The Land of Mind-Rape and Honey

Canada is/was a nice enough place to visit or grow up… several large nice cities surrounded by tons and tons of quaint and cute functional “Mainstreet USA” style quirky little towns.

But when you scratch at the surface there’s something profoundly deeply wrong with Canada. You can feel it. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work... when you go to church... when you pay your taxes.

and the Canadians are quite pleased to tell you just what that thing is:

America.

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Funnily though, when you ask what Americans have done to them or what is wrong with America, they’ll tell you things about moral degeneracy and perfidy of Americans… no different than what the American elite and the US Government expresses about it’s own populace.

For reference: Canada is a vassal of the US.

It has been since the 1960s when the British lost the Suez Crisis and the American Deep State backed “Multiculturalism”, an end to “God Save the Queen”, Legalized Sodomy, ended prayer in public schools, Demilitarized Canadian Education (which til the 60s included rifle practice, marching, and survival training)… and oh ya a New flag.

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Canada’s entire culture, defined by being British, Imperial, warlike, frontier Militiamen (Indeed Canada’s 1950s culture in many ways resembled Washington’s and Jefferson’s colonial American culture more than America did)… was ripped out in the course of a decade… Quite Intentionally and by design.

Indeed Canada was the testing ground for the Global American Empire’s psychological cultural program.

To get a feel for just HOW aggressively Canadian culture was purposefully ripped apart… I encourage you to flip through the various programs for “Empire day in the Schools of Ontario” up on archive to see English Canada’s actual natural culture. (I will be writing about this in more detail in another piece.

And Please Note: The British did nothing comparable… the “Narnia” age of Canada coexisted with The Fabians, George Bernard Shaw, and the basically open communist treason of the actual British Aristocracy.

This was immediately ripped out by State-Department’s assets like Pearson and Trudeau in the 60s and 70s in favour of “Multiculturalism”.

How does the one Canada: Royalist, Militaristic, Patriotic as Can Be, defined by the 3 institutions of Church, Militia Armory, and the oldstyle Highschool ruthlessly enforcing standards… More akin to Cadia from 40k than a 21st century country… How did it transform into the modern Canada within living memory?

How do you destroy the entire culture of a country and replace it with an entirely new culture in front of it’s population’s very eyes… without resistance and without protest?

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Well that’s the problem that was solved here.

Canada was the testing ground for all of the American Government’s cultural occupational weapons it would go on to use on Europe and on its own people.

Terms like “melting pot”, “racism”, “tolerance”, “the open society”… These of course has all been coined by American Jewish and Communist activists (“Racism” specifically is a Trotskyist doctrinal term of art propagated by Trotsky’s personal pamphlets, and you should call any “Conservative” who ever uses the term a Communist traitor).

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However it was in Canada that top down US foreign policy institutions first applied the current model to a country which they had conquered without a war.

Indeed when one looks into “Denazification” in Germany or the US occupations of France, Italy, or Japan you find little to no overlap between the language, structure, and even values of the “Democratic”, “antifascist”, and “Peaceful” occupational ideology and modern Globohomo.

Whereas in Canada the US occupational ideology EXACTLY resembles modern globohomo. From the outset.

Pierre Trudeau’s first major political moment was the 1967 decriminalization of homosexuality.

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Canada’s greatest film is indeed exactly about this dynamic.

“Television is Reality. And Reality is less than Television”

A million essays could be written on David Cronenberg’s 1983 film Videodrome.

I’ve written on it before… And I’ll write on it again:

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It is maybe the most daring cyberpunk movie ever made.

It is the greatest Toronto Film ever made.

And it is the great Canadian film…

Indeed it set the tone for almost all subsequent Canadian horror like American Mary, Pontypool, Screamers, Possessor… All revolving around high concept alienation, manipulation, and illusions of language and flesh. Memetic warfare.

A nebulous genre I call “McLuhan Horror” for reasons you will see.

And what’s more it is the Great Internet movie… Despite not featuring anything related to the internet at all.

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Rather the same way the internet has really destroyed existing American culture, political institutions, social feedback loops, and existing generational power structures… Videodrome is about how old Canada was consciously destroyed via Television.

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James Wood plays Max Renn the head of CIVIC-TV, a fictionalized version of real life Toronto television executive Moses Znaimer (yes he, like Cronenberg, is of the tribe of Moses), who was the head of the Canadian television station CityTV.

Max and his team intercept a pirate television broadcast of what appears to be a pornographic BDSM signal, that might be a snuff film… And this drives Max on a quest to hunt down and find the Signal the “Videodrome” signal, because he wants to license the violent pornographic program, for public broadcast over the airways.

This might sound odd… License a porno for live public broadcast? But the real life Moses Znaimer had already done this, CityTV’s late night “Baby Blue Movie” block had been broadcast since 1972 and continued until 2008, sending out softcore porn and erotica, with films and series such as: Beverley Hills Bordello, Camille 2000, Deviant Vixens, Pleasure Palace, and The Best of the New York Erotic Film Festival… broadcast to anyone with a bunny-ears television set.

However this is merely the setup…

Nicki : Got any porno?
Max : You serious?
Nicki : Yeah. It gets me in the mood.
[looks through cassettes]
Nicki : What’s this? “Videodrome”?
Max : Torture. Murder.
Nicki : Sounds great.
Max : Ain’t exactly sex.
Nicki : Says who?

Max in the course of his quest, and in his capacity as a Television Exec goes on a TV talk-show where he encounters the trippy figure Nicki Brand (Deborah Harry, Blondie), a call in talkshow host who does bizarre psychological exploitation programing… Whom I’m almost certain is based on real life 1980s Toronto TV/Radio personality Ziggy Lorenc, a MuchMusic (Canadian MTV) VJ, who wrote her monologues and interludes between songs, segments, and commercials seemingly with the goal of causing you to doubletake that you might be having a hallucinatory stroke, that the TV is talking to you personally and having a grossly inappropriate and intimate crisis of identity, or wonder that the Crew forgot they were recording.

Sortof over-intimate anti-punchlines designed to create the most awkward silence imaginable. Very Anticipatory of Sam Hyde and other anti-comedians.

Is this good entertainment? Well you’re looking at the TV now aren’t you? You’re gonna remember the Ad that this smash cuts to.

Remember… All hipsterism originates in Canada. All of it. Your twee early 2000s folk band that made the transition to sea shanties in the 2010s are all just imitating Neil Young, Stan Rodgers, and Gordon Lightfoot. And they got their sensibilities from Stephen Leacock in the 1910s.

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But also on that interview Max meets media Professor Brian O’blivion…

A direct basically explicit Analog for real life legendary Toronto media Professor Marshall McLuhan who coined the phrase “The Medium is the Message” in his 1964 book Understanding Media. (Yes this Phrase does aptly apply to the new Canadian Flag of the same year)

O’blivion however, does not appear on the television interview. He refuses to appear on Television.

Instead he broadcasts himself to a local TV Set in the studio so that he might avoid appearing on television… except on television.

This is of course very in line with the creepy parts of Marshall Mcluhan’s own work on the interaction of identity, perception, mass media, crowd dynamics, industrial reproduction of images…

Indeed every line of McLuhan’s 1967 documentary “The Medium is the Massage” (not a typo, a pun) takes on a horrifying and terrible double meaning almost 60 years later in the second half of the 2020s with Corporate, Globalist, and State backed Legacy Media and the Rise of equally, though more subtly, manipulative social media.

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Max’s quest to find the Videodrome Signal leads him to hunt down Dr. Brian O’blivion in the flesh… There’s just one problem.

Brian O’blivion’s dead. He’s been dead since before the story started.

