Long discussion with Doug Macgregor from PBD

 Mostly about America, some about Putin’s Ukraine

John Helmer’s account of Prigozhin affair

 From John Helmer

For a semi-official Russian account of what happened in Rostov when Prigozhin was there last Saturday,  read this piece published yesterday in Vzglyad. This reports Shoigu’s presence in the city at the time; the advance knowledge at the General Staff of Prigozhin’s threats, intentions,  plans, and force capacities.  

The inventory of the initial official searches of Prigozhin’s St Petersburg offices and vehicles uncovered five kilogrammes of cocaine, about Rb4 billion in cash, gold bullion bars, barrels of US dollars, several false passports, pistols, and records of offshore transactions in the Central African Republic and elsewhere. Prigozhin, speaking before Putin made public his comment on stealing,  confirmed the cash and told Fontanka, a St. Petersburg publication, he saw “nothing terrible”

Doug Henwood on neoliberalism

 Neoliberalism right and left

Scott Ritter on Prigozhin and the future possibilities in Ukraine

 

Douglas Macgregor’s take is different.

John Goodenough RIP

 John Goodenough: Nobel-prize-winning battery pioneer dies aged 100

An interview with Carlo Ginzburg

 Carlo Ginzburg: ‘In history as in cinema, every close-up implies an off-screen scene’

VElcheru Narayana Rao used a similar approach.

Lads P. Syll on early Ricardo

 Straffa on Ricatdo’s ‘corn model’

Branco Milanovic on Chinese capitalism

 “…we can see the current Chinese state capitalism as a protracted NEP that began in 1978 and continues until today. But Lenin seems to overlook the possibility that with a very long NEP the economic and political power will gradually seep from under the Party and the very nature of the state would change. Those who have money will dictate things as in capitalist countries. The state may not be able to control them and the commanding heights of the economy may change ownership. This happened under Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao: the development of state capitalism under socialist conditions led to the increasing influence of rich people and capitalists, including their inclusion in most of the party organs, and through the idea of “The Three Represents”, it gave a pretense of ideological acceptability to such evolution. The change in the elite composition, evident in a study done by Li Yang, Filip Novokmet and myself, is another product of such policies. The social structure of the Chinese elite had enormously evolved between the late 1980s and 2013 (when our study ends). While the private sector was marginal among the elite (the top 5 percent) in 1988, twenty-five year later almost one-third of the people in the elite were private businessmen (owners of small enterprises and large scale capitalists). If one includes professionals who are employed in the private sector, a bit over one-half of the elite is private-sector dependent.

It is in this context that one can look at Xi Jinping’s policies: as an attempt at the reassertion of the power of the state vs. the capitalist sector and the rich. Or to use Lenin’s distinction between the two, as an attempt to move from state capitalism to state capitalism. It is an adjustment in the political power between the two sectors: the state, ruled by a bureaucratic stratum, and the rich. It represents the analog of the populist reaction in the Western democracies: the feeling that the business elite has become too powerful, has no discernible interest in the problems of ordinary people, and has to be reined in. We can thus see Xi Jinping as both a heir to Lenin’s New Economic Policy and in much more contemporary terms as a populist response to the excesses of the new rich. ”

From http://glineq.blogspot.com/2023/06/state-capitalism-one-hundred-years-ago.html

Douglas Macgregor perspective on Prigozhin

 

Repeated, only the first half needs watching.

Big Serge on Prigozhin fiasco

 TheWagner uprising seems very reasonable.

Douglas Macgregor on Prigozhin and nuclear threats

 

Possibilities of dirty bomb. Similar warnings from’the Duran’ and Simplicius the thinker

Bhadrakumar on Prigozhin

 The rise and fall of a Russian oligarch

Scientific branch creation

 A Report on Scientific Branch-Creation: How the Rockefeller Foundation helped bootstrap the field of molecular biology ERIC

Latest updates on the ground from Military Summary

 

Evolving techniques of modern warfare

 Excellent article as many of his are. According to Simplicius the thinker It is getting so technical that it is difficult to follow even the comments. One of the comments:

marcjf

17 hr ago

I read this article a few days ago (and might even have dropped a link here?) but hoped it would be covered - and it has been and very well - thanks!

