it's no wonder the US state department and its clients have obsessively kept the region shattered for 75 years
The British I maintain were doing this before them for at least another 40 years prior based on lessons learned in subjugating India. And I believe worked hand in hand with the US to construct the modern middle east and "moderate rebels" as well as the various corrupt kings and fragmented islamist movements.
Yep. Threaten everyone, only actually hit one or two non-cooperative parties at a time, not enough to create a bloc out of them, make an example and get the rest in line. That is the way of the clever bully.
I see I've upset you.
Frankly I feel this site and others needs a bit of (non-liberal-brained) dissent against the circlejerk so readily adopted in the vein of "oh Russia is going to crush the west, NATO stands no chance, Ukraine is going to be fucked up, Russia will win handily and is just going slow as a brilliant strategy of grinding down which has no downsides even as the west is scrambling to build capacity because they can't do that despite recent history showing they can" and that plus the "any month now their lines will break" which I have been seeing from hopium parties I won't name since the start of this conflict with persistent predictions that oh 2024 would be the end, the wrap-up, and now it's 2025. Or the China hoperism which gets to the point of blindness in seeing any weaknesses or problems in the grand chessboard they're going to be playing on given the plays the US/NATO is making. I'm still broadly hopeful but the chessboard for China and our side is definitely not as rosy as it was only 3 years ago. Some sobriety is helpful.
Sometimes I just post kind of thoughts, not all are terribly well thought out as in I've sat down and really thought about it. In fact I welcome reasoned or well sourced rebuttals as those help me sharpen my own thinking and I think that kind of interaction leads to real growth.
As someone else said if you want an echo-chamber of nothing but positive spin and propaganda this site isn't that.
Anyways I just noticed the old mega is locked so I'm going to post a reply I wrote up to someone else who objected to my post there before noticing the post was locked.
Russian intelligence and air power is still very inadequate (in absolute terms and compared to NATO) as they're unable to both locate the factories for Ukrainian production of drones/weapons and/or deliver the high power munitions necessary to put them out of commission such as glide bombs because of inability to suppress Ukrainian air defenses properly
Sounds like you uncritically swallowed the NATO propaganda line and actually believe the ridiculous 95% interception rate claims from the AFU. Russia is still attacking with huge drone swarms and missile barrages, and successfully striking positions deep within Ukraine.
Don't read it so have no idea how I could swallow it. I consume next to zero western press beyond headlines and scoff every time I see something about Ukraine in the headline, promptly mentally discarding whatever it is I just read.
I said nothing about interception. Fact is Russia does not have air dominance over Ukraine. Ukraine has a lot of western supplied anti-air assets which make it dangerous or impossible for bombing raids with Russia's limited force of heavy bombers. They hit the front lines where they've softened up the anti-air with glide-bombs sure but they don't strike Kiev with bombers or the middle of the country because they can't get close enough. They're relegated to using very expensive and limited production hypersonics and drone swarms. The latter of which cannot take out hardened targets and can't deliver enough payload to take out large targets (like manufacturing) either and is mostly used for clearing trenches, taking out vehicles, hitting anti-air units in forward operating areas. Russia is not the USSR, Ukraine is still operating F-16s and other fighters deeper within their country as well. Despite Russia bravado about how they'd "burn" Russia has taken out only a portion of those delivered. Frankly this is down to intelligence capabilities.
I notice you didn't even address my point about intelligence which is a real problem because you need intelligence for targeting. Look at the zionists, they have excellent intelligence and were able to assassinate Nasrallah and attempt to kill Iran's leadership because they know exactly where their command bunkers are. The US is part of that and has excellent intelligence. A massive satellite spy network much larger than what Russia runs and more modern with more capabilities to watch more places at once. They also have more funding, more people working on analysis. They have deep penetration via hacking, human-int assets (Russia's CIA network was never rolled up like China's because they used an older system that wasn't compromised and even without that there are so many west-brained, west-loving, liberalism and west as absolute saviors on a shining city on a hill types in Russia that they can get a decent amount of cooperation from that angle alone). And massive signals surveillance of course as well. Most of Russia's big hits on say officer gatherings have been luck, things like some fool posting about it online and Russian intelligence noticing as I don't think Russia is even able to remain embedded via hacking in Ukrainian networks as the NSA is successfully repelling them and maybe Russia is reluctant to burn cyber-weapons on it.