He keeps on appearing on television through a seemingly bottomless archive of video records and lectures sent out by his daughter Bianca.

Much as Marshall Mcluhan had died in 1980, but continued to appear on Canadian TV in various reruns and re-aired lectures well past 1983 and the release of Videodrome… saying creepy things about the immortality and power of media from beyond the grave.

Bianca actually runs a “mission” a sort of “Safe Supply” Halfway house or Methadone Clinic… whereby the homeless and various junkies can get their fix… of Television.

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It is then that Max finally meets Brian O’Blivion.

Via hallucinations.

O’blivion reveals that the Videodrome signal both Max and Nicki have seen is in fact a weapon.

That viewing it permanently damages the mind causing hallucinations, mental derangement, permanent loss of inhibitions, Brain tumors, and stranger permutations of flesh (It is a Cronenberg film)… However even here O’Blivion is creepily hinting at other things…

O’Blivion (or Max’s hallucination of him) believes that it was not the Tumor which caused the hallucinations but rather the inverse. That Videodrome is in-fact a new stage of human evolution, and that via Videodrome he had accessed a deeper level of the memetic and media world… A concept that would be called the “digital world” decades later. But here is creepily more menacing as a concept, because it is not an aspect of machines but rather human minds.

That Videodrome is the beginning of a “New Flesh”.

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Of course none of the surviving non-hallucinating experts on Videodrome believe this, rather they treat it as a weapon… And use it to program Max into a sort of Golum, an MKUltra “Manchurian Candidate” assassin that they might use him to kill his partners at CIVIC-TV and secure political, media, and electro-magnetic control over Toronto for wider weapons testing of the Videodrome signal on a captive civilian population.

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Have I mentioned thus far that Canada was one of the real life testing grounds for MKUltra?

That being outside America, it was ideally suited for torturous chemical and psychological experiments on non-consenting mental patients over the course of 20 years.

Indeed many of these stories were declassified and reported just before Videodrome started shooting.

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Psychological Warfare:
Or How Toronto Conquered the World

We must leave of the story of Videodrome there…

What will Max do or become?
Will the Golum Max rebel against his new masters?
What is this “New Flesh”?

Watch the Movie!

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But for our purposes the core concepts: that new mimetic, psychological, sociological, and media based weapons and modes of warfare have been in constant development throughout the later half of the 20th century and still are being developed… Is I think almost undebatable…

And that the place they are tested first and perfected is English Canada. More often than not Toronto.

The Canada/US Border has indeed been the cutting edge of global Psychological Warfare since General Brock got The American General hull to surrender Fort Detroit to an inferior fort without firing a shot in the war of 1812.

I’ve written on this before:

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Indeed Canada’s Original pre-Suez culture was itself much of a Psyop, a conscious design of the British Empire to militarize British North America and resist US cultural and geopolitical hegemony.

But why is it still a ground for Psychological warfare? Why Toronto?

For the same reason so many of the core MKultra trials were preformed in the English parts of Montreal.

Because US intel agencies, carve outs, and political actors have legal and political cover to run experiments in Canada. If the CIA gets caught screwing with Canadians… What’s Ottawa going to do? Is the Prime Minister going to chase them to Langley, Virginia?

Are they going to be to be called in front of joint sessions of the Canadian Parliament?

If a US intel agency decided to screw with Americans, or American culture, or American politics… And it were to go horribly wrong or backfire, Congress could call the individual agents and department heads involved before hearings, the department itself could be disbanded, hell they could be tried and imprisoned…

You do that in Canada however, and technically you didn’t do it the US… Intel agencies GET to screw with foreigners. That’s their job.

They can perfect techniques, try out new things, and experiment at their leisure a short 10 hour drive north of NYC or Washington…. And if it blows up horribly or causes the opposite of the intended result? who cares? That’s Ottawa’s problem. Let them deal with the fallout, it’s contained.

It’s exactly just far enough away… And yet everyone speaks unaccented American English, all the amenities and lifestyle conveniences are the same as any American city, and all the sociology and political behaviour is close enough as makes little difference.

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As soon as you understand this you start to understand some bizarre things that would be otherwise inexplicable.

For example… The great meme wars of the 2010s…

I can never keep the timeline straight.

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People will tell me that GamerGate started in 2014, or that #MeToo was 2017.

And I’ll recoil from them…

Because I could have sworn #Metoo happened in 2011 and the very classroom friends and I debated it in… or that GamerGate was 2012?

It actually took this happening a few times for me to remember/realize that…

No it wasn’t called “#MeToo” in 2011… It was Called SlutWalk.

And it wasn’t called “Gamergate” in 2012, and the world wasn’t reacting to the perfidy, lies, and manipulations of Zoe Quinn…

But instead everyone was reacting to Canadian-American feminist Anita Sarkeesian who started her “Feminist Frequency” while at York University near Jane and Finch.

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From my perspective, in the schools and campuses of Toronto Ontario, from about 2011 to 2020 it was really a non-stop blur of shockingly heavily funded Feminist, Anti-Racist, LGBTQPALPHABET+, activists with non-stop infinite funding at all levels of institutional power… And every individual leg of it predicted what would happen next.

All the Culture warriors of the era, Jordan Peterson, Lauren Southern, Stephan Molyneux, were all Torontonians, and Stephen Crowder was veteran child actor from Canadian Children’s programing. Gavin McGuiness was one of the founders of the Montreal based magazine VICE and lived in Toronto at the time.

The radical overrepresentation of Torontonians in the early culture war industry isn’t an accident.

Toronto is ground zero for basically every political cultural trend, because it’s used as a test ground for psychological warfare and social engineering. And as a result the first place to develop immune responses.

SlutWalk resembled the rhetoric of MeToo so closely, because SlutWalk was where all the cultural and institutional forces and maneuvers were perfected on small scale beforehand.

“Because it’s 2015” Was a Justin Trudeau line before it was a PC principle line on SouthPark.

I heard it in 2013 “Because it’s 2013” when he was touring University Campuses trying to gin up buzz for his leadership campaign for head of the Liberal Party.

The Globalist Iron Governing principle: “Diversity is our strength”… Is the official motto of the City of Toronto. Adopted in 1998.

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Yes, the Municipal motto of Toronto has become the governing motto of the Western Globohomo Regime. Space aliens visiting earth 30 years apart would conclude Toronto had conquered the entire western world.

Indeed my explanation… That Toronto is the testing ground of the Global American Empires cultural and political maneuvers and psychological operations… Is far more grounded and less Grandiose than the alternative…

That Toronto is just quietly the real political-cultural center of the Anglosphere, and all the trends the rest of the English speaking world thinks is something organic to them or their culture… Is in fact an unoriginal import they got from some Toronto Hipsters they subconsciously imitate. but all but the best of them are not hip or sophisticated enough to know the cultural and ideological origins of their inferior derivative iterations.

The Toronto Film Scott Pilgrim vs. The World Is treated as some patient ZERO plague-rat for Hipsterdom and female promiscuity. “In 2008, a women having 7 Evil Exs was considered an absurdly high number” As the meme says… However the Scott Pilgrim Film was not patient Zero.

Scott Pilgrim was the adaptation of the fictionalized biopic comic-book Scott Pilgrim, that started in 2004, and was about the author’s arrested-adolescence in Toronto in the 90s hanging out with garage bands (this is why all the video-game references stop at the PlayStation 1, that wouldn’t become a reddit manchild aesthetic choice until later). And the band of the film? Ramona Flowers?

Its Emily Haines of Metric. She’s Patient Zero. She’s was Bryan Lee O’Malley crush/friend he wrote Scott Pilgrim tacitly about.

(This is 2006. The Song was written in 2003).

