Whatever You Have to Tell Yourself

Uncle Volodya says; “You are not permitted to kill a woman who has wronged you, but nothing forbids you to reflect that she is growing older every minute.”

“We seem to be unable to resist overstating every aspect of ourselves: how long we are on the planet for, how much it matters what we achieve, how rare and unfair are our professional failures, how rife with misunderstandings are our relationships, how deep are our sorrows. Melodrama is individually always the order of the day.”
― Alain de Botton, from Religion for Atheists

“Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us.”
― Jane Austen, from Pride and Prejudice

A Captain I occasionally work with uses the title phrase to suggest the person he is speaking to is getting a little above himself – that he might be getting an inflated view of his importance and worth. An updated version, I guess you might say, of Pascal’s “Do you wish people to think well of you? Don’t speak well of yourself”, although I think we can agree that would be an unwieldy phrase in an era where nobody talks like a 17th-century French philosopher. But in that context, it is an extremely useful and utilitarian means of conveying subtle mockery without being openly insulting. And on a national scale, the United States – or at least its government – has elevated getting above oneself to an art form.

Consider this recent example: on the occasion of the ‘retirement’ of Victoria Nuland, principle neoconservative architect of The Glorious Maidan and the Revolution of Dignity – and, to a large extent, the subsequent hot war between Russia and Ukraine – US Secretary of State Antony Blinken offered this tribute via X:

“Russia is weaker militarily, economically and diplomatically. NATO is bigger, stronger, and more united than at any time in its nearly 75-year history”

All, presumably, attributable at least in part to the selfless pick-and-shovel work of Victoria Nuland, who made it a lifelong project to fuck over Russia by any means necessary, at any cost and using every resource at her disposal. Including, obviously, the lives of Ukrainians, the American government’s proxy army. By Mr. Blinken’s reckoning, her tenure as the US Department of State’s Big Anti-Russia Boxing Glove has been a rousing success.

Has it?

Well, let’s look. I mean, we know what Blinken thinks – actually, I have to correct myself there; he’s a politician, so we know what he says, which is not necessarily what he thinks. But Blinken doesn’t have the only brain in the west, even though there is plenty of evidence there are more people in the west than there are brains. David Sacks, for example; ladies and gentlemen, David Sacks, former Chief Operating Officer and product leader of the online payment utility Paypal, and decades-long investor in internet technology firms such as Facebook, Palantir, Uber, and SpaceX. Zero military experience so far as I can make out, so I would normally dismiss any analysis from him on military matters…but. Have a look at his assessment of Russia’s obviously-accelerating military strength, but before you do, make up your own mental list – don’t look ahead, do it now – and see how many of the pluses you credited.

“I call this Biden’s big backfire. If you look at all of his claims at the beginning of the war, they’ve all come true in reverse.

He said that we would weaken Russia in order to prevent them from waging this type of war again. In fact, we’ve made the Russian military stronger, it’s larger than it was before, it produces far more weapons, the industrial base is ramped up. Plus it’s now battle-tested and battle-hardened, especially against Western weapons, so it’s a much more formidable military Biden has created on the part of the Russians than when we started.”

How many did you get? Did you count battle experience as a net gain? If so, good for you, but I bet many people, especially the bean-counters to whom only numbers matter, did not. The Russian military is indeed larger than it was before, because in addition to its regular callup, it absorbed hundreds of thousands of volunteers and previous-service members. But we might as well deal with an attenuator now that is going to come up over and over – Ukrainian math and American math, as opposed to real math. The Ukrainians use Dreamland Math, where the numbers of a desired quality – in this instance, dead Russians – have no actual connection to reality, and can be adjusted up or down as necessary to get a good feeling: whatever you have to tell yourself. The Americans use Unquestioning Math, which provides that they accept, publish and calculate using Ukrainan figures provided, without criticism or protest.

We’re going to use real math. If you are Ukrainian or American and prefer to use your national system, feel free, but your numbers might not be the same as ours. And it is important to recognize that the true and accurate numbers will probably not be known until some time after the war is over, when assessors can get access to all the verifiable information. But what I am talking about is a demonstrably and verifiably real situation in which the Russians outgun the Ukrainians by a wide margin, and have done since the first shell was fired, and are currently firing about 10 artillery shells to every 1 fired by Ukraine with the kind of accuracy possible when both sides can see in real time, thanks to drone video, what they are firing at…but according to Ukraine, Russian casualties outnumber Ukrainian dead by hundreds of thousands.

Is that likely to be true? I vote no.