Seems to me that the BTGs were an attempt to create all arms units at a very low level - maybe 4 manouvre companies backed by artillery, grad, recce and AD. These could and maybe still work well (but seems even company sized groupings are vulnerable) but obviously came unstuck in close terrain. Back in Feb 22 I recall confidently saying to a pal that I thought the Russians would not invade as the weather forecast was bad and the Raputitsa would soon arrive. This would create conditions where heavy Russian units would be road bound and hence vulnerable - and could be held up by relatively light forces in villages/woods etc. As proved to be the case. Any way - I was thus surprised the war began when it did and I could make a point that it was started when it was via UAF provacation and shelling for just this reason.

What has surprised me was the failure of Russia to apply its massive army to overwhelm the UAF. This article goes a long way to helping to understand the reason why. Put simply, the fighting has become atomised attrition. Killing enemy soldiers is important, but destruction of their firepower and communications much more so. Russian attacks on infrastructure were it seems to me intended to degrade AD capabilities mire than anything else so as to allow Russian air superiority to come into play more decisively.

In this war of material attrition it seems that large battles have been replaced by hundreds of [fire strikes] daily and the slow erosion of enemy long term capabilities. The UAF would have been overwhelmed last year if it were not for NATO arms. But now it seems NATO itself is becoming degraded as it ships its weapons stocks to the war and they become consumed. It is a moot point whether NATO can in the medium term replace these faster than it is spending them.

Battles like Bakhmut become explicable because only in close terrain can large scale units operate. And it thus becomes clearer that the UAF made a grave error trying to hold here as they traded lives for Russian shells. 

How does such a war end as it is hard to win a long war of attrition? The Twitter war may provide part of the answer. NATO has clearly dominated the English language and western European media spaces. This helps prime [voters] for the long haul, but is also intended to undermine Russian morale - maybe leading to collapse and regime change. Personally I think this is a fools hope, and there is a danger that one starts believing your own BS and propaganda - and I think that has occurred. But the corollary of this change the way wars are fought must lead to a change in the way they are won. If Russia is concentrating not on taking ground but attritting weapon systems, then at what point does Ukraine/NATO throw in the towel?

I suggest there must logically come a point where one side or the other cannot continue and it collpases, and then we will see lots of territory changing hands. It appears that many western analysts thought Russia was close to that point in early June and that one more attack would collapse Russian resistance. Not many who come here would have agreed. But is the UAF close to that point? That is the real question. And if not, what will bring it to that point?

From Bhavana on DONALD Knuth

 The Dawn of Rigour in the Art of Programming by Sudhir Rao

And one on R.C.Bose https://bhavana.org.in/raj-chandra-bose-universal-mathematician/

Bhadrakumar on Ukraine’s NATO accession

 Biden walks back on Ukraine’s Nato accession

An unfolding tragedy

 An Unfolding Tragedy: The Impossibility of Doing ‘Anything Other’ by Alastair Crooke

P.S.

I’ll Clinton on Putinin 2013

 

The Duran on divisions in the US establishment

 

Apparently Pentagon and its allies feel that Ukraine war is lost and want to build infra structure and the industrial strength of US to counter China. But the state department is dominated by Russia haters who feel that Pentagon will eventually have its way and want to escalate the efforts in Ukraine when they still have the chance and Biden’s support.

From Danny Haiphong and others

 

China WARNS US Stop 'Confrontation' or Risk Conflict w/ Garland Nixon and Carl Zha

19:59

24:57 / 25:00

Russia and China are WINNING and the Neocons Are Furious w/ Garland Nixon and Carl Zha

T.S.Eliot and Bob Dylan

Too much of nothing: Bob Dylan’s take on TS Eliot, maybe. 