The Entire 2010s was a Toronto export. Indeed, you look closely and you see that the entire Hipster movement was a stew of weird cultural cancers, Weaponized-Memetic-Brain-AIDS, and McLuhan Psyop Horror That’s been stewing in post-Suez Upper-Canada for decades.

Indeed you can find specific Toronto precedents and antecedents to Haines in figures like 1980s Martha Johnson of Martha and the Muffins or later Molly Rankin of Alvvays.

Or Put otherwise: Toronto Hipsters are the real cynical sophisticates and you Brooklyn transplants are braindead posers.

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I mean that’s certainly what us Hipsters in Toronto think… and I find myself struggling to resist my flannel/skinny jeans/beanie (toque) instincts that would have me come to the smug conclusion… (Hipsters just dress like Canadians… that’s hipster attire… Hipsters are just American-to-Canadian Transexuals)

But those are the real alternatives.

Either we posit that Toronto and English Canada more generally is the natural testing ground for the American empire’s psyops and Cultural warfare upon the nations of the western world, and the natural place to develop immune responses first…

Or we posit that there’s something so innately culturally important, sophisticated, urbane, well-read, and media sophisticated about Torontonians and the wider Laurentian world that extends across Ontario to English Montreal, that their small municipal Neuroses wind up inflecting the entire culture of the anglosphere by the sheer force of their worldly cosmopolitan sophistication.

(I think some poor Albertan just threw up in their mouth a little).

But the core conclusion is that whenever we see odd double events… Matrix style Deja Vu where world historical cultural trends that Shake America, the wider Anglo-sphere and ultimately “the West”, that all seemingly all have bizarre weird precedents in Toronto… (Even the Railroading of Derek Chauvin for the death of George Floyd, something you wouldn’t normally think could have a Canadian precedent, was precedented by the Shooting of Sammy Yatim, and how that was used to crush the institutional power of Toronto police and establish lawyer/social worker rule over the city)

That we should conclude there are major institutional and cultural forces using Toronto as a testbed for future Psychological and Culture-War fuckery.

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There’s a lot of other things like this… and documenting it all would take several more essays (I need to eventually write about the first hipster).

But once you notice the patterns suddenly you see them elsewhere and can judge future political/psychological events by them.

For example:

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Cast Study 1: “Everybody hates [insert target here]”

The Canadian/Albertan band Nickelback was maybe the biggest Band in the world in the Mid-2000s. Selling more than 50 million albums at the last moment that was really possible. Getting more airplay than a lot of the most famous bands in history… Quite arguably overplayed… But their blend of rock, grunge, metal, and country was inoffensive in basically any market in the world… and wasn’t preaching anything or really trying to offend sensibilities, generate controversy, or grate on anyone (something you can’t say of most genres).

A Band that should have really kind-of disappeared into the background of world music discussion. It had a mall-dad/sports-bar sensibility.

Indeed the origin point of Alberta… The most “Country Music” part of the world that’s not in America was almost certainly part of it’s appeal. A Sub-urban/Ex-Urban/ Rural cultural nowhere that was a bit too obscure to make people arround the world feel it wasn’t their backyard.

And then it became the most hated band in world history.

“Everyone hates Nickleback”. Famously.

There are dozens and dozens of documentaries and video-essays on this specific case study.

Hatred in a way almost no band before or since has ever gotten. And it wasn’t organic.

Legacy Music Magazines, establishment comedians, primetime comedy shows… The Exact same people you now expect to lie about absolutely EVERYTHING. All spontaneously united and in one unanimous voice declared Nickelback the worst thing ever.

This is really weird. This does not happen.

Usually if a band or actor or other entertainment act is hated, it has either had a series of scandals, the core personality has said something about gays or jews, or it actively cultivated the hate as part of it’s brand… like Insane Clown Posse.

That the industry and media would just suddenly turn on a multi-billion-dollar entertainment property organically out of “taste” or “preference”… is basically unheard of for the same reason we’d never expect all the entertainment magazines and media companies to suddenly all speak out in hatred of the Marvel Cinematic Universe with one voice, or all suddenly decide that liking Taylor Swift made you a fat ugly loser.

These are some of the industry’s biggest ticket items, the revenues for the companies are insane, and rocking that boat too hard is going to get your career torpedoed by corporate who probably has relationships with the property you’re damaging.

Someone had to decide this messaging press was going to happen. That someone had to be pretty high up. They had to have more influence than a multibillion dollar entertainment property.

And as soon as you start thinking that big and that influential you have to think political, or national.

But why Nickelback? They aren’t political?

No they’re not. They were merely inoffensively popular. Indeed they didn’t even really have scandals.

The only thing that was going against them was that they were white men. They were heterosexual. And they were Canadian.

This made them perfect for a Psyop weapons test… A sort-of benchmarking exercise for the amount of media messaging and social control that could be effected against the public’s own revealed natural market preference.

Every band is from somewhere, and if you had targeted say The Dropkick Murphys of Boston, or Jimmy Buffet of Florida, you might have stirred up a big hornet’s nest really fast... People are really attached to their hit local bands. It could have political implications. But all of American media targeting Alberta’s biggest success story? Who cares?

Any potential political fallout is contained.

Indeed, when you put it that way, this is one of the few really big bands or properties of any scale you could ever do this to… Do this to Taylor Swift and it might start a gender war. Do this to Jennifer Lopez or Oprah and it might start a race war. Going after Jimmy Buffet might anger Florida enough to swing a presidential election.

But if you needed to test how much buy-in you could get from a Democratic public for pure compliance, off of messaging alone… how easily you could make them hate white men who had done nothing and were otherwise popular, attractive, and embodied a tough rustic spirit… without being attached to any specific region or location.

Nickelback was the perfect contained test target. They had even avoided politicizing themselves.

Indeed reading the Wikipedia page… The big years for Nickelback hate starting were 2010 to 2013… The exact years that SlutWalk, Anita Sarkeesian, and all the early 2010s 4th wave political correctness culture-war maneuvers were being tested in Toronto.

And the lesson was clear: Yes, you could make a completely random innocent group universally reviled for no reason whatsoever except the status anxiety of a bottomless mushy middle of people doing what other people were telling them, and performatively hating lest they be thought uncool, retrograde, or low-status.

Ie. Exactly what would be tried on every single group of dissenters for the next 15+ years.

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The only problem is… The test ended too soon. They didn’t observe the after-effects. That just like Wokeness’ attacks on right wingers and young white men in the 2010s. Nickelback’s fandom hardened and became radicalized by the experience of universal hatred… They’re still going strong today off the fanatical loyalty this engendered in their fans.

And remarkably they did it by not flinching and not second guessing themselves. Somehow the 200th corporate executive to get cancelled still plays the apology and appeasement game after decades of seeing that not work out for others and get them cancelled and destroyed…

But Nickelback was amongst the very first to be targeted by these techniques and methodology, by paid off early-2010s half-online magazine influencers and TV personalities… And they never thought to rebrand or change their sound, or “Update for modern audiences” in response to the hate.

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Nickelback was the Test case for every cancelling, ten-minute hate, and 2010s online Magazine hate-fest “Takedown”… Every Mother Jones Hatedown… They were the first most aggressive test case.

And they survived it.

By being true to themselves… By looking at their photographs, and reminding themselves what they really are.

Case Study 2: Canadian Lockdowns

Canada is known for a few things… Innovative and Technocratic governance is not one them.

Canada is generally run by incompetent clowns. Indeed Canada’s most famous innovations are weird nightmarish stop-gap measures like MAID or Mass-Indian Immigration whereby the Canadian elites cover up their mismanagement in things like healthcare by implementing Euthanasia to relieve wait-times… Or propping up their catastrophic housing bubble by importing mass of the third world to brute force enough of a housing shortage that Boomer home-prices won’t drop.

