Comments by "LRRPFco52" (@LRRPFco52) on "Zeihan on Geopolitics"
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@101wormwood I’ve lived all over the US, from CA to Maine, GA to WA, VA, NC, CO, and UT. Used to do a lot of investigative work 6 days a week mainly on medical fraud claims as well. I have multiple family members in the healthcare industry both in hospitals and nursing homes.
You might find this surprising, but most Americans don’t take the bus or public transportation. So your anecdotes in Omaha don’t represent a broad perspective of the US. I suggest taking a course in statistics, probability, and analysis. It will help you avoid forming invalid ideas about reality. I would also recommend a course in critical thinking, where you learn to avoid ad hominem attacks because of the weakness of your arguments. It will help you out a lot.
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@Dafnessific Trump is infinitely more experienced than former Presidents though when it comes to negotiating, because of decades of business experience.
The closest that could have come to that was Jimmy Carter, but there are limitations to peanut farming talks, though still superior to career politicians who live in a very artificial reality. Carter was also a nuke submarine officer with unparalleled engineering knowledge, that didn't seem to translate well because he kept quiet about certain defense matters like ATB/B-2.
Trump is the only President who brought in multiple black leader panels to implement inner city programs for the fatherless, negotiated more Middle East peace deals than the prior 11 Presidents combined, and didn't start any new wars.
Trump also stopped the insane rate of drug costs by starting a price war between pharmaceutical companies, authorizing 900-1000 generic drugs each through HHS. Pfizer, Merck, GSK, etc. hated that, and they control all the corporate media along with 20 other biggest industries.
The cult of personality/populism shouldn't ignore the practical moves Trump made that benefitted the US.
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@Rake3577 Russia is not even remotely close to being richest in resources either. Russia has no connected river network and is frozen almost year-round due to its latitude and relatively land-locked position. Nobody cares about Russia's resources other than maybe China and Arabs who rely on Russian grain for their subsidized bread industries.
The US is the richest Nation in resources, connected river networks, largest arable farmland, sea ports, mountains, the inter-coastal waterways, vast tributaries on the Eastern Seaboard and Deep South, with vast forests, minerals, and multifaceted industries that have been built on this natural infrastructure.
If US geography was taught in Russia, Russians would see that the US has no interest in Russian resources.
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Legacy core nations of NATO began demilitarizing while Eastern Europeans came scrambling and begging to join while they had a chance.
Russia was in near free-fall in the 1990s. The only things keeping their defense production sector open were FMS orders from India, China, and some smaller customers. Most of the Russian defense programs in theftelopment of the late 1980s almost died.
KGB senior Generals took over Russia's oil, NG, telecom, and mining industries under Yeltsin's absentee Kremlin.
They realized they needed new leadership after the failure of the 1st Chechen War of 1994-1995, so they grabbed some former KGB and intelligentsia guys and made them Deputy Prime Ministers under drunken Yeltsin.
One of the 3 Deputy PMs was tasked with kicking the Chechens on the teeth, launching the 2nd Chechen War in 1999 with a scorched-earth policy that leveled Grozny, and filled mass graves with civilians using Su-24 & Su-25 air strikes.
Midway into the 2nd Chechen War, on Dec 31, 1999, Yeltsin went on Russian TV and said, "And now, it is time for me to retire. And why should we have elections when we already know who we all would vote for? So now, Deputy Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is your new President. Dasvidanya."
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@geneoh5048 2 years living in a foreign country on their economy, using their transportation, buying your food from their markets, organizing and planning your calendar with locals, scheduling meetings with locals, striking up conversations with people....yeah, you learn to live, eat, speak, think, and breathe in that language.
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@StephenGillie So pronunciation of the city names is what you gathered from this, rather than the actual historical implications and effects on the world moving forward? This is an example of public-schooling and modern universities failing to produce a quality student who understands how to critically think. You need to take a critical thinking course, a formal one. Learn about Logic, Relevance, Significance, Completeness, Precision, Breadth, Depth, Accuracy, and Fairness. Right now, you’re demonstrating to everyone that you don’t have the mental acuity to even approach the important aspects of this subject, and are trying to compensate with an obscure canard that has zero relevance to the meat of the material.
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@asdasdasddgdgdfgdg This is a common misunderstanding of STRATFOR, and now Peter Zeihan's analyses. They are not based on nativist patriotism, especially since George Friedman immigrated to the US from Hungary.
The favorable outlook for the US is dispassionately based on:
1. Geography: better than any nation on earth
2. Climate: temperate zone with long, warm spring-summer-fall seasons, relatively mild winters
3. Population and demographics, positive immigration flow
4. Economy: world's largest economy without peer, mostly driven by domestic consumption, not exports. Even with that so, US is still the 2nd largest exporter in the world, providing technologies and services that other nations can't.
5. Military. The US military is without peer, while two great oceans defend it from any meaningful foreign attacks.
These are just cold, hard facts, not "being bullish" on America. America is the bull that determines markets, trade, energy, technology, and alliances.
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When we passed through Copenhagen in 2005 and stopped at a mall, I felt like I was in Kuwait City or Riyadh, not Scandinavia.
Helsinki has been totally transformed with immigrants from Somalia, North Africa, and Sub-Saharan Africa.
Abdul procreates with his sister, aunts, and cousins cranking out babies like rabbits, so they can get government money for each child, social services-funded apartments, strollers, baby starter packs, monthly stipends, free public transportation, and benefits with no work.
The French people are more openly-vocal against these policies than most. They say things you aren't allowed to say in the US because the French have a very devout sense of national pride and dostinct culture rooted in their history, language, art, food, and geography.
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@jascu4251 Interesting that you mention organized crime. In the late 1800s US, syreet gangs worked for the local politicians doing electioneering, intimidation, and whatever it took to keep their politician bosses in office. In exchange, they were given practical immunity to loanshark, run betting schemes, racketeering, and prostitution by the police chiefs.
When Congress saw fit to finally pass Prohibition in 1919 after giving themselves a bigger revenue stream with Federal Income Tax in 1913, they handed all the revenue from alcohol to those organized gangs.
Taxes and excises on alcohol accounted for billions in then-year dollars, so you can calculate retail sales in the tens of billions.
The legacy WASP and Irish gangs of the late 1800s then had to contend with the newer Italian, Sicilian, Russian Jews, and Slav gangs as they were all drowning in billions of cash that had to be laundered.
Meyer Lansky suggested they all work together as syndicates and abandon violence to promote financial advancement.
They flipped the tables during the 1920s on their political bosses by buying Congressmen, Judges, Police Chiefs, Sheriffs, city councils, and Senators, while financing Presidential campaigns even when we look at FDR-forward.
They legitimized and took over the government. Peter references this when interviewers ask about the cartel problem.
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@Leto2ndAtreides One of my contacts was in the Russian foreign ministry when Putin came into power in 2000. He said that with the new leadership, Russia would be taking back Kazakhstan, Dagestan, Chechnya, South Ossetia, Georgia, Ukraine, Moldova, Romania, Bulgaria, Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland “because those are historic Russian territories anyway”. That’s literally the viewpoint inside the Russian foreign ministry under Putin. So far:
Kazakhstan is under puppet rule, with repressions of uprisings where blood has flowed in the streets like a river.
They took South Ossetia/Georgia in 2008 (when I was in Estonia).
They occupy Chechnya
When Ukraine threw out Yanukovych in 2014 (4 months of Euromaiden), Russia invaded Luhansk and Donetsk, then annexed Crimea.
Once Biden got into office, the door was open for Putin to invade Ukraine with a quick special military action, coordinated with Biden evacuating Zelensky.
Zelensky not going along with the plan threw a wrench in everything, which bought Moldova, Poland, Romania, the Baltics, and Finland another 3-7 years.
Notice how Biden killed Keystone XL pipeline as priority #1 when he took office? That was to raise oil prices back to over $100/BBL for Russia, which is exactly what happened. Biden has been on Soviet payroll since 1972, when they paid for his hopeless Senate campaign in Delaware.
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@butterflies655 My first trip to Finland was in 1979, as my mom is from there and we went to visit relatives and friends. We lived in West Germany from 1980-1982, and travelled all over Europe.
I was also an exchange student in Japan, and traveled to Mexico several times since the 1970s. Joined the military and was stationed all over the US, South Korea, and Middle East. Went to Panama as well.
Lived in Finland from 2005-2006, then went 2-4x per year from 2007-2016. Have relatives in Sweden, have been to Estonia 12 times, lived in Russland, and total country count is 30.
Finland used to have far less immigrants than most places in Europe, but they have let more in over the past 20 years to where many places in Helsinki are unrecognizable and run-down.
Denmark made me think I was back in the Middle East when we rolled through there in 2005. Copenhagen was filled with Middle Eastern immigrants in the malls during the day. It was crazy.
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@somethingelse9535 The US contributions to Ukraine are sunk costs in 22-36yr-old weapons that were scheduled for de-mil, long removed from the modern munitions feed into Active, Reserves, or National Guard units.
We're talking about 1980s-1990s ATACMs, HIMARS, TOWs, Javelins, Patriots, M2A2 Bradleys, etc.
We spent billions on them in the 1980s-1990s, and then are left with the burden of de-militarizing those systems, which is extremely expensive.
Loading them up onto transports is exponentially cheaper and removes a significant burden DoD has to deal with every year.
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@saltmerchant749 Every nation that signed on to the EU surrendered certain elements of their sovereignty. One of the main examples of this was immigration. Most nations in the EU also adopted the Euro as their currency. The Euro is actually the German Deutsche Mark as the bench currency, just renamed and expanded to the Eurozone.
The UK never saw itself going to the Euro, because GBP has always been one of the strongest currencies on the globe.
Another problem I saw in Europe, having lived there on and off since the 1970s, was the EU parliament overriding national parliaments not only on immigration, but food, transportation, and other domestic affairs.
In Finland, there was pushback with the bent cucumber rule, for example. They also banned Finns from their normal dairy box distribution in rural areas because German tourists thought it was free meals for them, and they ate the wax off the cheese.
Silly things the EU Parliament has no business even knowi g about, let alone legislating. But these busy-body feminists see govt as the solution to everything, and keep passing stupid law after law.
UK was smart to get out.
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I was an exchange student in Japan, after my family hosted many Japanese exchange students in our homes in the US. The geography and topography definitely has created a series of practically-isolated urban states, only recently connected by a rail network in history.
Population density acts as a barrier to much travel, so there are identities associated with the different prefectures. I also noticed racial variances, poverty, and brothels that I was not expecting to see.
You could ride the bullet train to go from one city to another, but people tended to stay close to where they're from.
There is no way to compare the culture, geography, demographics, and infrastructure with anything I've seen in the US, and I've been to 48 of the 50 States, lived in 8 across distant regions (SW, NE, Mountain West, Deep South, PNW).
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@mrd-fu9dh In his defense, he's been traveling to various countries for decades for white papers, briefings, and guest speaking gigs. It has been like that since STRATFOR in the early 2000s using Friedman's methods of going away from the capitols into the distant areas and making observations about whether people are at work or not, how much they eat for lunch, how long the lunches are, the condition of people's shoes, men vs women at lunch, ages, and other economic indicators. This is done in addition to an extensive geographic, demographic, industrial, infrastructure, and economic analysis using multiple reliable sources.
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@GenovaYork951 None of those countries are even close to being Central Europe. If Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Slovenia are Eastern Europe, then Belorussia, Ukraine, and Russia certainly aren’t Central Europe. In Russia, they teach geography differently saying there is no such thing as a separate Europe and Asia, but Eurasia.
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@YAMAHA1 I’ve lived in Moscow and have been all over Western Europe. You’re smoking crack if you think Moscow is even remotely-comparable. Infrastructure, services, corruption, driving habits, thievery, and black market functionality make Moscow a totally-opposite metro area compared to most of Europe. Just basic access to clean water in the Khrushchev-era apartments in Moscow is an issue. We had to resupply people with clean water from countryside wells, filled in large water bottles and tied together with plastic grocery bags so you could haul 2x as many of them up the stairs. The water in the faucets in many apartment complexes in Moscow looks like a mix of urine, excrement, and rust. This is not even remotely the case in Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Netherlands, or the UK. Moscow is a place time forgot, very old and decrepit. The only new things about it came from Germany and the West, which are mere sprinkles of technology and products that would never have emerged from Russia in a hundred years, left to its own devices.
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Germany has gone through several major waves of immigration post-WWII. Germany lost so many prime age males during the war, that workers had to be imported from all over to rebuild under the Marshall Plan. Turks, Greeks, Romanians, Italians, Portuguese, Moroccans, Tunisians, and Yugoslavians came in waves from 1955-1968. Those were supposed to be temporary work permits for 2 years, but companies kept renewing the permits.
Towards the end of the Cold War, hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans who had been displaced throughout the Soviet Union returned to Germany. Then came more Yugoslavian refugees from the 1990s ethnic hostilities.
Then came over 1 million Syrians, Afghans, Iraqis, Kurds, etc. from the Middle East in the 20teens.
Now we have the mass immigration of Ukrainians into Germany since Feb 2022, so Germany will be even more of an immigration welfare economy with millions demanding free rent for apartments, while taking time to learn German and minimal labor force participation. This is happening at a time when older Germans are retiring, many of them with only 1 child born between the years 1964-1980. Those kids are all in their 40s to 50s now, and many didn’t even have kids.
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Sweden, like many other remnants of the bygone empires, had some small firms that adapted to new developments pioneered in England, Germany, and the US, but its modernized infrastructure came much later, namely after WWII.
Sweden was a major naval power in Europe up until the early 1800s, having spent centuries dominating the Nordics and Northwestern Russia, with bouts of competition with Polish-Lithuanian Empire as well.
There is a delusional sense of romanticism among Swedes that they are still some type of super power, without even being a middle power anymore.
They definitely contributed to the development of some new artillery technology and high quality steel barrel manufacturing even in the late 1800s, after the Prussians really took high-strength steel artillery to the forefront in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, but the 1800s-forward Swedish population has never been large enough to support modern industrial sectors. Take gas turbines, for example.
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There were waves of successive industrial revolutions that happened outside of the USSR during the Cold War, that left Russia and its satellite states behind, because of the centrally-planned economy that served as a vassal network to reinforce the Russian security apparatus, not enrich the infrastructure of the satellite states.
This is what he’s referring to, especially in context of the revolution in electronics, automated manufacturing, advanced tooling, programming, semiconductors, telecommunications, aerospace, etc.
Russia handicapped Czechoslovakia in many ways, even down to small arms. Czechoslovakia had superior weapons designs and cartridges that weren’t standard with Warsaw Pact, but Russia forced them to adopt their standards anyway. Czechs made some of the finest small arms prior to WWII, and still do, but weren’t allowed to really blossom with creativity and problem-solving to their potential.
Russians didn’t like being out-shined, which all you need to do is show up, so they were very condescending and oppositional to Czech ingenuity. By the time the Russians political-economic abortion had collapsed, Czechs were ready once again to kick things into gear.
Supporting evidence: Czech Republic went from $40.7 Billion GDP in 1990, to $282.3 Billion in 2021. Same thing happened in Poland, only they went from $254 billion to $1.6 Trillion (larger population, resources, etc.)
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@Foogle6594 Peter started out with STRATFOR in the 2000s, where they continually did white papers for US and global clients, to include DoD, defense ministries, foreign governments, huge industrial sectors all over the world, finance, transportation, intelligence agencies, etc.
He's not a YouTube guy who relies on YouTube for income. I suspect he recognized YouTube as the new marketing medium standard, where if you don't have a channel, you won't be taken seriously.
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@basestone Marshall Plan immigration brought in unskilled workers from Turkey, Italy, Spain, Yugoslavia, and North Africa.
They loved socialism with all its hand-outs, which left the burden even greater on actual Germans. The posterity of the immigrants are a mix of a few technically-inclined, failures to integrate, and straight up welfare-class people. The unity of Germanic peoples from the Prussian Reforms, Kaiser Republic, and reactionary Nazi era are long-gone.
The Brits and French finally got their wish by destroying Germany, but they suffer from the same problems too. They all are headed into demographic winter, flooded with incompatible ethnic immigrants who have no historical or ideological connection to the land, hate its native inhabitants, and expect hand-outs and "free" services.
Continental Europe is ripe for internal conflict, let alone Russian invasion. Have you been to France lately?
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@SianaGearz I've lived all over the US, Europe, and Russia, have been to Canada (among 30 nations in total). I'm also a continual student of the geography and population statistics for G20 and other nations.
The biggest difference you see between Europe and the US are suburbs. Suburbs are where the bulk of the US population lives.
We never saw sprawling suburbs in Europe after WWII because Europe was already population-dense, suffered massive destruction to cities and infrastructure, and was very poor due to substantial losses of prime age males. Open land in Europe is used for farming.
Europe remains a very apartment and government project-focused housing market with extremely limited ownership opportunities, high taxation/theft of labor, with centrally-planned urbanization.
Russia is like stepping into a time machine back into a frozen world only our great-great grandparents might recognize.
The US has vast open spaces, especially West of the Mississippi. East of the Mississippi, the population is more dense, but you can still own large lots of land for individual family residences not only on the South, but in New England.
In the Midwest, there are very large parcels for single family residences as well.
In the West, it's much more dry, but still has large parcels and homes in the suburbs. What we consider tiny and claustrophobic would be spacious and opulent in Europe.
Geography and climate form culture. The US is warm, wide, open, and free. Europe is tighter, colder, crowded, and very diverse.
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@paskowitz 100%. I lived all over Russia, which is a very poor country compared to the 30 other countries I’ve been to or lived in. Poland’s economy grew 6-fold since 1991, which is what Ukraine saw happening and wondered why they couldn’t have the same thing, especially since they have more people and more resources.
It’s why Ukrainians wanted out from under the boot of Russian puppets, so I’ve been paying close attention to the events in Ukraine, especially since the early 2000s.
I like Tucker Carlson a lot, but he’s simply out of his league when it comes to foreign policy. Sure, you can go to Globus (German mega store) in Russia if you have money and buy plenty of quality food, but most people don’t have that kind of money in Russia.
What I noticed in Russia is that adults had no sense of hope, no happiness. Just struggle day-to-day between packs of cigarettes and alcohol, whatever comes is their fate.
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@nunyabidness3075 Most nations. Being an officer means you came from a certain family with connections and privilege, but not good enough to be higher up in government.
As such, officers distance themselves from conscripts and only associate with each other, using their power to enrich themselves and pretend to be part of the class structure they're not.
They don't like anything resembling discomfort, uncleanliness, hardship, or inconvenience.
The US, Canada, UK, Danes, Norwegians, Germans, legacy NATO nations, and Australians are the exceptions to this where a meritorious framework is more in-place. Combat arms officers pride themselves on embracing and enforcing hardship, or at least the impression of it for the garritroopers.
