Recently, Mexico declared lithium a strategically important resource and nationalized all deposits.

Biljana’s comment at that point was “watch how America occupies Mexico now”.

Current news: America contemplates sending the military to Mexico, because the terrible “drug cartels” (probably CIA-run) kidnapped some Americans, and baby Jesus will cry if America doesn’t introduce democracy and rules-based order to the suffering people of Mexico whose leader is a dictator who is killing his own people with weapons of mass destruction and is a new Hitler.

Either Biljana is a prophet, or America became predictable as fuck; you tell me.

Božo forwarded me an article by Paul Craig Roberts this morning. Basically, the man is frustrated because Putin didn’t do any of the things the Americans would expect a stereotypical Russian leader to do:

As I have pointed out again and again and now again, Putin’s idiotic–indeed mindless–way of conducting war has destroyed the credibility of the Russian military. I am becoming convinced that the outcome of the nonsensical “limited military operation” will be either Russian surrender or nuclear war. By continuing to encourage provocation on top of provocation, Putin is backing himself into a corner where his only option is surrender or nuclear war.  It is extraordinary that the Kremlin does not realize the danger in the picture of weakness and indecision that the Kremlin and Western propaganda have created.

So, basically, the Americans created this image of a Hitler-like Putin who is the ultimate tough guy who just wrecks everything in his path, and now that it turned out that Putin is in fact an orthodox Christian who tries to do things in the least violent and disruptive way possible and prefers treaties and agreements to war, which every sane person who actually watched Putin knew from the beginning, they are unhappy because in their thinking to be peaceful and reasonable is to be weak, and their reaction to weakness is violence.

The problem with the Americans is that they perceive the world in terms of a wolf pack, and they even fail at understanding wolf packs. They think that you can be either “alpha” or “beta”, either dominant or submissive, and if you’re submissive then you’re worthless because only dominance matters. They don’t care about the engineers or any of the people who actually make things work – only the leaders matter, only the politicians and managers who are “dominant” and “in charge”, regardless of the fact that those are the people whose main tools are excel and powerpoint, for presenting their “narrative”, and not Autocad or CNC grinders and plasma cutters. They think submissive people need to be kept weak and afraid to not give them “ideas”, and if someone loses his position of leadership and control, he no longer matters. Basically, America functions exactly like a society of Satanists would be expected to function, and this doesn’t seem to be an accident. America looks very much like Satan’s pet project.

So, Putin has basically two options: the one where he conforms to American crazy ideas of him, and thus justify total war against him because he’s “literally Hitler” and must be destroyed at all cost, or he can try to de-escalate, keep the war “boring”, work to slowly grind down the enemy’s resources, avoid critical “Pearl Harbour moments”, use economic forces to divorce America from its actual source of power, which is the fact that people elsewhere have to get dollars in order to buy energy to power their societies and America is the only one who can print them.

So, option one, Putin responds to American encroachments by turning their bases in Europe into a glass parking lot and crushes Ukraine like an empty can of soda, which would be perfectly easy if he had more than the current 5% of his forces doing something about it. As a result, the American hawks would say “see, we told you so, he’s dangerous, he’s literally Hitler, we need to destroy him”, and America uses a decapitation nuclear strike against Russian leadership, Perimetr issues a strategic response signal, half an hour later America is a glass parking lot, the rest of America launches everything they have at Russia and China, about 2000 nuclear warheads go off within a day and the northern hemisphere is about as fucked as that carousel in Pripyat facing the Chernobyl reactor.

Option two, Putin grinds the Ukrops down slowly, allows all his enemies to throw everything they have into the meat grinder, slowly deplete their resources, and simultaneously works on establishing ties with other countries and re-route the lines of power and control that used to go to the UK and America, and now increasingly to Russia and China, and the kind of war the Americans get to have is the one Asimov described in his Foundation series, where there’s no shooting, but lots of dishwashers, washing machines, computers and cars breaking down and leaking fluids, with no replacement parts and no new stuff, and there are lines for bread and gas, and money is worth increasingly less, until the populace had enough and there’s a popular uprising in the West, taking down the governments who are utterly undemocratic anyway.

