War, loverly war. In Ukraine and in the USA.

Been distracted from posting. Trying to prep my long-gestating Big Book on Artificial Intelligence! (Isn't everyone writing one?) But let's zoom in on current events.

First off, they are deliberately distracting you from what's important. For example, while I am ticked-off at the blatant banishing of some late-night comedians and the rampage of masked, tattooed gang-bangers and ex-cons kidnapping innocents off the street or even from courthouses... all of that has driven from the news things that are even more important -- much more important.

For example, the Trumpist-KGB gang has severed the sinews of Law, in profoundly dangerous ways.

I cited the firing of nearly all of the Inspectors General in most agencies, eliminating the skilled professional auditors and their staffs, dedicated to keeping those agencies generally honest and law abiding. See where years ago I urged that Democratic Congresses strengthen and protect those primly meticulous officials, as dedicated to non-political competence and rule-of-law as the men and women of the US military officer corps... who are also right now under siege.

Only now...

...Now it's JAGs*! The ones who advise generals what's legal. Now why would the Kremlin... I mean Republicans... want to do that?

And then there is the cashiering of 400 Internal Revenue Service CPAs who had been assigned to audit zillionaire tax cheats.

Plus disease researchers at the CDC and universities across America. (And the very idea of universities -- the topmost pride of the WWII GI Bill Generation -- is now under relentless, moronic attack.)

Which brings us to the assault on skilled professionalism that is scariest of all -- the gutting of anti-terrorism and counter-espionage experts, laying us spread-eagled and wide open to enemy attack. (Bush did that months before 9/11 and it sure worked for him.) All of which suggests two terms that you need to look up: - the 'Reichstag Fire'

and

- The Gleiwitz Incident ... and be prepared to chant those words when we hit the streets, after whatever fell tragedy Vlad & his DC stooges have planned for us, to serve as a pretext for martial law.) Still, you might stock up canned foods too. And realize that it may be your turn to praise the 2nd Amendment.

ADDENDUM: Those of you quoting the poem: "First they came for the Jews..." Well, first they are coming for the professionals. Yes, what's happening to immigrants is terrible! But that is not their core goal! Which is to wage all-out war vs ALL fact using professions, from science and teaching, medicine and law and civil service to the heroes of the FBI/Intel/Military officer corps who won the Cold War and the War on terror.

Now who would want that?

*JAG = Judge Advocate General: the most primly meticulous law folks on the planet, who would make an ascetic monk seem lascivious. JAGs and IGs were the men and women protecting you, even more that the counter-terror folks and soldiers with Javelins. And they have been flushed away. By monsters.

** Vlad and his KGB (sorry, slightly relabeled FSB, with the same commie agents dedicated to the same goal: our downfall) hold kompromat on all high Republicans. Do I need to prove that, when Congressional GOPpers have ALL laid down to allow ALL of this, and so much more?

== End times... again already? ==

Veering in another -- frighteningly related -- direction. A recurring mania is apparently rising again... millennialist declarations that the fervently-desired apocalypse is coming! 

It's moronic stuff, of course, recurring every couple of years for the last 2000 or so... and in this essay I laid out for you why the 2030s will be an especially fraught time for those of us with Revelations-obsessed neighbors... or politicians.

Want something even more moronic? Twice per decade since I was ten, recurring episodes of UFO Mania have swamped media, along with declarations that this time all will be revealed, for sure! My fairly recent posting is about the sub-branch of "UAP sightings" by US Navy jests and such. Oh, fer....

Same thing. Upward prayers for a cheat code, rather than do the work to save and improve the first civilization worthy of the stars. One that we crafted, for ourselves.

== Ukraine and now... Poland? ==

Was the Soviet - um, Russian - swarm-probe of drones into Poland 'an accident'? Disproved by extra fuel tanks. Western analysts deem a 'test of NATO abilities &resolve.' A test that Poland and her allies - except the USA - passed brilliantly.

Only the reason for Putin's recent spate of near-attacks on NATO is one more of hundreds of things that were familiar to my parents' GI Bill/ WWII generation, but that time has erased from living memory.

In this case, the root is a tendency of national leaders in war time to assume that the enemy's home population lacks any virtues, including courage.

While this tendentious mistake was shown (somewhat understandably, but still immorally) by Churchill, "Bomber" Harris, Curtis LeMay and R. Nixon, it was a flat out religious tenet of Hitler and the Japanese imperialists... and Stalin. The leaders who ordered devastation of cities all shared a self-satisfying and delusional assumption...

...that the citizens of Antwerp and London, Hamburg and Berlin, Tokyo and Osaka and Hanoi, and now Kiev, would despair and knuckle-under. Instead, they almost always picked their way through the rubble and redoubled efforts in their roofless and windowless factories. (Destroying those factories certainly made sense and worked for the allies.)