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@TD32333 He's correct. Race relations in the US have been agitated by the Soviets for decades.
By the year 2000, this had largely been attenuated with decades of achievement and barriers broken down.
People saw Obama's candidacy as a crown jewel in race relations, proving that anyone could achieve anything in the US.
Obama had the opportunity to spell out a formula for success, but instead, he stirred up racial Agitprop and scraped off the smooth scar tissue, ripping open ideas of animosity, encouraging people to "vote for revenge" in 2012.
This makes him one of the most divisive and destructive Presidents in US History. On top of that, he didn't respect the office, and saw it as far beneath him since he had been handed everything in life.
Read his books to gain more insight into his character. The hardest job he ever had was an ice cream stand, where he complained about how it hurt his wrist to dig into the ice cream tubs with the scoop.
His post-college job was as an economics analyst for a CIA front company, where he complains he was only hired for diversity quota, and could do whatever he wanted without fear of being fired.
Again, the public image is totally different from the reality.
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@joythought A thing people don't understand is the US is supplying the Pacific nations, Canada, Western Europe, and Middle Eastern countries with foreign military sales packages based on many years-old defense procurement agreements.
You don't just magically fulfill defense article shipments overnight, especially aerospace systems like missiles, Radars, armor, communications gear, ships, vehicles, and even small arms.
Most European countries have continued to cut production and capacity for manufacturing these things because of weak parliamentarians who have acted like 1991 was perpetual.
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The caliph absorbed those things from the Byzantines, the Mediterranean civilizations, Spain, and India. The knowledge of medicine, mathematics, philosophy, and other disciplines has existed throughout various civilizations in history. It ebbs and flows with cataclysms and warfare diminishing it, followed by interaction through trade that expands it. The Sumerians and ancient Babylonians had much of his knowledge, as did the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans.
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@MarcosElMalo2 They have lost 2 of their Black Sea Flagships already in the past few months to a nation that doesn’t have a robust anti-ship capability. Once Krim is isolated, Ukraine will then be able to focus even more on the anti-ship weapon campaign, with over a dozen NATO nations who want to see their latest AS missiles and ISR platforms tested, because they face significant seaborne threats from Russia as well. Think Norway, the UK, Denmark, Netherlands, Spain, France, Italy, as well as new members Sweden and Finland.
Ukraine is in no rush to lose thousands of soldiers assaulting Krim, though they can make inroads with the echelons of fire from HIMARS and M777 coordinated with drone strikes. Anyone left in Krim will be pinched and Russia’s options for supporting them will be severely constrained, unwinnable.
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When Peter talks about stability, he ignores the fact that Trump negotiated more Middle Eastern peace deals than all US Presidents combined, refused to start any new wars, curb-stomped Putin in Syria while threatening Putin with extreme consequences if he effed around in Ukraine, is the only President who sent weapons to Ukraine prior to 2022, and enacted energy and fiscal policies that made buying a home more accessible for Americans in generations.
Biden, Obama, Bush, and Clinton are the opposite of that. Look at energy policy, defense, PPP, the border, finally an America-first trade policy, unemployment, and the WTI under Trump vs any of the other establishment suits. Trump did more for the US than any other President in our lifetimes and the numbers aren't even close.
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@jacarandaization After WWII, Finland was forced to pay $300 million in "reparations" to Russia, and was dictated what kind of military it could have.
Russia seeded Finland full of communists in the government, the Finnish News service YLE, Finnish universities, and military leaders.
Then reprisals were committed on Finnish war veterans and heroes like Lauri Törni, who were trying to prepare for another Russian invasion, throwing them in prison in their own country.
Russia relied on Finland for many things during the Cold War, including imports of processed wood products, paper, machinery, and construction engineering services to name a few.
There's a reason why Russia installed the rail system in Finland in the mid-1800s so Finnish goods could be railed into Russia and Russians could move into Finland more freely.
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@Rid3thetig3r Comanche, Dakota, Iroquois, Cherokee, Algonquin, Hopi, Lumbee, Apache, Cheyenne, Lakota, Kiowa, Pawnee, Shawnee, etc. all came from travelers to North America.
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European politics is slanted to the left because of the make-up of Parliaments and the people after 2 world wars. The real men who normally bear the brunt of societal challenges in leadership never matured to those positions because they died in combat. This left only shopkeepers and women to move into positions of critical national decision-making. While being insulated from the tough decisions for security, which were made by the US for them, they were able to focus on the economies and domestic infrastructure, education, services, and rebuilding with help from manual laborers from elsewhere.
Instead of being held to account for their systemic failures in decision-making on government, economic, education, social, and military matters, they rode the waves of inputs from the US and US-backed security environment, taking credit for the things they never built.
US politics is slanted to the right because of the original pilgrim stock being Puritans who fled out of survival, followed by waves of those who saw opportunity and risk in a new world. These people tended to be individualistic, not expecting for others to solve their problems for them. They believed that hard work and good principles might reward them, expecting no guarantees. After they built the largest economy in the world with the most productive industries, that bailed Europe out of two world wars and left the US as the dominant super power, it didn’t make sense to consider that the losers were ever right about their approaches to government.
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@kevf Zeihan doesn’t declare the US geographic, economic, and military advantages out of a blind sense of patriotism, but dispassionate analysis. That’s what most foreigners get wrong about him, thinking he is pushing a pro-US narrative out of an ideological motive. He’s one of the least ideological figures in this space, who doesn’t really care about policy wishes, but ground truth reality.
Yes, Russia knows how bad their situation is because they’re stuck in it. I’ve lived in Russia and there is a general sense of being condemned to bad geography and bad weather, nothing you can do about it but put your head down, live a life of accepted misery.
If you look at Russian naval force posture on Krim, they have been pulling out due to Unmanned Submersible Vehicles packed with explosives attacking their ships in port.
Russian Air Forces haven’t been able to prosecute an effective strike campaign because they never established air dominance and suppression or destruction of enemy air defenses. As a result, Russia has lost 160+ combat aircraft in the past 8.5 months, including their latest advanced multirole fighters like the Su-30SM and Su-34.
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@kobalos73 Peter Zeihan has been at this for decades, working as a senior analyst for STRATFOR under George Friedman, which has included travels to all sorts of governments, industries, companies, and organizations all around the world.
His favorable assessment of the US/North American position is entirely based on geography, demographics, industrial might, and infrastructure, not ideology.
People who have only heard ideological arguments their whole lives misinterpret Peter's assessments as some sort of 'Murica perspective, because most people don't know anything about geography, demographics, industry, economics, infrastructure, farming, and trade-all the areas Peter has focused on for decades. His books pre-date current trends in social media. It appears he's treating social media how companies used to treat magazines. If you didn't have ads in magazines, you became irrelevant due to consumer perception.
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@becnal Novorossiysk is well within the range of Ukrainian ballistic missiles, naval commandos, and even still without those, naval mines have been appearing all over the Black Sea already. At a minimum, assuming that no military attacks will ever happen against Novorossiysk (big gamble), any tankers will need mine-sweeper escorts and will have to assume that Turkey will be totally fine with them passing through the Bosphorus.
To counter that, I could argue that Russia will provide the mine-sweeping operations for any oil tankers.
Then those tankers will need to pass through the Suez Canal, the Red Sea, around the Horn of Africa and into ports in India, while others will have to pass through the Strait of Malacca, the South China Sea, and into sea ports in China.
All of those areas have entered the first month of being cut off from Russian and Ukrainian grains on a 90-day cycle of food supplies, and the incentives for piracy or seizing of sanctioned vessels will be high.
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Coal-powered electric grids, yes. Anytime I see transportation infrastructure comparisons between the European and North American continents, I question the basic familiarity with geography and population density possessed by the promoters of the Euro models.
Europe has very high population density with tight geographical constraints, and a transportation infrastructure built on millennia of ancient road networks that never had automobiles in mind.
The US, Canada, and Mexico have vast expanses of open terrain, low population density, and have open spaces where large highway, freeway, and road networks have been built.
The US and Canada also experienced something unique in the post-WWII era where planned suburban developments erupted all over outside of all the major cities, so people could own larger plots of land with homes on them, as opposed to being cooped-up like rats stacked on top of each other in cities.
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@Rjsjrjsjrjsj Zeihan's framework is from the old decorum of White House protocols and cabinet meetings that were last seen in Bush41 and Bush Jr White Houses. Clintons threw that out the window by bringing in criminals and radicals who ran the WH like a frat house, and many of those came back with the Obama WH.
Biden is used to the older decorum from DC culture dating to the 1970s, but has a really young, diversity-hire staff who don't have a clue what they're doing.
This is Zeihan's metric for "managerial experience", while ridiculing Trump's.
Trump is the only President who came from a private sector background totally foreign to WH/DC meetings, where the can is kicked down the road.
In the private sector, you have to demonstrate competency and the ability to manage highly-capable teams of people to produce results, especially in the billionaire sector.
This is why I thoroughly disagree with the managerial assessment of the Trump WH, as chaotic as it was. Look at the results in terms of energy independence, economic growth, trade relations favoring the US, defense, and peace negotiations between Arabs and Israelis, while lighting a fire under NATO to honor their defense spending agreements.
No President has accomplished anywhere near that in 4 years. JFK comes closest in terms of dealing with crises, but only had 2 years and 9 months.
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@MrNicoJac Yes, US media is almost entirely slanted to the left, as is most European media. The US had largely moved away from racial division and strife by 2008, evidenced that many people voted for Obama across party lines because of the “hope and change” mantra that was in most of the news. European media is largely run by the remnants of the IOJ, so America is always presented in a negative light in Europe. I have lived in Europe on-and-off since 1979, as my mom is from Finland. I follow European news from various sources, and have done so since 1980. I remember watching the 1980 election results when we were in West Germany, just for context of how far back this goes for me.
George W. Bush is anything but a "dumb religious cowboy”. He comes from an Eastern financial establishment blue blood family that moved to Texas, attended one of the most difficult prep schools in the US before going to Yale, was Governor of one of the largest land area/population/industry/agricultural States in the Union, and is the only American President who was a supersonic interceptor fighter pilot. Bush flew the F-102 interceptor in the Texas Air National Guard, which was a high mishap-rate fighter that was difficult to land (couldn’t see forward from the cockpit on final due to AOA).
If you have grown up on European news, depending on the country/region, it’s very likely you are just about as misinformed as most people in the US were prior to the great disengagement of corporate presstitute legacy media, but with far superior orientation to the European geography. Germans tend to be better-informed, but still suffer from politically-biased, leftist media. Scandinavians and Nordic countries have very simplistic views of the world and swallow whatever their governments tell them, from single source state media as a general rule.
Italians and Greeks just assume everything is corrupt and go about their lives. Brits still are under the impression that they deserve to be treated like heads of the empire that hasn’t existed in 70 years, now barely coming to terms with the reality that they are a middle power at-best.
Yugoslavians are still trying to get people to understand what has happened to them since 1992.
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@jlvandat69 The people who organized the nuts and bolts of ACA in Obama’s cabinet were tied into the insurance industry, financed for decades. It was a massive transfer of revenue to insurance, not a panacea of coverage. They also mandated arbitrary shelf lives on a multitude of medical devices and products, so that they had to be disposed of and replaced by new ones more regularly, benefitting the medical device manufacturers who wrote obscene cost benchmarks into the bill for themselves. It was nothing as advertised.
The US was and still is way ahead of the “other advanced nations”, who rely on US research, devices, products, EMS service infrastructure, new treatments, and bulk rate wholesale pricing for US drugs, while the US patients and providers pay inflated prices for those same drugs.
This is something I’ve studied for many years now, especially living in those “more advanced nations with better healthcare” that don’t exist. It’s all a fraud.
We have significantly better access to healthcare in the US than the Nordic nations, where my mom is from. Better than Canada, the UK, Australia, Japan, Germany, etc. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either ignorant of the reality, or misrepresenting data.
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@MrNicoJac I have dual citizenship with US and Finland, so I can live anywhere I want in the Eurozone, have watched the Eurozone evolve from the 1970s economic pacts through the 1990s and to the present, have lived in multiple European countries under their NHSs, and have many close and distant family members in Sweden and Finland. I have also lived in 8 different US States across almost every region (SW, NE, South, Atlantic Coast, PNW, Mountain-West), and have been in the formal medical system in Emergency Medical Services as an EMS technician. More importantly though, I have been studying the medical market realities of the US, several States, Canada, and European nations for many years.
What I have seen is that the numbers don’t add up to the general statements I see common with this topic, and all of my and my family experience anecdotes support the numbers I have researched, not what is reported in US and European media, or academia in the US.
So in the US, if I have an emergency condition, accident, or sudden illness, I will get into an ER and have specialists on-me like white on rice. I will have diagnostics performed with the latest equipment, including CT Scan, MRI, X-Rays, blood tests, physical exams by senior nurse practitioners, PAs, and MDs specific to that set of symptoms. For urgent priority, I will have an MRI or CT scan within an average of 1.5 hours of arriving in the ER.
For transport methods and times, States with lower populations than Finland or Sweden have more ambulances, more paramedics, more Life Flight helicopters with flight medics (called Air Ambulances in Europe), and faster transport time to a Level 1 Trauma Center (which there are more of per capita).
In Finland, I have literally sat in the ER with my father (patient) waiting for over 6 hours before anyone saw us. The doctor he was supposed to see came and said “bye” to us on her way out off-shift. I’ve never seen that in the US.
In Finland or Sweden, you get taxed no matter what to fund the NHS and other government-managed programs, where there is very little accountability.
We definitely pay more in the US, but we also have higher quality and quantity of care available. That includes specialists, Emergency Medicine, oncology, dentistry, orthodontics, orthopedics, prosthetics, internal medicine, etc.
The US has far more medical and technical universities where doctors, nurses, and medical professionals are trained. We also attract a lot of doctors from Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.
As to medical tourism, out of the 30 different nations I have been to, none of them would attract me to go there for any of the common procedures, especially anything surgical-related. I live in probably the best place on earth for orthopedic surgeons because we have so many people in sports, athletic teams, with an unusually-young population even for the US.
I am very critical of the US internally from a position of seeking excellence, but we out-perform anything I have seen in Europe or Canada. Canada has a very US-like access to equipment and larger hospitals, but run by their sad NHS, which is why they complain so much about wait times. Canadian MPs come to the US for a lot of their procedures, rather than wait in NHS and suffer or die like the rest of the people must do.
Short story is most of what is reported on this subject is grossly-erroneous, and misses fundamental facts about population size, regional climate, water sources, diet, and other truly-factorial variables, while focusing on policies that don’t manifest in reality.
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@conanbillybone2218 America isn't ethno-centric. Americans care more about meritocracy. Show me hard-working man from any ethnicity who continually improves his lot and that of his family, is a good neighbor, and cherishes the freedoms enshrined in the US, and there's an American.
Europeans have very strong ideas and pride about cultural norms, language, and regional allegiance. The French, Spaniards, Italians, Greeks, Irish, Brits, and Scots are very proud and hardwired in this way.
Germans have very distinct ideas and expectations based on which state they're from as well, and it's quite fragmented within.
The US is much more fluid, interconnected, and shares the same language in every State. People can move to, work, and live in many States throughout their lives. I've lived in 8 States, for example, in totally different regions.
I've also lived all over Europe to see the things I'm talking about first-hand.
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I’ve been following him and other analysts at STRATFOR back in the 2000s. I didn’t accept any of their observations, but went and checked everything they were claiming since I had already been to 30 countries by that time, spent several decades in Aerospace and Defense, military, and working with coalition partner nations. Even after all my years of studying maps, traveling, military planning, global combined component forces exercises with access to imagery and real-time force movements, micro terrain analyses, and tactical combat aircraft overlays, the lessons in geography I learned from STRATFOR were worth 10x the subscription easily. The places they were describing were mostly areas and regions I had lived in, deployed to, and studied for most of my life. They explained things in ways I had never seen before, which was very illuminating and humbling.
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@victorcapel2755 I’ve lived all over Finland and have been doing so off and on since 1979. From the Finnish perspective, Finland has all these different cities like Turku, Jyväskylä, Tampere, Pori, Vaasa, Oulu, and Helsinki, but relative to the world, Helsinki is the city-state. Finland does have excellent roads, highways, and a train system that are very modern, but towns and cities are separated by thousands of lakes in central and eastern Finland in the summer. It has very unique geography due to its position and topography, which do not support a large population.
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I've been following his analyses since the 2000s. He goes to the ground truth, after having a higher level education on geography, demographics, and history.
For ground truth, he talks with actual petroleum, civil, construction, aerospace, electrical, and transportation engineers with decades of experience in their fields, as opposed to trying to figure it out like an academic.
George Friedman used the ground truth approach at STRATFOR, where Zeihan was a senior analyst, along with former FBI, DEA, and other intelligence analysts.
This is why their presentations were so different than anything you would see in the brainless media advertisement channels.
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His command for us to ignore Tucker is not a good look at all. Tucker is not very focused on foreign affairs, although he’s more aware of them than the average cat due to his family’s wealth and travels, but he did a great interview, challenging Putin many times, and behaving more dominantly than Putin is used to seeing among anyone he’s met before, sans Trump. When he met Trump, Trump literally yanked him into him with a powerful handshake that told the judo “expert” that his manlet body was no match, even for an overweight guy like Trump who doesn’t work out.
To me, it’s like Peter didn’t even watch the interview. Tucker challenged Putin throughout the sit-down, and did so on the edge of assertiveness and respect. He caught Putin many times with funny little quips like, “Should Hungary take back its 1650 territory in the region?”, and was very persistent about releasing Evan Gershkovich.
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The US has had forward-basing in Europe, Asia, Central America, South America, Africa, and the Middle East for generations.
I've spent a huge portion of my life living overseas, to include West Germany, Japan, South Korea, Panama, Kuwait, Finland, Estonia, etc.
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I don’t have an iPhone but from what I found:
The iPhone’s display is made by either Samsung or LG in South Korea.
The flash memory and DRAM are made at Kioxia’s factories in Japan.
Gorilla Glass that protects the screen is made from a Corning factory in the USA, Taiwan, or Japan.
Apple’s A18 Pro chip is custom silicon-designed in California but manufactured by Taiwanese semiconductor company TSMC.
Custom-made components like power management ICs, USB microcontrollers, wireless chipsets, and OLED drivers are sourced from large companies such as Broadcom, Texas Instruments, and smaller manufacturers in Southeast Asia.
Apple is now moving a lot of their final assembly to Vietnam with Ear Pods, AirPods, AirPods Pro, and Apple is moving a significant percentage of iPad, MacBook, and Apple Watch production to Vietnam.