Option two is the only one that gives a non-negligible chance of a survivable outcome, because I expect there to be a limited nuclear exchange, but the overall emotional power of the conflict is intentionally kept low, which frustrates the attempts to justify a total escalation. This is the Scylla vs. Charybdis stratagem: you need to pick between a sea whirlpool that will destroy your entire ship, or a monster on the shore that will eat some of your sailors. So far, Putin has made the choice of Odysseus, and chose Scylla who will eat a few of his men but hoped that the rest will live. The warning of this stratagem is that Odysseus in the end had the worst of both options – Scylla first ate a few of his men, and then Charybdis swallowed his ship and the rest of his men, and he himself barely survived.

The Americans (using local traitors and useful idiots) destroyed a Russian AWACS plane (Beriev A-50). It is not reported, but I would venture a guess that the plane destroyed was the A-50U variant, modernized with state-of-the-art electronics.

This is the second large mobile radar the Americans destroyed. The first one was on the cruiser “Moskva”, and I always suspected that they used diversion in order to blow up the ammunition on the ship. The strategic intersection of those two is the ability to monitor the Western airspace with high resolution. The reduction in nearby radar coverage is likely to degrade Russian early-warning abilities related to American stealth aircraft, which means a delay in response to an American strike, possibly using stealth aircraft to launch nuclear-tipped cruise missiles. This is the attack of the kind Americans would answer with a nuclear strike, were it performed against their strategic assets, especially since Russia seems to have only seven or nine of those modernized flying radars, depending on various reports.

This took place because Russia encouraged such attacks by not responding to the first few, and if they continue playing this game, it will get worse.

Edit: There were no confirmations of this, and Intel Slava Z channel claims it’s all fake news.

Edit2: Intel Slava Z reports that “In Belarus, a terrorist of the Ukrainian special services and his accomplices were detained, who are involved in an attempt to sabotage an A-50 aircraft at the Machulishchi airfield, – said President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko”, so I would say that something obviously happened; either 1) an attack was attempted and failed, or 2) it succeeded but the consequences were of such strategic importance that the Russians preferred to just swallow it, fly in another plane, take pictures and pretend nothing happened, rather than escallate this to the level appropriate for such a transgression.

Edit3: “The aircraft was transferred to Russian for maintenance and another Russian A-50 should be sent to Belarus.” (Southfront)
Yeah, second interpretation from edit2 confirmed.

There’s something I’ve been thinking about regarding nuclear weapons. You see, we’ve been exposed to the incredible amount of propaganda stating that the use of nuclear weapons is an “all or nothing” proposition, meaning that if nuclear weapons are used at all, it will eventually lead to a total, unlimited nuclear exchange destroying at least our civilization, if not all life.

This is not necessarily bad, because it probably contributed to the fact that nuclear weapons have not been used in war since Nagasaki. However, as we approach the point where nuclear weapons might very likely be used in war, it might become a double-edged sword of self-fulfilling prophecy.

Ask people what would happen if 500 nuclear weapons were to be detonated, and they would tell you it would be the end of the world, mostly due to radiation and “nuclear winter”. I’m not saying that people in the fireball and shockwave radius of those 500 nuclear weapons would not have a very bad day, but let’s look at this rationally. There were over 500 atmospheric nuclear tests, before they were banned. There were over 500 megatons of total yield of those weapons. Some, like Castle Bravo, were extremely “dirty”, producing record amounts of fallout. Not only did mankind did not go extinct, but the number of people in fact doubled since then. The total result of 500 nukes going off in the atmosphere was, basically, negligible, unless you happen to be one of those few unfortunate people near the Nevada, Semipalatinsk and Bikini test sites. For those few, it was a life altering (or ending) disaster, but considering how many nukes we detonated in a very brief time span, the total effects were incredibly close to zero. Also, I don’t seem to recall there having been a nuclear winter of any kind, the greatest by far event of this kind during my lifetime being the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo. No, there would be no nuclear winter, and you could blast 500 nukes, wait a few weeks for the dust to settle, and in most of the world the radiation would be low enough not to matter. How do I know? We’ve been there, we did that. Unlike the “scientists” who like to talk about those matters, I’m not guessing, I’m working with historical data. We detonated 500 nukes and, outside of the testing polygons, the total cumulative result was negligible. This means that the casualties from nuclear war would amount to those in the impact zones, and those who died due to infrastructure failure – electricity, heat, fuel, transportation, refrigeration, agriculture, basically they would die from poor hygiene, neglected medical issues, water-borne disease, starvation, exposure to elements, looting and similar things you can expect if big cities are struck by an earthquake of great proportions and there’s no outside help for months and years. It would be a great disaster; imagine a combination of the Asian tsunami and this Turkey-Syria earthquake, and multiply it by a hundred. That’s what total nuclear war would look like. However, the problem with the “suicide pact” of NATO is that it basically guarantees escalation to exactly that point if, for instance, several nuclear weapons mounted on cruise missiles get to be used in Europe, against the American bases that coordinate the war against Russia. What would actually happen in such a case remains to be seen, but I guess some rational people would try to limit the conflict to a dozen or so warheads deployed against military targets, because I don’t think a rational person would assume that use of nuclear weapons against strictly military targets in a big war between superpowers is something extreme, irrational and something that needs to be escalated to the point of complete destruction of civilization.

