Geostrategerist. Policy wonk. Political adviser. Author: https://xitter.cf/t.co/JcTDdsUVh1. Traveler of antique lands w/the lovely @cmgoodlander. Views my own.
Joined April 2020
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And we’re live.
My book on the strategy of regional great power competition (with plenty for the naval power and WWI enthusiasts) is now available in print and electronic form from @MC_UPress. Very honored to be publishing with them.
Thanks also to @ElbridgeColby, @PatPorter76, @JJCarafano, @DavidBe31099196, and Nadia Schadlow for their endorsements. Honored to meet with their approval as well.
Get ‘em while they’re hot!
Broke: Quality Learing Centers
Woke: 👇
Astonishing details in the Los Angeles fake drug rehab center case, these fraudsters were genuine monsters
The fake rehab center operators were drugging their human livestock to stop them trying to leave, so they could keep the insurance money flowing
ALT Los Angeles Health Care Fraud Takedown Results in Charges Against 15 Defendants, Including 6 Medical Professionals, Nearly $2 Billion in Loss https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/los-angeles-health-care-fraud-takedown-results-charges-against-15-defendants-including-6
There is no good way to handle an attempt to replace the human species. That said, yes - this was the equivalent of letting people build nuclear reactors in their garages, and the only reason it won’t play out that way (assuming it doesn’t) is if the project is pretty well shut down.
We are going to really regret how the genesis of AI was handled, especially when it comes to oversight and regulation. Glaringly mishandled to an astonishing degree, what could have been a net blessing will become a net curse.
Most destabilizing weapon since the nuclear bomb was allowed to be freelanced out of Silicon Valley.
They’re not obsolete - they’re what makes this type of warfare both possible and necessary. Nuclear deterrence means that direct conflict becomes dicey, so the objective (as when we brought down the Soviet Union) becomes to use indirect means to collapse the opponent.
The catch is that we’re the Soviet Union this round.
Si templum Bucci quaeris, circumspice.
Kinda fun. I got Mars, which would be nominative determinism if nothing else. 😈
The medieval poets did not believe that the heavens fatalistically determined our future, but they did believe they each had a character that influenced the spiritual climate.
Take my short quiz to find out which sphere you most naturally belong to!
mythicmindfellowship.com/sph…
That “Minneapolis in 2020” vibe.
Paris's top cop advised shop-owners to provide for their own security during this weekend's riots. The rock-bottom, core purpose of government is to protect its citizens. A government that admits it can't do that is a government in defeat.
zerohedge.com/geopolitical/p…
There’s a parlor game you can play where you argue about whether fascism has to occur in Catholic countries, and otherwise is just sparkling authoritarian nationalism.
Academic and trivial, perhaps, but the Catholic-Protestant divide was relevant here, and persisted elsewhere. Catholicism forces a “bog standard” package of policy concerns for a dictator; a Protestant-based movement like Nazism could make more things up as it went along.
Franco made the Führer wait.
October 23, 1940, Hendaye station. Hitler’s train sat on the Spanish-French border while Franco’s was still rolling.
When the Caudillo finally arrived, the most powerful man in Europe had already been left cooling his heels. The meeting that followed dragged on for nine hours of circular demands, territorial shopping lists, & polite obstruction.
Hitler wanted Spain in the war, Gibraltar, the Mediterranean, a southern flank against Britain. Franco wanted grain, oil, French North Africa, & time. He got the last of those.
On paper Franco was prepared to honor the war. He had accepted Axis aid during the Civil War, shared anti-communist rhetoric, & kept the door open. In practice he treated the alliance as a transaction he had no intention of completing on Hitler’s terms.
Spain was exhausted, its army thin, its ports vulnerable. Joining would have been suicide dressed as gratitude.
What made the stall personal, not merely strategic, was the deeper contempt. Franco was a devout Catholic who had built his regime on the Church.
Hitler’s private remarks about Christianity, his open scorn for its “Jewish” origins, its universalism, its refusal to kneel to race, were known in Madrid.