So it’s really weird that CANADA would be the first country to implement an Mandatory COVID Tracking App “ArriveCan” for international travel.

Indeed Canadians themselves (contrary to Americans who were keen to tell us that we had surrendered our freedom just like our guns, which no Canadians have surrendered) were not really shocked at all when the App didn’t work, there was no enforcement, not another country on earth enforced it (so effectively there was no barrier to leaving the country) and had no way to enforce the mandatory “quarantine” on Canadians returning from abroad who had left the country without getting vaccinated or getting the app.

Having travelled internationally unvaccinated during the “ArriveCan” days… I can tell you border guards were more embarrassed and kindof relieved when you showed up without the app… That the protocol for not having it was simpler than having to actually wrestle with the app that didn’t work.

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So why was Canada leading the charge on this? Well the opposition will tell you it was Liberal money laundering (which yes) but it was almost certainly just another case of Canada being the testing ground for Washington’s global controls and psychological policies…

Thus why every “western” regime freaked out at the Trucker Convoy and all Abandoned COVID and Lockdowns in unison that the policy had failed so spectacularly it somehow escaped the Canadian testing ground and Truckers from Alberta and Timmons were now Blockading one of America’s most vital trade arteries at the Ambassador bridge.

If Canadians had not pushed back at lockdowns and the ArriveCAN app that did not work and was not enforced, and employer mandates that as far as I can tell no one was actually ever fired for…

Would these policies have been expanded to countries whose governments could have built an App?

And Yes I’ve Written on the Trucker’s almost total victory and the timeline of events before:

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Are You Noticing Patterns?

A Mysterious full court press media?

Activity well beyond natural funding and economic interest?

Bizarre choices double and tripled down upon?

Activity the complete opposite of Natural Pre-media Opinion?
(Canada was hyper-British and nationalistic, Nickelback was Huge, Everyone thought Covid was just a cough before “2 weeks to slow the curve”)

A test environment/case-study that DOES NOT MATTER to world leaders… but acts as a proxy for their propoganda power to act on things that do matter?

Have these Canadian case studies reminded you of anything?

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Have we seen something like this recently?

The Odyssey is About Iran

Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey started filming in August 2025.

One month after after the 12 Day War between Israel, the US, and Iran.

Indeed its pre-production started November 2023, one month after the Oct 7th attack on Israel.

And it is releasing immediately in the sensitive moment of July 2026 where a new escalation is being weighed.

Considering that this is a “novel” film (No existing franchise) and a financially risky venture… Which is weird to say for the most important story in western civilization… These surrounding events are almost certainly vital to the fact that it got it’s 350 million dollar budget.

Indeed most US blockbusters that release around wars have some propaganda purpose or value.

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Think of how tightly the first Michael Bay Transformers acted as a US Military propaganda piece or the political military importance of 300 as an archetypal “West vs. East” story to understand how intimately tied to US Foreign policy Hollywood’s big masculine movies are.

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The Odyssey is maybe the most important war story in this respect…

And so they cast a Black woman as Helen of Troy and Eliot Page as Achilles? Sorry “Sinon”.

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I think this was a benchmarking exercise.

The Odyssey is a parody of a woke movie. These choices are the choices you’d see in a South Park version of the story.

They were gathering social media and box office test data to see if they did a full legacy media push… If they faked the Rotten Tomato scores, had all their bought social media accounts spin it, buy out empty movie theaters (this is documented… People buying tickets to what on the seat reservations looked like sold out shows, only to show up and the theater was empty)…

How much buy-in could they get? How much narrative control could they wrangle?

Trans Achilles? Black Helen of Troy?

It’s a perfect “turd sandwich”… And exactly the kindof safe, politically contained, tertiary concern that would make a great benchmarking exercise for the Israeli/US Military’s control over public perception.

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Indeed to a MAN all the influencers who were pushing that the Odyssey was “not that bad” or “actually pretty good”, were all the influencers who push for Israel.

Ben Shapiro, Bronze Age Pervert, the OSINT people, Conservative Media, Various “Christian” influencers…

All the openly paid for Likud party affiliates… Who would normally jump at the opportunity to say “Achilles is not a biological female”, “Helen of Troy was not Black”, “Fairness in women’s sports” and other nothing culture war nonsense to win points with their conservative audience… Then sell them Israel’s foreign policy on a platter or try to finesse their audience into being neutral on foreign policy…

BAP had previously attacked the Emily Wilson TRANSLATION of the Odyssey, that Nolan’s Version is based on, as woke and Feminist… And Yet here BAP is defending the vastly more woke Nolan Adaptation as NOT WOKE…. A film With a black Helen of Troy with a noticeably scarred and disfigured face.

Meanwhile EMILY WILSON HERSELF publicly criticized the film and Bemoaned how antithetical to the values of Homer the film was.

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What is going on!?

You expect it to be the reverse. Indeed everything BAP has ever posted about Homer would lead you to expect that he would be ripping Nolan apart and Wilson defending it as an achievement of feminism.

Why is this?

Well Costin Alimaru (BAP) is a Romanian Jew deeply personally attached to Benjamin Netenyahu’s Likud party, and Israel in general… this has been known for some time.

If this was a benchmarking exercise to see how powerful their propaganda control is and how effective their playing both sides and controlling their own opposition is for shaping American opinion… Well BAP is one of the assets they’ve developed specifically for this purpose. Same as Ben Shapiro whom most naive conservatives would have expected to oppose the woke Odyssey movie… Then go back to advocating war in the middle east.

Instead here Ben Shapiro (a Jew) is arguing that Nolan’s Odyssey is actually not a woke Subversion, but a Christian Subversion! And so all his fans should go see it:

Different arguments for different audiences… But Shapiro and BAP are playing the same game trying to increase the likelihood their audience will see the film.

In the exact same manner that both would argue for an escalated Iran War and for young Americans to volunteer or “do their part” if drafted to die in Iran. They’d use different arguments for different audiences… But the the goal would be the same.

So who’s buying up all the empty audience seats for screenings of the Odyssey to try to trick you into going?

Israel, and probably the US Military.

Nolan and the Studios get told they have a guaranteed hit, they just have to make it as offensively woke as possible so the US can benchmark their ability to get Americans to take a bite of the turd sandwich.

This is why the financing makes no sense on the Odyssey, as I’ve written about.

This is why Nolan was given 20% off first dollar revenue for he and his wife in spite of a Woke-Dyssey not seeming anything like the kind of money maker it’d need to be to justify that… This is why the Actors almost certainly got their own points off revenue… Despite on paper this meaning that the film needs to make 4-8 times it’s budget to pay off the investors after advertising, theater cut, and the sweetheart deal given to the “talent”.

This is why Donald Trump and Republican Congressmen have said NOTHING about the film even to meme on it… Despite this type of Hollywood culture-war nonsense being EXACTLY the kind of distraction they’d usually be jumping for joy to make a news cycle out of and show their Fox News watching constituents that they’re on their side… without actually holding anyone accountable, reigning in any spending, or trying anyone for treason.

How much discipline do you think it takes for Trump NOT to tweet “Truth” about this?!

Why isn’t he.

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Because this is a benchmarking exercise. This is their trial run for a ground invasion of Iran.

A test case to use all their propoganda tools and see what impact they can have

If they can make you take a bite of this Turd Sandwich, they can make you take a bite of Iran.

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I’ve Discussed a few films here at Anarchonomicon… We Did a Podcast on the insane psychedelic Canadian History Film “The Twentieth Century”, I went almost 4 Hours on the crime in Micheal Mann’s “HEAT”, and I Adored the Re-Cut of CALIGULA… And I still get Comments on my review of “Blackberry”.

