I don't believe this was ever about taking Ukraine with the Russian military. I believe this is about destroying Ukraine and squeezing Europe's energy-dependent balls until the EU cracks under the economic pressure caused by the sanctions. This is already happening with Germany whimpering to Daddy Vladdy for all that precious, precious oil and gas. "Oh, we gave Zelensky a billion euros!"; yeah, and you gave Putin 25x that in oil/gas purchases.

The mealy-mouthing and dissembling has already begun, most shamefully from the New York Times, who is calling for Ukraine to make "hard choices". "This isn't capitulation" -- fuck you NYT, yes it is.

I had honest hopes that the western powers would show some spine and resolve, but as soon at their economies started to feel a little pain, the number of fucks given for Ukrainian lives went to zero. Russian is going to rape and murder its way from Odessa to the Belarus border until the western powers figure out some way to make it all Zelensky's fault or force him to cede massive amounts of Ukrainian territory before any real economic pain felt.

The worst part is that Finland and Sweden are going to be granted NATO membership, but Ukraine still is denied. Why are these two the hills NATO is willing to die on and Ukraine not? If NATO isn't willing to risk nuclear war over Ukraine, what happens when the tip of a single Russian boot touches Finnish soil? What happens when Finland then calls for Article 5 and the rest of NATO suddenly realizes shit just got real? What happens when it's time to shit or get off the pot; put up or shut up? Either NATO charges into the teeth of a potential nuclear war, or NATO is shown to be a paper tiger. If someone sees a middle ground, I'm interested in hearing it.

(Incidentally, NATO's Article 5 is pretty porous. A-5 doesn't say every NATO nation commits whatever forces are deemed necessary by the whole to defend against an aggressor. Instead, it says that in the event of A-5 coming into play, each member will take "such action as [the member state] deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area."

Notice the whole 'each member' and 'deems necessary'? Yeah, to quote a popular movie 'I don't think this mutual defense pact means what you think it does'.)

The above clip seems like a lot, but is much more reasonable sounding when you listen to the full podcast, and understand the history and where Stone gets his ideas from. Anyway i found the full episode very interesting. Worth the listen if you have the time.


2:54 - Nuclear power
15:52 - Russia and US relations
21:07 - JFK and the Cold War
26:24 - Interviewing Putin
50:02 - Invasion of Ukraine
59:20 - Why Putin invaded Ukraine
1:13:44 - Propaganda
1:21:02 - Interviewing Putin in 2022
1:28:17 - Nuclear war
1:34:28 - Advice on interviewing
1:38:09 - Interviewing Hitler
1:41:30 - Putin interview language barrier

We can still steer between the different possible future realities.
Like that large scale famine or water shortage is preferable to nuclear war or global deadly disease outbreak. Which will it be, food or water? Reality will get more unpleasant before it has a chance to improve. Can we outrun the population and ecosystem gun with science? Possibly. Problem is society and morals cant keep up.

We have resources to do ANYTHING. Send people to Mars. Make water out of thin air and grow tomatoes in the desert. The only thing in the way are nation states and their institutions, and human instincts. The only thing that keeps those in check is culture and morals. There is no such thing as international law unless you are willing to go to all out war to enforce it (not possible since WW2).

And the "leader of the free world" is busy building a wall around his office.

So we probably need to be deceived or else we would all be hysterical without antidepressants.

Still a hysterical voice is not the voice of reality for me.

All these except nuclear war are happening now, and effecting first world countries too.
Food shortages, check.
Super bugs, check.
Climate change, check checkity check.
Massive migrations due to effects of climate change, double check.
Water shortages, check....ask a Californian.
Wealth inequality causing civil unrest, check.

Because we aren't living in Bartertown yet is no excuse to ignore reality. These things are currently happening around the globe, in third AND first world nations.
Here's one small example getting very little airtime....
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/may/10/five-pacific-islands-lost-rising-seas-climate-change

1. Even though I definitively know the world is beyond fucked at this point, I still think the scientists are not doing themselves any favours by making these "probably" scenarios rather than almost definite ones. As said, even though in some ways I'm looking forward to when the shit starts hitting the fan, I've lost faith in knowing when it'll actually start happening. It seems like every other week I'm told that "soon it'll really start to go all to shit". And it never really does, especially for 1st world countries.