Latest from Scott Ritter

 

Levity and insights

Latest from Douglas Macgregor

 

What about air power?

 Round Two? There Is No Round Two. Game pretty much over in Ukraine. AURELIEN 14 JUN 2023

“Thus, the West is at a massive structural and doctrinal disadvantage with airpower, and it is hard, if not impossible, to imagine what practical military tasks its air forces might successfully perform in a hypothetical conflict with Russia. There’s a good chance, in fact, that the age of the air-superiority aircraft is finally over, given the unprecedented advances in missile technology of the last few decades, and the mind numbing cost of individual airframes today. Now, it’s often said that NATO doctrine presupposes air superiority. This isn’t really true historically: in the Cold War NATO never expected to challenge, let alone overcome, Warsaw Pact control of the airspace over their own forces. Its aircraft relied on flying low and fast to survive in the most hostile air defence environment in the world, while hoping to retain at least some margin of air superiority over NATO territory. It’s truer to say that NATO has been operating for twenty years in environments where air control (and thus its fighter aircraft) are simply irrelevant, and the artillery metaphor of air power has been dominant.” and more in the article.

Using AI in drones?

 SITREP 6/15/23: Kakhovka Powerplay Heats Up as AFU Readies For Round 2

Putin interview with Russian journalists

 Putin Invites Top Russian Correspondents For Candid War Q&A + SitRep Updates from Simplicius the thinker.

P.S. Vladimir Putin meets with Russia’s war correspondents, A shorter one fromGilbert Doctorow.

Three hour discussion on Ukraine and related topics from The Duran and Scott Ritter

 I watched the first two hours and then they start on answers to questions from the audience. 

The Duran on the continuing misconceptions about the relative strengths of the armies

 

One point they do not discuss is that much of the Russian army is new and not battle hardened. By now, they had months of training and now some experience during the Ukraine offensive. Perhaps they will be ready but we do not have any examples of operations where the new recruits are involved,

Does economics cause more harm than good?

 The answer seems to be yes A review here.

Russia Day

 Today

More from Simplicius the thinker

 SITREP 6/11/23: Ukraine Reorients and Makes Breakthroughs on Eastern Axis

An overview of various commentators on the Ukraine crisis

 The more I watch Military Summary, Weeb Union and all other net video-strategos, I am drawn more and more to the conclusion that those are very, and surely non-intentionally, misleading and assuming stuff that is not very realistic in the real world battleground.

Surely most of them do play a positive role of a commentator, an updater, and an analyst for uneducated masses in military matters.

Also, mr. Ritter, col. MacGregor, mr. Martyanov and others of that rank and level explain the overall situation much better having an "eagle view" on the conflict, not being bothered with the "Bradley Square" and how FPV drone blew some Hummvee in some field.

Trouble is, I find nobody who connects those two camps at a certain level. Closest were The Duran, with some early broadcasts, but I have an issue with a way of too long Mercouris' words juggling and retelling stories collected from various sources. Gudaze is cool and sober in explaining the SMO from RF MSM media positions. Indians are funny to watch and very straight forward anti-Ukraine, but also cynical on China.

The New Atlas is eloquent, and comes closest to explaining to a commoner both views, a military and political. 
But he is not close to a current battlespace analysts and his role is more important in explaining Asian position, as he lives in the hood there.

Russians have some superb analysts outside English-speaking spectrum, but they are not as everyday shows, and reading from Rybar, Kots, Sladakov, and such on TG is exhausting as they tend to write cliffhangers and my TG ability is limited to just observing it as in channel preview. 

George Galloway is talking about the substance that has some reach, The Redacted are funny trio with a correct mindset, also with a substantial reach. 

Also, Down South does cool TG updates from Ukrainian critical perspective, not only, but certainly helpful stuff here.

B. our host here is a former military man, and he is to be trusted on operational systems and methods of both sides of the conflict. 
There are some others, surely credible more or less, as Nightvision/Simplicius, Imetatronink, Big Serge do good job too.