But this is the first time I’m discussing Hollywood as a business…

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Was “The Odyssey” about Embezzlement?

HELLO. This is insane.

So Nolan is getting 15% off direct Revenue, (Not profits, Gross) and his wife another 5%) from the Odyssey, basically risk free, AFTER his 20 million up front.

That’s a better cut than a lot of mob bosses take off drug dealers. (which tend to vary between 5 and 30% depending on how much violence they can command)

And probably core stars (Daiman and Hathaway mostly) are getting some smaller percent of the same deal.

This is unheard of. Basically a violation of fiduciary duties to the investors.

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So if another 10-30% of Gross is divided across Daiman, Hathaway, Holand, Pattinson, and Theron... You know the real stars (Zendaya, Nyong’o, and Page don’t draw crowds and aren’t getting that)...

Then you might have to effectively cut all revenue first by 50% for theaters, then by another 40-50% for the star power.

It other words... The Odyssey would need to make 800million- 1 billion before it could even hypothetically start to turn a profit for investors.

All the Woke casting etc. Is actually a cover for basically outright money laundering and embezzlement by the entertainment class. And because its “sticking it to the Chuds” business news and institutions are covering for the fact a bunch of studios just defrauded universal studio’s parent Comcast, to possibly the tune of hundreds of millions.

Comcast is a publicly traded company. That’s 401Ks and pension funds.

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And all the woke stuff is in there so that no studio execs, corporate leaders, media, or corporate watchdogs will call them out for basically transferring hundreds of millions of retiree dollars into their own pockets.

All the discussion of “Will the Odyssey make its money back” is missing the point that there is almost NO WAY for the Odyssey to actually produce a reasonable return to investors... BY DESIGN.

It is a pure, basically fraudulent, wealth transfer from American middle-class investors to Hollywood insiders irrespective of whatever money the film does or does not make... Intentionally.

And all the woke window dressing is chaff, or a bonus to prevent any institutions from having the nerve to call them out lest they get called, racist, sexist, and transphobic.

Indeed, Nolan has been playing this game for a while... He somehow got the same deal on Tenet... A film that almost certainly made hundreds of million LESS at the Box office for having a relatively unknown black star as opposed to a traditional leading man with star power (of which there are some actors of Color... Will Smith, Dwayne Johnson, and Vin Deisel notably), but which meant that the insane cut he took got almost no scrutiny.

Indeed, the Tenet deal was justified as a way for Warner Bros to secure their relationship with Nolan (something apparently 3 Batman Films, Inception, Interstellar, and Dunkirk hadn’t done)... Only for Nolan to switch to Universal for Oppenheimer and never make another film with Warner Bros again... Did someone senior at Warner Bros realize what he and his producers were doing?

And why did Universal give him the deal Warner Bros never gave him again?

Who at Universal was willing to let Nolan walk away with 10s of millions whilst their investors lost money… just so long as he included “Elliot” Page and a black Helen of Troy, and depicted the Greek rhapsodes as black rappers?

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Whenever you see woke, you should think “Money Laundering” because Hollywood and other institutions know that Government and Media watchdogs won’t investigate and any investor’s group who sues will have a nightmare arguing the malfeasance, but also that their loss of funds can instead be blamed the “racism” of Audiences... That the film was rightly predicted to make whatever insane billions it needed to break even, it’s just the racism of the Audience! Which of course should be predictable and accounted for given you’re using OTHER PEOPLE’S MONEY, but which no law firm is going to want to argue, and no court or Jury is going to look favorably on... That you violated your fiduciary duty by hiring black actors and are using that as a cover for embezzlement.

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This summer I’ve already commented on the Situation in Iran and how basically the only way the US could get the strait of Hormuz open by force is a full Ground Invasion, and deep dived Modern unconventional warfare in the Works of Hideo Kojima, and why Effective Political Organizing is Really Just Organized Crime…

but I want to focus on the other war, and what no one’s talking about:

What’s wrong with Putin?

One could be forgiven for thinking that there is something deeply wrong with the Russian State and Vladimir Putin in particular.

Every 1 to 3 months some new unprecedented Ukrainian asymmetric attack hits Russia’s homeland in ways almost tailor designed to provoke an escalation, outrage the populace, and leave the Russian Government humiliated at the loss of face.

The “Crocus City Hall” (it’s a civilian music venue not an actual city hall) attack in Moscow was killed 151 and injured 600+ Civilian music fans in an “ISIS” terrorist attack… That everyone knows was funded, coordinated, and enabled by Ukraine (and the CIA). Right down to the assailants passing through Ukraine, and being on camera collecting their discarded firearm magazines (presumably because the manufacturer stamps would tie them to their backers)…

This was huge Russian News, and the specific band whose audience was targeted is also significant.

Piknik is a massive hit Russian 80s band. Now, Students of history will note that Russia was still communist in the 80s. They’ve been around forever, and are generally inoffensive and middle of the road (they were mainstream under the USSR)… They’re kind of a weird gothic slavic prog-rock blend of Phil Collins and the Tragically Hip. And they’re huge… Individual videos with 10s of millions of views on Youtube… As big as any hit western 80s band and lots of cultural fondness in the Russian imagination.

(Presumably it hits harder if you can appreciate Russian)

This matters because their core demographic are Russian boomers who are Nostalgic for their Soviet Childhoods, but are also established and content in Modern Russia… Ie. Putin’s Core demographic.

This would be like if you attacked a Hamilton performance or a Bono concert in the west. That’s the regime’s core supporters right there. That’s a knowledgeable and incisive cut that actual Muslim foreigners wouldn’t know or care to hit… But that Slavic Ukrainians and calculating CIA planners trying to apply pressure or destabilize Russia into escalation would know and salivate at.

Likewise Ukraine explicitly attacked Russia’s Nuclear Strategic Bomber fleet in Operation Spider Web, assets that were not used in the Ukraine war, and indeed were basically irrelevant to the conflict… But are core to Russia’s nuclear triad and the stability of the global nuclear balance of power… Again basically begging for a massive escalation and almost certainly making Russian Generals and Strategic planners break out in a cold sweat until they assessed the damage.

Beyond this there have been prominent assassinations of Russian Generals… In Moscow. And assassination attempts on Putin himself…

In addition to the destabilizing Ukrainian counter-invasion of Russia, and escalating strikes on Moscow itself.

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The thing to understand is that none of these have been conventionally advantageous for Ukraine. The Invasion of Russia stretched their forces, the Assassinations if anything probably cycled in younger, more competent, hungrier generals, attacking Moscow Boomer civilians probably gave a massive morale spike to the outraged Russian populace… These strikes on Russia have infuriated Russians and made them call for blood.

This is in many respects THE OPPOSITE of what you’d normally want to do as a smaller country fighting a larger that hasn’t fully mobilized. Usually you want to exhaust a larger force that’s half committed or politically divided, without getting them to up their commitment or causing them to unify. Think of Vietnam… The Vietnamese wanted Americans to get tired of fighting them and get demoralized at the idea of ever “winning”, fight amongst themselves, then wind down and withdraw. If in 1972 Vietnamese terrorists had attacked the Superbowl and killed hundreds of American civilians on US soil… that’s actually one of the few things that could have united American in 1972 or gotten America to commit to another 5 years in Vietnam at that point.

It would have greatly damaged American prestige… Moscow or China might have liked that… But from Vietnam’s perspective where they want America to wander elsewhere, it’d lock in years of misery.

So that’s weird… but weirder has been Putin’s Reaction: Nothing. Basically no counter-escalation. Certainly nothing that’s made Zelensky sweat and hesitate at sending more drones at Moscow.

