross-borders nuclear war – in short, WW3.  It was offered as the most probable response and ensuing scenario.  In my 547pm I rejected that as the only possible contingency, and offered the much more likely alternative contingency were we to continue Biden’s strategy of a limited defense that in effect is no defense.  This is corroborated hourly by Putin’s rapid expansion of the scope of his invasion, now expanding it into western Ukraine with attacks on multiple targets with scores of cruise missiles.

The west’s current response that lets Russia maintain air superiority to support his overwhelming numbers of mechanized infantry, armor, massed artillery, and amphibious assault will result in the inevitable ‘rubbling’ of Ukraine, no matter how ineptly the Russians execute their land attack.  To date, the west led by Biden, has made it clear that saving Ukraine is not our top priority; minimally irritating Putin is.  Given our feckless support and promise not to do more, President Zelensky will soon come to the decision to either surrender sooner and save Ukrainian lives or surrender later, leave Ukraine in a pile of rubble, and sacrifice tens of thousands of lives to no avail.  As he continues to shame NATO, Zelensky will do the right thing and save lives if the west is not willing to up the game and also start giving Putin worries as to what we will do.

And the latest surrender of Ukraine will cement Putin’s list of conquests – Georgia, Chechnya, Donbas, Crimea – as the proper strategy to continue expanding Russia.  We will inevitably then fight in Poland and the Baltics.  It will also affirm Xi Jinping’s assessment (repeating that of Hitler, Stalin, and Tojo) that America is now a weakened and fearful paper tiger, willing to surrender all in order to assure peace in our times.  Appeasement will most certainly bring about a drastic change to an Orwellian-structured world order.  My counter contingency of today’s ongoing appeasement has a long history of being practiced along with the mass suffering by all concerned.  And this contingency has a demonstrated high probability of coming to pass.  Putin pulling the nuclear trigger and thereby assuring his place in history as humanity’s ultimate pariah, eclipsing Mao, Stalin, and Hitler, is to me a reach and a low probability event.

So that’s the debate.  It’s all a matter of probabilities that the opposing sides assign to their contingencies going forward.  I’ll take my stand with history and Putin’s desire to live to fight another day.

[16mar22 update]  Brookings Institute leftwing maven William Galston is a nationally known regular contributor of progressive perspectives in the WSJ.  In the paper’s 16mar22 edition (here) he concludes “We shouldn’t risk nuclear war, but there’s still a lot more we could do” while arguing that we have a “moral obligation to help Ukraine against Russia”.  In supporting his argument he uses profoundly misguided and inappropriate examples of America’s reticence to intervene in the Rwandan slaughter of Tutsis and the 1964 stabbing of Kitty Genovese while bystanders watched and did nothing.

In these citations Galston misses two major points that characterize the Ukrainian war.  First, the assailants in both cases were weak, and not able to overwhelm the proximal agents able to aid the victims.  And second, neither attacker was prepared or capable of continuing his murderous rampage beyond committing their initial atrocities.  This is not the case with Russia invading Ukraine.  To the world Putin has made it clear that his intentions have been and will continue to be more than simply the return of a compliant Ukraine into the resurging Russian empire.

And echoing Biden’s peremptorily cowering announcement (joined by many Republicans), that the US will do nothing to risk nuclear war with Russia, seals an extremely dangerous future for all, while not reducing the eventual risk of nuclear war one whit.  For the decades during the cold war it was the prospect of MAD (mutually assured destruction) that reined in the USSR and kept us from a nuclear holocaust.  Had the Left’s ‘better Red than dead’ become the geo-strategic policy of the west and NATO to contain communism, we would all be fluent in Russian by now.  MAD worked only because Moscow knew we were willing to risk a nuclear war as we implemented policies (the ‘minor wars’ presaged by George Kennan) to stifle the spread of communism.  Without communicating such risk to the Politburo, MAD would have been toothless.

So, the bottom line for us today should be to counter Putin’s nuclear saber rattling with that of our own – ‘if you pull the nuclear trigger Vlad, we will incinerate you.’ – and bring back MAD. The time to stand up to a thug is early in the game before he and his star chamber become invested in the success of his previous threats – that should be our Plan A. The later we trade in our wish bone for a back bone, the more likely the thug will be willing to initiate a nuclear exchange.  Remember that Stalin blinked in 1948, Khrushchev in 1962, Brezhnev in 1981, Gorbachev in 1989.  Today again there is no endpoint in sight for retreating from such threats and conquests that does not involve eventual wholesale worldwide misery.

Anybody have a workable wishbone Plan B?

Sandbox – 13mar22

[The lying season from Washington is now in full swing, perhaps more intense now than since the Great Depression.  The Democrats’ demonstration of wholesale ineptitude and incompetence requires a steady stream of whoppers that I challenge anyone to compare in scope and national impact with what Trump has been accused of.  And the feckless Republicans along with conservative media like FN allow progressive pundits and politicians to get away with lame stats like ‘more oil has been pumped under Biden than Trump.’  Even if true, any 3-digit rightwinger should immediately point out that such residual pumping capacity was made possible under Trump and his legacy encouragement of America’s energy independence.  On his first day Biden started doing everything he could to cripple US fossil fuels production.  gjr]

Scattershots – 8mar22 (updated 12mar22)

George Rebane

Probability is the measure of possibility.