Adolf so needed to believe this that he delusionally thought Londoners would buckle in 1944 when a few hundred V1 and V2 flying bombs murdered a few hundred civilians... a small fraction of those who died two years earlier, in the Blitz, inspiring their neighbors to strive harder, in revenge.

For more than three years we have seen Vlad Putin follow exactly this pattern, hurling destruction at Ukrainian cities and civilian populations, blatantly (and publicly avowed) in order to cow them into toppling Zelensky and submitting to Russian yokes. And all it accomplished was to solidify - diamond hard - Ukrainian national identity and passion to resist.

Note that most Ukrainian drone and missile counter-attacks into Russia have been aimed at infrastructure, war assets and strategic materials. Leading now to gas shortages across the whole country. Note also that last winter the AFU could have trashed urban heating systems plunging Moscow etc into dark and cold... ass did happen to Ukrainians. But they did not, because of sapient realization of what I am talking about here... that enemy-inflicted privation thends (not always) to make populations more determined. Though THIS winter will likely be different. Because Russians are by now ready to pin blame where it belongs.

Which brings us back around to Putin's drone probe of Poland. Which not only showed NATO strengths and served as a perfect training exercise. It also revealed Vlad's insistence on the feel-good narrative of enemy cowardice. And 'surely now - after 3 years of insistence 'hey will fold any day now!' It should be obvious to those surrounding Vlad that belligerent insanity is no longer an excuse. Rather, obstinate stoopidity.

== US political in a pathological state ==

I keep seeing calls for restored calm negotiation between parties, even though one side has unambiguously declared phase 8 of the American Civil War. * Now the latest meme spread on on social media? "Debate" training is supposed to calm everyone down?

Seriously? I took two paths in high school. BOTH speech/debate and science. The former was useful, but mostly at appraising my opponents' argument for polemical flaws to attack. The latter taught me the sacred catechism of science: "I might be wrong." With its corollary: "Ain't it cool? Let's find out!"

It's no accident that former debaters like Alex Jones and his ilk are in full-blown attack upon scientists and universities in general. Because facts, well-presented, can crush polemics! As every single position of today's gone mad right can be demolished by actual evidence.

Which is why the MAGA cult - spurred by "ex" commissars in Moscow - wages all-out war vs ALL fact using professions, from science and teaching, medicine and law and civil service to the heroes of the FBI/Intel/Military officer corps who won the Cold War and the War on terror.

Look, I am all in favor of returning to friendly, fact-centered and courteous argument aimed at negotiation! But it is one side that ended that in America. Look up DENNIS HASTERT! Whose Hastert Rules in 1995 ended all negotiation in DC and declared total war on science by banishing the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment. A total campaign that has continued with the gelding of OSTP, the disbanding of most anti-terror and counter-intelligence units, demolishing the audit divisions of the IRS and firing most of the executive agencies' Inspectors general.

Reprising earlier parts of this missive. This is not the GOP of Ike or Lincoln or TR or Barry Goldwater or Reagan, who would spit in the eyes of Kremlin stooges helping "ex" commissars to rebuild the USSR. This cult is at war vs. the entire Western Enlightenment, including the universities that were the pride of the GI Bill generation and that truly made America great.

And no, I will not be calmed down into being nice about it anymore. Not till their Appomattox. Then it will be "malice toward none and charity toward all..."

Which their cult will not show to me, if they win. They have already told me so. And they are telling you, daily.

The Ukraine War... Putin's czar-worship... MAGA's Putin-worship... monarchists are back... and the real 'c-word'...

First, the war. As I post this, the world resonates with Ukrainian victory in Kherson and west of the Dnipro River.  

Again, the key to resolving so many things can only come from awakening the Russian populace (and indeed our MAGAs) from their respective collective loyalty trances. Bits of info do get through, but can be shrugged off under incantations by state TV (or Fox). 

You know I recommend challenging lie machines to a head-on degree that none of the players on our side ever seem capable of doing. And it takes more than just repeatedly whining: "That's not true!" 

In this case, what's needed is a direct confrontation that would penetrate every propaganda screen. Here's how.

Demand a Big Commission to investigate claims that Ukraine had been 'Nazi,' or building nukes, or joining NATO, before the February invasion (Putin's pretexts). Or whether there's any sign of 'satanists' running Ukraine or the US Democratic Party. Or to metric the extent of devastating harm done to Ukraine by RF forces, that RF citizens will have to pay for in taxes for generations. 

What? You say Russian media will simply denounce the partiality of such a commission? The same way Fox nightly denounces every single US fact-using profession as terminally biased, from science to the FBI and military officer corps? 

Well sure. Unless the public demand is parsed right.

So, demand the commission consist of 100 Russian citizens chosen randomly from old utility bills... and 100 Ukrainians, 100 westerners and 100 from non-aligned nations. And yeah, 100 Chinese... so long as all may converge in Turkey and freely choose (at US expense) to go anywhere and see and report on anything. Talk to anyone they choose. Including citizens of Kherson, both liberated and dispersed by RF kidnappings.