They don't care if they kill us all. They're desperate to replace workers, the one threat to their power and resolve the contradiction forever in their favor by moving to some imagined new system. In the end they'll likely rip each other off but not before killing off a huge number of us. This sucks. And I have little hope Americans will correctly identify the enemy soon enough to matter before tens of millions die. They'll probably find a release valve by ramping up the imperialism again which is why they're seizing control of the internet and pumping it full of reactionary content, they plan to make today's kids into tomorrow's soldiers lured by the promise of unlimited water if you fight to conquer Africa or Latin America with the US military. Seeing how easy it is for them to get recruits for their ICE stormtroopers from an atomized culture like ours, it'll be so much easier to direct that violence outwards again. But not before an inward purge I think.
Another thought I just had. Many of us have assumed they can't really deport all the non-white farm workers because it would collapse agriculture. But what if that doesn't matter? What if that's part of getting rid of excess worker capacity they expect to have all too soon by making food scarce and sucking the wealth of workers even more, along with benefit cuts making unemployment a death sentence and increasing desperation. They may actually think that's a good thing and that the people on benefits, the neuro-diverse especially can be bused and marshaled into the fields eventually after killing off a certain amount and the population will support it continuing once it's in place for fear of another food price and supply shock occurring over ending it.
Bulletins and News Discussion from July 7th to July 13th, 2025 - Sanctions on Russia: The Sequel
They burned through stocks of the fodder weapons slated for decommissioning anyways and are now onto things that are still useful but superseded by even better and newer models and thus by using them they create demand for more production capacity and room in armories for these newer weapons which they wish to stockpile and have massive production of for their coming war with China.
More importantly they may have gathered all the data they can on Russian defenses from older weapons and want to see if newer weapons being used gets them other data or forces fielding of newer units by Russia which can be studied.
Bulletins and News Discussion from July 7th to July 13th, 2025 - Sanctions on Russia: The Sequel
Iranian president injured in June [zionist] airstrikes
The IOF struck Masoud Pezeshkian’s underground bunker during last month’s war, Fars News Agency reports
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian was slightly injured during "israeli" airstrikes on a bunker last month, according to Iranian state-affiliated outlet Fars.
The June 16 strike reportedly involved six bombs targeting access points to a secret underground facility in western Tehran, where Pezeshkian and other top officials were attending a meeting of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council.
Fars said on Saturday the blasts cut power to the facility, forcing the president to flee through an emergency shaft, during which he sustained leg injuries.
The outlet claimed the operation was modeled after the September 2024 strikes in Beirut that killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.
In an interview with Tucker Carlson he claimed the zionists tried to assassinate him. The zionists have not commented. It's likely IMO they did and only failed because of their lack of ability to get close with larger bombs. Also they were totally serious about killing Khomeini and Iran is so incredibly compromised by zionist/US intelligence that the only reason they weren't able to attempt that is he went totally off-grid, his own top government people unable to get in direct contact with him during critical hours because of this.
Glass and ceramics are the most likely to break. Good quality cookware glass like PYREX (all caps, lower case is junk from a quality and materials standpoint but okay for food storage in fridge) will still stand up to an impressive amount as but it is a danger. Metal can last a long, long, long time when properly cared for and not abused.
Bulletins and News Discussion from July 7th to July 13th, 2025 - Sanctions on Russia: The Sequel
In practice they are fucked if they don't do something about China and multipolarity broadly. They don't have to per se fight China directly but they must stop multi-polarity and ensure most of the world's resources and markets are for the benefit of the west and China is isolated to a regional power.
Bulletins and News Discussion from July 7th to July 13th, 2025 - Sanctions on Russia: The Sequel
Hot take: I could see Russia throwing in the towel in 2026 and accepting reduced terms as Ukrainians are getting tougher and are going to be able to inflict enough damage on Russia to be a problem soon. That and Trump likely stepping up attacks on Russia because Putin wouldn't make him look good by negotiating terms he could sell as a win.