And this is important, because Dreamland Math eliminates the net gain of taking in hundreds of thousands of new soldiers by reckoning they have all been killed, and then some, resulting in a net weakening. The same for manufactured military machinery such as tanks and aircraft – Ukraine claims to be blasting the shit out of everything that moves, faster than Russia can build new ones, even as their diminutive frontman wails that if somebody – anybody – doesn’t give them more money and ammunition RIGHT NOW, it’s all over.

Look at this example – yes, I know it’s Newsweek, but we were talking about nonsensical figures, so this is as reliable a reference as any. Usually a good rule of thumb, based on the phenomenon known as projection, is to assume Ukrainian figures for Russian casualties are pretty close to Ukraine’s actual losses.

Ukraine, on the second anniversary of the beginning of the war, claimed Russia has sustained 407,240 casualties, killed and wounded. That’s even higher than Russia claims Ukraine has lost – around 383,000. I would suggest that is probably a very conservative estimate, and that the actual total is closer to a half-million. But Newsweek has its bespoke stable of experts – Kurt Volker, (former US Envoy for Ukraine negotiations), Nick Reynolds (research fellow for Royal United Services) and James Heappey, the UK’s Defense Minister – and they say, stuff and nonsense; Ukraine is winning, or at least easily holding its own. Dreamland Math reigns supreme, so that even if Russia wins, it loses because everyone in Russia will have been killed by that point.

We spent a lot of time on that issue, but I think it was necessary because such distortions can be used to warp all other statistics on the war. Russia is plainly producing far more military hardware, and ammunition for it is being churned out by an industrial economy on double-shift stereoids – these are production lines that are already set up and proofed for efficiency, unlike NATO, which would have to retool much of its peacetime production apparatus if and when it stops dithering about going to war. But Dreamland Math says sure – Russia is producing more tanks, but we’re blowing them up so fast that production can’t keep up. A ‘leading think tank’ (doesn’t say where) claimed Russia has now lost more tanks than the entire Russian Army had operational before the war began, which would suggest it is now running entirely on new replacements. Dreamland Math.

But you can tell America believes it, or pretends to believe it. ‘US officials’ said in August that the total casualties on both sides were around 500,000. But they appear to accept Ukraine’s claim of having taken out 407,000 Russian soldiers. It would have been something less than that in August, but figures published by ‘US officials’ suggest they believe Ukraine is at least 100,000 ahead in notches on their gun butt. Russia says the casualty balance is about 10 to 1 in favour of Russia. That might well be an exaggeration, too. The thing is, you’re going to have to wait until after the war is over to find out the truth, and it suits the USA for that situation to prevail because it’s hard to get a country to surrender when everything you say is aimed at convincing it that victory is just around the corner.

Meanwhile, Ukraine trots out amazing news of having killed 10 Russian warplanes in 10 days, making it a far more effective air-defense power without ammunition than it was when its ‘allies’ were pumping missiles and weapons into it. Two of the planes Ukraine claims to have downed are the high-value new Beriev A-50 AWACS. No wreckage photos were provided. In the case of the second A-50 report, the British Defense Ministry claimed the stricken aircraft had crashed in the Sea of Azov.

The Sea of Azov, interestingly, is the shallowest sea in the world, with an average depth of only 7 meters. The Beriev A-50 stands more than 14 meters tall on the tarmac at takeoff. With its wheels up it would be a little shorter, but I think you can see the likelihood of the miracle that could hide a 14-meter-high aircraft in a 7-meter deep sea so that no wreckage was visible from the air. No such photos have been offered.

Photographs and video have been provided of what are allegedly Russian SU-34 warplanes falling burning from the sky, but they are very grainy and could be just about any shot-down aircraft filmed anywhere at any time. Given the quality of video capture possible in decent light with the average smartphone, I suspect the gritty quality is deliberate.

Anyway, I want to get back to David Sacks, because he also mentioned some economic factors which directly contradict Blinken’s peyote reasoning. To wit;

“Then you look at the economic claims that Biden made, he said that sanctions would crush the Russian economy. In fact, the Russian economy is growing faster than any of the G-7 economies. It’s really booming and it’s our European allies’ economies that have been crushed by the sanctions.

So, you know all this policy that he’s pursued has really boomeranged and again come true in reverse.”

Hold on, though; he’s just one guy – against him are thousands of faceless ‘US officials with direct knowledge of the matter but who cannot be identified because they do not have permission to discuss it with journalists’. Does Sacks’ claim hold up?

Gadzooks!! It’s true!! So saith the BBC, and since it sweats Russophobia, it follows that it would not say anything positive about Russia unless it knew a lie would be exposed by even a casual review.