2. Great Filter, Humanity. Humanity, Great Filter. Nice to meet you.

3. I'm beginning to want to start a pot of which terrible thing will happen first to 1st world countries (sadly, the beginning will be poor countries getting fucked and 1st world countries complaining that it now costs $30 for a single banana). Super bugs and catastrophic pandemics (maybe measles!)? Climate change? Nuclear war? Massive migrations of refugees who can't live where they are due to climate change or war? Water shortages? Wealth inequality that will implode on itself? There are so many terrible things on the precipice of happening that I don't even know what I'd bet on, honestly.

The YouTube comments on this video are enough to make you wish there was a nuclear war that wiped out everyone.

The simple point is that as soon as we realized the capability of the Zero we easily and quickly designed a plane(s) capable of combating it.

The Yak-3 didn't enter the war until 1944, at which point the war had massively turned in Western Theatre. For the bulk of the conflict, they were using the Yak-1.

The Mig 25 and Mig 31 are both interceptors, they are designed to fire from distance and evade. The Su 35 is designed for Air Superiority. We have held the edge in our capabilities for years compared to them.

Every expert I know of is skeptical of China's claimed Railgun weapon. As to why they would bother mounting it and making claims, why not? It is brinkmanship, making us think they have more capabilities than they do.

The laser rifle is a crowd deterrent weapon. It would serve almost no purpose in infantry combat because it cannot kill. Yes, it can burn things and cause pain, but that is all. Again, this was claimed to be far more effective than experts think during our diplomatic arguments over China's use of blinding lasers on aircraft. We have no hard evidence of it's capability.

Yes, Russia could sell such a missile to our enemies versus using it directly against us. The problem is that as soon as they do so, the genie is out of the bottle. It will be reverse engineered quickly and could be USED AGAINST THEM. No country gives or sells away it's absolute top level weaponry except to it's most trusted allies. Allies which, for all intents and purposes, know that using such a weapon against another nation state risks full out retaliation against not only them but the country that sold it to them.

Our carriers are excellent mobile platforms, but they are not our only way of mounting air strikes. If we were somehow in a conventional war situation, we could easily fly over and base our aircraft in allied countries for combat. Most of our nuclear capable aircraft are not carrier launched anyway. Even if somehow all of our carriers were taken out and somehow our SAC bombers were destroyed as well, we would still have more than enough land launched and submarine launched nuclear warheads to easily blanket our enemies.

My points remain:

1. It is in the greatest interest of our enemies to boast about weapon capabilities even if they are not effective yet.

2. Most well regarded experts consider many of these weapons to either be still in the research stage, early production stage (IE not available for years), or they are wildly over hyped.

3. There is no logical reason for our enemies to use these weapons or proliferate them to their closest allies unless the weapons can prevent a nuclear response. Merely mentioning a weapon that would have such a capability creates a situation that could lead to nuclear war, like SDI did. I don't know if you recall, but I do clearly, how massively freaked out the Soviets got over our SDI claims. For two years they started threatening nuclear war as being inevitable if we continued on the path we were, all the while aggressively trying to destabilize our relations with our allies. 1983 to 1985 was pretty fucking tense, not Cuban missile crisis level maybe, but damn scary. Putin has acted similarly over our attempts to set up a missile barrier in former satellite states of Russia, although we still haven't got to the SHTF level of the early 80's.

A big part of the Zero's reputation came from racking up kills in China against a lot of second-rate planes with poorly-trained pilots. After all, there was a reason that the Republic of China hired the American Volunteer Group to help out during the Second Sino-Japanese War – Chinese pilots had a hard time cutting it.

The Wildcat was deficient in many ways versus the Zero, but it still had superior firepower via ammo loadout. The Zero carried very few 20mm rounds, most of it's ammo was 7.7mm. There are records of Japanese pilots unloading all their 7.7mm ammo on a Wildcat and it was still flyable. On the flip side, the Wildcat had an ample supply of .50 cal.

Stanley "Swede" Vejtasa was able to score seven kills against Japanese planes in one day with a Wildcat.

Yes, the discovery of the Akutan Zero helped the United States beat this plane. But MilitaryFactory.com notes that the Hellcat's first flight was on June 26, 1942 – three weeks after the raid on Dutch Harbor that lead to the fateful crash-landing of the Mitsubishi A6M flown by Tadayoshi Koga.

Marine Captain Kenneth Walsh described how he knew to roll to the right at high speed to lose a Zero on his tail. Walsh would end World War II with 17 kills. The Zero also had trouble in dives, thanks to a bad carburetor.

We were behind in technology for many reasons, but once the Hellcat started replacing the Wildcat, the Japanese Air Superiority was over. Even if they had maintained a lead in technology, as Russia showed in WW2, quantity has a quality all of it's own. We were always going to be able to field more pilots and planes than Japan would be able to.