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If you follow Zeihan, there isn’t such a thing as the metro-dollar. The USD is backed by far more than oil exchange currency. The US mainland with its temperate zone, agriculture, rivers, sea ports, mountains, isolation from any enemies, industries, manufacturing, education, medical advances, biggest economy, and military are what actually back the USD. When the world experiences instability, nations with large cash reserves put their money in the US. The Russian propaganda about metro-dollar is very myopic thinking without even taking a few monumental economic factors into consideration.
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@dogblack3400 Uh, Democrats supported offshoring of US labor for generations now, starting with restrictive policies on business in labor, environmentalist laws that big corporations avoid, and taxation. Republicans and Democrats are financed by the larger corporations, whereas more local politicians see the effects of offshoring regardless of party. It’s not a simple Dem vs Rep argument, but the Dems have been the worst about attacking businesses and making it difficult to operate them.
You would think Democrats would favor US labor with all the union votes, but the ideology around environmentalist cult behavior throws the US worker to the curb, in favor of Chinamen and other Asians, especially as China finances so many Democrat candidates with bribes.
This is why the Dem party is losing the union vote, but cracking down on making sure they COUNT the union vote more, while managing expanded ballot-harvesting and stuffing scams.
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@bob_lemoche Soviets worked very hard to penetrate and co-opt Western media since the late 1940s, with much success. Anytime you turn on a major broadcast network, look for the demoralization messaging, right out of Soviet Active Measures ideological warfare strategy.
A great example of this is the CBC anti-JSF/F-35 messaging. They forgot to mention the dozens of Canadian companies making parts for F-35s, or the fact that Russia doesn't want a 5th Gen net-centric NORAD web flying and operating together between USAF in Alaska, RCAF from northern airfields, and US Air National Guard bases in New England.
This will provide even more early warning and tracking of Russian bombers, submarines, ships, and satellites.
Trudeau even campaigned on killing the F-35 deal for Canada as a main promise, which would only benefit Russia, while harming Canada's defense posture.
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@billweberx Yup. It takes about a century (10 decades) to develop an initial competent navy that can just function, not necessarily win anything, but just operate with sustainable losses from accidents.
That's assuming a competent military and political leadership, training, and shipyard base.
Russia has never really had such a force. Their main naval yards were in Ukraine. They couldn't operate without significant losses, which were emphasized by how incompetent their submariner force was, but plagued their black and ice water armadas as well. Russians and Chinese are not seafaring peoples at heart or in their DNA.
Swedes, Dutch, Brits, French, Spaniards, Portuguese, Japanese, Italians, and Greeks, are.
The US was born from Brits, Dutch, French, and Spaniards, and rose to be the most seafaring people on the planet.
No other competent navy emerged dominant after WWII, then the US throttled up into an era of sea power the world has never seen.
A new generation of sea power has been created by the US where net-centric low observable platforms in space, the air, on the surface, and below the surface work together in unison without much interference from planners far away.
Japan and the US are allies in the Pacific, with the US enabling Japan with cutting edge net-centric weapons and stealth technology, while China rapidly tries to play catch-up in a game where no matter what they do, they can't control access to their critical sea ports.
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My contact in the Russian Foreign Ministry was bragging about how Russia would re-take all its rightful territories, including Kazakhstan, Georgia, Ukraine, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland. This was in the 2000s after Putin assumed the Presidency. It was before Russia invaded Georgia in 2008. After hearing these braggadocios claims, I went to Estonia to help out with the Erna Raid exercise. At the end of that, we learned Russia was invading Georgia. Peter and George Friedman were in the process of writing a book at the time where they had to change the manuscript from “Russia will invade Georgia.” to “Russia has invaded Georgia.” I subscribed to STARTFOR after that and have been following Peter's and George Friedman’s work ever since.
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@GalaxyFur I agree about relative stability of inflation in the US, which is represented by long-term graphs, but I’m looking at the US Inflation rates right now from 1919-2019. The worst major spikes in inflation have been under:
FDR (D), Truman (D), LBJ (D), Ford (R-unelected), Carter (D), and Biden (D). They were stabilized or dropping under Eisenhower (R), Nixon (R), Reagan (R), Clinton (D), Bush (R), Obama (D), and Trump (R). If someone or any organization correlates a historic inflation trend in a binary conclusion to Democrat = good, Republican = bad, just understand you’re being lied to. Anyone can verify the above info with a simple inspection of an inflation graph.
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@GlenKrog That would mean those 39 fighters would need to have flown about 4 sorties per day, with no down jets. Do you want to tell me you’ve never been around a fighter squadron before without telling me?
US fighters are far more reliable than Russian fighters. The days of the MiG-21 are long-gone, once the Soviets tried to compete with the US with the MiG-23 (hangar queen), MiG-29, and Su-27/Flanker series.
Russia/USSR departed from its proven single engine mass-produced fighter force and went to all twin-engined designs to try to match the thrust-to-weight ratios of US 4th Gen fighters, while adding pulse doppler Radars and threat warning systems, BVR missiles, IRSTs, with tons of wiring harnesses and federated systems that are prone to failure.
Russian jet engines have always been low Mean Time Between Overhaul units that experience early core blade failure, often with catastrophic results. The US went through this with its early 4th Gen motors in the late 1960s-1980s until it developed single crystal turbine blades and more advanced fitment of parts, driven with FADEC.
If you read the maintenance reports from India and China on their Flankers, they are hangars queens. Radars, Missiles, and IRSTs are not that good.
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@fridrekr7510 Yes, I could argue it both ways since I’ve lived throughout Scandinavia and traveled the Nordic countries since 1979. I was explaining Zeehan’s perspective more than anything, since I’ve followed him since the 2000s when he was with STRATFOR.
From the fully-integrated economy and infrastructure of the American perspective, Scandinavia looks like city states. Zeihan is also probably referencing the differences in laws, customs, VAT taxes, language barriers within, let alone between the nations, and the effects of the the winter and summer climates and geography on movement of goods.
For example, in Finland, I can get from one part of a town deep in the interior to the town center much faster in the winter than the summer, because there are surveyed and signed roads across the frozen lakes, but this is only useful for mostly light residential traffic, not constant truck traffic for moving freight.
Even though Finland has a larger population than the US State where I live by 2 million, we have more emergency medical services, hospitals, clinics, universities, military infrastructure, and are connected to the rest of the US with the vast highway system, rail, and airports with a single language.
Finland is geographically isolated from Sweden due to the Gulf of Bothnia and the fact that Finland uses Russian rail line gauge tracks, which are much wider than in the rest of Europe, not that there’s a land bridge anyway.
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@jlvandat69 I only know Ecuadorian immigrants to the US, not anyone from the US who is even thinking about moving to Ecuador. Immigration stats seem to magnify the anecdotes, not contradict them.
I could live in Finland, Sweden, Germany, France, Italy, Greece, Cyprus, etc. The security and opportunities, as well as healthcare and taxes all favor the US, and it isn’t even close. I have lived in several of those places and love Europe, but I don’t like government getting involved with my personal healthcare decisions or those for my family. That should only be between me and the doctors, and who is paying.
We don’t have universal home, car, or life insurance, but responsible people spend trillions on those financial products each year in the US. We don’t need anyone else getting involved. This is why I and many others see government involvement in healthcare as a form of control.
2020-present has only confirmed those suspicions.
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@Stephenvguerra I've been in the US MIC since the 1970s. We have more missile lines open, more fighter lines open than anyone, a next gen Stealth bomber in production, drones from space down to micro level, rocket motors, warheads, superior streamlined guidance systems, and an extensive OT&E infrastructure that's unparalleled. The systems all work better than the legacy ones from the 70s, 80s, 90s, and 2000s.
The amount of explosive material and sorties or fires we expended for effects back then exceeded what we can do now with one sortie or one fire mission.
The other thing most people don't realize is that as the Europeans cut production capacity across the board, the US became the default arms supplier for them and a lot of their former customers. So any statements about reduced capacity in the US don't align with the actual deliveries I've witnessed over the past 50 years. I track FMS contracts regularly for aerospace and missiles primarily. It's the opposite of what you're portraying.
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@TD32333 "Largely put behind us" and "not an issue" are 2 different things. When I was in the military in my first unit, my Squad Leader, Platoon Sergeant, Company Commander, and Battalion Sergeant Major were all black. There was a disproportionate % of black leaders when looking at US demographics, especially in my Career Management Field, which had less than the US demographic breakdown of blacks.
By that time, race-based promotion ahead of peers was already the standard in the early 1990s.
Obama came along decades later and talked to the Nation as if we were in Thelma, AL in the early 1960s, while he sat in the WH with Michelle chowing down on filet mignon like corrupt African dictators.
That was not helpful at all. And when genuine black community leaders tried to meet with him to promote proven practical programs for dealing with fatherless and crime in the inner city, he couldn’t be bothered.
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@ArawnOfAnnwn The most advanced SC technology is made all over the US, mostly in the West, then Northeast, South, and Midwest.
There are exclusive supply chains for defense and satellite that can't be exported except to Canada, Australia, UK, JSF customers like Japan, ROK, Italy, Norway, etc., with anti-tamper kill-switches.
I was stationed in South Korea and have deployed their since. ROK is an Asian industrial powerhouse because of the US technology sharing. They were fertilizing rice paddies with their own feces still when I was there first, then have developed with US freeways, heavy industry, electronics, automobile tech, all brought in from US.
It isn't egotistical, just facts.
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@DeirdreSM Herman Cain is one of the best leaders we could have had for the Presidency, due to his defense and business experience, measured temperament, and high intellectual faculties.
Obama was not a good student, not particularly smart, got Cs at Occidental University in LA, then got admitted to Columbia based on foreign student admissions, not academics for a US peer base.
I would never describe any of the men I mentioned as “throwing their own under the bus”. That’s literally what Obama did when black inner city community leaders tried to meet with him to get his support for their successful programs at dealing with fatherlessness, drugs, and crime.
Trump ran multiple, lengthy sessions with them within his first few months in office, and gave them his full support-more than the combined engagement of all White Houses before him.
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@gerardmonsen1267 I literally had/have a close contact to the Russian Foreign Ministry. The particular Deputy Foreign Minister was bragging about Russian expansion into Ukraina, Yugoslavia, Poland, Baltics, and Finland since the early 2000s right after Putin was handed the Presidency. Foreign Minister told him to shut his hole about it because it contradicted Putin's open statements about peace and non-intervention.
There was a palpable policy shift once Putin took over, which was to re-assert Russian dominance over all the regions Peter Zeihan talks about.
George Friedman and Peter Zeihan have been talking about this since the 2000s.
Germany's Chancellor just announced their defense budget would jump from 50 Billion to 100 Billion.
So Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Albania, Montenegro, Moldova, Greece, and Turkey all have a familiar sense of uneasiness right now similar to the 1871-1914 and 1919-1938 time periods in Europe.
This is why so many Eastern Europeans rushed to join NATO after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
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Like with every source, you need to filter it. He has great insight on demographics, history, geography, trade routes, sea ports, raw vs value-added goods and where exactly they come from, supply chains, precursor materials, weather patterns, and topography relative to business and military activities. He stays away from or criticizes any questions about conspiratorial actors in the intelligence and business communities, condescends to genuine concerns from Europeans and Americans about their sovereignty and ethnic struggles, but also recognizes the role organized crime played in forming the US political class. You really need a lot of study before you can filter Peter well, but it’s worth it I think to be in that place of discernment.
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He’s discussing actual seafaring people, not Russia. Russia has always struggled to project into the seas, but they are basically land-locked and in such a high latitude with extreme cold, that they never were a seafaring people. Peter the Great tried to change that by starting the Russian Navy, but it’s just not in the cards for them. They have 4 major seaport areas for a nation with more land mass than any other in the world. Almost every US coastal State has that or more. Russia has Archangelsk, Primorsk, Novorossiysk, and Vladivostok. California alone has 40 sea ports, 5 very large deep sea ports that take heavy displacement vessels, 1 large port, 7 medium, and 19 small ports. You can look at each sea port in the world and see how deep they are, how much tonnage they process each year, and quickly see Russia just isn’t anywhere in the top 10 nations for sea trade. 95% of their exports go through Novorossiysk, which means they are extremely vulnerable in the Black Sea.
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@obcane3072 The waves of North African Arabs, Sub-Saharan Africans, and Middle Eastern immigrants to Europe have already been rioting, engaging in terrorism, raping, incest, and behaviors not acceptable to post-WWII Europeans.
I foresee multiple flash points as the economic conditions deteriorate, leading to multiple Civil wars and uprisings in France, Germany, UK, Sweden, and Netherlands.
Europe will ask the US to send peace-keepers, but the US might not want to commit.
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@TrendyStone The US manufactures high-end and DoD contract chips in Silicon Valley, Silicon Slopes, and other SC plants in the US. Taiwan does not have a monopoly on SC manufacturing.
A big problem people have is thinking that the commercial sector is the same as DoD. They are parallel sectors, with entirely different supply chains and sources subject to Berry Amendment compliance.
This applies to boots, uniforms, gloves, vehicles, tires, lubricants, pallets, small arms, aircraft, missiles, and all the subcomponents.
Every single subcomponent in a DoD contract has to have a Technical Data Package with security of supply and strategic materials compliance certification process.
It's nothing like the commercial sector. So when you hear someone talk about chips from Taiwan in M-1 Abrams tanks and F-35s, you realize that source isn't remotely aware of how DoD supply side works.
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China bought up GE appliances division through questionable deals, in order to weasel-in on GE jet engines. They could give to rips about airlines, as the priority is for their fighters and military aircraft. Airlines are down the priority list for them. They’re important for domestic and regional clout, but it all comes down to being able to back up your clout with air power. Making jet engines is an exclusive club China has been trying to join since the 1980s, and failing miserably at it.
The US is the global leader in fighter jet and turbofan engine design and manufacturing, surpassing the British in the 1960s-1970s at the latest.
UK is 2nd in terms of quality.
Russia is 2nd in terms of quantity and knocking off US designs, but still falling behind in performance, systems integration, and HPHT stage longevity.
France is 3rd in quality, right up there with UK.
Germany is up there with UK and France.
Japan is up-and-coming in this space.
China is way behind all of the above, and they’ve been throwing billions at trying to copy the GE CFM56 since the 1980s.
China crashes Flankers and J-20s quite frequently, one of the main causes being engines exploding in flight. They have relied on Russia for the better part of the last 70 years, and Russian engines have sucked all along that time. China had no interest in the Su-35 itself, but had to order them just to get the engines. Russians put dead-man’s switches in them of course so the engines couldn’t be used in other Chinese Flankers like the J-16.
Engines are a big deal though.
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@bernardvc5820 This is my take on it too, having been a student of Russian military history for quite some time, and having lived there to gain an understanding of how they think, what their culture is like, what makes them function. Like anyone else, I would love for there to be a total ceasefire and Russian forces completely return to Russia, leave Ukraine. I also would love for Marilyn Monroe to come back to life and be my girlfriend, minus the drama and being used as a rag doll by the Kennedy Brothers and mafia bosses. I really think there’s going to be a Russian offensive this winter with the recent mobilization effort, and I think those soldiers are going to perform well enough to at least soak up as much Ukrainian combat power as possible as basically human bullet, artillery shell, ATGM, and drone-delivered munitions dummies so the next campaign can push through next year.
I think we’re looking at a 3-year overall initial series of campaigns going back-and-forth. Russia will work hard to deter foreign military sales/transfers into Ukraine with their network of moles and compromised politicians within NATO and the US, but that will still be hard to pull-off. They almost had it with Biden offering a ride for Zelensky and his family from the outset of the war, remember?
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@michaelmaroney1660 It's interesting because during the Czarist times, they had 25yr-life military service commitments, professional soldiers who learned their jobs and were selected for the type of unit they would serve in based on experience with horses, their physique, literacy, and local village elders input.
They have incrementally reduced the conscription years of service from then into the Soviet times, then even more cuts in the Russian Federation to where these guys are institutionally incompetent from Generals down to conscripts.
Even their low density, high skill set career fields are filled with incompetents.
Their SAM battery operators shot down a civilian airliner, then discussed it frantically on an open cellular network while driving out of Ukraine as fast as they could.
Their fighter pilots are being shot down for sport while talking on open, non-secure, single channel freqs, no use of brevity codes, rambling on without any sense of urgency, even as their flaming wreckage powers down and they should have ejected already.
They're a shell of what they used to be, bumbling around like a sick drunk, but dangerous enough to still destroy, maim, and murder.
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@michaelmaroney1660 I've listened to their radio comms when they have violated Finnish airspace. Finns published it openly years ago. Same exact thing, Su-27SM pilots ranting on and on over the radio, sounding inebriated, "da da da...", non-secure, open text, no brevity codes.
I saw better radios and comms discipline in line Infantry units in the early 1990s in the US. US and NATO fighter pilots have excellent equipment, freq-hopping, encrypted radios, brevity, and data links with graphics overlays on JTIDS displays.
They have lost a lot of Su-30s (11), Su-25s (22), and Su-34s (16-17). Su-30s and Su-34s are some of their most advanced, modern fighters.
They also had 1 Su-35 shot down, as well as some Su-24s shot down/destroyed on the ground, and now lost a MiG-31.
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There’s a STARTFOR video on the geography of the United States that is a must watch to understand US geography. I’ve traveled across the US and lived in 8 States in Southwest, New England, Southeast, PNW, DC/Virginia, CO, and UT and never had it explained to me that way. I watched that and asked, “Why hasn’t anyone told me this before?” I attended multiple schools, deployed all over as a military brat and active duty soldier, lived all over abroad, did strategic analyses of terrain and combat systems in their regional deployment postures, constantly measuring distances, power centers, bases, weapons reach, logistic routes, population centers, water bodies, and still never saw the big picture the way George Friedman and Peter Zeihan laid it all out.
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He purposely built a dumbed-down public image as common person, as to not alienate public-schooled voters (like Newt Gingrich). In reality, he's a whitty fighter pilot crack-up who is more fun to be around than his dad, Clinton, or Obama. They are all like brothers, part of a tight-knit club (Clinton, W, Obama).
Bush is nothing like the public image. He describes this in Decision Points.
If you were to be invited to one of his private parties, then sat down with him for a one-on-one conversation, you would quickly realize that he's orders of magnitude higher than most college professors in intellect and number of books read. He wouldn't rub that in though, but would instead ask you questions and start a conversation between you and someone else with something insightful based on how he profiles you.
He was already very gifted and highly-educated by his prep school days, before attending and graduating from Yale.
His intellect and confidence sky-rocketed in Universal Pilot Training and conversion into the F-102 supersonic interceptor.
He had a running book-reading competition with Karl Rove when he was President, where they read thousands of classical literature, history, biographies, etc.
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By the 1950s, Sweden was assembling jet fighters made with critical systems built in the US and England.
The internal propaganda to Swedes was to make them believe Sweden had the capability to manufacture all of the systems in its jet fighters, starting with the most critical system of all: the engine.