Sound expensive? Well it would be worth it. Except we'll never have to pay. Because Putin would shriek and refuse! 

And it is that REFUSAL, penetrating through the borscht curtain, that would not be explicable or shruggable by any amount of blather on Russian state TV...

... just as wager demands over almost any testable foxite assertion ALWAYS result in MAGAs fleeing in jibbering panic amid the ruins of their macho preening.

It's called accountability. And I've only been yammering about it for 40 years.

== And more... ==

A note about the Ukraine war that tweaks a special place in my heart. Despite operating under severe adversity and continuous threats, Ukraine’s postal service carries on: 

“Officials at Ukrposhta say that of its approximately 73,000 employees, 15 have been killed and 14 injured during the fighting. About 50 post offices have been destroyed, while 480 have been damaged, some repeatedly. Even so, Ukrposhta had continued to work until recently in some of the regions occupied by Russian forces.” They finally stopped because of repeated robbery by small roving bands of Russian soldiers. 

Opposed to that positive symbolism is the other kind. Putin - who grew up reciting Leninist catechisms - later restored the crest and other symbols of the Romanov Czars, rebuilt their most tasteless edifices and erected a statue to Nicholas II, a monstrous dunce who, with his equally addle-pated cousin in Berlin, plunged the world into a century of wretched agony. Nicholas lost everything (and killed hundreds of millions) by underestimating Germany and hurling unhappy Russian boys into meat grinders.

Now step back and look at Vlad emulating his beloved Czar, in Ukraine. Try, try to see the context! History doesn't repeat. But it has recurring attractor states. It rhymes.

For an extensive look at recent ideological and cultural trends in Russia, take a look at: Cultural and Political Imaginaries in Putin's Russia, by Niklas Bernsand and Barbara Tornquist-Plewa. 

Oh, an after-note on Russia's military might: Russia’s new super torpedo, the Poseidon, which is expected to be 2 meters (6.5 feet) in diameter and over 20 meters (65 feet) long, "is the largest torpedo ever developed in any country." Picture how big that is. These nuclear-capable torpedoes are designed to be launched from hundreds of miles away and to sneak past coastal defenses by traveling along the sea floor to deliver warheads of multiple megatons, causing radioactive waves that would render swathes of the target coastline uninhabitable for decades.

Apparently its big test, yesterday, was a botch.

== Topics I've explored elsewhere ==

A couple of my best older blog postings:

• Are you all down on humanity, especially short-tempered, harshly-divided Americans? Well, I have a tonic for your pessimism and gloom.  No, I won’t try to talk (or beguile) you out of your sour funk. Instead, I propose a simple experiment! Going down to a busy 4-way stop sign intersection and just watch for a few minutes. Very soon you WILL feel better about yourself and your fellow citizens. Give this a try:  Ritual of the Street Corner

• Alternate Visions of the Future: Some bold proposals having to do with my proposal for a World Ownership Treaty – If you own something, say so – which could (without raising taxes an iota) erase almost all national debts almost overnight and save honest taxpayers trillions. Oh and included are riffs on corporate transparency, Abraham Lincoln, and getting to be more like him.

== The word our New Lords never mention ==

And yeah, the noxious ones are back. See a fawning profile of Peter Thiel’s eagerly dyspeptic (and trivially refuted) incantations that ‘liberalism has failed,’ while wallowing in its protection and myriad benefits. I so hope the author of this piece misinterprets almost everything, in almost every paragraph because… wow. "Peter Thiel on the dangers of progress" by Mary Harrington.

The core take-away - revealed in his hostility to Universities and support of the "neo-monarchist" movement - is rejection of all aspects of our civilization that led to himself! Including the older-deeper meaning of 'liberalism' appraised and espoused by Adam Smith. Which is unleashing the fantastically fecund creativity of flat-fair-just-confident and fully-informed Competition... 

...the c-word that was promoted by the First Liberal - Adam Smith - and the word that is never, ever mentioned nowadays by the gone-mad right. That core endeavor - of transparent/flat/fair competitive creativity - requires maximizing the number of skilled, confident competitors... (um, duh?)... as F. Hayek called-for. Which, in turn, necessitates social justice and mass education and especially freedom.

Sure, our Smithian reversal of 6000 years of oligarchic/racist hierarchy has been imperfect, improving with grinding slowness. But its effective outcomes (including Thiel himself) outweigh those of ALL other societies -- all the feudal/monarchal dope-zones combined -- across those sixty+ centuries.

Let's be clear. Thiel's proposed program of to-the-hilt technological progress toward personal, organic immortality must be advanced by the very fact-professions, researchers, scientists and university nerds who almost universally despise everything about the oligarchic putsch to restore feudalism that PT passionately pursues.

Nor is there a prepper citadel anywhere on the planet whose location isn't known by many in the nerd clade, down to the centimeter. 

Perhaps (just a suggestion, m'lord) rejoining the Enlightenment might be the better choice.