But, I am a bit fed up, and possibly some barflies too, with reiterations of already known and expected positions. 
I think we know only around 30% percent of what is really going on, countering the Western MSM that lives in some other space-time and creates some other realities.
What I do not get is how some are citing Telegraph, Sun, Bild etc. 
as anything reliable. Those are the lowest common denominators for anything true and correct. 
So I think the whole information circling around is broken and obfuscated beyond any repair. 

MoA surely tries to fill those blanks somewhat with a slightly chaotic disorder that has its charm, but rare and highly valued content here.

Having written all this, I still feel that there is something missing, especially adding to the picture a bit more lucidity.
But I do not know what or who. Do you feel or see the same? 

This is comment 114 by one ‘whirlX’ in https://www.moonofalabama.org/2023/06/ukraine-open-thread-2023-139/comments/page/2/#comments

Gujarat model?

 Girls used to get married by age of 14, deliver child before 17 years: Gujarat High Court invokes Manusmriti in pregnancy termination matter

Peter Turchin interview

 How to avoid civil war…

Two views of the U.S. economy

 Both mention chips. From Michael Hudson https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2023/06/michael-hudson-on-the-us-economy-surprisingly-resilient-or-potemkin-village.html

From Business Insider https://www.businessinsider.com/us-building-factories-census-data-chips-act-inflation-reduction-act-2023-6?fbclid=IwAR2YRS8Py1pqOxiOlFmyKhileJQjUMl0unEKhZwPyMt6Zf0Yp-GgUmLgcc0

Latest from Simplicius the thinker on the Ukraine offensive

 Anatomy of a NATO-Planned, Trained, and Armed Disaster

And one from Military Summary on the offensive last night 

First song of Geeta Roy

 

Arms development in USA

 

Armchair Warlord

@ArmchairW

The United States military has a long track record of figuring out exactly what it needs for the war of the future, developing appropriate weapons, and then discarding them and being caught with its pants down when its enemies develop equivalents decades later. From https://twitter.com/ArmchairW/status/1667007971363262464

Douglas Macgregor on Serbia and Ukraine

 

Khakova dam breach by Big Serge

 Russo-Ukrainian War: Dam! Shorter than the one by Simplicius and also gives dome history.

“Portaging a boat on the middle Dnieper in 800 AD was dangerous. While disembarked and laboriously dragging the boat downstream, a trading party would be highly vulnerable to attack by the various warlike tribes which inhabited the region at the time. So it became necessary to build some sort of outpost stronghold which could serve as a waypoint to make passage down the river at least acceptably safe. Hence, Kiev - buit originally as a timber fortified trading post to ease passage along the middle Dnieper. 

This is perhaps interesting, but as an aside it illustrates the basic point that for most of human history the Dnieper was not a friendly or easily navigable river akin to the Mississippi or the Rhine, and in the Soviet era a major effort was undertaken at last to tame it, in the form of a series of hydroelectric dams. These dams stiffled the rapids, generated electricity, smoothed the river’s course, and created enormous resevoirs, of which the Kakhovka resevoir is the largest by volume.”

Kakhovka Dam Breach by Simplicius

 Postmortem Analysis on Kakhovka Dam Breach

Simplicius the thinker’s latest on the counteroffensive

 BREAKING: Hell Breaks Loose as Kakhovka Dam Completely Destroyed

“Major news broke that the Nova Khakovka dam has been completely destroyed. This is the central, extremely important dam that was critical to the whole Kherson situation last year. It was the sole reason Russia retreated, as the threat of destroying the dam kept their troops on the right/western bank of the Dnieper river highly vulnerable.”

Another tweet: 

Chebureki Man

@CheburekiMan

·

8m

Well this is good news. Apparently only the upper part of the dam with the control gates was destroyed. The reservoir dam foundation is still solid. That will limit the flooding as the entire reservoir won't flush out.