Sweden never could build a fighter engine and still can't. It has always imported jet engines from Rolls Royce, Pratt & Whitney, or General Electric.
The UK and US engines were then rebranded under Volvo Flygmotor and given Volvo designations starting with "RM".
Examples: SAAB Draken had the Rolls Royce Avon.
SAAB Viggen had the Pratt & Whitney JT8D.
Gripen A/B/C/D has the GE F404.
Gripen E/F has the GE F414.
The same thing happened with fighter Radars and missiles. Hughes, GEC-Marconi, and Raytheon developed and sold the critical avionics and fire-control systems to Sweden, who then re-branded them.
Within Sweden, the people are told SAAB, Volvo Flygmotor, and Swedish electronics firms are superior to the other countries, way ahead of their time while concealing the reality from the public. This feeds into a sense of Swedish nationalism and superiority complex, and makes the people feel a sense of pride as they look down on everyone else.
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@ordningsmannen Georgia not only produces fighters, but C-130s as well. F-16 production line was moved to Georgia. C-130 has been there for 70 years in Marietta.
If you want to talk about naval shipbuilding, you're looking at Virginia, which has a smaller population than Sweden, and has put more hull displacement in the water than most nations combined.
Sweden tried making its own jet engines in the 1950s and failed, not because it's a flawed nation, but lack of industrial, scientific, and test capacity.
Brits and Germans made the first jet engines, but the US surpassed them long ago.
It just goes to the point about the size of the US vs individual European nations. The US States are connected by the most navigable set of waterways in the world, in a temperate zone, with a common language and government, with more physical and human capital resources.
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Defense contractors aren't even in the top 20 industries in the United States. DC is surrounded by lobbyists and corporations who Finance Congress From those top 20 industries. Look at finance, real estate, big retail, tech, auto, insurance, teachers/public employee retirement accounts, Agriculture, food & dairy, chemicals, telecom, computers, software, heavy industries, construction, power, all the stuff you buy and interact with daily.
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He has been very specific about forecasting Ukrainian loss eventually, due to the sheer numbers Russia has compared to Ukraine.
Russia hasn't mustered a general mobilization for Ukraine yet, since Putin planned to preserve the main forces in Moscow and Saint Petersburg for defense, and the invasions of Poland, Finland, and the Baltics.
Now he's faced with the decision whether to escalate to a general mobilization, use tactical nukes, some other strategic move, or back down and negotiate a peace treaty/ceasefire.
Ukraine has emphatically stated that they will continue to fight until all of Ukrainian territory is repatriated, including Crimea and Donbas.
My gut tells me Putin will escalate. He's the only "strongman" Russia has left, and all the oligarchs owe their positions to him.
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@festekj Putin has been planning to invade Russia since the 2000s. One of his Foreign Ministry secretaries was running his mouth about that then, and was told to shut his mouth after spilling the beans. The plan was to "take back" Georgia, Ukraine, Moldova, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland.
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@sciencecompliance235 One of the most distasteful forms of contempt in America is the college- indoctrinated elites who think they know anything talking down to the technically- oriented and highly-trained working class, who have far better understanding of how things actually work.
A great example are veterans who go into any of the major sectors of the economy, especially energy, defense, IT, agriculture, small-medium business, or manufacturing as examples.
The college ignoramus will condescend to these people, having never been anywhere overseas, never cut payroll, never built anything with their hands or tools, never managed teams of people, never solved a real-world problem in their lives.
Intoxicated on the fumes of their own flatulence, they bloviate on the solutions to all of life's problems as if gifted with omniscience, completely unaware that they are truly uneducated and clueless about pretty much any topic.
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@elysiumfields This is a great example of what I’m talking about. College kids in the US have been told a pack of lies by teachers and professors who have never lived in any Nordic country. My oldest son and daughter-in-law are going to school in one of those Nordic countries right now, where my mom is from. Education isn’t free. It’s very costly to everyone, namely the taxpayers. It’s also very exclusive, where gaining admission into university is extremely difficult. They section students off from each other at a certain time in school, so most go to skilled vocational training, and the more intellectually-minded kids with disciplined studying habits get to apply for university through entrance exams. Many take 2-3 times with the exams before they are admitted. Many do not complete their studies, then are in debt for the cost of schooling and housing. I’ve seen that happen to friends of mine as well.
When all is said and done, those countries rely on the US for their most advanced defense systems, medical diagnostic equipment, finances, trade, computer technology, software, and critical aspects of the economy all stemming from innovation mostly in the US or mainland Europe. Even with more GDP than comparable population US States, the US States with lower GDP have more Emergency Medical Systems, healthcare, transportation, finance, housing, higher education, PPP, etc.
But if we can leverage the inherent power of tariffs to fund limited government in the US, that would be far superior to what we’re doing now.
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@elysiumfields Of the 30 countries I've been to, guess which one I've lived in the longest, besides the US? Finland. That's where my mom is from and where half my family lives right now.
We have a lot of relatives in Sweden as well, where I've also been multiple times.
The critical systems I'm talking about are aerospace & defense related, as well as medical. Finland is one of the biggest customers for US fighter aircraft, missiles, and weapons.
Finland could never build a fighter gas turbine engine, for example. Neither could Sweden, Norway, Denmark, or most of the countries in Europe, let alone the world.
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Clinton (not his birth name) was raised in the biggest Buick Car dealership family in Arkansas, where his adoptive grandfather taught him memory training, and the senior salesmen taught him how to profile and communicate with "suckers"(customers). He became very adept at this when taking advantage of girls in high school, pulling up in his new convertible coup.
He admired JFK very much, and saw himself becoming President from a fairly young age.
He is gifted and well-trained in remembering facts and figures, but often fudges numbers to fit his narrative, with confidence and delivery that are rarely challenged.
He became accustomed to having any girl he wanted, which quickly lost its excitement, so he moved into more forceful exploitation of college girls and women until rape was normalized.
A fellow law student at Yale saw his potential and how people drew to him, but also how he ran through girls voraciously. She would intimidate them after he had humped and dumped them, to keep his wake clear.
He proposed to her due to her usefulness in that regard, but she declined, seeing herself cutting out her own path in politics.
He passed the bar and returned to Arkansas to run for Congress.
She took the DC bar and failed. She then called him up and asked if the offer was still open, which it was.
Her father strongly opposed the marriage, telling her that a Democrat was only one step away from a communist. Her brothers came down from Chicago to babysit Bill before the wedding to mitigate the obvious scandal.
His name is William Jefferson Blythe III.
Hers is of course Hillary Rodham.
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@u2beuser714 Millenials with no experience in these matters can make a lot of mistakes and bad assumptions, since they rely on internet searches and OSINT, with zero real-world. We were involved in Nunn-Lugar base exchange program, but the main effort in Nunn-Lugar was to remove nuclear weapons from the former Soviet satellite states of Georgia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belorussia to get them under centralized control. What we found out was that Russia had been running a shell game throughout the Cold War, bolstering their capabilities through a series of feints and movements, when they were in-fact very limited in their ability or willingness to actually trust warheads at all the advertised operational units across the "triad”.
They relied more on controlling the US intelligence community within using plants, moles, and political stooges placed throughout government, CIA, and DoD to orchestrate an image of the 10ft tall Russian bear, with its thousands of warheads deployed all over. This is yet another example of the US system being totally ignorant about Russian/Eurasian culture and how no self-respecting Russian leader would trust subordinate leaders with nukes all over the place. So they ran a shell game from the warhead production sites purposely timed with US satellite overflights so we would see the trucks carrying the warheads out to Murmansk, to the Tu-95 bases, and mobile ICMB munitions hubs. But the trucks just took the few warheads they had back to the manufacturing site because they had problems cranking out reliable initiation systems.
They manipulated the US with Nunn-Lugar to get billions in funding in exchange for a continued shell game, and former KGB oligarchs pilfered all the money that was meant to prop up Russia from falling. They also used it to disarm Ukraine and Georgia further in preparation for taking those states in the future (we’ve already lived through partially now).
If someone tells you Russian maintenance is good, they’ve never lived in Russia, have never studied Russian military maintenance “standards”, and haven’t had insight into the Russian nuclear forces culture. The deterrence is based on posturing, with far less warheads and capable delivery systems than advertised. It’s still enough for a deterrent, but Russia can’t afford to find out if their systems work, because then every territorial dispute they have with the rest of their neighbors will kick off, especially with China.
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There is no Putin wing of the Republican Party. Biden has been on the Soviet payroll since no later than 1972. Hunter Biden and James Biden have been on Russian and Chinese payroll for years, which has spilled out into the open. Trump is the only US President who authorized US forces to destroy Russian forces for 6 hours in Syria in 2018 at the Battle of Khasham. Those were Putin’s very own Wagner mercenaries 5 Storm unit, who were leading a Syrian battle group of tanks, artillery, and engineers-2 battalions worth, from the Syrian 4th Division, National Defense Forces, and Baqir Brigade.
Trump blessed-off on F-22As, F-15Es, AC-130s, B-52Gs, AH-64Ds, MQ-9 Reapers, M777, and HIMARS to rain precision-guided weapons on the Russian/Syrian Battle Group for hours until they were obliterated twice-over. No American President has ever presided over the stacking of Russian forces like corkwood before. Wagner has direct ties to Putin.
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@kld70 Most Americans approaching retirement have one or more of the following:
IRAs
401k
Stocks
Bonds
Pensions
Savings
CODs
High asset value (real estate)
We are not facing abject poverty without SS & Medicare.
As a Nation, we are facing bankruptcy because of SS & Medicare.
We should fulfill all SS & Medicare obligations to Baby Boomers, then transfer funding for Gen X & Millennials over to a new hybrid system fed by IRAs, real estate, government surplus, and tariffs.
SS & Medicare will not be able to be funded or contribute enough to keep people out of poverty due to inflation and demographic collapse/low fertility. Inflation baselines are baked-in already due to demographics, price point trends, and sustained devaluation of our currency.
Not only is most of the biggest generation of consumers out of the workplace, but they are going into nursing homes and dying.
Gen X is very small, unable to sustain much growth, and old Gen X is already 2 years from retirement.
Millennials are the 2nd largest cohort, but about half of them are under-employed or not employed, already burdening society.
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I’ve been following since the STRATFOR days in the 2000s as well, which was much better when you had George Freidman and the senior analysts all collaborating on their assessments. Peter and the former FBI guys were very adverse to feeding into “conspiracy theories” because they all come from backgrounds where confirmation bias and conformity of thought were critical to organizational acceptance and your source of income. In academia, it is very dogmatic and cult-like. In the Federal agencies, you will lose your job if you are seen as “one of those guys”. The Bureau is especially insular, with a cult of personality expectation to worship the Director, even as openers to daily communications between junior staffers and agents. It’s very weird.
One of the biggest failures of STRATFOR and Peter is not looking at conspiracies with a clean slate, and vetting them using their same analytical methods. Instead, they just dismissed them reactively. One of the main areas that left a void in their assessments was failing to understand and assess false flags and other types of operations conducted by the intelligence agencies, organized crime families, criminal NGOs, and International money-laundering networks that actually do conspire together as a rule.
I also recognize that had they done so, they would have alienated a lot of their corporate customer base, who don’t want to hear or deal with those rabbit holes. The problem is, if you ignore them, it can cost you a lot of money.
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@kevf The US never wanted any of this. Ukraine wanted to trade with Europe and get Euro valuation for their goods and services, not deal with Rubles anymore than absolutely necessary. That’s what this war is really about. Putin had his puppet Yanukovych sign onto the Russian-Eurasian Economic Pact in late 2013. Ukraine protested for 4 months in all the major cities until Yanukovych fled in 2014. That’s when Hunter Biden got on the board of Burisma, and Putin invaded Donbas while annexing Krim.
Forget about the US, who hasn’t contributed much to Ukraine, and think about UK, Poland, and Europe. Europe has more motive than anyone to present Russian cancer from spreading into their nations again. Biden, a Russian puppet who has been on Soviet payroll since 1972, delayed deliveries of critical munitions and weapons systems throughout the war.
Oryx Report shows all losses in Ukraine, not just Russian. Stop consuming Russian information sources and look at dispassionate, non-aligned, independent reports with accompanying photographs and video of all weapon and equipment losses.
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Panama Papers exposes all of this. They even ran searchable address programs for the files and mapped it. The hottest spots are London, Moscow, Beijing, Shanghai, Switzerland, Dubai, Cyprus, Caymans, Gibraltar, Singapore, etc. Do an image search "Panama Papers Map".
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@R3GARnator The US has been steadily withdrawing strategically from Europe since 1992.
We were stationed in West Germany when you could barely count the number of US bases in Europe, there were so many. We had Ramstein, Bitburg, Spangdahlem, Hahn, Torrejon, Geilenkirchen, Vicenza, Soesterburg, multiple bases in UK, and pulled out of those dramatically after Desert Storm. It has been a constant draw-down since then, despite the dominant Russian propaganda claiming otherwise.
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@korayven9255 Let’s put insanely-inflated grocery prices and high gas prices aside for just one moment and look at housing. We’re raising a generation of kids who we can’t tell anymore to simply work hard with a valuable skill set and you’ll have access to the American dream of owning a home.
You need to work harder, smarter, own a business, or have 2 professionals working under the same household just to have a legacy middle class lifestyle. Under Trump, access to first-time home buyers was more reasonable than it had been in decades with roughly $75k median household. Now it’s $119,769 as of April 2024, to afford a $332k home. Where I live, there aren’t any homes in that price range. Most are double that. I have 5 kids, 2 of whom are adults and the conversations I have with them about what it takes to get into a home are nothing like the ones I heard and experienced.
This isn’t partisan, but just part of the American experience. Under Joe/Kamala, they have ended that dream for millions of younger Americans.
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@seashackf1 Crimea was annexed in 2014 under Comrade Barrack Hussein, not Trump.
Trump literally threatened Putin that if he did anything in Ukraine, the US response would end him.
Trump also is the only US President in history to authorize the decimation of Russian forces in Syria at the Battle of Khasham Feb2018.
Biden, (who literally got into the Senate with help from the Soviet/Russian front, Council for a Livable World), tried to pull Zelensky out of Kiev so Ukraine would be leaderless for Putin to then occupy.
Eric Trump never said any such thing. Trump made his fortune legitimately building hotels and large mega projects, not taking money from corrupt donors like the rest of the political class does.
Feb 2014, Putin had Elena Baturina wire $3.5 million to Hunter's front company, Rosemont Seneca, jointly owned with John Kerry's son-in-law, Chris Heinz. "10% for the big guy."
Then Hunter magically got on the board of Burisma in May 2014, which was under investigation for defrauding Ukraine and sending the money into accounts controlled by Putin associates in Cyprus, Switzerland, Panama, Singapore, and Grand Camans.
You have it all very backwards.
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@Laotzu.Goldbug I've been in aerospace and defense since the 1970s. Some of the programs we worked on were the ALCM, SRAM, SRAM II, JDAM, and other guided weapons systems, so I'm quite familiar with what it takes to get a warhead on-target. Before JDAM, it was all INS-based.
The launch aircraft would get an update for its INS with Radar ground-mapping off known reference points before weapon separation, then pass that data to the missile so it would start off with the best available position references.
Degradation of INS was a real thing, especially with weather. GPS and other things take precision-guidance into a new generation since then. There are better off-the-shelf guidance systems nowadays available to civilians.
You do have to take terrain into consideration though, including altitude and solve for that if you want to fly a Nap Of the Earth profile.
With modern digital mapping from satellite-based programs, you could manually chart an NOE course into a corridor, or run a real-time terrain-following profile algorithm.
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Baby Boomers had Gen X and Millennials. Gen X had Millenials and Gen Z.
So I see a current growing consumer base of these 3 prime working years generations.
Gen X are in management and early mid-life stages, many earning over the median household income.
Older 1st phase millenials born in the early-mid 1980s are coming into their own with home ownership, at least 10 years of solid credit history, stable work history.
Younger millennials and Zs are facing out-of-reach home ownership prices outside of apartments and town homes, and just watched median home sale prices fly away from them just as they thought about reaching for a single family residence, which is sad to watch.
Boomer and Gen X are watching their children have a bleak outlook on the future, which they feel together with them.
There is a strong consumer base for automobiles, home appliances, personal electronics, computers, TVs, insurance, education, and groceries.
All of those industries own the legacy alphabet media, who most of the 3 living generations don't trust and have ditched viewership of if you look at Nielsen ratings trends.
I think that's a pivotal pillar going forward: the decoupling from legacy media and information sources combined with decoupling from deglobalization.
We just don't trust the corporate news spigots that have lied to us for so long. This presents great opportunities and challenges.
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@kaseyc5078 Yes, but after WWII, there was a massive deficit in prime age males who are necessary for rebuilding society, and getting back to work. All of the European nations except for Switzerland and Sweden suffered tremendous losses to their native prime age males.
What many of them did was import workers from Turkey, North Africa, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East. Most of these men worked the low-skilled labor jobs, while some of them went into higher-skilled education and work as well.
Along with all of that, Europe adopted relaxed abortion laws, so native young adult females exterminated their children in the womb. This created even more demand for foreign laborers.
The problem is that these foreign laborers were enticed to come to Europe to take advantage of “free” social welfare programs, not to work. The uneducated and altruistic weak Europeans who idealized their social safety nets started to see that the immigrants weren’t contributing to society with productive work and paying into the tax system.
What did they do? Abort more of their children, and import more foreigners with promises of free everything. The consequences of this are disenfranchised and separate class of foreigners who will never be accepted as natives, who see themselves as superior to Europeans due to their own bigoted ideology and internal messaging from elders.
This means from a societal order standpoint, you have a people who don’t respect the nation’s laws. Any time you try to enforce the laws when they break them, they feel like they’re being discriminated against, rather than accepting responsibility. You also have genuine criminals who will use this dynamic to claim discrimination in hopes of avoiding consequences for their crimes.
The best thing would be to deport everyone back to their homelands because they refuse to integrate and refuse to obey the laws, refuse to work to contribute, while stealing the workers’ fruit.
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@hermaeusmora2945 Putin had the expansion of Russia into its "rightful territories" planned out since he assumed office in 2000. It literally didn't matter what anyone in Europe or the US did, he was always going to invade or place puppets and install Russian forces in Georgia, South Ossetia, Ukraine, Moldova, Finland, Poland, the Baltics, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria.
The Ukrainian SMO was supposed to be a Desert Storm-like moment for Russia with shock and awe, sending mass fear into Europe so that subsequent nations would capitulate and crumble like dominoes.
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@CanadianPrepper It's really not. Nobody collects, analyzes, and forecasts like this. The presstitute corporate whore media drives messaging, and the "independent" online media is full of foreign disinformation and bad attempts by legacy presstitutes to adapt.
The overwhelming majority of start-up information channels don't even have a basic education in geography, history, economics, business, and industrial market structures, yet make all kinds of absolute prognostications about these events out of utter ignorance.