“In a long and rambling interview this week, President Putin gleefully exclaimed Russia as the fastest growing economy in Europe.

Last week, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) underlined the resilience of the Russian economy when it upgraded its forecast growth for this year to 2.6% from 1.1%.

Based on the IMF’s figures, the Russian economy grew faster than the whole G7 last year, and will do so again in 2024.

These are not just numbers. The stalemate in Ukraine last year and the growing expectation of a frozen conflict on the ground across this year, has been underpinned by Russia’s remobilisation of its economy to its military effort, especially in the construction of defensive lines in the east and south of Ukraine.”

Pardon me a short digression, because there were a couple of dog-in-the-manger gratuitous misdirections in there. One, describing a Putin interview as ‘rambling’ is pretty rich coming from a staunch press ally of Joe ‘Treacle Brains’ Biden, whose speech in Vietnam last fall went so badly off the rails that his press secretary cut him off before he could start getting into his pyjamas (in what’s left of his mind) right there on stage. There’s ‘rambling’, and then there’s ‘gurney bait’; it reflects extremely badly on the Democrats that they will not let the poor old man get some rest and care, and instead insist on wheeling him from event to event in a grotesque pantomime of state business that would not fool a chicken. Two, as I frequently highlight – mostly because nobody in the press seems to get it – Russia’s performance is despite focused effort by all the G7 countries it is leaving in the dust to ruin it. It is one thing for a country to perform well in the economic sphere simply bucking the everyday complications and challenges of shifting global fortunes. It is remarkable for a country to do it with a dozen or so assassins clinging to its ankles and trying their best to drown it.

There’s more, but we have to move on. Suffice it to mention the simpleminded stupidity of announcing ‘this economic miracle cannot last’ in nearly the same breath as “2024 will be much more positive for Putin than we thought. He has managed to reorganise his own industry more efficiently than we thought.” You were completely wrong in all your assessments that Russia would be ruined by your machinations – why should anyone believe Putin cannot continue diddling you at his pleasure for as long as it suits him?

I just want to quickly – before we adjust our aim to the absurd claim that NATO is more of a supercharged dynamo than ever – address the equally foolish claim that Russia is ‘diplomatically isolated’. The American news resource which bills itself as ‘the paper of record’ says Blinken is as full of shit as the north end of a southbound bull. The effort to isolate Russia is acknowledged, but the New York Times branded it a failure more than a year ago. Which is to say, not to put too fine a point on it, before it was recognized that the Russian economy knocked sawdust out of the G7 in 2023, and looks to do it again in 2024.

“A year on, it’s becoming clearer: While the West’s core coalition remains remarkably solid, it never convinced the rest of the world to isolate Russia.

Instead of cleaving in two, the world has fragmented. A vast middle sees Russia’s invasion as, primarily, a European and American problem. Rather than view it as an existential threat, these countries are largely focused on protecting their own interests amid the economic and geopolitical upheaval caused by the invasion.”

By ‘cleaving in two’, I presume Washington meant ‘Russia and China and a couple of other bad actors like North Korea, and the USA and all the good countries’. Clearly it has turned out nothing like that. The USA seized control of Europe, but the forcible disconnection of Europe from cheap energy is wrecking its industry. The situation is so dire that Europe’s leaders have simply stopped talking about it; this piece, from 2022, forecast energy rationing and shutdowns across Europe.

“Miles Roberts, chief executive of FTSE 100 packaging company DS Smith, said businesses had to be prepared for energy to be rationed this winter.

“We are expecting there to be rationing across Europe, that’s what we’re preparing for. It may not happen, but we have to plan for that now,” he told the Financial Times.

The company, which relies on gas for up to 70 per cent of its energy usage, is combating high prices through hedging, diversifying its energy use and reducing consumption.”

Diversifying energy use? Haven’t you heard? Natural gas is back in fashion!

“While climate change remains at the top of the agenda, the immediate name of the game is “energy security”, and that has opened up enormous opportunities for investors on both sides of the divide. At the height of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, European countries were even forced to return to coal burning. While that has since declined, with climate change returning to the top of the agenda, natural gas has regained status as the only viable bridge to a green energy transition.”

