As of this moment the trajectory in the Russo-Ukraine War is towards peace – mostly because both nations have failed in their desires. Ukraine wanted to get the Russians all the way out, the Russians wanted to get all the way in – as it turns out, neither are capable of achieving these goals and so a peace of exhaustion is on the horizon. Will Trump be able to broker it? I hope so. We’ll see how sticky both sides get on this…but at the back of the mind for both Putin and Zelenskyy is the fear of sudden and total collapse. That is, their respective armies just fall apart and thus allow the other side to impose it’s will – this is a greater fear for Ukraine than for Russia but it is a distinct possibility for both. Getting out now allows both men to have at least some reserve military power to retain control.
We did learn, once again, the power of a well-knit defense. There is a mental attitude out there that the tank and airplane of WWII cancelled the cannon and trench of WWI – nope, never happened. Blitzkrieg only works when it enters a void – against a tight defense it becomes just a Somme with tanks. First Battle El Alamein, Kursk, Caen and Seelow Heights proved again and again that even a vastly outnumbered defense if well situated and competently commanded can hold off the enemy for a long while and only retreat, if necessary, after extracting a usurious blood price. The use of drones has just added to defensive depth and flexibility – and I do hope our military is paying attention and trying to figure out the best way forward given what we’ve learned.
We also learned, again, that Russia is a quantité négligeable on the world stage. Twice now Russia has appeared to loom up all-powerful: 1815 and 1945. But in both instances Russia only triumphed (over Napoleon and Hitler) because others drained the enemy who also made a whole series of stupid mistakes. Someone on X noted that Russia is a mud-pie with a crown and there is a great deal of truth to this. The Winter Palace is magnificent…but the Russian army invaded Ukraine without properly maintained vehicles and so bogged down within days of the start. Think about that: you’re a Russian officer in command of Motor Rifle Brigade and you know that next week you and your men are heading into Ukraine…and you didn’t even make sure your vehicle tires were in good shape! Think of the level of lazy incompetence this required! And then you remember Russia’s Second Army in World War One…just blindly sent into East Prussia and wiped out by a smaller German force with nobody on the Russian side even knowing that a battle was going on until it was all over. A century on. Multiple total changes in Russian government…and the tip of the spear still gets broken because the Russian organism can’t plan or prepare.
I don’t know what makes the Russians what they are but they are brutally incompetent. Unfortunately, they are also just strong enough to prevent a Ukrainian victory so we’ll have to cut a deal with them…and then try to woo them away from China because grand strategy requires at least a neutral Russia if we ever tangle with China. Foreign policy: its just a lousy thing.
Trump wants to be the Peace President – part of this is simply humanity but the other part of it is that he knows America needs a period of peace and prosperity. We need to rebuild our manufacturing, rebuild our shipbuilding capacity, rebuild our agriculture, rebuild our labor force…we need to grow out of debt and finally start paying it off. We need to revive a general sense of American exceptionalism and patriotism. Of course, we also need God – but Trump knows he can’t make us go to God…but he also knows that the most successful people in a revived America will be those who believe in God. It is time to wind all this Endless War up…this Endless War which started in August of 1914 must finally be brought to a conclusion. End Ukraine. Gaza. Yemen. Sudan…these and a score of other simmering conflicts have to end. Even if doing so requires us to knock some heads together (Trump having a B-2 Bomber fly over Putin was the clearest message possible that intransigence isn’t a good idea: basically, our attack on Iran just showed the world that you only have your most valuable strategic assets as long as we allow you to).
What will the Ruling Class do with peace? Don’t give the least damn. Christopher Steele was out on X – with locked replies, of course – condemning Trump’s meeting with Putin…and it just disgusted me that he’s living well instead of in a van down by the river. The world is out of kilter – made so by people like Steele who never would have risen above dustman level in any sane society. Stupid liars have run things into the ground for too long…and that is also why Trump wants peace: it’ll make the stupid liars unemployed…or at least finally get a real job.
Blogs For Victory 
Democrats never want solutions, they want ongoing problems and perpetual state f crises they can use to demand ‘solutions’ which don’t solve anything but channeling more money somewhere.
I’m not even sure any longer they know what they want – other than “not MAGA”. With “MAGA” being a catch-all for anything they just don’t like. It is sort of like “saving our Democracy” means whatever it needs to mean at the moment…with the current moment being they’re actually all pouty faced because the Army won’t conduct a coup against Trump. They are just spoiled children in the largest sense…but dead certain that they’re right, and we should be dead. The good news is that they’re dying out – literally killing themselves off via abortion and assisted suicide (I mean, sure, that isn’t actual good news…but there is a sense of relief knowing that in 2125 they simply won’t be around). And Trump de-funding them will wind them down…we’ve already seen that the protests grow more pathetic all the time…they just don’t have the money to hire out thugs so they’re stuck with upper class and increasingly elderly white people…1960’s relics.
First, I do see a difference between rank and file Democrats, the people we work with and live near and so on, and the upper echelon of the Left which is where the plotting and conniving are generated.
I have increasingly become convinced that there is an actual decision at that upper level to seek out the personality disordered, recruit them, validate their mental and emotional disorders and then send them out as cannon fodder to make noise end be disruptive. If you can find seething general rage and then focus it on a designated target, you can take advantage of it, which I think accounts for the more physically volatile “protesters” like the No Oil people.