Then you have PhD professors and retired Generals running their mouths with ridiculous comments, getting some things right, while failing terribly with the fundamentals.
Show me anybody else who has broken down the global semiconductor industry structure, trends, and challenges in a way that both the industry professional and layman can understand in context.
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I fundamentally disagree with Peter’s perspective on this interview overall, but he’s right about American myopia. Our legacy media has us hyper-focused on one subject at a time, then forgets it and moves on to the next thing. Public school breaks down lessons into 45 min blocks so you really only skim over subjects, instead of diving into them. We are an attention-deficit society that lacks focus in general. When we do become focused under crises or rare, great leadership, we are a formidable powerhouse that has dramatically changed the power dynamics of the world in regions thousands of miles away from us. The British, Spaniards, Germans, French, Russians, Turks, and Japanese have seethed at that power we wield. All of those former empires except the Russians are now our allies and trade partners, heavily-reliant on our security and foreign military sales.
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@crosslink1493 The problem is a lot of those people in the State Dept and WH are idiots who are appointed based on political kick-backs and who they’re related to. DC is very incestuous with the elite classes who live in an administrative state that begets more bureaucracy. This current WH has the youngest staffers ever in history on the economic council, for example. CIA was populated with 200 Russian double agents when it was formed in 1947, from the OSS days.
State Dept weenies and department heads come from Harvard finishing clubs (secret clubs), while CIA are mainly from Yale historically with their societies as well. These are blue bloods who groom their children to maintain the old order of European-based finance elites leveraging positions within USG to further European goals. The Russians did the same thing as much as they could dating back to the Czar, but since Russia has almost no trade with the US due to their geographic isolation, they have focused more on espionage, political subversion, and planting as many people within key levers in US society to protect their interests.
So the State Dept and CIA were filled with Russian moles dating way back. When the US formed the CIA in 1947, the Russians had already been tapping diplomatic cables since the early 1900s and reading all of our communications between the President, foreign ministers of other nations, and related nodes in the geopolitical web around the world.
They also propped up multiple political action organizations to get politicians elected who would do their bidding, especially on nuclear armament affairs because of the US’s dominance in that space. They watched us nuke Japan twice unilaterally, and always have feared that we could do the same to them if things got kinetic between us. That’s why they financed a pedophiles hopeless bid for the Senate in Delaware in 1972, along with 420 other Congressmen since 1962. He’s now sitting in his excrement-filled diaper drooling on himself in the WH, surrounded by Marxists in his senior cabinet positions and staff.
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Obama was habitually an absentee President who saw the job as beneath him, with his vast experience at Baskin and Robbins and a CIA front company to lean on.
He let Hillary, Biden, and Valerie Jarrett run amok. State Dept always wants to throw their weight around, and since they were all taking bribes from China, Russia, Iran, Pakistan, Saudis, etc. they gave allowances to all of the above.
Putin funneled $363 million into the Clinton Global Initiative, for example. It's just a coincidence that Obama, Hillary, and Biden fast-tracked Putin's access to Uranium One mining rights in the US and Canada.
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Russian intelligentsia doesn’t take anyone else’s ideas seriously. They see themselves as the biggest, the best, and believe that about themselves in most ways, regardless of the facts. They laugh at anyone else’s opinions of them because most Westerners have no real knowledge or cultural awareness of Russia and Russians. You could tell them highly-informed information collected from all sorts of reliable sources, and they will turn their noses up and dismiss it, even if it’s critical to their survival. If they did collect and process intelligence correctly, they wouldn’t have done something this stupid. Same with Afghanistan, Chechnya, Georgia, South Ossetia, Transnistria, etc.
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@davidfirmino3829 The US has been lifting up and bailing out other nations militarily, economically, and industrially.
England, France, Belgium from 1914-1918
Russia, China, England, France, Belgium, Norway, Netherlands, Italy, Austria were bailed out militarily from 1940-1945.
Germany and Japan were re-built and industrialized further with full US support after the war, while the US loaned billions to Europe to re-build.
Post-War, the US helped all kinds of nations with industry, monetary loans, transportation hubs, engineering, shipping, airports, universities, hospitals, canals, military equipment, etc.
South Korea, Philippines, Egypt, Greece....it would be easier to list the nations the US didn't help.
Computing, satellites, GPS, internet, free trade, increases in agricultural efficiency, air transport...all US technologies shared with the world.
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One problem with your premise though is that the Nation with the biggest budget developed drones of all types and has been working on them feverishly since WWII. It’s the only Nation that has everything from unmanned reusable re-entry vehicle drones that run lengthy space missions and high altitude/high endurance ISR drones, down to handheld micro drones deployed by soldiers....in addition to the thousands of fighters in its Air Force, Navy, and Marines, surface warfare vessels, super carriers, amphibious assault/light helicopter deck carriers, nuclear submarines, attack submarines, heavy lift transports, tanks, APCs, attack helicopters, etc.
The little nation with a minuscule defense budget stands no chance against such a Nation.
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@aleksandrs1422 The Ruble was about 24-29 to the US dollar at the time. I stayed in Saint Petersburg, Pushkino, Moscow, and Obninsk, so I saw a lot of different areas. You really needed a car to shop at Globus. Globus was a German department store that was focused on food, but also had a travel agency, dining room items, furniture maybe, and household goods.
The ruble is now 103 to the USD.
I have also lived in Germany and Japan. They are different worlds. Strangely, Russia reminded me more of Korea for some reason. I found it far more Asiatic than expected, mainly because of the effects of 250 years of Mongol rule still not washing off yet.
But people in Russia were generally very poor, and relied on weird hidden schemes and alternate methods of revenue just to get by, even with energy and food prices deflated by the government.
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@baolichang6019 Saudis will provide security in the Central Asian Republics? Saudi's entire security apparatus is built on internal control of Shiites and preventing uprisings instigated by Iran, while also fighting Yemenis. They have zero reach into the Central Asian Republics with their military.
Have you looked at a map of the Belt & Road plan? Imagine trying to move goods through Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Iran, and Turkey.
It's as if they gave a fat crayon to a mongoloid and said, "Draw me a road from China to Europe. Bonus points if it goes through some of the most unstable, thief-ridden regions of Asia, and over as many mountains as you can find."
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Jack Smith Zeihan's analyses are based on decades of white papers for foreign governments, large corporations, heavy industries, shipping, manufacturing, and intelligence services.
His teams start with the question, "Where could we be wrong?", then work from there.
The problem with Belt & Road is that China is trying to service a collapsing European demographic with a trade route through geographic and thief-ridden challenges, to bypass the South China Sea, Indian Ocean, Persian Gulf, and Suez Canal.
China has launched this long-term trade program as their own population is headed into demographic winter, self-inflicted by One Child Policy of 35 years of infanticide.
Put that recipe in the oven and see what it looks like when you open the door when the timer goes off.
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We've always lived in a world where information was controlled by those in power.
Because of the internet, there's a struggle over that power base and people are ignoring legacy media tunnels with abandonment of corporate advertisement-based groupthink.
When Peter referenced the lunatic fringe conspiracies that used to be espoused by the left percolating into the right in US politics, he didn't specify which conspiracies, but he's right.
The main ones are:
* JFK assassination had US government involvement in both the murders and the cover-up via the Warren Commission. This was a pillar basis of politically-active academics and journalists who affiliated with Democrats from the 1960s-forward.
There were also people across party lines who thought it was a conspiracy, didn't buy the WC narrative. These are just the facts about people's perceptions and instincts, supported by the Church Committee, Assassination review Committee, and ARRB acts from 1975-1992.
* Another big one is pharmaceutical giants' manipulation of media and ads through corporate media, while concealing their harmful products.
People on the left and right are seeing more eye-to-eye on these types of topics, which is alarming to those who are used to ruling through division.
Peter skips over these details, though he has discussed the overall trend towards a new populist political movement in the US.
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@paulallen2680 I attended public, on-base, and private schools growing up all over the US and the world, so I got a lot of samples sizes. I went to 7 different high schools, not including my exchange student program to Japan.
The Prussian Reform model format is pretty universal, except in Montessori. Lecture format, children abandoned for the day, 45 minute blocks of limited instruction, Pavlovian bell-ringing on the intercom to switch classes from Junior High and up, behavioral modification and conditioning focus, very limited academics.
Private schools were ahead by about 2 years on average, but still the same structural model mostly, with their own unique cultures driven by the particular sect.
I’ve also had my kids at various types of schools in 4 different States, 2 countries, and now home schooling for the younger ones. My older boys went to a unique academy in Europe, so they’ve learned foreign languages by immersion.
If you’re not going to learn anything in school, it might as well be in a foreign language.
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There's a really great article written by 3 former Soviet professors basically explaining in great detail how the collapse of the USSR wasn't a singular event, but a massive series of trends that began decades prior to 1991, and continues decades after.
Key points include:
* Planned economy failure
* Black market allowed it to function under the table
* Major industrial initiatives were utter disasters, like Chernobyl
* Their spending on military was excessive and still failed to come close to matching the West. Bekaa Valley 1982 humiliated their fighters, for example.
* Soviet-Afghan War
* One of the only things that kept the Soviet economy afloat was massive revenue from oil and NG.
* Orders from Moscow to all the mines, production facilities, and plants dropped in free-fall mode once the government collapsed.
* Workers, technicians, scientists, and engineers left their more remote cities to gather in large cities or fled the country if they were smart.
* Education had already been suffering, then went into free-fall in the 1990s as well with so many professors, engineers, and researchers moving internally or leaving the country for Western Europe, US, Canada, Australia, etc.
Putin was put in place to right the ship in people's minds as a strong man, even though everything was still in collapse.
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@jacobgordon7998 Trump accomplished more in 4 years than most Presidents in the last 30. Look at Middle East peace deals, energy independence, military build-up, black leader engagement for inner cities, housing affordability, record-low unemployment, stopped the multi-billion dollar payments to Hamas and Iran, kept Putin in-check in Ukraine, renegotiated NAFTA in favor of the US, put tariffs on China, had HHS authorize 900+ affordable generic drugs every year, reduced illegal border crossings dramatically, the list goes on and on if you just look at it dispassionately.
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@SomeGeezer0 I’ve been working with Finland from 2005-2016 in preparation for these contingencies. My mom is from Finland and I have Finnish citizenship as a result, have lived there many times since 1979. The biggest thing is that people apply their thinking to the Russians, and the Russians don’t think like the rest of us, not even close. They’re historically retarded and also self-aware in a way that we aren’t.
Russians will do whatever Putin orders, and Putin still believes the history that fascist Finland invaded Russia in World War II. The official internal dialog within the KGB was based on Stalin’s history, where the false flag Stalin used to start the Winter War was a real attack from Finland.
Russians don’t generally even acknowledge Finland as an independent nation, many saying that the Czar created Finland, therefore Finland belongs to Russia and they should rightfully take it back. Same for the Baltics. Estonians aren’t even recognized as people. “Who are they? What do they have?”
Russians are very primitive thinkers in ways that make some of the dumbest, uneducated people in the West seem brilliant. You have to see it for yourself to understand what I’m talking about.
What that looks like in practice is Iskander cruise missiles hitting Helsinki, whether Russians can take any ground in Finland or not. Putin doesn’t read any Western analyses of Russia because he already has the best, most reliable information in his mind due to his KGB background. Everyone else are stupid peasants in his mind, filled with propaganda. Russians project their own condition on everyone else just as Westerners do to them. Neither are correct.
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You have to study Russian influence in US media and universities dating back to the 1930s, especially after FDR formally recognized Stalin and the Bolsheviks over Russian Nationalists in 1933.
Every journalism student has been thoroughly indoctrinated with Marxism-Leninism, anti-US sentiment, and views US foreign policy through a curated perspective driven by Soviet and Russian disinformation.
Since Russia could never go toe-to-toe with the US militarily, they knew they had to rely on subterfuge, lies, propaganda, and co-opting politicians with aggressive MICE attacks via the open US society.
That's why they financed the Senate campaign of a young recent law school graduate in 1972, who suffered from uncontrollable pedophilia tendencies.
He was a nobody, zero political career, never did anything notable. Then through a Soviet front company, he magically had campaign financing to unseat an incumbent Senator in Delaware that year.
His son lists him on his iPhone contacts list as "Pedo Pete", but most know him by the name of Joseph Biden.
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@ericr6829 Sweden & Denmark are Bretton Woods, NATO, and EU beneficiaries integrated into the US-European security and trade system.
Even though Sweden wasn't part of NATO, they still benefitted from NATO members around them (UK, Norway, Denmark, Germany, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland) and used critical systems in their defense sold to them by NATO nations.
Example: SAAB fighters have always been powered by Rolls Royce, Pratt & Whitney, or GE motors, using licensed avionics/Radars from Hughes or Leonardo, US/NATO missiles, servos, landing gear, brakes, fuel systems, Mauser cannon, etc.
Sweden is a hybrid form of government like any other Nordic state, not pure socialist. The socialist policies mostly weaken Sweden though, which is offset and insulated by being part of the above-mentioned security and trade networks that allowed them to focus on economy and social issues while ignoring defense mostly.
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@imgreen2563 During the Cold War, they ran a shell game with warheads. The production facility would truck warheads out to the operational units, whether they be subs near Murmansk, bombers at various air bases, and arming hubs for mobile ICBMs, only they would return with the same warheads and not plus-up the units with functional nukes.
For starters, there is no trust in Russian culture or history internally, let alone with their neighbors and Warsaw Pact members.
They kept enough ICBMs loaded-up with very short leashes in the command-and-control hierarchy though.
The truth is they simply never had the institutional culture necessary to produce and maintain anywhere close to the number of nukes they claimed, and it was all designed to appear as if they had tens of thousands of them.
This is one of the main missions of their co-opting of the CIA out of the gate, to misinform the US and NATO about how powerful they were, when in reality, they were always retarded peasants who found themselves awake in a century with technologies that simply were beyond their capacity to understand outside of theft.
Nunn-Lugar gave the US an inside-look at how broken and neglected their strategic and tactical nukes forces were.
This was the main question Putin had upon assuming the presidency when Yeltsin resigned.
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Gripen is mostly US and UK technology. Engine, Radar, hydraulics, fire control computer, databus, missiles, ejection seat, pylons, rails, landing gear, brakes, servos are all US/UK...the gun is German.
It's basically a NATO subsystem fighter partially-assembled in Sweden.
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@frankpinter9508 Funny how Macron either isn't aware or purposely ignored the fact that much of the weaponry and supplies it sent to Ukraine were manufactured in the US, and sold to NATO and EU countries prior to, and during the war. Take Patriots, Javelins, Bradleys, Abrams, NASAMs, HIMARS, M777, and F-16s, for just a few examples.
I wouldn't expect Macron to be competent or well informed on this subject though.
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@fridrekr7510 It’s Peter’s argument, not mine. I was merely explaining his perspective as I understand it, having followed his analyses since the 2000s. City States by definition operate autonomously for the most part, with their own economy, culture, and politics. You do see this in Finland, Sweden, and Norway, though it isn’t as pronounced as the ancient city states of Europe of course.
A better contrast would be to compare the Nordics to Central Europe. Central Europe is integrated with highways, the EU government, rail lines, and high volume air traffic. The Scandinavian Peninsula is geographically isolated, subject to more extreme cold weather, with limited connectivity between Norway, Sweden, and Finland, dotted with a few small population cities along the coasts.
That’s how I see Peter’s perspective, which does have some validity to it. The Nordic countries like to think of themselves as bigger powers than they are. Sweden is the most guilty of this, and Finland just wants to be recognized and accepted so that people will not make the same mistake again that was made in 1939, leaving her to deal with Russia alone.
Hopefully that makes sense.
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@josephtorres3229 Actually Russia violated Minsk, since Ukraine gave up her nukes as part of that deal where her territorial integrity was off-limits.
Putin’s red line was crossed when Ukraine threw out his puppet in Kiev, Yanukovych, who signed onto the Russia-Eurasian Economic Pact, against the will of 79% of the Ukrainian people. They actually wanted to trade their goods and services for Euros, not Rubles.
Step outside of the Russian Pravda and into a more holistic assessment of the history and real events. Turn of Russia One TV, and build a timeline of events on your own, asking who, what, where, when, why.
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@gmw3083 Biden has been on Russian payroll since 1972. They literally financed his campaign into the Senate through Council for a Livable World. Yes, people under Biden continue to coordinate with Russia to subvert US interests.
Putin’s plan backfired horrendously on him in Ukraine, and likely eliminated his chances of going after Poland, the Baltics, eastern Romania, and Finland during his presidency. Now that Europe has seen how easy it is to curb-stomp Russian forces, it will be a potentially-volatile time, because they don’t want this spilling into Europe anymore, and Putin has to somehow continue to sell his image as a strong man to the Russian people.
The Russian tactic of throwing bodies at the problem doesn’t work against modern ISR networks and precision munitions, because they can find, fix, and attrit logistics nodes with impunity.
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It's important to understand that Peter's reference for an optimally-functioning Presidency is that of George H.W. Bush, because he was the last one with an actual foreign policy.
Trump pulled off what nobody has been able to do in at least a century of Roosevelt-initiated Blue Blood control of the WH (and the crony relationship between Wall Street conglomerates and the political parties).
He circumvented the sell-out politician career path to the WH, bypassing Congressional, Gubernatorial, or cabinet positions (over a lifetime of fake public speaking and obedience to the financial interests who control both parties).
This is why Trump was hated and feared by both parties. There are dozens of Congressmen plugging away with the establishment system like good little conformists, eager to lick the boot of the financial interests who determine who makes it into the run-offs, who then not only got sidelined and politically eviscerated (especially Jeb Bush), but then faced a potential dynasty blocking them out.
Think about Cory Booker, Marco Rubio, Gavin Newsom, John Kennedy, Lisa Murkowski, Amy Klobuchar, etc.
There's a narrow window that opens at certain times, mainly determined by a combination of age, tenure, party affiliation relative to the cycle (RR, D, RR, D, RRR, DD, RR, DD, R, D), name recognition, previous campaign experience, Vice President, etc.
Trump threw all of that out of whack, which ruffled the feathers of dozens of career politicians in both parties.
Even worse for them, he commands such a groundswell of grassroots support, fomenting a rare populist cultural swing that hasn't happened since Reagan and FDR.
FDR's populism was created by crisis and mass control of the media. Trump's was created despite the established media, by leveraging the internet and his long career in business and entertainment.
The worst possible outcome for the establishment sell-outs in DC would have been a 2-term Trump, followed by whomever his VP would be in 2024 with his blessing.
This is why they threw everything at him possible, short of assassination like they did to Reagan.
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@jlvandat69 ACA was a shake-down for insurance companies, pharmaceuticals, and medical device manufacturers. Medicare and Medicaid already covered uninsured and hospitals aren’t allowed to deny life-saving care.