Russian intelligence and air power is still very inadequate (in absolute terms and compared to NATO) as they're unable to both locate the factories for Ukrainian production of drones/weapons and/or deliver the high power munitions necessary to put them out of commission such as glide bombs because of inability to suppress Ukrainian air defenses properly. I think the Ukrainians probably severely damaged the Russian strategic bomber force in their drone attack gambit and I think Russia's response was very weak to that and only encouraged the west with the idea that Russia is a weakened animal that can be killed off or at least left severely damaged and weakened. I expect Russia to probably shirk again and again. They can't really step up from where they are now to my knowledge without either using nukes, doing a mass mobilization/forced conscription which would be very unpopular or really engaging in very aggressive attacks which will rack up much higher casualties than I think they're willing to accept.
So the grinding attrition strategy which many hailed as brilliant really had and has a time limit before the west and Ukraine catch up and start making it painful for Russia to go slowly.
Once they take the territory that has been legally incorporated by Russian law into Russia (up to the Dnieper river) I think they'll give up on the total disarmament thing, the denazification thing and only demand no NATO and no western troops, and maybe settle for that and new elections. NATO will spin this as a win for them and Ukraine and the visible defeat of the west will be averted. Obviously if they do this it will come back to bite them as the Ukrainians will spend about 2-5 years building up a massive stockpile of missiles, drones, and weapons then go ape on Russia right as the US opens up on China with the rest of western NATO in the SCS and abroad. This will nicely tie down Russia from being able to help China and vice versa and free up western Europe NATO to join the US in fighting China while Ukraine on its own keeps Russia occupied for at least 12 months. But the Russians are liberal capitalists unfortunately and still very much seek a rapprochement with Europe and the US.
Also as above posts notes by destroying the old patriot systems and other old weapons it creates demand for new US sales of new weapons to Europe and also arms Europe to the teeth with weaponry that will make a war against Russia quite possible and quite painful for Russia. Oreshnik may not be able to overcome these new intercept systems but more worryingly their nukes may not be able to overcome them except in numbers.
I think the goal of Ukraine at this point is to turn it into a cheap weapons factory and resource for the west for especially maintaining drone power against significant producers like China or to hold down Russia in a future conflict with China to prevent them from helping say their BRICS+ multipolarity partners as the US takes the fight to them and China at once and knocks them down one by one with Russia too pre-occupied to supply weapons or troops to help. They'll churn out cheap weapons and they'll churn out deranged Nazi fascists hardened by battle and CIA trained for use in Africa, in Asia, around the world crushing multipolarity and serving the empire in clandestine missions and spectacularly well thought out, well engineered drone assisted attacks like we've only just begun to see. They also want its minerals and farmland for their climate fortress plans later this century and would prefer to depopulate it significantly to make it easier to exploit and plunder and use those resources and are using Russia to achieve that.
I don't know. Yandex maybe? It does tend to prioritize Russian results a bit higher than any western search engine but so long as you're using the English site it seems okay when I've tried using it. I think the whole web is poisoned with AI SEO slop and we're not likely to ever go back. Going forward if you want info you'll have to pay for premium search, for an AI assistant to search for you, etc. Knowledge is being gated behind a paywall of frustration and time-wasting.
Bulletins and News Discussion from July 7th to July 13th, 2025 - Sanctions on Russia: The Sequel
Very rare, very ineffective. Just individualistic frustration that cannot deter groups of heavily armed, coordinated cops. Just one person who gets immediately domed or arrested with zero kills on their side doesn't lead to mass copycats and doesn't intimidate the other side into backing down or slowing down.
The realistic fact is they are using teams of at least 3, often up to a dozen heavily armed, trained people with the ability to call in back-up and who often are wearing some sort of body armor or have armored vehicles. To do real damage to groups like that the fact is it would require multiple coordinated assailants and the fact is the second you start talking about organizing for that kind of violence you're likely to get arrested or infiltrated by cops and then arrested. So I don't see that kind of coordinated violence arising frankly in the US given the conditions.