Franco had no interest in subordinating Catholic Spain to a movement that treated the faith as an obstacle or a temporary tool.
The waiting, the endless conditions, the refusal to commit: these were not only military prudence. They were the behavior of a man who disliked the person across the table & saw no reason to hurry into his war.
Hitler left furious. He later said he would rather have several teeth pulled than negotiate with Franco again. Spain stayed out. Gibraltar stayed British.
The meeting at Hendaye remains one of the cleaner examples of a weaker power using delay, faith, & national interest to refuse a stronger one, without ever quite saying no.
This used to be the philosophy of most militaries. War is rough on digital systems.
It again comes down to narratives. You don’t develop an “everyone for themself” attitude toward water, power, food, etc if you’re in the middle of national renewal or even if you expect to have a functioning state.
Reality has a way of revealing preferences and vice-versa.
The “something” is that we’re in a world war.
It looks more like the Spanish Succession War (fought by small, professional forces for relatively limited stakes), as well as perhaps the round that preceded it (where the war of the Armada, the Dutch Warbof Independence, and/or the 30 Years War all featured irregular, mercenary, and proxy forces. And it also bears a strong resemblance to the collapse of the Soviet Union (with the positions tragically reversed). But it’s a world war.
And the bases are vulnerable to just about anything, not least including drone attack.
In a way, William Lind et al’s “Fourth Generation War” concept may have been more early than misguided. Before “4GW” was made synonymous with the GWOT after 9/11, and before Lind himself asserted that it should instead be understood as a “crisis of legitimacy of the state,” the actual article that inaugurated the concept understood it as a combination of “little green men” attacks involving deep strikes against infrastructure, and (speculatively) a broader concept of the opponent’s society being the target.
Ie, a little Putin and a little Chinese-style “Unrestricted Warfare” or “combination war.”
And, we see that in all sorts of ways.
Link here for the curious: pratclif.com/guerre/history.…
This goes way beyond general national defense preparedness. This has the earmarks of something urgent and much, much larger scale than anything previously contemplated.
Preparations of this nature and magnitude would only be envisioned for an attack on America from a major global power as part of a world war.
Given the urgency with which Pentagon officials are announcing this initiative, I’m worried that they know something is coming and they’re not telling us…
Transhumanism and transgenderism are related aspects of the religion of the tech bros, whatever precisely it should be called. It stresses alienation from humanity and from the physical world, and a desire to transcend both.
If this were a thousand years earlier, they’d be ascetic monks or similar - they also would not be allowed near money or power.
The blurring of the distinctions between male and female and man and machine are both simply the latest consequences of an anti-teleological philosophy of nature that has deceptively cloaked itself in the mantle of science since early modernity. More here: claremontreviewofbooks.com/g…
It’s easier just to assume anything with any contact with the financial system -or- social media (and the two connect in obvious and non-obvious ways) is a bubble, and will be unless and until a godawful crash/collapse/“reset” happens.
What’s mildly interesting about this is that once enough people get this, bubbles themselves (which loosely translate to “hype” or “mania”) become harder to sustain. Unclear what the equilibrium there is.
It’s foolish to expect people who invented and distributed a fraud machine to do anything so prosocial as cure cancer.
What people do not (all) see is that this network has infected defense procurement and is now in the process of taking it over.
We’re buying our surveillance software from these guys; in short order we’re supposed to be buying submarines from them.
It really comes down to Bayesian inference (things going together; what else would likely be true if x were true?) and the story you think we’re in.
If you think American renewal is on the horizon and all we had to do to get it was get the current admin in, you’ll infer one thing. But if you recognize that we’re in the middle of a superpower bankruptcy over a fiscal expectations mismatch the size of Weimar, a late Soviet level of internal negligence and dysfunction, and a late Roman level of national security mismanagement…you’ll infer other things.
The tech bros look a lot like Russian oligarchs from the latter angle.