H&I fires.  The Russians are using an unusually insidious, deadly, and dastardly artillery tactic to kill fleeing civilians on negotiated evacuation routes.  The tactic is called Harassment and Interdiction fires, and are designed to deny the enemy free use of designated areas over extended periods.  H&I fires are conducted randomly with high explosive shells fired from one or two tubes, and set to denote at 50-150 feet above ground level.  This results in an anti-personnel ‘kill circle’ of at least 200-300 feet radius depending on shell size.  Historically artillery is the biggest killer on the battlefield, spraying shrapnel (extremely jagged and irregularly shaped pieces of steel ranging from bullet to tennis ball sizes) at extreme velocities around the detonation point.  And whereas small arms military bullets travel at around 3,000 ft/sec, shrapnel comes at you at over 20,000 ft/sec.  Targeting H&I fires on escape routes that are used only once by escapees is like shooting fish in a barrel – they never know whether or when its incoming, and they’re always out in the open.  I wonder what a Russian battery commander feels when ordered to schedule H&I fires that he knows will kill/maim only civilians?  Talk about war crimes.

Minds that never will meet.  We have yet one more example of the Great Divide in progress.  In my recent ‘Pentagon teaches socialism’ post’s comment stream we have one of our longtime leftwing readers deny acceptance of this important piece of anti-American news, why? because he considers the cited Newsmax “hardly a credible news source”.  This reader is an established representative of this kind of progressive mentality – if the messenger is unfavorable, summarily reject the message.  He never even bothered to examine the further referenced links which would have taken him to the DoD website where the conference was announced, described, and additional links provided.  Instead, he and his consider CNN, MSNBC, NYT, WaPo, … and other lamestream news media as reliable, no matter that they don’t report news that doesn’t comport with the DNC narrative, and are unrepentant and uncontrite about most items they falsely report and/or spin.  People of the Right have no problem consuming leftwing news and progressive literature – we demand to know it.  However, those of the Left never lift the blinders they had carefully installed during their K-12 years.  Such news consumption practices of the Left and Right are but one of many asymmetries that have made meaningful communication between the sides a rapidly fading episode in our country’s history.

[10mar22 update]  Re the restraining order on my daughter.  Nearly everything that has been admitted as evidence from the plaintiff at the hearing is a lie as corroborated by the available videos and the physics of the possible (e.g. see 1032am comment below).  The judgement was a preordained political act.

[12mar22 update]  Putin’s Rasputin bubble?  Perhaps a little play on words, but a friend and reader sent me a link and asked whether I had ever heard of Aleksandr Gelyevich Dugin.  It turns out that Dugin has been the political philosopher and intellectual ideologue of Putin’s inner circle for some time now, dishing out his esoteric views on neo-fascist ‘Eurasianism’. (more here)  Now I have never heard of Dugin or even that Putin has had an ‘inner circle’ of confidants.  From what has been reported it appears that Putin has used the Machiavellian structure of alternating advisor circles whose members are political enemies of adjacent circles, thereby making it hard for a court conspiracy to mature sufficiently to topple the prince.  But according to the referenced article, it appears that Putin’s Rasputin may have successfully implanted his ideas about the historical resurgence of a post-czarist Russia extending from the Atlantic to the Pacific.  “Gestated in anti-communist right-wing activism during the waning days of the Soviet Union, indebted to a specifically anti-liberal and anti-Enlightenment philosophical embrace of authoritarianism, irrationalism, and hyper-nationalism, Dugin dreams of a reborn Orthodox Tsarist state surpassing the borders and spheres of influence as they existed before 1989, of a Novorossiya (New Russia) built not on socialist principles, but fascist ones.” 

The mentality of a Russian soldier has always been a puzzle to westerners since at least the 1905 Russo-Japanese War.  (Recall that my grandfather was a czarist conscript in that war, transported to and from Pacific rim battles on the trans-Siberian railroad in cattle cars which served as troop trains for Russian soldiers.)  The Russian soldier has been distinguished by his overall and abysmal ignorance of his mission, especially as it fits into the geo-strategic situation du jour, and his lack of what the western soldier knows as patriotism.  The Russian soldier always has found himself poorly led and poorly outfitted – his main goal is just to stay alive and go back home.  To achieve this, he will follow any orders and do anything that lets him survive the day.  Questioning authority is an unknown concept as long as it doesn’t put his life in immediate danger.  However, he has been known to sabotage his own equipment, and even his own body, in order to avoid being thrown into the next maelstrom from which retreat often means summary execution.  In this light one can understand Russia’s wanton shelling of Ukrainian civilians, be they in their apartments or fleeing on an open road.

Pentagon teaches socialism

George Rebane

Promoting public benefits without including public costs is the hallmark of charlatans and evil politicians.  Accepting public benefits without inquiring about their public costs is the way of the useful idiot and the ignorant.