Indeed many sympathetic commentators both in Russia and the West have been screaming their frustration at Putin that he hasn’t suitably punished these insults to Russian Honor or restored Russian deterrence… Or merely enforced baseline international norms around targeting heads of state, civilians, and Strategic nuclear assets in a non-nuclear conventional war.

It’s not as if Russia lacks conventional options. Kiev is RIGHT THERE. Hell, If the Russians really wanted the Tornado MLRS (Multiple Launcher Rocket System) has a range of 200km, fires thermobaric warheads or White Phosphorus rounds, and could hit Kiev from Russian Ally Belarus…

Without even debating the extent of air-cover, and to what extent Ukrainian Air Defense is intact (or to what extent the US can supply them with interceptors)… Putin has the capacity to firebomb Kiev on the scale of Dresden if he wanted to, from the ground. He’s not lacking in conventional, nuclear, and every other kind of escalatory option.

And yet he’s not escalated… And his retaliations have been as close as possible to the bare minimum he could get away with to not be overthrown for treason.

So what the hell is wrong with Putin?

Has he gone yellow in his old age? Is he weak? Is Russia’s position crumbling? Is Russia on the verge of collapse? Is he secretly blackmailed by the US, Israel, or Brussels?

Not exactly.

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There’s a saying in geopolitics: The Russians play Chess. The Americans play Poker.

And the first thing to understand is that this is quite literally true. DC poker games are incredibly common, and the spell poker has on the American imagination outstrips anything Chess really holds… Many highly educated Americans can’t even play it! by contrast Russians are taught chess in school and it’s always held a spell for them.

But of course this is also a profound statement as to how both approach politics:

The American Presidency has term limits, and the US has 2-year election cycles.

American presidents are constantly looking for fast wins. They’re constantly looking for big things they can go at and grab some political capital and energy… Because the US has 2 year election cycles. If you screw up or don’t take wins where you can get them, then you’ll lose the midterms and have no power to do anything else with your rump lame-duck presidency.

This is where almost every president follows the same formula: Big executive orders to make their base shut up in the first hundred days, and then almost an immediate pivot to DC insiders after 6 months, at which they start rushing a massive spending bill in the first year of their presidency to try and get maximum political capital and checks out before the midterms…

This is also why every president, the second things start falling apart, reaches for some foreign intervention of one type or another… Whilst libertarians might whine that only Congress can declare war, this is a dead letter. And as long a president doesn’t actually try to sign an official Declaration of War, toppling a foreign government is the one thing he actually can do without it getting gridlocked in congress.

Thus American presidents almost inevitably fall into fast paced brinkmanship and high-stakes negotiations both domestic and foreign… around years 2-3… Because they need to either get a clear unambiguous win, escalate to a fight, or pull out and pivot elsewhere as fast as possible. Because you have 2 years, which really is like 2-3 months… Because you need multiples of these wins. And if you lose the midterms, then you’re completely shut-out of your domestic policies so can only try to win a second term or a successor from your party via a foreign war. And because the American empire is so vast and the news cycle and the American people so easily distracted… All these interventions DO play out like poker hands.

DOGE, The 12 Day War, ICE Deportations, Epstein, Venezuela, and the current Iran war… All played out almost completely unrelated to each other as far as mainstream public perceptions were concerned, as if it was a new set of cards every time. And Trump just had to decide how aggressively he wanted to play each hand and how much he wanted to bet on each of them being a hit… He folded on DOGE and ICE in Minneapolis… Called Epstein a “Hoax” (it wasn’t and everyone knows it). Doubled down on Venezuela and Iran.

In the words of esteemed presidential advisor and great American statesman Kenny Rodgers:

This is where all the “5D Chess” claims about Trump by various “Plan Trusters” is a complete misunderstanding of the situation.

Trump exactly embodies the “Americans play poker” school of thought. He’s maybe the most “Poker Player” president America has ever had.

Trump IS a poker player. He explicitly describes himself this way. He’s made Poker Promos and given “poker lessons”:

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Trump explicitly describes his career as a series of Poker hands and big bets, and his “Art of the Deal” as an exercise in Texas Hold’em style brinkmanship.

Trump’s rise to power in the 2016 election indeed resembles nothing so much as a poker tournament, knocking out players from the 16 person Republican field with various massive gambles, bluffs, blusters, and statements that changed the entire field, forcing his opponents to lose face, double down, and burn out on the wrong hand… “Low energy” Jeb, jabs at Ted Cruz’s wife, calling the Iraq War a lie/disaster… It resembled nothing so much as an aggressive poker player bullying a host of defensive players more afraid of losing than keen to win.

And he’s been impressively willing to come back swinging and aggressive, even after seemingly devastating defeats that would chasten a lesser player or put them on tilt and at risk of losing everything.

Russians by contrast play chess

And unlike poker where the hands are unrelated… Chess just builds on itself, there are individual chess puzzles, not games, puzzles that are 50 moves deep with every individual decision building on each other and relating and having subsequent consequences.

This directly compliments Putin’s position.

Vladimir Putin has ruled 26 years (since 2000) if you don’t count the cheeky swap out with Mevedev. And he will probably rule another decade. You’ll see western commentators still talking about how he answers to oligarchs or Gangsters… Which really doesn’t appreciate the fact that if you were a senior partner to Putin in 2000 and somehow avoided falling out or getting purged… Ugh, you’d be dead of old age by now anyway. It’s been 26 years. Putin has been slowly consolidating power the entire time… For anyone under about 60, he is the Great Tsar from whom all power flows down and has always flown down… And Russian Male life expectancy is still only 67.

He’s been playing the long-game, classic chess starting with the endgame, for 30ish years… that isn’t to say he’s been playing Conspiracy-tastic Giga-Brained 5d Chess Qanon shadow wars “PQTRIQTS IN CQNTRQL”… He’s playing chess. Not BBC’s Sherlock.

But it does mean he’s on a long time horizon, no 2 year election cycle, decades of runway, and an entire bureaucratic and political cultural built around this chess mindset.

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Indeed The Defining feature of chess is the fact there is no move limit… If you win in 10 moves or 200 moves that’s equivalent. Pros might have a chess timer limiting how long they can think… but if they win after 1000 moves hitting that timer fast enough and not burning through their thinking time… that’s just as good as the guy who got a fool’s mate on the second turn.

And unlike poker or US politics where you have to gamble big or engage in brinkmanship… And the inherent repeatability of poker or the inherent security of the US Geopolitical position, economy, etc. Will rescue you if you lose once or twice…

Russians are keenly aware of their vulnerable position between the bloodlands of Europe and the chaos of Central Asia. Washington DC has burnt once… And that’s just a cute story in a war Americans don’t really remember. The Russian homeland has been massacred dozens of times.

Whereas Americans think of a “Forever War” or “quagmire” as the worst possible thing that can come about from a presidency and American presidents are willing to humiliate themselves or burn entire nations to avoid having an unending unpopular inconclusive Vietnam or Iraq laid at their feet and dragging into the midterms and general election… Russians are willing to accept them as the norm… or at least a not terrible option.

Russia has seen countless rolling decades long frontier wars in their history, and as long as it’s kept to a non-disastrous, or slow and steady simmer… It actually can sort of benefit the Russian state. You get a helpful reformatory/disposal option for criminals and ne’er-do-wells… And the tension of a low level war lets you reform and restructure Russian institutions that are perpetually yo-yoing between being very good, having just had a war, vs. Being corrupt as can be, having gone through a decade or so of peace.

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But to really get a feel for this mindset… You have to look at maybe Russia’s Greatest hero:

Field Marshall Mikhail Kutuzov is maybe one of the most unique national heroes of any country.