As far as Soviet rockets, once we were stunned by the launch of Sputnik, we kicked into high gear. You can say what you will of reliability, consistency, and dependability, but exactly how many manned Soviet missions landed on the moon and returned? Other than Buran, which was almost a copy of our Space Shuttle, how many shuttles did the USSR field?

The Soviets did build some things that were very sophisticated and were, for a while, better than what we could field. The Mig-31 is a great example. We briefly lagged behind but have a much superior air capability now. The only advantages the Mig and Sukhoi have is speed, they can fire all their missiles and flee. If they are engaged however, they will lose if pilots are equally skilled.

As @newtboy has said, I am sure that Russia and China are working on military advancements, but the technology simply doesn't exist to make a Hypersonic missile possible at this point.

China is fielding a man portable rifle that can inflict pain, not kill, and there is no hard evidence that it works.

There is no proof that the Chinese have figured out the technology for an operational rail gun on land, let alone the sea. We also have created successful railguns, the problem is POWERING them repeatedly, especially onboard a ship. If they figured out a power source that will pull it off, then it is possible, but there is no concrete proof other than a photo of a weapon attached to a ship. Our experts are guessing they might have it functional by 2025, might...

China has shown that long range QEEC is possible. It has been around but they created the first one capable of doing it from space. The problem is, they had to jury rig it. Photons, or light, can only go through about 100 kilometers of optic fiber before getting too dim to reliably carry data. As a result, the signal needs to be relayed by a node, which decrypts and re-encrypts the data before passing it on. This process makes the nodes susceptible to hacking. There are 32 of these nodes for the Beijing-Shanghai quantum link alone.

The main issue with warfare today is that it really doesn't matter unless the battle is between one of the big 3. Which means that ANY action could provoke Nuclear conflict. Is Russia going to hypersonic missile one of our carriers without Nukes become an option on the table as a retaliation? Is China going to railgun a ship and risk nuclear war?

Hell no, no more than we would expect to blow up some major Russian or Chinese piece of military hardware without severe escalation! Which means we can create all the technological terrors we like, because we WON'T use them unless they somehow provide us a defense against nuclear annihilation.

So just like China and Russia steal stuff from us to build military hardware to counter ours, if they create something that is significantly better, we will began trying to duplicate it. The only thing which would screw this system to hell is if one of us actually did begin developing a successful counter measure to nukes. If that happens, both of the other nations are quite likely to threaten IMMEDIATE thermonuclear war to prevent that country from developing enough of the counter measures to break the tie.

Heh I can understand why you think so. No I was talking Truman. Granted he wasn't as completely unaware as Trump was when he was elected. But he'd only served in the senate for two years before he was pushed in as VP. Note that the VP selection process was really different even though it was only ~70 years ago.

Once he got selected he became president that same year. Instead of working along Roosevelt's post-war plan and he refused to be a part of the grand alliance (meetings between the leaders of the big 3 powers that came out of that war).

Instead he started threatening the USSR with nuclear war if they worked toward developing nuclear weapons or expanded their territory... the so called Truman Doctrine.

He also played a fairly big roll in starting the whole middle eastern mess we're still dealing with to this day. Though that obviously goes back to the political failures after the Great War.

Guy was a dumb-ass who by reports of those around him didn't know WTF he was doing half the time.

He took one tiny step towards a good thing, and gave up quite a lot of leverage to take that tentative step. IF it eventually leads to some binding meaningful agreement, kudos to him. It's insanely early to be patting any backs yet, though, except perhaps Kim's back, he did amazingly well for his country already.
It's not straw grasping, it's reality, there's no agreement yet, only a stated willingness to discuss one. That's only a good thing if it's successful, certainly not good if it ends with more concessions from us but nothing from NK, and I think that's what many people expect. Don't expect any kudos for Trump until the process bears tangible fruit that benefits us.

Edit: you said he made peace, but there is no peace agreement and we are still technically at war, then you said he got nuclear war off the table, but that's simply not in any way true. Who's grasping?

Well I'd say nuclear war is off the table so that's a good start. Again, credit where it's due.

Because Libya and Syria are the same situation as North Korea, and put us on the brink of nuclear war. Fantastic logic there. While we're on it, why not bring up Iraq and Afghanistan? Clearly Bush also wanted to nuke NK.

Her 'brains' would have left her listening to the hawks as she always does and taking us ever closer to the brink of nuclear war.

Fitting, since the real threat of nuclear war looms again.

I notice this time the Kaiju is bigger and threatens the whole world.