The talking points used to sell ACA didn’t have basis in reality. Examples:
“Millions of Americans are going bankrupt because of medical costs!”
Reality: Anywhere between 738,000 down to 424,000 US bankruptcies are filed each year in total, including businesses, with bankruptcy rates falling each year, not increasing, even as the population increases. We just don’t have millions even filling each year. A smaller % of total bankruptcies are attributed to medical costs, but these were avoidable in most cases had the patients applied for Medicare, Medicaid, and even Social Security.
ACA is one of the biggest scams hefted onto the US, but was a windfall in money for the corporate interests who control DC.
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@thomasdonovan3580 Putin was planning on invading Finland anyway. One of his foreign ministry secretaries was running his mouth about the new plans already in the 2000s.
Russia didn’t invade Ukraine over possible NATO membership, but because Putin lost his puppet, Yanukovych, and Putin had been using Ukraine for a personal bank through embezzlement of Ukrainian revenue through various companies, including Burisma. As long as Yanukovych was in power, Putin was happy, along with Biden, Obama, and all the other stooges who were on Putin’s payroll. Look at the Panama papers for further evidence of what I’m talking about.
Finns know that without a mutual defense pact, they would be seriously damaged by Russia at a minimum, with a giant loss of population. The Ukrainian refugee crisis is 2x the Finnish population, for example.
The US didn’t drive a wedge between Russia and EU. EU nations got in front of that on their own, outside of the influence of puppet Biden or Obama. The US has been in strategic withdrawal from Europe since 1992, after Desert Storm and the collapse of the Soviet Empire.
Eastern Europe came begging to join NATO because, unlike the comfortable Germans, French, and UK, they didn’t buy into “the end of history” silliness that was being spewed from Brussels, London, New York, and DC.
The Eastern Europeans’ instinct was of course correct, and all the talking heads and academics in the US and Western Europe who thought we were done with the old ways were wrong. This should have been clear already with Yugoslavia. When Russia invaded Georgia in 2008, most knew the gig was up.
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@kevinsutube1p528 Biden openly credits Council for a Livable World for getting him elected in 1972, same organization that helped lift the campaign of "a community organizer" into the Illinois Senate, who then became President in 2008.
Council for a Livable World is a Soviet era front group started by Leo Szilard in 1962, helping 420+ Congressmen, Senators, Governors, and Presidents into office.
Biden was a no-name pedophile with zero political history in 1972.
After Ukrainians threw Yanukovych out in March 2014, Elena Baturina (human/sex trafficker/former 1st lady of Moscow) wired $3.5 million to Hunter Biden.
Hunter Biden then joined the board of Burisma, which triggered an email from John Kerry's son-in-law, Chris Heinz, a front company business partner with Hunter in Rosemont Capital.
In Sep that year, Obama flew to UK to ask David Cameron to shut down MI5/MI6's investigation into Burisma.
Then VP Biden demanded that the new President Proshenko not only shut down the investigation into Burisma, but fire Viktor Shokin, otherwise Ukraine wouldn't get $1 Billion in foreign aid from the US.
Biden, Clintons, Obamas, Kerrys, and numerous US Senators and Congressmen have been invested in the embezzlement scheme in Ukraine for many years, as an insurance policy for Putin/Russia.
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@kevinsutube1p528 The former Soviet officer, Pavel Sudoplatov, who managed Council for a Livable World as part of the NKVD and KGB's "Administration for Special Tasks", revealed its true purpose in a book after the collapse, co-written with his University of Moscow Economics Professor son, Anatoli.
Szilard was about to be arrested back in the early 1960s because he had been passing nuclear secrets to the Soviets all along.
The Soviets had so many moles in the FBI, they were able to steer their assets in advance to prevent them from being arrested, or sacrifice them to bolster the credibility of new high-level moles.
Zsilard's value was enormous if they could have him switch gears from technical espionage, to political activism based on nuclear alarmism.
That is why they directed him to found a front group called The Council for a Livable World. Their strategy was to first focus CFALW money on Senatorial elections in States with tiny populations where their campaign donations and bundling could have more influence on the outcome.
Enter a young pedophile named Joe Biden in 1972, and the State of Delaware.
What was Biden's first conspicuous action in office in 1973? He traveled to Leningrad to meet with Senior Soviet leadership so they could talk about policy, while showing off their new trophy to each other.
Biden returned to the US and immediately began cheerleading against the B-1A, which was supposed to replace the B-52 fleet.
After he, Admiral Stansfield Turner (DCI under Carter who had been recruited into CIA by one of the original NKVD double agents in CIA), other closet CPUSA Congressmen, and Carter cancelled the B-1A in 1977, Joe was then tasked with getting the US to reduce its nuclear arsenal while the Soviets built theirs up under Strategic Arms Limitation Talks. He returned to USSR, that time to Moscow in 1979 for this purpose. You can see photos of this yourself with an image search.
Joe Biden has literally been working for the Soviets his entire career.
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Yeah, the thing he said about Trump “clearly failing” couldn’t be more wrong. How many politicians in US History could have ever done the amount of campaign rallies and planning sessions that Donald Trump did, even if they were in their 30s? Trump Jr. said he can’t keep up with him at age 46. Trump did all those events up through election night, didn’t go to sleep, then went straight into the cabinet formation meetings with a lot of people half his age that were wanting to take a break. Then if what Peter projects will be true, it’s as if Trump didn’t pick probability the greatest VP pick of all time, JD Vance. On top of that, he literally built his cabinet with a core of former Presidential candidates, including RFK Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, and Vivek Ramaswamy. So Peter is orders of magnitude erroneous here on this alarmist forecast of a Constitutional crisis. In reality, it’s a Constitutional stabilizing movement, the likes of which have never been seen before in US Presidential history. No Republican President would ever surround themselves with former Democrat Presidential candidates like this, because Trump is an American President, not a partisan.
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There is no Putin wing of the Republican Party. It’s a ridiculous construct designed to accuse people of what the guilty party is guilty of as a distraction. Biden has been on the Russian payroll since 1972, when they financed his hopeless Senate campaign in Delaware. He has taken an anti-US defense crusade since the moment he got into the Senate, to include immediately flying to Leningrad to meet with senior party officials, who gave him his marching orders on killing the B-1A program.
As soon as Carter came into office in 1977, they did exactly that-killed B-1A saying it was too expensive, but allowed it to remain as a test program so the Soviets could get more technical data for their response to it: The Tupolev Tu-160 Blackjack supersonic strategic bomber.
Reagan re-started the B-1 program as the B-1B, which wasn’t as fast, but had a much smaller Radar Cross Section.
Soviet Active Measures programs are still alive and well in the US and Europe, with over 420 Congressmen, Senators, and Governors assisted into office with Soviet money and political groups. Biden has openly credited one of them for helping him into the Senate in 1972, The Council for a Livable World.
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@MarcosElMalo2 The US bought Swedish Bofors steel barrels for some 40mm weapons systems on the AC-130 Gunship, but we also make our 155mm and 105mm howitzers, 40mm,30mm, 25mm, 20mm, .50 Cal, .338, .30 Cal, and .224 Cal barrels at scale that no other nation can match.
Instead of relying heavily on those types of weapons, our primary methods for delivering explosive munitions is via air, sea, and ground-launched missiles with bigger warheads.
Why drive a tank when you can fire missiles and drop Precision-Guided weapons? We've shifted far away from WWII thinking with an emphasis on air power. Russia has an artillery-based land component forces, with motorized Infantry to follow the echelons of fire and pour through the rubble.
US echelons of fire start with coordinated air power strikes and air dominance sweeps, to include bombers, strike fighters, Stealth Fighters, Wild Weasels, light multirole fighters, armed UAS, then move into ground-launched missiles, long-range PGM artillery, then mobility-based armored & mechanized forces who all use precision-guided weapons as well.
Explosive material delivery is much more efficient and lightning-fast with the execution of combat operations, which reduces losses of life on both sides due to the overwhelming speed of the campaign in full spectrum warfare.
Russia thinks differently, but imagined they could execute a blitzkrieg on Ukraine without having these critical systems, training, and doctrines.
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The Ukraine “Special Military Operation" was supposed to be a lightning-fast seizure of Kiev and the coastal sea ports, predicated on the removal of Zelensky by Biden. Remember, “I don’t need a ride, I need ammo.” Biden played a key role in opening the door for Putin, but Zelensky didn’t play along, and threw the whole invasion into a long-term slug-out of conventional forces.
People, including Generals and military historians, rarely discuss or consider the critical roles that traitors play in major strategic moves. Biden has been on the Soviet payroll since 1972, when they financed his hopeless campaign into the Senate to act as a mole in the US who would vote against and cheerlead to weaken US defense programs and positions on START II. Having traitors inside your opponent’s castle court is a basic tenet of Eastern thinking.
Russia has hordes of traitors on their payroll in Germany, the UK, France, Poland, Finland, the Baltics, Ukraine, Moldova, Romania, Bulgaria, etc. When you coordinate an invasion with strategic moves from leaders within the targeted nations, the invasions have much greater success. Look at what they did to Hungary in 1956, and Czechoslovakia in 1968. How many EU Members of Parliament do you think are on Russian payroll or compromise? How many NATO staff members and Generals? Remember that the German BND was headed by Reinhardt Gehlen, who the Soviet NKVD turned at the end of the war before BND was even created once West Germany was formed.
Russia’s deck of cards is so extensive, that they use traitors’ sons and family members as pons in puppet regimes in other nations even. For example, Hunter Biden was on the board of Burisma. Burisma was being investigated for embezzling funds and routing them to Putin. That’s why Vice President Biden told Ukraine that they wouldn’t get a billion dollars from the US until the prosecutor was fired. Burisma’s CEO was living in exile avoiding prosecution for these crimes at the time.
Russia has invaded all of these territories throughout history, and they were almost always part of an empire to counter Russia. It didn’t matter to Russia, they invaded anyway.
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@crawkn He openly credits Council for a Livable World helping him get elected into the Senate in 1972.
The former KGB officer who managed CFALW exposed it as an arm of Soviet foreign subversion after the collapse.
As soon as he got into the Senate, with zero experience in foreign policy, he flew to Leningrad and convened with senior Soviet party leaders and intelligence, then returned to the US and began lobbying against the B-1A strategic bomber, which was cancelled in 1977.
Then in 1979, he returned to the USSR, this time to Moscow to meet again with even higher Soviet leaders. Upon return to the US, the junior Senator lobbied for US to submit to SALT II treaties, which reduced our nuclear deterrent, while Russia built theirs up.
In recent times, his son Hunter has been on multiple Russian payrolls, including a sex and human trafficking business partnership with the former first Lady of Moscow, as well as Burisma.
Burisma was embezzling funds from Ukraine and funneling them to Putin, as part of Putin's puppet regime under Yanukovych in Ukraine.
This is a guy who has been involved in treason against the United States his entire political career.
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@crawkn Putin didn’t come into power like that at all. Putin as placed in the Yeltsin presidency as a Deputy Prime Minster after the 1st Chechen War, by the KGB Oligarchs who took over Russia’s main industries after the collapse. They recognized Russia was in a state of chaos and needed to stabilize the nation under authoritarian rule, which Yeltsin was not capable of exercising. Putin managed the 2nd Chechen War with a scorched earth policy to appear to be the new strong man that Russians are used to having, and Yeltsin resigned on Dec 31, 1999 on TV, announcing Putin as their new President. https://youtu.be/ZVitEiKkRZ8
Putin was financing Hillary through Clinton Global Initiative. He didn’t take Trump seriously because all the media said Hillary would win, and Putin had given $363 million to Clinton Global in exchange for Bill to give speeches , but really to bribe Hillary, Obama, and Biden to sign off on Putin’s access to US and Canadian uranium mining rights with the Uranium One deal. There were hundreds of millions of dollars changing hands, with whistleblowers/informants inside the companies reporting to James Comey’s FBI (Director from 2013-2017 synonymous with Obama WH and Hillary State Department).
https://youtu.be/6qTQJXni48k
The sources for Biden corruption evidence are whistle-blowers, business partners, and Hunter’s own communications, as well as VP Joe Biden bragging about getting the Ukrainian Chief Prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, fired with an open bribe to the Ukrainian President, using US international assistance money allocated by the Obama WH. He isn’t even trying to hide it: https://youtu.be/UXA--dj2-CY
I have disapproved of Biden since the 1980s, just as the Democrat Party laughed him out of the 1988 primaries. Especially after I learned about his treason regarding the B-1A program, working with the Russians through Council For A Livable World, I disliked him even more. I also disliked his calling for over 300 new death penalty sentences for inner city blacks, and how he talked about forced bussing would create racial jungles. I disliked his co-sponsoring legislation from KKK Grand Masters in the Senate. I especially disliked his drafting of the Domestic Surveillance program after Oklahoma City Bombing, which was signed into law as the PATRIOT ACT by George W. Bush after 9/11.
The evidence is in the open, not special or insider. Biden literally bragged about being corrupt and told people not to assumed he wasn’t corrupt, because he’s literally that stupid. I’ve been watching him run his mouth for over 4 decades, and only stupid things come out of it as a rule, even before he had the aneurysms.
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@crawkn Ukraine has been governed as a puppet state of Russia for centuries, and went back and forth with puppet presidents after the Soviet collapse.
Ukrainian people wanted to trade with Europe and grow their economy like Poland. Putin had Yanukovych as his puppet, who basically managed the flow of Ukrainian industry revenue embezzlement to Russia to keep Ukraine subverted.
Yanukovych violated the will of the people, who all voted in favor of trade with EU by 79% in 2013. Instead, he signed onto Putin's Russia-Eurasia Economic Pact in late 2013. That triggered the 4 month Euromaiden revolution and protests, leading to the ousting of Yanukovych in March 2014.
Ukraine began a systematic house-cleaning of these Russian-loyalist plants in government and industry, including the investigation into Burisma by chief prosecutor Viktor Shokin.
Guess when Hunter was brought on board with Burisma? Spring 2014. That would insulate Burisma since Hunter's father was Vice President at the time in the Obama WH, with bought/paid-off Hillary as SECSTATE.
Russia did everything in its power to ensure Ukraine didn't have control over their own energy, because it would then be able to compete with Russia by providing natural gas to Europe, as a bilateral trade partner with no territorial ambitions against European states.
Joe Biden threw a wrench in Ukraine's government attempts of cleaning house. He wasn't helping to fight corruption, but to instead enforce further Russian subversion of Ukraine.
The timeline and facts are extremely damning for the Bidens.
Trump is the only US President who presided over US forces destroying Russian forces in Syria in 2018 at the Battle of Khasham. US F-22As, B-52Gs, F-15Es, AH-64Ds, and MQ-9s dropped JDAMs, Hellfires, combined with M777 artillery, HIMARS, and AC-130 gunship fire for 6 hours on Russian Wagner mercenaries and their Syrian Army battle group who attacked US Special Operations Forces over the Euphrates River.
Stories about Trump "licking Putin's boots" in the leftist media were projection. Soviets hijacked US media starting in the 1950s with the CIA's Mockingbird program.
Look at all the money that changed hands between Putin, the Clintons, and Bidens. Hunter was business partners with the former first Lady of Moscow in her sex and human-trafficking ring.
Biden corruption and treason is in the open.
Iran just "obtained" US shipments of Javelins and Stinger missiles by the way. It took over 6 months for Biden WH to send a lot of the promised military aid to Ukraine. Much of it came from critical stockpiles in the UK, Poland, and Finland.
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@crawkn Russia has been meddling in US elections and politics since no later than the 1930s. It’s a running operation of active subversion that is top priority by their intelligence services. They have helped elect over 420 Senators, Congressmen, Governors, and US Presidents since 1962 using Council for a Livable World and other front groups.
If you try to see these events through the lens of US-internal political partisanship, it will prevent you from viewing the big picture, though it is true that Russia/Soviets prefer to co-opt Democrat candidates. They target everyone though.
Quid pro Quo was Uranium One to help Putin revitalize his nuclear forces, not soft corruption. Taking heat off a company Putin had corrupted to benefit Russia (Burisma), while subverting Ukrainian independence is not soft corruption, especially when the Vice President and his son are acting as lead men to that effort. Biden exercised corrupt influence to get Shokin fired with a massive bribe/carrot-stick approach using US foreign aid money to Ukraine, which benefitted Putin. There isn’t any Russian propaganda exposing their high-level moles in the US, but disinformation spread through their media mouthpieces in the MSM to distract and attack those who present a threat to them.
Russia also focuses on fanning the flames of political division within the US through their assets in the MSM and now online to create chaos and agitation. They have always been involved in AGITPROP, especially through the universities and media. Their goal is to balkanize the US so that our forward-deployed combat power in Europe can be weakened, allowing them to take territories on their borders to act as buffers from the historical invasion routes into Russia.
It makes zero sense for Russia to hurt their chess pieces in the WH, Pentagon, and Congress. In fact, Putin endorsed Biden in the 2020 election. He stated his reasoning was that since Biden is a Democrat, and the Democrat party is more ideologically-aligned with socialism, it made more sense since he is also ideologically socialist from the Soviet times.
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@nickorme8112 I've been tracking foreign aid for decades. The problem is the people who the aid is intended for never/rarely receive it. The UN is usually involved in these matters, and they are filled with puppets for China and the Soviet Union back in the day, Russia today.
For example even in some cases where it was private aid, like hands across America, none of that food went to the starving Africans. There were soviet IL-76 transports parked at the airports ready and waiting for the US goods to be loaded onto them, then flown into the Soviet Union.
The titles of these aid packages are false & misleading. Most of the money ends up in the hands of money- laundering networks, intelligence agencies, weapons traffickers, organized crime rings, shadow-bankers, and the various criminal-govt entities who exploit these shake-downs.
It's a giant scam.
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@ГеоргийИванов-й6ю9ш One of my contacts in the Russian Foreign Ministry was running his mouth about how they were going to take everything back. This was in the early 2000s, as we had the discussion with an intermediary in 2007 when I brought up the subject of the risks vs rewards of Finland joining NATO.
It was explained at the time that Russia would interpret a Finnish NATO membership as a hostile action, which would accelerate the invasion of Finland on a timeline, but Russia planned to take Finland either way, along with the Baltics, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Romania, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Chechnya, Uzbekistan, and any former Czarist or Soviet satellites.
I put a pin in that conversation thinking it was notable, but also possibly an old Soviet blow-hard who was casting his own desires on the new Putin Presidency. He was reprimanded by his superiors though for running his mouth too much about the new Putin foreign policies, because Putin was pretending to be peaceful at that time.
In summer of 2008, I was in Estonia finishing up the Erna Raid competition as an observer-controller when Russia invaded Georgia. The rest is history, as they say.