I think the most effective type of resistance we can expect given the conditions is not lethally violent but stridently resistant. Mass groups of rapid response protestors willing to hold the line and prevent them from fully carrying out raids or slow them down significantly and wearing them down in their job with tons of riot control type duty, people screaming at them, calling them fascists, child kidnappers, all the usual vigorous protest stuff, that kind of stuff and just making the job painful and not fun and not worth the travel benefits until morale starts sagging, people quitting, short staffing, half-hearted efforts to carry out their jobs, that type of thing.
Bulletins and News Discussion from July 7th to July 13th, 2025 - Sanctions on Russia: The Sequel
I mean people are going to rag on him for this but he's not wrong just pragmatic and saying the unpopular but obvious fact.
The Iranians have and always had two choices after the US and zionists kept screaming about them about to have a nuke:
They chose neither. They refused to make a choice. They instead chose this silly, imagined liberal middle path and well it just got them bombed and they've been under sanctions for years. So their choices are still the same.
Putin is not a great leader but he is in a drawn out war that won't end this year which is a major drain on his country. He wants to keep the idea of nuclear proliferation off the table because if he comes out and says to the west with a troll-face "yeah Iran should have nukes, we support this", the west MIGHT push to give Ukraine a nuclear weapons program or some other disposable state on Russia's borders that's under their thumb or soon to be like Azerbaijan and they want to avoid that. Nuclear powers generally don't want more people in their exclusive club.
What Russia privately thinks while they're in diplomatic mode who knows but they do have an interest in appearing reasonable to get the Ukraine thing wound down in their favor because they don't think they can win on any reasonable time-scale with a Ukraine that the west is still supporting and don't favor the idea of having to grind them down all the way to the far west of the country before taking over and administering a totally destroyed state which is what the fanatical Ukrainian to the last man strategy is still at this point. They want a settlement and to be able to draw down their military ASAP. I think they're still very west-brained and despite their own announced pivot to the east and China they still absurdly hold out hopes that Europe will be forced to reintegrate with them after the Ukraine conflict and they won't war on Russia. So there's a bit of that in him taking stances like this. The whole try and appease the west thing they did with not obstructing them on destroying Libya or sanctions on the DPRK.
It's very realpolitik.
What choice would they have? It's a mutual suicide pact like the elites abusing children in front of each other for mutual silence and blackmail.
The US can remotely disable their jet fighters and other military assets they force Europe to buy. "Who would do that, who would accept that" someone like you would cry. And the answer is someone without a choice, who didn't know better or who thought that the person doing it was their friend and would only use it on their enemies only to realize too late that they expect you to go down with them if you ever flinch in your support.
Europe is convinced that they support them for guilt over centuries of anti-semitism and that doing so absolves them and makes them morally superior and able to lecture others and I could see Germans saying "yes, please, engineer a gun to point at our head to murder us if we ever dare flinch in our support of you, it's our penance for the holocaust".
So who would do that? White supremacists. Full believers in NATO/US/EU hegemony. Full believers in zionism who are actually all over the place and in many powerful positions and would have gladly helped such a program along so that their successors could not back out, could not have a choice to stop the support of the program, would be forced to carry on the work they believe is right and necessary, locked into that course by their forebears.
This isn't something that I think most eyes states are aware of to be honest. And if it is what can they do? Europe is very weakly trying to get some limited tech autonomy and being punched in the face by the US for that and not having much success because it's a liberal capitalist affair and funding a few open source projects at low levels cannot compete with the years of code and lock-in major American tech suppliers have on the tech stack. Screaming to the world this is happening won't stop it happening anymore than screaming the zionists have nukes which they don't officially acknowledge does anything about those. They're under the gun, they can't get out easily if at all because their blackmailer may threaten to shoot if they try and remove themselves from their power entirely.
I mean you're not informed if you say what you just said. Who would allow the NSA to spy on their leadership as the Germans did unwittingly? When you're convinced you're the good guys, your zionist friends are the good guys and they say they'll do these things for good guy reasons you say yes. Because you've already said yes to compromising networks and your own encryption and information services with the NSA and GCHQ through the 14 eyes agreements and continue to cooperate in that even after finding out the Americans were abusing it to spy on you their supposed friend.