Just in time for Biden to announce a slowdown in the American LNG industry. You guessed it! Climate Change AND National Security! Yup, Europe certainly made the right move when it signed on to board the Molecules Of Freedom train. In short, Washington managed to capture Europe as a gas market, but to what avail, if an inability to support European industry means its collapse, costing hundreds of thousands of jobs? How many banks can Europe support? People have to work somewhere, and they can’t all be bankers and hedge-fund investors. The very thought of admitting Ukraine to the EU sends cold chills down the spines of Europe’s farmers, because unless the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is completely rewritten, Ukraine’s huge tracts of farmland will qualify it for more than €90 Billion a year in subsidies, even as the share of subsidies paid out to farmers in forever-European countries drops by 20%. Where are these people going to work to earn money to purchase ‘friendly’ gas at a significant markup?

Which brings us to Blinken’s mostly-fatuous claim that NATO is bigger and bolder and badder than it’s ever been, so Russia had better hide under the bed. I say ‘mostly’ fatuous because it is true that NATO is bigger than at any previous point in its history. That’d be sort of a given with any country joining NATO unless a bigger country dropped out, and I think we’re all agreed that’s a remote possibility.

According to the US Department of Defense, a key determining factor for admission to NATO is “…whether their admission to NATO will strengthen the alliance and further the basic objective of NATO enlargement, which is to increase security and stability across Europe.” NATO’s own website suggests an aspirant member must “demonstrate the ability and willingness to make a military contribution to NATO operations.”

Sweden and Finland? Let’s look.

Sweden is actually not too bad, depending on your point of view; Global Firepower ranks it overall at 29 out of 145 countries rated. That same site has a useful feature entitled ‘overview’ – let’s look at it. A heading in green means excellent, blue is good, grey is average, yellow is fair and red is look out. So we can see immediately that Sweden’s rated capability in air power is not bad; it has a good number – for its size – of fighters and transports and a fair number of helicopters. No attack-type fixed wing air, though – 145th out of 145 – and no attack helicopters. Its paramilitary personnel rating is likewise good, although its fit-for-service rating is only fair. Where Sweden really shines is as a naval power, scoring ‘excellent’ in minor combatants from corvettes on down to mine warfare vessels. Terrible for capital ships, though – no frigates or destroyers. But as other analyses point out, in the current scope of conflicts none are naval wars per se, and in the Russia/Ukraine conflict – the reason, supposedly, that Sweden gave up its neutrality and sought the bosom of NATO – what matters is infantry, armor and artillery. Sweden only scores ‘average’ in these.

Also available, though, are economic factors which would advance it as a net contributor, or condemn it as another hungry mouth to feed. And in this, Sweden is clearly the latter; out of consumption/proven reserves – a poor rating, naturally, meaning a high consumer and/or low or no proven reserves – Sweden scores a big fat goose-egg for oil, natural gas and coal with only a ‘fair’ rating for proven coal reserves. Blinking red on the rest.

Military forces no longer use coal for anything, and their consumption is maximized for destructive potential, survivability and speed – not fuel efficiency. Sweden scores not badly overall for military capability, but would need help to get its forces into battle and to sustain them in combat.

Let’s look at Finland; big on hate for Russia, but short on just about everything else from a strategic point of view. Rated at 50 out of 145 nationally, it is weaker than Sweden. While it rates ‘fair’ in population factors, it has a big red light for ‘reaching military age annually’, which suggests an aging population. According to Trading Economics, the population has only grown by around a million since 1960, but growth has nonetheless been fairly steady. In the air it suffers from a similar deficiency of fixed-wing attack aircraft and attack helicopters, and for all intents and purposes has no navy, only offshore patrol and mine warfare vessels. It scores highly for towed artillery, but towed artillery is a liability rather than an asset in the shoot-and-scoot conditions imposed by drone warfare – you have time to fire once and maybe twice from the same position, and then you have to be moving or you are dead.

In oil and coal production, Finland scored ‘fair’ while it scored ‘terrible’ in consumption of all energy resources. Its rating for oil consumption was only 63/145, but still red, which suggests it consumes all its own production plus additional volumes. Its natural-gas imports from Russia dropped from an average monthly 9018.11 terrajoules between 2008 and 2023 to 0.00 in May of 2023. However, its natural-gas imports overall increased from 8165 terrajoules in December 2023 to 8266 terrajoules in January 2024. This suggests Finland has made some economies of consumption, but now all of it is at significantly higher cost and the consumption at lower rates is not sustainable.