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@tawmas1593 Hegseth is cleaning house in DoD of waste, fraud, and abuse so we can have more capability, not less. If you've ever been in DoD, you would agree there is a lot of largesse in the wrong places with overweight management, huge ancillary civilian workforces with obsolete jobs using out-dated equipment in unnecessary buildings, and billions wasted on things other than weapons, ammunition, fuel, spare parts, active duty and guard salaries, etc.
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@JJthename55 I wonder what judges we can find to oversee the trials of Joe Biden for child molestation, abuse of his own children, raping female staffers, treason, selling out the United States to Russia and China, the Iranians, weaponizing the DoJ against political rivals, compromising National security with the border, money-laundering untold millions from hostile nations to the US, conspiracy with Obama in attacking political rivals with the IRS, smuggling thousands of guns to Mexico under F&F, etc.
Oh wait, too senile to prosecute. Here's an icy and a diaper.
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@garyspence2128 Now I’ll have to go figure what form of bigotry it was I was using when I had a black wife, and why I keep voting for black Congressional candidates in my district since 2012, and why I preferred Herman Cain over Mitt Romney, and why the best Sniper Squad Leader I had was black, but the worst Battalion Commanders I had were also black. Maybe because I look within the person and don’t really give a rip about their skin color? What form of white supremacy is that?
I fell in love with that girl because she was brilliant, a talented musician, above Master’s degree collegiate-level writer, and very attractive.
I voted for the Congressional candidates that I have because of their experiences and inspiration to build a better America, not looking for other to blame like Obama.
I preferred Herman Cain over all the other Presidential Candidates in 2012 because he was the only one with actual leadership experience in business, knew the numbers, and was powerful and confident enough to call out Bill Clinton on his fabricated numbers in a town hall meeting.
You might be guilty of blind partisanship, where carpet-bagging political opportunists have told you lies for generations, "vote for me", then do nothing to help you once in office. Biden is a lifelong open racist. Obama looks down on everyone.
Content of character >>>>> color of skin (don’t care)
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The US and the rest of the world is very critical of US leadership, because it’s one of the only systems where you’re allowed to criticize the leadership. Imagine a Russian, Chinese, Iranian, Saudi, Venezuelan, or Belarus media firm criticizing Putin, Xi, Ayatollah, the Crown Prince, etc. The US looks particularly egalitarian and ultra-stable when you analyze other nations, and I’m one of the biggest critics of US White Houses dating way back.
The real dynamic is that the old powers of Europe realized that they needed to be invested in America and the US as the US proved resilient to overt rule by the monarchies, so they took over the US financial system and subverted the political system. Russia caught onto that in the early 1900s and turned it on heavy from the 1930s-present.
China is more of a later player in that game since the 1970s, competing with the Brits, Japanese, Russians, Saudis, Israelis, Iranians, Pakistanis, etc.
No matter how many bribes they pay to senior politicians in the Senate and WH, we have very quick turnover in the WH and still have long-standing alliances and trade policies that are quite treason-proof, even with Bushes, Clintons, or Bidens in the WH.
Presidents and Senators come and go. Programs and policies endure much longer.
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@boynamesue7720 Yup. Putin himself inquired about joining NATO, which would have cut the other members nations out of being able to intervene when he executed his plans to take Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Slovakia, Czechia, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia.
Notice how NATO doesn't get involved with Turkey and Greece over all their disputes, including Cyprus?
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@Vractis Obama wasn't afraid of GOP, but he was sensitive to being called out for the domestic spying and targeting of Tea Party PACs using the weaponized IRS, and the DOJ Fast & Furious gun-running operation to the cartels. He was very indifferent and distant even from career Senate Democrats who had been trying to do universal healthcate legislation since the 1970s. He didn't play DC two-step, instead secluding himself and watching TV, or calling staff meetings to learn about a matter. Valerie Jarrett and other behind-the-scenes actors got a lot of skullduggery done on-behalf of foreign governments.
The media ran huge cover for Obama, so we still don't hear about what extent the Chinese, Russians, and Iranians played.
The biggest attraction was to Uranium One, which Putin used after bribing the Clintons through Clinton Global Initiative, to help Putin re-build his nuclear arsenal.
Then there was the Iranian deal where they got billions of dollars on pallets, and the US got nothing.
PATRIOT Act was further cemented as a domestic political opponent spy program under Obama as well.
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@michaelboano7183 Someone groomed his rise to power, someone with motive and means bigger than the DNC. His actions in the WH were extremely injurious to the United States and our relations with out allies, while agitating and polarizing the US populace against itself.
Some relevant points about his family history....
Fact: Madelyn Dunham (Obama’s maternal grandmother) worked at the Boeing Wichita manufacturing facility on the B-17 and B-29 during WWII.
Fact: The B-29 Technical Data Package was compromised and transferred to the Soviets, (who had physical in-tact samples of B-29s from crash landings and diverts during the war, but needed technical data for materials and processes to make the clone/unlicensed Tupolev Tu-4).
Fact: Madelyn Dunham worked the night shift at Boeing’s B-29 manufacturing facility, and she and Stanley Dunham (her husband) can be seen in photographs where they are dining with Boeing executives from the plant at an exclusive table, where Madelyn is in the arms of one of the older men, far from Stanley Dunham.
Fact: Stanley Anne Dunham (Obama’s mother) was born 10 months after Stanley went off to serve in World War II.
Fact: The FBI was investigating who transferred the B-29 TDP to the Soviets from the Wichita plant, even after the war, narrowing-in on Stanley, even though he didn’t have access.
The more you look into the Dunhams, the more of a rabbit hole you will find. Their history is extremely strange, to say the least.
What is absolute is that a young Senator from Chicago with a doctored past, shot into the White House with an extremely short political record, a flimsy work history of being employed by a CIA financial intelligence front company (BIC), and a Constitutional Law professor.
The whole thing is extremely odd by any metric.
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@jps0117 I called 2016 way in advance based on the partisan swing, the campaign event turn-out, and the professional debate stage set-up with R vs D. The system was rigged in favor of Hillary by big tech, banks, Wall Street, and DC (as evidenced in the Podesta emails), but they didn’t account for the mass wave of populism that overcame the corruption of the Democrat voting mechanisms. Dems, Wall Street/Big Pharma, and Chinese made sure that didn’t repeat in 2020, and bypassed all the other Dem candidates to put a geriatric pedophile in the WH, who has been on Soviet payroll since 1972, and Chicom payroll since the 1990s.
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@peredavi Finland was in population decline by the 1990s due to abortion and urbanization plus 3rd-wave feminism. Their solution? Import Africans and Middle Easterners, especially Somalis. Sure, the population grew. Abdul is now impregnating his wife, his sister, his aunt, and his cousins to get lapsilisä (govt baby money). Somalis have an entirely different genotype, culture, climate acclimation, work ethic, and religion that simply isn't compatible with Finland, and yet the government enables them to scam the system to the extent that portions of Helsinki are now "pieni Mogadishu", especially Itäkeskus.
Helsinki is unrecognizable now. Finland's Parliament, multiple prime ministers, and Presidents have been a joke.
One of the only smart things they have done was to acquire Hornets in the 1990s, based on the Finnish Air Force, and now the F-35A to replace those.
The underground shelters tunneled out of the granite are another sound policy, given who their neighbor is.
A huge portion of Finland's prime age male future was wiped out from 1939-1944, just like most of Europe.
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You've clearly never lived in Russia. The world is not a well-behaved, rational, peace-loving place. Russia is a brutally-cold, poverty-stricken, under-developed, systemically-corrupt, under-educated place time forgot. They've had 8 major brain drains and prime age male collapses since 1914. It's not even remotely rational by your standards, but if you lived there, you would see their perspective and say, "Ah ha....oh damn."
Mainland Europe doesn't fit most people's idyllic image what European culture and history really are. Europe is a place of extreme, continual, senseless war, conquest, territorial disputes, enslavement, and genocide. The Cold War was a strange aberration from that for 50 years, broken by the Yugoslavia genocide, and now escalated further with Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Putin truly believes he is acting in Russia's best interests by attempting to control Ukraine, otherwise Russia would be doomed to have a successful democratic state on its underbelly, especially if they experienced economic growth like Poland.
It's a really bad neighborhood to live in over there, and with Russia as your neighbor, you're destined to have trouble with them. Choose where you're born/live carefully.
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@Knightonagreyhorse Putin and the Russian intelligentsia look down on the US as a temporary inconvenience. They have 1000 years of Russian history and the most balshoi country in the world in their minds.
Throughout the Soviet times, they were told how great Russia is, biggest, baddest, best military, first in space, best in space, best in industry, best at everything.
Anytime the US outclassed them in each of these metrics, it was ignored, not reported, nit-picked, or counter-reported.
Putin was raised in that environment with Sputnik, Yuri Gagarin, Salyut, MIR, Buran, MiGs, Sukhois, Tupolevs, etc.
He was never told about how Russia stole or acquired all these technologies from abroad, but that the great scientists of the people's revolution produced the best minds in human history, who then of course birthed these amazing achievements for USSR, led by Russia.
He has no time to listen to things from the little capitalists and their silly USA.
This is Russian thinking of that era. I lived there and witnessed it first-hand, have been studying them since the 1970s.
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@warfarenotwarfair5655 Puget Sound, Vancouver, Sierra Nevadas, Yosemite, Rockies, Zion, Grand Canyon, Colorado, Great Lakes, Mississippi River, Appalachians, State Parks galore.
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@johndelta00 The days of baby boomers buying new homes, cars, appliances, TVs, entertainment, computers, etc. are coming to an end in the next 3-4 years. They're more of an elderly care economy now, moving into nursing homes or retirement communities, drawing on Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid, and dying. Many of them are dead already.
Early Gen X are eligible for retirement in 3 years. Gen X was a very small cohort. Millennials are much bigger, but nowhere near as big as Boomers.
Millennials are crunched by insane home prices, auto prices, student loans, and rising interest rates. The ones who bought a home before the recent interest rate hikes are in a better financial position when you could find a home for $250k-$400k at 3%. Those same homes are now priced at $350k-$680k at 5.5% interest.
Average used car transaction price broke over $25k in 2021, and hit $31k in Sep 2022.
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@inquisitivenessandcontempl9918 Russians are trying to make the imperialist argument that there is no Ukrainian identity, therefore Ukraine belongs to them.
I pointed out that a Kievan Rus prince is the official founder of Moskva, as explained to me when seeing his horse-mounted knightly statue in Moskva in 2008, and that the Kievan Rus pre-date whatever gaggle of Ruriks were scattered around the region, eventually congregating and expanding Moskva.
So the Kievan urbanized center started by Vikings is the impetus behind Russia's early civilization and current capitol city.
I also noticed among the Russian intelligentsia that they scoff at the identities of Finns, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, and Bulgarians. None of these people are real to them, just Russian territories.
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@aleksandrs1422 The thing I noticed among Russian intelligentsia was that surrounding states were dismissed in their cultural identity, "Who are they!", and it was asserted that those territories belong to Russia. Estonians aren't a valid identity. Finns aren't different, just a barking little drunk dog. Central Asians, anyone once occupied by Imperial Russia are merely parts of the Russian sphere of destiny.
It was very interesting to see that mentality, since my family is from Finland on my mom's side, and I know so many Finns, Estonians, Latvians, Poles, Czechs, Ukrainians, Romanians, etc.
There's a kinship between all these nations based on Russian oppression, with no love for Russia. Yet people who think about these matters in Russia feel a sense of ownership and superiority over the others.
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@AliceinWonderlandzz Everyone with influence got a vote. Everything I'm talking about is part of the historical record, not a conspiracy theory.
Read up on the Potato Famine, Reconstruction, Tammany Hall, Prohibition, and The Great Depression.
Look at who Prohibition agents weren't allowed to investigate or raid (Congress, State Legislatures, City Halls, Chiefs of Police...), and look at how organized crime took over unions, local, State, and DC governments, services, government contracts, construction, port surveillance, sexual blackmail of the FBI, transportation and logistics for OSS, etc.
Papa Joe Kennedy was made SEC Chairman after swindling millions out of people. FDR was made defacto head of the National Labor Unions with the National Industrial Recovery Act in 1933, after 10 years of rapid union membership decline.
It isn't a singular dark cabal, but just various factions weaseling into power and influence over our government.
That includes the Brits, Germans, French, and Russians in that era.
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Obama was basically an absentee President who really did believe he's smarter than everyone else, condescending with his smirks, habitually late, didn't like to have many meetings, and let the political activists run much of the show. Valerie Jarrett had a lot of power in that WH, as did Hillary as SECSTATE, and Joe Biden as VP serving his masters.
They all were working for Putin, Hu, Muslim Brotherhood, and the Mullahs of Iran on many fronts:
1. Uranium One to help Putin revitalize Russia's nuclear weapons
2. Burisma with Hunter Biden acting as an insurance policy from investigations into how Putin was using Burisma to pilfer Ukrainian revenue
3. Keeping Ukraine vulnerable to Russian invasion by denying them arms, and not lifting a finger when Putin invaded in 2014
4. Coercing Poroshenko to fire Viktor Shokin who was investigating Burisma. Obama then flew to England in Sep 2014 and told David Cameron to shut down their investigation into Zlochevsky, CEO of Burisma living in Monaco.
5. Syria-let Putin strengthen Russia's footprint there with Assad
6. Billions in cash sent to Iran with nothing in return
7. MB in the WH
8. Blatantly soured the relationship with Israel
9. Open affronts to the UK
10. Energy policy that benefitted Russia
11. Killed the F-22 before we could go into Full Rate Production, which created a fighter gap
12. Hillary destabilizing Libya, with Benghazi blowing up into the spotlight and the death of Ambassador Stevens
13. Hillary selling US secrets via her basement server, which processed tens of thousands of sensitive documents to hostile foreign governments not authorized to have them
These were just some of the high crimes and treason going on during the Obama Presidency. The domestic side was also a nightmare with a weaponized IRS, Fast & Furious, illegal spying, racial agitation, ACA, bail outs, divisiveness, and erosion of the military culture.
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@JimVanderveen We're in an economic situation with no precedent and no models:
1. Baby boomers retiring or dead, not buying big ticket items anymore.
2. China manufacturing de-coupling from US, high unemployment in China, demographic collapse has begun there.
3. Europe has entered demographic collapse.
4. Russia has entered demographic collapse.
5. US has steady growth, manufacturing re-shoring, consumption driven by a small cohort of Gen X and large cohort of Millennials.
6. Housing availability for Single Family Residences is way behind on supply.
7. Foreign investors who have lost billions in Wall Street have moved into residential real estate, inflating the median unit prices with corporate money, and then rent out those homes.
8. Interest rates are still relatively low, but median home prices are dramatically higher than ever.
9. Auto loans have crept up into intrusive and prohibitive % of median household income.
10. Student loans have inflated preposterously, while education quality has dropped inversely to the amount of money spent.
11. Natural gas is almost free for the US to extract and distribute, and we're effectively energy independent.
12. The US military has been in strategic withdrawal from Europe since 1992, as well as the Pacific.
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@davidthompson4383 Royal Marine Commandos are essentially a maritime special operations force with a dramatically-longer initial training pipeline and higher OPTEMPO. They are more like US Army Ranger Regiment and UK Para Regiment in culture, training, and capabilities. I’ve worked with all 3, so this isn’t an academic perspective foe me.
USMC is small by US standards, but huge by international standards, so a Commando Regiment isn’t a good comparison with 3 Marine Divisions, which have their own organic aviation artillery, heavy lift, armor, drone, cyber, and combined arms forces capabilities. USMC brings M777 and F-35Bs to the fight, whereas Royal Marines rely on other organizations for those capabilities.
I agree on training standards in the UK vs the US, but this is mainly because the US military is so huge, whereas the UK forces are so tiny. I embraced the UK approach to many things with what I did and still do, since many aspects of it are more professional. US wings on logistics and weapons quality, but UK definitely has a more combat-focused training culture.
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@robdyck1187 Yes, we lived through the development and implementation of GPS within DoD, having come from a ton of work on INS prior to that. This was all on cutting-edge, multibillion dollar programs with top priority in USAF primarily. I've spent decades dealing with RF propagation, antennae design, xmit/receiver architecture, waveforms, and a list of other challenges. Towers would only be useful for coastal navigation in the Arctic, provided you could maintain them. Mx is a b*tch in arctic conditions, which I've also spent a bit of time in, both in summer and winter.
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The US has a lot of deep sea ports along 3 huge coastlines, not including Alaska. The maintenance and overhaul schedules have been ongoing for over a century in the US, supporting the most powerful and modernized Navy in history. We have dry docks in Hawaii, Seattle, Portland, San Diego x2, Bayonne, Brooklyn, Sturgeon Bay x3, Newport News x 8, Pascagoula x 2, Philadelphia x3, and Boston.
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@RyanNovaktheFirst I've driven across the US so many times, I lost count. In one particular period of just 6 months, I drove from NC to CA to NC 6 times.
I had 2 carjacking attempts in NC, which I shut down pretty fast just by presentation of my handgun.
I live in a very safe State and County now, but I still plan every stop I make as if someone is going to attempt to carjack or mug me.
I plan and prepare just in case, like having a fire plan for my kitchen, grill, house, or car engine.
If you are going about life oblivious to these threats, then you're merely a victim who just hasn't been hit yet, especially if you travel as much as I have on the road.
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@GoingFar77 The US blue collar middle class kids went into more tech jobs, college degree programs with expectations of office work rather than factory work. The US leads the world in innovation, creating new technologies, and more think work vs labor, although we still have a gargantuan skilled labor sector. We offloaded low-skill/low-priority work, like toys, pencils, pens, short life goods, clothing/textiles, some furniture, small appliances, etc.
For durable goods that require skilled labor, we still have massive aerospace, automotive, electronics, and semiconductor jobs. For the energy industry, we lead the world in production and refining. For agriculture, there isn’t any place like the US in terms of volume, variety, and long-lasting crop harvest seasons.
One of the biggest misnomers is that America doesn’t produce anything anymore, when in fact, we’re the 2nd largest exporter, 1st-largest consumer of our own goods, with exports being only 15% of our economy. When you place those into context and see that our exports are huge for the world, but small for us, you realize how great the US economy is.
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He has addressed that for well over a decade. Who wants to trade in Russian rubles? It’s literally a worthless currency outside of Russia, and isn’t valued inside of Russia over dollars. Most of the world’s oil and sea trade is measured in and exchanged in dollars. No other nation or collection of nations has a secure banking system or regional security from foreign invaders, so the US is the only safe bet.
Add that to the US economy being the largest and without peer, where there exists mass industry, no foreign invaders on its borders, the largest bread basket in the world, a vast connected river network, coastal sea ports that allow heavy displacement vessels across 3 huge coastlines, protected by the biggest and most powerful military in the world. BRICS has none of that, and they aren’t even geographically connected. Russia, China, and India all have beef with each other in some way, especially China vs Russia and India vs China. China relies on the US as its biggest trade partner and protector of oil shipments from the Persian Gulf. The moment China tries to go it alone, or ally with Russia for security of trade, they’re toast.