Well doubtless they hope the work makes some of them strong slaves because they were just faking it to be lazy because that's a real thing that definitely happens. And those it breaks and leaves disabled beyond the point of doing anything like this they leave to die in the gutter, having extracted some value from them for capital in the process and disposed of them successfully. But while they're dying they'll be desperately fighting existing workers for jobs thus allowing worsening conditions, crackdowns on unions, pay kept lower, etc.
I've read several times now from several thinkers the notion that the Samson option is not just firing nukes at Europe and Arab neighbors plus Iran but actually because of the zionist dominance and intertwining with high tech that they have hidden code, bombs to activate on command which will cause the collapse of modern infrastructure. They'll take down power systems, medical devices will stop functioning or malfunction, mapping will fail, just all kinds of chaos from them using their positions intertwined with Microsoft, Google, and a ton of other tech companies with zionist intelligence officers that they will bring down the modern world if the west allows them to fall.
This would be powerful incentive for the western leaders to not move away from the zionists. To do so would require acknowledging this penetration and weakness on a scale far larger than anything they've even accused China of and a decade of work methodically searching for and removing it after kicking all the zionist intelligence collaborators (really any zionist occupation company) out of these positions and praying doing so and obviously searching for and trying to disarm this doesn't make them set it off.
CIA has been doing this type of thing with insects (maybe not bees) for a while supposedly. They even bragged about it in an ad campaign a while back. Something in the vein of "some of our bugs have been real bugs" with a picture of an insect. Still not sure how that works for getting any kind of data back but I suppose it's possible they might be able to tap the optical nerves, broadcast it weakly and use super high-power boosted antennas pointed at the location to pick up vague pictures like outlines of layouts in buildings or maybe something similar with audio reverberations. Not sure.
The CIA near the height of the cold war was able through front companies to buy USSR titanium for their weapons programs such as the B2 and other high performance planes without the USSR detecting this.
Frankly if you're China and you don't control global monetary flows, don't have ins at every bank, every shipping company, every logistic company, don't have a global illegal wiretap network and do have a policy of openness and trade wherever possible there is just no way for them to totally stop this.
I mean the west hasn't been able to completely stop Russian imports of western products through intermediaries and they really want to and have a lot more visibility throughout the supply chain than China.
In the electronics space Macbooks tend to be pretty durable. The downsides are anything recent which is worth buying (M1-4 chips) has soldered on storage, ram, etc so they're not really user upgradeable and there's also the issue of needing an adapter for anything USB-A. I wouldn't buy new for value unless it's on clearance as an old model. But after at most a battery replacement they tend to be pretty solid machines even used as long as they weren't badly mistreated. Older Thinkpads (not E-series, mainly T and P) also tend to be pretty durable and you can buy them cheap used on ebay and are a lot more serviceable than Macbooks. Screens are not as great though, not the clearest or sharpest things but usable if you're not doing graphics work or using it as a high end, high quality media player. Macbooks win on the nice screen front hands down.
why is this so common?!?!
Bourgeois propaganda. They don't want their taxes raised nor those of their top servants (C-suite execs, etc). So they fear-monger that the moment you earn just a bit more money, bam you get hit with losing 50% of it which is horrifying to normal people who just want to make a bit more money and fear this will happen to them. Thus the people who have been indoctrinated with this oppose tax increases. If they understood the amount you need to live on (say $250k) was taxed at one lower rate and you only got hit with 50% tax on the amount over a million you earn they would be much more amenable to higher taxes on the higher brackets.
Not only that but it makes workers content with less. I've literally heard people say they didn't take a raise or a promotion because it would put them just a few thousand over into in a higher tax bracket. I mean this is the dream for the bourgeoisie. They get to blame it on government and convince their worker serfs that they want a lower paying job because of taxes.
So it's a gross simplification for the purposes of getting people to oppose all taxes by fear-mongering brackets as cliffs.
Exploiting existing ethnic or other tensions to play groups off each other to keep a nation divided so you can conquer them with your own forces and significant amounts of proxies from these groups. Pioneered by the British in India hundreds of years ago, still working today in tons of places and a favored strat of the US from Yugoslavia to China (Xinjiang, Tibet, Hong Kong), to Russia and therefore likely a strat their regional outpost has taken note of.