The second thing people get wrong is the concept of a “nuclear button”, where the presidents of superpowers give authorisation and hundreds of ICBMs launch simultaneously. Yes, a final phase of a nuclear war would look like this, but I would expect a dozen or so military installations to be hit by nuclear-tipped cruise missiles or ordinary bombs at that point. The nuclear response is so hardwired to full retaliation at the sight of ICBMs flying, I actually don’t expect ICBMs to be used in war; they are “for later”, if everybody goes bat-shit crazy. In an actual war, expect ordinary cruise missiles of the kind Russia routinely uses in Ukraine, the kind that can hit a single building from 1500 km distance, or nuclear-tipped hypersonics, that are immune to detection and interception. The difference between using conventional warheads and using nukes is that one nuke with 10kt yield is more effective than many, many conventional warheads. How much more? One Kalibr carries 500kg of explosive; this is 0.5 tons. 10kt means ten kilotons, or ten thousand tons. This means that one thermonuclear Kalibr with low yield has the same destructive power as 20000 conventional ones. There’s been talk about Kinzhals, Zircons and other hypersonic being a replacement for nukes because of sheer kinetic energy equalling around 7 tons of explosive. Well, a single low-yield nuke is equivalent to around 1400 hypersonics. A typical modern thermonuclear warhead with 100kt yield equals around 14000 hypersonic strikes. A big, obsolete thermonuclear warhead would be around 20 Mt. This is 2000 ordinary 10 kt nukes, and that’s the kind of stuff people scare children with, but that’s also the kind of stuff that’s unlikely to ever be used. What’s actually very likely to be used is the kind of stuff you put on a Zircon hypersonic and turn Ramstein base into a glass parking lot to let Americans know you’re done fucking around. That kind would produce very little effect outside the area of immediate impact, but the main effect would be complete panic and lunacy everywhere, because everybody is conditioned to believe that the world is about to end as soon as the first nuke is detonated anywhere. In reality, it could be 2-3 nukes in one strike, then panic, then a response within a few weeks, then panic, and then they either start talking to each other and stop posturing like they’re Churchill staring down Hitler, or they escalate and really bad stuff starts happening. Because, you see, if the impacts are reserved to the military installations alone, the total overall effect of that would be 99.9% psychological, on everybody but the soldiers killed, but they already participate in war and as far as I’m concerned, being killed by a nuke or being killed by an artillery shell is pretty much the same, except that in this case the American cowards piloting drones and plotting attacks from a safe distance would learn that there’s no such thing as a safe distance. In fact, there would be much less civilian casualties in a limited nuclear war, than in a conventional war of the kind we’re having right now, because I am absolutely sure that the first nukes would be targetted at very symbolic military targets, of the kind absolutely everybody would agree are legitimate, and everybody there got what they had coming. For instance, Ramstein base, or a similar one in Poland, or Deveselu installation in Romania, or Aviano base in Italy, or something similar in Britain, or American aircraft carriers, they are all guilty as sin – those are the bastards who bully other countries into submission just because they can. It’s not like Hiroshima or Nagasaki, where civilians were deliberately hit to showcase the weapon to Stalin. The idea people have, that somehow Putin would use Sarmat missiles, that’s just because they are absolutely clueless. Sarmat and Yars is what you use to turn America into a glass parking lot, and that’s no longer war, it’s retaliatory extermination of the enemy. The actual weapon of war used to compel the enemy to stop fucking with you permanently is a nuclear-tipped cruise missile, and they would all be targetted at the American bases, not at the poor bastards in Ukraine who are stupid and villainous enough to fight for them.