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@Khyberization He’s been forecasting the decline of China for about 20 years, and most/all of the things he talked about back then have slowly been happening in real-time. I was a subscriber to STARTFOR back in the 2000s-2010s, where he was one of the chief analysts. They used to have a very respected economist come on who talked about how China was taking over, vs Peter Zeihan who would discuss all these major structural issues with their demographics, corruption, financial illiteracy, military incompetence, theft, environmental disasters with seasonal flooding wiping out cities, and capital flight with the billionaires and multi-millionaires investing in the West. Very good, respectful debates with tons of information, maps, statistics, and graphs to support each of their arguments.
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@negativeionz I have to agree with you there. I’ve been studying virology, epidemiology, and immunology since 1997, marginal to my main focal areas, but more out of an interest in my survival.
I approached my analysis of SARSCoV with a timeline method, leaving out anything from 2020, so 1999-2019. The picture that emerged was very damning and quite ominous. Patent applications for zoonotic-to-human CV are easily seen in US Patent and Trade Office dating to 2002, with Dr. Baric’s name as one of the applicants. Patent description details artificial spike protein manipulation with positively-charged amino acids, and chimeric organisms as test subjects used to get the zoonotic disease to jump to humans.
They ran the chimeric research at UNC Chapel Hill, with Shi Zhengli as one of the researchers until it was banned in 2014, at which time she picked up shop and took it to Wuhan. They took human fetal lung stem cell tissue and infused it into mice embryos until they successfully made mice with little human lungs.
Then got the spike protein-augmented bat CV to successfully bond to the endothelia of the chimeric human/mice organisms.
Fauci oversaw this from a funding aspect, and continued to fund it in Wuhan. He’s referenced in Moderna’s 2019 shareholder report (scrubbed but accessible through wayback), along with Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, DARPA, BARDA, and other unnamed entities down at the bottom of the report. Moderna’s CEO paints a picture to investors of a windfall in billions of dollars coming soon due to their work with mRNA technologies (without mentioning that every single clinical trial failed).
The Ukraine invasion was really a bleed valve for all the mounting pushback against government lock-downs, masking, and injection policies, so an unusual amount of effort was redirected away from social unrest in Canada, the US, and Europe. That doesn’t detract from the fact that Putin invaded a sovereign nation without provocation.
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@jimluebke3869 The young Russians I knew in Russia were very apolitical, as are most of the population. Kids just wanting to hang out with friends, sneaking into apartment stairwells to smoke, drink and listen to music.
Young adults were just looking for work or staying on their sports teams. I met one businessman who barely broached the subject of politics, complaining that it was a rigged system with no room for dissenting voices, because they would be arrested.
Russians instinctively know they have to back their strong man, because everyone is out to get them. They truly believe that greedy capitalists want to come steal their resources, as they have been told that Russia is the best, biggest country in the world with the most resources.
Never mind that they aren't a value-added economy and live in the sub-arctic with no real access to the seas or major trade routes. It's a very poor, frozen, isolated, depressed society where people don't smile. Smiling means you're basically a village idiot half-wit. "Why Sergei is smiling? Is he thick in his skull?"
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@farnarkleboy F-35 parts manufacturing is international, with 15% of every single F-35 built in the UK.
Every ejection seat for F-35s is built by Martin-Baker in the UK. Canada, Norway, Italy, Netherlands, Belgium, and a bunch of countries that make parts and subsystems, with 3 assembly lines in 3 different continents.
Because the break-rate is so low on F-35s, they have dramatically-superior availability and sortie-gen rates compared to any other fighter, especially Rafales and Typhoons, which are very maintenance-intensive.
Parts supply priority goes into new production F-35s and the partner nations are still finishing their logistics infrastructure.
But wrench hours on F-35s are in single digits, while Rafales, Typhoons, Super Hornets, and F-15s take dozens of hours to maintain per flight hour.
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@55metalmonkey The US of the 1800s rapidly transformed into an industrializing society with the railroad, shipping, steamboats, machinery, telegraph, ironclad ships, photography, breech-loading firearms, rifling, metallic cartridges, widespread training of doctors and nurses, universities, and territorial expansion. You can watch videos of how major cities grew, and how there were 8 major technological developments already by the Civil War that changed the world forever, stemming from the US.
By no later than 1890, the US had become the largest economy in the world, which it has held ever since.
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@55metalmonkey The countries exporting the products pay the tariffs. The US produces and exports novel or at-scale products and services in the following areas:
Refined petroleum products
Gas turbine engines (jets, generators)
Heavy equipment
Advanced Computers, electronics, and higher performance semiconductors (low and mid SCs are produced in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, China)
Automobiles (much of the global fleet relies on US automobiles, work trucks)
Farming equipment
Financial services (the US banking system is the largest, most stable banking in the world)
Advanced aerospace systems
Airliners
Fighter aircraft
Cargo aircraft
Anti-Submarine Warfare aircraft
Missiles of all types
Precision-guided bombs, Artillery
Advanced Unmanned Aerial Systems
Military communications systems
Construction engineering services
Petroleum exploration and engineering
Agricultural equipment
We're the #1 - #5 producer of a huge variety of foods.
Medicines
Advanced Medical equipment like MRIs, CT Scanners, cath lab equipment, instruments, etc.
It's a very long list that no other country comes even close to.
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@Nylon_riot It’s been a passion of mine for many decades, among other things. Leif Erickson didn’t just set sail Westward on a whim into the chilly waters of the North Atlantic. There is growing evidence that there were preexisting trade routes between Europe and North America for fur, copper, and unique goods to NA, and the Norsemen knew of them in their oral history. These trade routes would have ebbed and flowed with the expansion and retraction of the northern ice.
If you look at the Great Lakes region, there’s an island that has ancient copper mines all over it with open pits still to this day that contribute to wildlife deaths (from falls, can’t escape). There is no recorded history known about who excavated and mined those pits.
The volume of copper mined out of the Great Lakes indicates that the export of the copper would have been intercontinental. Copper was very prominent in Native American civilizations and tribes, and they also traded with Central America.
Ancient Mediterranean civilizations had ships large enough to get to America and such a discovery would have been kept secret to its explorers/traders. There are stones and many other artifacts in the US alone that are engraved with ancient Phoenician/Hebrew, mound-builders who made mounds in the shapes of Minoras, and the Bat Creek Stone has an inscription that reads: “For the Judeans”. It is way pre-Columbian.
What I think we would find with a complete record would be multiple expeditions and trade routes throughout time with North America and the British Isles, Mediterranean, and Europeans covering many different eras. Chinese are the likely predecessors to the Central American Olmecs.
History gets erased by cataclysms, wars, famines, and migrations or extinctions. I have a lot of books on these subjects, and have traveled to many museums from Asia to Central America, the US, and Europe.
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Many of Ukraine's elections have been more legitimate than the US's, especially after they overturned the results in 2006. Even still, Putin eventually got his puppet in with the 2010 election, Yanukovych. Ukraine finally threw him out in March 2014, then coincidentally, Russia invaded Donbas. Putin also funneled millions to Vice President Biden's family that year, with $3.5 million to Hunter in Feb 2014, and Hunter getting placed on the board of Burisma by May, to shield the investigation into Zlochevsky.
Sep 2014, Obama flew to the UK to meet with David Cameron, demanding that MI5 and MI6 shut down their investigation into...Zlochevsky.
Zlochevsky was the CEO of Burisma, acting as a front for stealing Ukrainian energy revenue and funneling it into Putin's accounts in Cyprus, Switzerland, Panama, etc.
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@adamjj001 Guard and Reserve soldiers generally have more maturity and experience than active duty. They are able to get leadership and organizational experience from the civilian sector as well as the military.
I was active duty for 10 years, after having been a cadet for 3 years, then continued work in the security sector ever since. As AD, we dogged on guard units because we didn't know what we didn't know about them.
For example, SF National Guard units have a lot more skill sets to bring to the table than active duty SF units.
The person in question, Tulsi Gabbard, has a balanced mix of experience from military command with GWOT deployments and serving in Congress, with access to defense & intel briefings.
She's working with General Flynn, Pete Hegseth, and other leaders who are actual Patriots, versus the treasonous swamp rats of DC.
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@nole8923 It's more complex than that. I've lived in 8 different US States and 2 of the Nordic Countries, have citizenship in both the US & EU.
If you have no life, quality of life doesn't matter and the Nordic countries don't respect your individual right to life as a human being, so you start off with a major eliminator criteria right off the bat.
Scandinavia enjoys its security on the back of the American taxpayer, so that part is out of balance. Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Finland benefit from hundreds of billions in US RDT&E on critical defense programs that they've been able to purchase without ever contributing a dime to the development of those systems. (F-16/F100, F/A-18/F404, F-35A/F135, AIM-7, AIM-9, AIM-120, APG-66, APG-68, APG-81 etc.) Saab Gripen uses US GE engine, servos, landing gear, brakes, and many of its subsystems so it isn't a domestic program as advertised.
Advanced medical diagnostics systems, equipment, and drugs used in Scandinsvia were almost all developed and manufactured in the US.
Transportation, telecom, satellite, and many other systems used to benefit the Nordic nations were mostly developed and made in the US. There have been things made in the Nordics that benefit the US in normal trade like Kone elevators and escalators, Nokia, and Ikea of course.
US housing costs have sky-rocketed because foreign investors are buying up residential real estate to park their money in the US economy while generating monthly cash flow in billions, because the US economy is more stable than Europe's.
I literally had a Finnish friend of mine die on an organ waiting list because the Finnish NHS deemed him not as worthy to receive a new liver. The NHSs in Scandinavia and Finland are a joke compared to what we have in the US.
Taxes are out of control and purposely-punitive in Sweden and Finland to artificially depress the entire population for the purpose of social equality, which really handicaps the societies as a whole, making them dependent on the US for security because they neglect their defense budgets.
Quality of life in the Nordics has more to do with geography and clean water from the lakes. When many people are able to have a summer cottage where they can get away from the cities, it's very healthy to be out in nature.
You can say the same thing about Maine, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Montana, Idaho, Oregon, many places in CA, UT, CO, WV, VA, and NC for cabins.
It's an imbalanced comparison to pick tiny little populations of traditionally-homogenous Aryan peoples with 334 million Americans living in vastly-different geographic regions of the US.
I found most of the claims about the Nordic nations to be childish propaganda fed to the people steadily to create a pacified and servile populace.
As far as governments go, the Nordic nations are astonishingly-childish to watch in-action, with the multi-party divisions, lots of stupid leftist women, and low-T males who know precious little about the world or their own history in general.
These are places where parliaments frequently resign en masse, and place defense of their nations at the lowest priority. They can't be taken seriously, which is sad to say coming from the US system where politicians have been owned by organized crime since the 1920s.
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@nole8923 Lived through all of that as well. Quality of life in many ways has improved in the US, while more stressors have been added so it’s not as black and white as some make it out to be. We were still under the threat of MAD, but the world was simpler with bi-polar super powers. 1960s US was one of the most chaotic periods in history, maybe only out-done by the Civil War. JFK, MLK, and RFK assassinations, riots, Vietnam War protests, LBJ WH policies, exclusion of blacks from much of the middle class sector they had worked into, and the beginning of the welfare state that ultimately destroyed the black family to beget waves of crime in the 1970s-1990s with fatherless black inner-city gangs and the cocaine epidemic.
1st half of the 1980s was still in recession from the terrible 1970s policies and global market forces with OPEC, along with a new wave of punitive government regulations on blue collar middle class in the US.
FDR had no such protections, as he was a stooge for the organized crime families who took over in the 1920s, along with the socialists and Soviets in many ways. He transferred gargantuan amounts of US technology to Stalin and allowed Soviet Lend-Lease Generals to dictate policy to US manufacturers during the war.
Financially collapse of 2007-2009 was created by Congressional welfare promotion politics that dictates to lenders to issue mortgages to people without bank accounts who normally wouldn’t qualify for a home loan. Banks that were smart got rid of those loans and people started bundling them as junk, which European banks bought up stupidly. The main people that needed to recover from 2007-2009 in terms of housing liabilities were the ones who took out variable rate mortgages and got taken when the bottom dropped out, and their payments went up. I wouldn’t describe that as the average American, since most mortgages already existed prior to that period.
Your recollection is common to talking points from partisan class-warfare propaganda, which does not align with the completeness of the picture. I find the political parties do a terrible job of understanding domestic issues because it’s all about trying to tidy-up complex metrics into partisan angles. It gets even worse for foreign policy matters where they both really fall flat on their faces trying to see the world through tiny partisan lenses.
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@scyphe I've lived all over the US, Germany, Finland, and have spent a bit of time in Sweden, and Denmark. We have family in Sweden from my Finnish side.
It has more to do with different geographic regions, weather, food, transportation, entertainment, personal security, health & wellness, and multiple factors that don't compare well when you take a giant Nation with 338 million people covering vast regions from Hawaii and Alaska to Florida, and try to compare them with a few State-sized nations with tiny populations of relatively-homogenous cultural-ethnic groups.
There are things I love about Scandinavia and Finland (geography, history, lakes, architecture), and things I don't (nanny state beaureaucrats, excessive taxes, broken NHS, collectivism, church-state, VAT, capital gains, restrictions on freedom of speech and thought, restrictions on personal security, neglect of national defense, etc.).
All that said, there are a lot worse countries to live in and I place the Nordics more to the top of everywhere I have been, but still under the US.
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UK, Germany, France, Poland, Italy, and Sweden have been run by peacenik females and limp-wristed low-T parliamentarians for generations now.
That means they Purposely attacked their own defense spending as a matter of national policy and baseline assumptions in the controlling political parties.
This has left all of those nations' defense industry development and manufacturing capacity in a very outdated and weak state of affairs.
For example, it took several of those big nations decades to start manufacturing a 1980's era 4th generation fighter.
While the UK, Germany, Italy, and Spain dragged their feet with funding and development of the Eurofighter Typhoon, the US already moved on with the tens of billions necessary to develop, test, and produce 5th Generation fighters, new air defense system upgrades for Patriot, and new combat systems across the force structure.
Now the US has led the effort in mass-producing 5th Gen fighters, with over 1300 airframes delivered to air forces in the US, NATO, and Pacific.
The Eurofighter consortium hasn't even put an AESA Radar in the Typhoon.
Sweden is buying Patriots from the US, right along with Poland and other long-term NATO customers.
Dependence on US advanced weaponry has only increased and is increasing more moving forward.
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@michaelmaroney1660 Russia has never had a real intact logistics train by Western standards. When things were running “well” by their lot in life, they had terrible rail lines, pothole-filled roads, weak strings between vast distances, cursed by extreme cold temps.
It has always been that way in Russia, even worse before they had paved roads. And yet still, they managed to throw millions of bodies at invaders until they out-lasted some of the largest, most tactically and logistically-competent armies in history-especially the Wermacht.
The distances required to deploy mass amounts of soldiers over their current borders with Ukraine are on the same terrain. One of the main campaigns of The Great Patriotic War was in Ukraine, and their ability to move men, weapons, and equipment really sucked back then.
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@CrazyYurie Voting in big cities has been rigged dating back to the 1840s though. Look at New York City and Tamany Hall for starters. Elections were very dirty business in the 1800s and just became the norm, but sanitized through the vote-counting systems, ballot-stuffing, harvesting, registering the dead, and destroying ballots. None of that is new.
In 2016, the election-rigging had evolved into Google contributing $2.2 Billion to Hillary’s campaign, and manipulating algorithms for her “ground game” if you read the Podesta emails. She knew she was getting elected no matter what, but the Democratic process overcame the rigged system due to Trump’s unprecedented popularity. Google suppressed image searches of “Hillary rally vs Trump rally”, for example. I saw that personally shift to where you couldn’t see that image split anymore on image search, which is what Eric Schmidt made sure of from within Google.
Now they’re curating and steering people’s feeds to magnify bias, so that someone who votes one way will see a totally different feed than someone who votes another. This is amplifying the division within the Nation. Who would want to do that and why?
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@Kartal49ful France, Germany, Netherlands, Denmark, and Sweden are primed for ethnic civil wars because of a combination of abortion and immigration policies.
Once the next global recession/depression kicks in, you will see older European natives and young North African, Sub-Saharan African, and Middle Eastern immigrants with major flash points in cities across Europe.
The immigrants will start rioting once the food and energy shortages begin to really hurt, followed by back-lashes from native European biker gangs, farmers, and military veterans.
European nations will be looking to the US to come act as peace-keepers, but the US will have its own issues to deal with and might just say, "Sorry. Can't help much."
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They began preparing for war decades ago when they bribed Ambassadors and Presidential candidates in the US since 1972, including George H. W. Bush, who was Ambassador to China then under Nixon, then Director of CIA under Ford.
They bribed Bill Clinton by financing millions into his 1992 campaign, and in return, the Clinton WH transferred billions in US cutting-edge weapons technologies in aerospace, nukes, satellites, manufacturing, missiles, intelligence collection systems, and communications.
Clinton gave the Chinese access to our strategic nuclear facilities, the B-2 program, Lockheed's aircraft manufacturing tooling and assembly line processes, Motorola defense communications systems, Loral Space Systems, with moles welcomed into the US en masse.
Since the 1990s, China has aggressively revitalized their military, stealing and bribing their way to access every US system they could possibly get, placing Chinese engineers in every defense program possible.
They've been in competition with Russia to bribe the Clinton, Bush, and Biden families for ages.
Riyady family scandal with Clinton campaign financing, Lincoln bedroom, John Juang of the '90s.
Neil Bush bribery and entrapment scandal with the Thai hookers, leading to his divorce, merging of his US defense aerospace holdings shell company with his Chinese real estate front.
Obamas with the micro-donation internet campaign financing, ties through Pakistan, Indonesia.
James and Hunter Biden with the money trail in the open for all to see.
Chinese steal and bribe. It's fundamental to their brazen culture.
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@benktlofgren4710 Gripen A/B/C/D has some Hughes and Raytheon licensed systems to Erickson, since Hughes provided the fire control computer and other Radar subsystems technology for the Viggen.
From Saab:
"For now there are no plans to equip the new-generation Gripen E/F with the GaN radar as the GaAs-based Leonardo ES-05 Raven is fully integrated for that requirement, but it could be substituted if a customer specified it."
Sweden never had the budget to operate the test ranges and small armies of engineers and technicians like the US has done at Edwards AFB, Pax River, Point Mugu, China Lake, Eglin AFB, Nellis AFB, White Sands, the NTTR, and multiple competing Radar and missile manufacturers.
Pretty much all of the Gripen's Radar and fire-control comes from programs run at all those bases and test ranges in the US since the 1950s.
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