The Left is brilliant at discerning free-floating anger, resentment, hostility, even just frustration, and then organizing it and focusing it on political targets. But it all comes down to Identity Politics—in this case to defining identity. The Left sets up an Identity Profile and then the belief systems necessary to qualify.
But their whole schtick boils down to the “I’m More ______ Than You” paradigm and it’s all about feeling “more” than others. More intelligent, more moral, more dedicated to causes, etc. And as long as the Left can keep these people focused outward, on the groups they need to feel “more” than, they aren’t going to spend any time analyzing the facts behind their emotions.
As long as the emotional temperature can be kept high enough no Jew is going to think “How does being on the Left show that I am smarter than other people when I am supporting a system that has not only never succeeded but has failed spectacularly and caused the deaths hundreds of millions and has been dedicated to destroying me and my entire heritage?” No screeching harpy celebrating her abortion is going to realize that instead of enabling and empowering women she is advocating for the deaths of millions of little girls while stripping womanhood of its inherent dignity and reducing women to mere pump-and-dump vessels of sexual availability for men. No programmed robotic NO OIL vandal is going to consider the insanity of demanding something not only impossible but destructive, much less that it is a lot more about his resentment of people who have more than he has than it is about “saving the earth”.
So the Left is using its tactics to destabilize our society by taking advantage of the emotional needs of the unstable and using them to create conflict and chaos.
the left thrives on unearned moral superiority.
The Left DEPENDS on unearned moral superiority, or the illusion therof
“We don’t want Trump because he is a dictator. We want to go back having a man sign a paper telling us we have to submit to injecting an experimental drug to have any rights. We look back with nostalgia on these good old days.”
I saw this and immediately thought of the Lefties who have abandoned this blog since last November. Casper is gone, Fielding is gone, Lynne is gone, and Rocks is, for all practical purposes, gone.
Gonna be a LONG 3-1/2 years for them, especially if the mid-terms turn out the way it looks. They’re going to have to convince millions of Americans to vote against their own self-interests on a half dozen different metrics to have any chance of gaining ground a year from November. I’m trying to have some empathy for them, but I just can’t seem to come up with any.
And then there’s this:
ROFL – not even started! All these cases Dems have filed are doing to get tossed over the next 12 months and then Trump will be able to fully exercise the powers of the Executive without even a delay.
I don’t know what makes the Russians what they are but they are brutally incompetent
I wonder if centuries of absolute tyranny and its accompanying characteristics have anything to do with this. I see two elements that might be at play.
One is the lack of ability to advance on merit. In the systems of Russia, from the czars to the Soviets, there was never an internal mechanism for rewarding initiative or accomplishment. In the feudal system there was no way to advance, and under Communism excellence was punished, if not by the government then by the workers who did not want the standards of production raised because then they would be expected to meet those standards. Everything about the way this nation was governed was designed to make productivity and improvement either unrewarding or dangerous.
A population born and trained to have innovation and productivity either unrewarded or punished is going to have a hard time adapting to a world where independence and personal responsibility are important and where innovation and initiative and excellence are rewarded.
The other thing that might be considered is that the very nature of Communism and its total control on all means of production meant a huge bureaucracy, designed on one hand to exert control over every aspect of a process and on the other to make sure that blame for failure could not be assigned to any one person or department. A rigid and inflexible system dependent on spreading authority and therefore accountability as thinly as possible over as many departments as possible, ensures that progress is hampered.
The primary metric in America that stands in the way of socialism ever taking hold here is that the majority of second generation + Americans have never been oppressed, which speaks well for our society and our system of government. The Left’s attempts at class warfare have fallen flat, and the switch to race warfare is in the process of falling flat as millions of black men supported Trump last November. One would think that, as we’re witnessing the rebirth of America, millions of non-ideological Democrats would be rethinking what kind of life they want as well as what kind of life they want to leave for their children.
James McNeill Whistler – who famously painted his mother! – spent some time as a youth in St Petersburg as his father had been hired by Czar Nicholas I to design a railroad from Moscow to St Petersburg…and his father noted that the way Russia operated – technically all power residing in the Czar, but he couldn’t be everywhere at once – produced official inertia in most (they wouldn’t move without an explicit order) and insanely aggressive effort in a small minority (that is, some people wanted to get noticed by the Czar and so would bend every rule and use up every person below them to get that notice). And we can blame the Czar but I’ll blame the people…it isn’t like nobody had ever progressively extracted concessions from the Crown in an organic political development. Russia never even made a move that way – and when the Czarist system started to show its limitations in the mid-19th century, the Russians who wanted change didn’t opt for slow, organic change but demanded everything all at once – complete revolutionary overthrow of the entire system. Because those who wanted change didn’t want to help Russia, but to become a new Czar (as Lenin and, later, Stalin very much did). It is, in a sense, like the Russians have never been Russian…just a collection of people trying to dodge the official rules or corrupt them to their own purposes. You think about Peter the Great and as you go through his life and efforts you realize that his motivating factor was hatred of Russia and Russians. He wasn’t trying to improve the lives of Russians…he just wanted those thick headed peasants and nobles to do as they were told so he could cut a great figure on the world stage. It is bizarre how they are so much all or nothing. To be fair, a few Russians – high and low – have risen to a sense of genuine Russian patriotism but they were swiftly ground up by the great mass who just wanted to work an angle.