He lost or drew almost all his battles. Famously losing several engagements early in the Napoleonic wars and being removed from direct command, only to be brought back in as a chubby old man on death’s door during Napoleon’s invasion of Russia.

He appears in War and Peace as an important character.

His biggest battle was Borodino during Napoleon’s 1812 invasion of Russia… a brutal slugging match outside Moscow against Napoleon that killed almost 100,000 men and decided basically nothing. Then the Russians withdrew before the French advance.

The Epic history Summary of the Battle is incredible:

It was after Borodino that Kutuzov appealed on his Emperor, his subordinates, and the Russian army and state… To do the unthinkable.

They extended their “scorched earth” defense, to Moscow itself. Instead of Reengaging and defending the city, they withdrew, evacuated the civilian population in the setting Russian winter, and emptied Russian prisons.

Napoleon would enter Moscow, only for the city itself to be sacked and burned around him… by the Russians. (Epic History also did Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow)

The Russians would not negotiate. They would not offer terms. And Napoleon, having lost a good percentage of the army getting to Moscow… suddenly realized he had no source of food or provisions for a winter occupation. The French had to retreat with the Russian Winter setting in…. Harassed by Cossacks and beset by ambushes, harassing battles, and brutal choke-points at rivers and elsewhere.

By the end of the retreat, Kutuzov had destroyed the largest invasion force in human history without winning a single decisive battle. Rather he starved, bled, froze, and harassed the Grande Armee to death.

Kutuzov would not live to enjoy his victory. He fell ill and died that April 1813 having seen the Grande Armee’s final retreat but not Napoleon’s downfall.

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I cannot Emphasize enough this IS the Russian Conception of Military heroism, and of themselves.

Kutuzov never went out of style in Russia, despite being a Tsarist Field Marshal the Soviets lionized him during WW2 as a model to look up to and emulate… an example of Russian endurance under invasion as the great ideal of the Russian people.

This is how Russian leaders conceive great military leadership… Not chasing victories. Not landing decisive invasions. Not having knock-out “Blitzkriegs” but rather these long brutal chess games, these challenges of endurance, and ultimately judgement, will, ruthlessness, and misery.

Americans lionize Washington crossing the Delaware, or the decisive landing at Normandy, or Desert Storm… Huge dramatic high intensity shock attacks that break the enemy with surprise, decisiveness, logistics, and overwhelming combined arms fire.

Gettysburg is still the great American battle/tragedy… Because Lee’s Campaign and surprise flanking maneuver across the Potomac north into Pennsylvania is exactly the type of daring decisive massive glorious surprise maneuver that usually works out for Americans… but just barely didn’t for Lee. This is why he’s still lionized as the great American General even over men who won the war.

By contrast American military historians, even of a unionist bent, always flinch at Lincoln and Grant’s embrace of the logic of attrition. That because they had the numbers they should just embrace brutal inconclusive fighting where ever they could… since even with a draw or slight loss, they could replace the men whereas the Confederacy couldn’t.

Americans find that rather unsporting, but more importantly inglorious… You want to win via dominance. You want to show your enemy that you’re better. Thus the American insistence, even where they lose… That the Vietnamese or the Taliban “never won a battle”. That Americans must be the best players on the field, and their politicians and leaders just frittered away the victory that was rightfully theirs.

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The entirety of Russian culture by contrast sees these big glorious dramatic heroic moments as traps. As follies in waiting, as the energy and pique of immature youth…

Russian culture, from pacifists like Tolstoy, to killer like Stalin, lionize Kutuzov… Because he was willing to say NO to decisive battles, and glory, and the demands of honor… And let Moscow burn to maintain his army and deny Napoleon a decisive battle so that he could RUN OUT THE CLOCK.

Very much like Chess… Resisting the temptation of taking a queen or some seemingly favorable violent exchange but which risks leaving you in a fatally weak position.

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That the hardest and most important thing a leader or general can do… Is nothing.

Not take the fight to the enemy. Not counter-attack. Not lead the charge. Not hit back as hard as you can.

But instead to be ruthlessly logical and almost cruel or inhuman in the prioritization of political or military objectives… that you serve your soldiers best by making the right decisions, even if they hate you for it.

That like Kutuzov, in that most Russian of manners, the real job a leader is not ask his men and people to fight and win… but ask them to suffer, endure, and accept the indignities of the correct military decisions not what honor, emotion, or sentimental attachment would have them do.

That if they are howling in rage that they should be fighting… That is a good thing, since they are intact and able to fight and haven’t been wasted on a temptation or bait.

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Now… Who does this sound like?

5D Chess? Or Bad Pattern Matching?

Putin knows Kutuzov’s story. All Russians do.

This is again the pattern of Russian military heroism and leadership that predominates in that country.

Embrace the attrition. Embrace the misery. Endure.

I can basically guarantee you this is what Putin is thinking, and the pattern his mind is going through when he decides not to escalate to some bait or atrocity or provocation by the Ukrainians.

This is the logic of his strategy.

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But is it a good strategy?

Or is he a senile boomer?

Is he pattern matching what he read about a clever old man doing when he was young… Not realizing that he’s not that clever and that this strategy is entirely inappropriate to his current situation?

Young Russian military posters often complain about the “Boomerism” of Putin and their ruling class… Does this strategy make sense? Or are there young officers in the Kremlin seizing in a near Aneurysm, head in hands, whenever some “inspirational” email or speech mentions “endurance” or Russia’s “proud history of resistance” or “holding the line” or “cautious sturdy hands”… or whatever buzzwords are used to justify not letting competent young men just go out there and win.

Is he inflicting death and misery on his young men for no reason?

Which is it?

Would a Russian officer reading this piece nod along? Or did he roll his eyes so hard he snapped his neck at the mention of Kutuzov?

Is “endure” the Russian boomer equivalent of “Pull yourself up by your bootstrap”?

Do young Russians still want their own kids to read Tolstoy? Or has this poisoned him for them? Does he hold the same cultural position as American boomer-lit like Great Gatsby or Tom Sawyer or To Kill a Mockingbird or Handmaid’s Tale or Forrest Gump or The Green Mile… That the young have been left with such disgust they’ll revel at the idea of it falling out of reading such that their own kids and grandkids might forget they exist?

Why the hell would Putin pursue a slow and steady, low intensity, don’t take the bait, run out the clock, attritional campaign… Against a country smaller than Russia?

Is this “endurance” and appeal to history a cope for weakness? Senile madness? Low-T aged cowardice? And institutional decay?

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I don’t think so. There is a logic. There’s actually a very good logic.

Whether it worked out or is working out… I leave as an exercise to the reader. But the strategy, on the face of it… Is very sound.

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Ukraine as a Geopolitical Chess Puzzle

Ukraine is entirely dependent, both militarily and economically, on the Aid of the US and Europe. Ukraine is eternally at risk of exhausting itself in this war in terms of manpower, materiel, money, and just political coherence in a way that Russia isn’t, due to just the size of it’s population and economy. Ukraine on it’s own without American and European money and arms would have lost years ago.

Remember this isn’t an insurgency or Guerrilla war. The battle line is actually almost entirely symmetrical and conventional. Much like World War 1. Where the casualty ratio is ENTIRELY a function of the ability of two symmetrical forces to keep their resources and logistics coming forward. With horrifying attrition should either lose out.