In summary, NATO has grown larger by two countries, but both are net energy gobblers while the added weight of their military capabilities is negligible, and not maximized for land warfare. Is NATO stronger? You tell me. According to its defense minister, Canada’s armed forces face a recruiting death spiral, with more military personnel leaving than joining. In the mighty USA, recruiting entrance requirements have been lowered again, to allow applicants taking the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery Test (which guides recruiters as to which trades and elements to offer you) to use calculators. Nevertheless, the US Army fell short of its 2022 recruiting goals by nearly 10,000, despite having lowered the goal twice, while the US Army Chief of Staff warned that lowering recruiting standards to allow previously substandard recruits to join is dangerous. This is important, because it is the very whatever-you-have-to-tell-yourself comfort filter western think tanks use to mitigate the growing strength of the Russian Army – sure, it’s bigger, but they’re all stupid plowboys from the Volga who don’t know the muzzle of a rifle from the buttplate. Except that the US Army does not even have the comfort factor of being bigger; as I write this, the US Armed Forces is at its smallest strength numerically in more than 80 years. And most of the new Russian soldiers who went straight into combat were previous military members, experienced and trained, because those were the men called up in the mobilization order.

Meanwhile, military capability in Europe is perhaps best characterized by the establishment of the hilariously-named European Peace Facility (EPF), a ‘mechanism’ for…providing training and equipment, including lethal weaponry, to non-European forces around the world. The long way of spelling ‘mercenary’. While the best minds of Europe apply themselves to even further use of AI, directed-energy weapons and ‘real-time cyber threat-hunting’. Ha, ha. Sorry, I tried not to laugh, but I couldn’t help it.

“Despite its name, the European peace facility, worth €5bn over the next seven years, will allow the EU to provide equipment – including lethal weapons – to non-European militaries. It also offers the EU more freedom of manoeuvre in Africa than previously, making it possible to provide arms and training directly to national governments and regional actors rather than going through the African Union, as training missions have had to in the past.

Germany’s foreign minister, Heiko Maas, has described the facility as “a fundamental investment in peace and stability”. Not everyone sees things this way. Forty human rights organisations have warned the possibility of providing foreign military forces with lethal weapons would “risk increasing human rights abuses and contribute to further violence and arms proliferation, rather than to protect civilians and search for political solutions”.

Gee – you think?

The UK military is less than a third the size it was in 1960 – in 2021, the army was the smallest it has been in 400 years. Planners tell us this is good – smaller forces are ‘leaner and more agile’. Presumably, then, the British army will have reached its zenith when it is down to a single member. So long as it’s not this one – in 2018 figures obtained under Freedom Of Information rules suggested nearly one in ten British soldiers was ‘clinically obese’, but only two years later that was no longer a bar to recruiting, as the army sought the overweight, the unfit and the shy. Dear God.

In the days immediately following the commencement of the war in Ukraine, Olaf Scholz announced a turning point – the ‘Zeitenwende’ – in global affairs generally, and more specifically in funding of the German military which was to benefit from a €100 billion special fund for the purchase of modern weapons. How’s that going? Well…the German military is…well…”In terms of equipment, the Bundeswehr is not yet fully operational,” Högl said. “There is a lack of ammunition, of spare parts, of radio devices; there is a lack of tanks, of ships and of aircraft.” So, not yet fully operational, then. Must be waiting for a clearance sale. Defense advocates call for an increase of more than 20,000 in the German Army by 2031, but it was 1,537 smaller at the end of 2023.

In the military ranks which remain, wokeness has seized control of the agenda, filtering everything through gender and sexuality concerns. I only have room here to illustrate examples for the US military, but perhaps that is fitting as it is supposed to be the most powerful in the world.

“In 2015, then Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus rejected out-of-hand a Marine Corps study concluding that gender-integrated combat formations did not move as quickly or shoot as accurately, and that women were twice as likely as men to suffer combat injuries. He rejected it because it did not comport with the Obama administration’s political agenda.

…Physical fitness has long been a hallmark of the U.S. military. But in recent years, fitness standards have been progressively watered down in pursuit of the woke goal of “leveling the playing field.” The Army, for instance, recently lowered its minimum passing standards for pushups to an unimpressive total of ten and increased its minimum two-mile run time from 19 to 23 minutes. The new Space Force is considering doing away with periodic fitness testing altogether.

…Much of the emphasis of wokeness today is on promoting the idea that America is fatally flawed by systemic racism and white privilege. Our fighting men and women are required to sit through indoctrination programs, often with roots in the Marxist tenets of critical race theory, either by Pentagon diktat or through carelessness by senior leaders who delegate their command responsibilities to private Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion instructors.“

The Russian Army likely does have its problems, but wokeness is not one of them, nor is it ever likely to be. Sure, Blinken – Russia has been weakened, perhaps fatally, by Ukraine’s brutal mauling. At the same time, NATO is more energized and dynamic than ever.

Whatever you have to tell yourself.