More evidence pours in that our military under progressive federal governments no longer considers national security as its prime and overarching mission.  The latest comes from the Pentagon which recently sponsored and hosted ‘Responding to China: The Case for Global Justice and Democratic Socialism’. (more here)

The event featured the French socialist economics professor Thomas Piketty whose widely panned ‘masterwork’, Capital in the 21^st Century (2013), is still celebrated by progressives everywhere.  Most real economists and students of economics – certainly of the Austrian and Chicago schools - consider ‘socialist economist’ to be a demonstrated oxymoron.

The Pentagon event was put on by DoD’s Institute for National Strategic Studies and featured Piketty’s ideas about how the west should reorganize its socio-economics for the remainder of the century, and specifically to successfully “meet the challenge of China”.  Piketty also wrote Time for Socialism (2021) in which he argues “that the right answer in addressing China's growth lies in ending Western arrogance and promoting a new emancipatory and egalitarian horizon on a global scale, a new form of democratic and participatory, ecological and post-colonial socialism," … "If they stick to their usual lecturing posture and a dated hyper-capitalist model, Western countries may find it extremely difficult to meet the Chinese challenge."

The obvious thrust of what our Pentagon mavens now promote is that to counter communist China and its new approach to state-capitalism, the west must become a socialist society and also develop a form of state-capitalism on its road to a Marxist world. (here)  Most free-market economists and business leaders not yet in the embrace of corporatism see such nostrums as advising us to destroy our economy in order to save it.  (There’s more to be said about that as we consider what is happening under the aegis of the Great Reset.)

In today’s military we take valuable hours from the training day to devote to ideologically indoctrinating our soldiers, sailors, and airmen to correct modes of collectivist groupthink. Since the Obama administration, we have increasingly started doing this instead of increasing and honing our troops’ warfighting skills with the ever newer and more complex technologies that already dominate today’s battlefields, and which demand a more highly trained warrior cohort to meet the enemy with modern weapon systems instead of ideological indoctrination.

The new emphasis from such programs is not the continued maintenance of a secure and powerful America as a sovereign nation-state and world hegemon.

The Oligarchs’ Fire Sale

"Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to ..."  Sir Walter Scott

George Rebane

As an idle exercise I’ve thought of what most likely is going on with those Russian oligarchs who have had their financial plans upended by all the sanctions and who stand to lose more in the coming weeks/months.  Reports are that they’re selling their expatriate assets – land, estates, townhouses, yachts, airplanes, art, securities, … - that can be seized and/or confiscated.  So what do you do if you’re one of Putin’s pals worth a few billion dollars, with a good part of it spread around the world, and you find your name on the internationally published sanctions shit list (SSL).

Well, I imagine that their objective is to survive in the post-Putin world with enough money to make their life comfortable wherever they may wind up once the dust settles and Russia regains some semblance of normalcy.  Now such a QoL does not require billions, a few tens of millions would do nicely, and even better with a few hundred million.  Time to have a couple of yard sales, one in Russia, and one in divers parts of the globe.  But now comes the tricky part.

Assuming you do have some trusted agents (relatives?) living in different parts of the world, how do you sell your stuff?  Let’s dispense with ill-gotten assets; all your foreign stuff has been legitimately obtained and held in their host countries, with above-board purchase monies paid and transferred through the then world banking systems.  But now you cannot sell any of it without payments going through the post-sanctioned banking systems.  Any sums entering those conduits of finance could and will be confiscated/frozen; in short, you wouldn’t be able to spend such monies even after a legal transfer of title to the buyers.  So what to do?

Well, you would have to sell your $200M yacht to someone for say an above-board $1,000, with your agent having negotiated a sub-rosa payment of $20M consisting of fungible tangibles like precious stones or gold bullion that can be squirreled away out of sight.  We’re assuming here that such buyers with ready access to fungible tangibles can be found in the world’s markets.  So let’s postulate that you can sell enough of your expatriate assets for stashes of valuable commodities that await your emigration from mother Russia.  (I assume that those on the SSL will not be welcome in a post-Putin Russia for all the obvious political reasons.)

After the dust settles, you see yourself ensconced in a luxurious townhouse in Buenos Aires or Santiago.  But will you be living the life of ease that you had planned and carefully endowed through a sufficient cadre of trusted agents?  You must know that now-expatriate former oligarchs on the SSL will be tracked and monitored by everyone from various intelligence services and Interpol on down.  On the more sinister side, you can expect that criminals of various stature will also track and know the whereabouts of SSL graduates.  And they all know that you still have considerable wealth in untrackable but readily transportable forms stashed away here and there.

Since SSL members will forever remain exposable pariahs, no matter where they settle, starting with the local authorities, no one will show any great concern if suddenly your wife or one of your children is kidnapped and quietly held for ransom.  For now you are a marked man for the rest of your born days.  I’ll end this little fantasy by wondering how an oligarch would fare if he decided to sign his in-country assets, or his overseas stashes, to Putin’s Russian state to provide much needed foreign exchange.  Would this generate survivable goodwill into post-Putin years?  We can dissect this another time or in the comment stream.  But we can all depart these musings with the conclusion that today it probably is not much fun being a known Putin toady and an oligarch on the SSL.