This is partly why I lean towards the Russian casualty numbers… Because Artillery remains the greatest killer in conventional static warfare, and Russia has had a 3 to 1 advantage, rising to even a 10 to 1 advantage for the entirety of the war (and somehow the US and the west still haven’t meaningfully ramped up production)… With even Ukrainian propaganda sites admitting this and celebrating the advantage falling to a mere 2 to 1. (if it did)

Now if you’ve played any video games you know intuitively what a massive thing an artillery advantage is for even short battles lasting a few hours. Across YEARS with static lines, it adds up immensely… And makes simply sitting and forcing the enemy to come to you… to counter attack to try to force you out of their lands, immensely tempting. You force your enemies to trade lives for shells. To die to maintain a position.

And much like world war one… Where the actual battlelines are located really doesn’t matter.

If the Russian Invasion in 2022 had gone better or worse, that would have been a permanent difference of tens or hundreds of miles… but unless Kiev fell, very little would have changed.

The Oil fields of Baku aren’t over the next set of hills. There’s very little either side could capture that would change the actual attritional logic of the war, unless Ukraine had an insane victory on one of their counter-attacks and actually managed to take Mariupol and cut off Crimea (which they almost certain won’t).

Much like ww1 battles where a few hundred yards change hands but thousands of men died… the battles really aren’t over territory, but to exhaust and break the enemy’s numbers, institutional coherence, and willingness to fight.

And in the case of Ukraine, that institutional coherence isn’t even their own… It’s NATO’s.

Putin and Russians say this over and over again, that they aren’t fighting a war with Ukraine… but with the West and NATO, and Ukraine’s just the front… And as far as finances, technology, supply chains, and the rewards being offered to fight… That’s very true.

Hundreds of billions more than the Ukrainian Economy could ever produce for war have been funneled through Ukraine to fight this… And that’s why they’re fighting. Their entire ruling class are getting richer than God off graft and other cashflows from the west. And Ukraine is utterly dependent on the arms flows from the US and Europe.

The beast that Russia is fighting is the American and European economy and international political alliance system.

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So imagine Putin did what a lot of his people seemingly want, he mass mobilized, declared the “Special Military Operation” was over, Declared WAR… And really smacked down the Ukrainians.

Imagine he took everything to the Denipro, or pushed beyond it to Odessa, or took Kiev?

It’s doable…In terms of manpower, no matter your theory of how well or poorly Russian and Ukraine are doing… Russia could flood Ukraine with troops and escalate massively.

But, Weird as it is to say, that wouldn’t really change anything.

So now the battlelines are in Odessa? or the streets of Kiev? Or on the border of Poland?

So?

None of the money or weapons that sustain this war are coming from Odessa or Kiev.

The West Ukrainians will still want to fight no matter how much “territory” (worthless shelled-out dirt with landmines in it that won’t be productive for years) Russia takes… And if Russia takes it up to some dramatic threshold… All that will mean is now Romanians or Poles will be forced into the breach by the EU or NATO in addition to all the mercenaries, little green men, press ganged Ukrainians, and other tricks they’ve used to get men to the front.

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The Russo-Ukraine war… Even in theory… can’t really be solved on the field because the forces that enable it and demand it aren’t anything to do with relatively worthless territory in the Donbass, or obscure sub-ethnicities of Russian-speaking Ukrainians… The West hasn’t spent 300 Billion dollars on the forests and fields of Andriivka, because there’s anything there that warrants a 300 billion dollar expense.

This war is a tectonic grinding of the American/European Globohomo Empire against a resurgent Russia and it’s allies in central Eurasia.

The war was dreamt up in Washington, Brussels, and Moscow, and there it’ll be decided.

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So what’s the optimal Russian strategy given that? What can they do?

On the field? Not much. There’s nothing that can be done on the ground in Sloviansk that’ll stop the Americans and Europeans from sending another 100 billion dollars or the Ukrainians from dragging another 100,000 conscripts of the street.

The optimal strategy…

Is to wait.

Kutuzov.

Solidify the lines… Minimize the cost to the Russian homeland… rest on the artillery advantage… And Wait.

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Americans can’t comprehend this, because America is a country uniquely incapable of waiting. Presidents need wins. They need to win fast Poker Hands, or breakoff and get onto something else.

But Putin’s ruled 26 years, and at age 73, could theoretically rule 26 more.

He has all the time in the world.

And the American empire NEVER has time on it’s side.

Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan… Americans dread forever wars, because they’re inevitably going to lose them on a long enough timeline just because the complexity and instability of domestic politics and foreign politics basically guarantees a humiliating retreat and total loss, at some point, 5-25 years from now.. not because America gets defeated in the field (or not that they’ll admit to) but because they lose their footing elsewhere.

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Putin’s insane Russian strategy… Is to realize that he doesn’t need to win on the fields of Ukraine… Indeed such “victories” would probably doom Russia to getting sucked into a wider war with NATO or various countries in the EU, if not a Nuclear exchange or American deployment.

Instead, he just needed to drag out the war long enough for some other shoe to drop in the American/Euro Globohomo empire… Then as soon as the next 100 billion isn’t coming to Ukraine he wins by default.

Like a Chess-player realizing his position isn’t necessarily good or winnable… But he has 9 minutes left of his timer, and his opponent only has 30 seconds. He doesn’t need to make good moves, he just needs to make moves that prevent a conclusion and forces his opponent to use up time.

In 2023, this was largely hypothetical, and looked like a stretch. in July 2026, this looks like Genius.

America Out of Time

In late 2022-2023, about the time various negotiations collapses, and the long war became apparent… This would have seemed like a long gamble.

Sure Europe wasn’t exactly stable with rising tensions and cracks in the EU between Native Europeans and the Muslim migrants and the Elites who imported them.

America wasn’t exactly stable with the Jan 6th Insurection/“Fed-surection” being very recent.

COVID Lockdowns had recently caused mass protests in Canada and elsewhere, with follow-on tensions.

The eternal threat of a Taiwan War with China, was of course prophesied for the 2020s that would rescue Russia from any resource non-parity…

And American/European sanctions on Russia had already been shown to relatively toothless relatives to Russia’s hard petroleum and natural resources… Whereas all the Covid-era money printing had yet to show it’s damage on the US economy…

But all of this was hypothetical.

The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent… And the American Government can stay bizarre even longer…

Then Oct 7th (Operation al aqsa flood) hit, cascading wars erupted in the middle east… Things you really couldn’t have predicted in early 2023, but of the same scale.

And now the US and Europe in particular are facing a global recession or depression level event with the closing of the Strait of Hormuz.

Already global food production is doomed to shortages and a multiyear crisis because artificial fertilizer (a petroleum/natural gas byproduct) out of the middle-east has collapsed. (Global nitrogen fertilizer production is divided between the middle-east, Canada, and Russia)

Global oil flows are wrecked, and look like they’re getting worse, with an Oil shock probably already locked for later 2026, and probably no price-relief even if the strait opens (various industries and countries have been heavily suppressing demand, which will restart if flows restart)…

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And basically no matter what, Russia has a locked in windfall of Petroleum and natural resource sales whilst America and especially Europe have been locked into a multiyear crisis that will deny them the free cash flow to subsidize Ukraine.

Putin Has Defeated the EU

Since the start of the war the most aggressive pushers of war in Ukraine have not even really been Americans. US war hawks like John McCain, Lindsay Graham, and the Biden Admin liked it… but there was lots of dissent, notably from the Trump wing and the “Realists”… (commentators of the “Realpolitik” school, not the factuality of their beliefs)… Rather the biggest war pushers have been core European leaders of the EU and British crypto-EU leaders like Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer.

The Unspoken force behind the War… the 2014 Euromaiden movement, and open statements that the goal of the war was to collapse Russia… Is that Russia is actually a real Democracy in all the ways EU countries aren’t.

Putin may be Defacto ruler for life… But he’s still standing for elections that are largely MORE fair than the EU’s.

Meanwhile Romanian electoral results have been overturned, Britain with half the population arrests multiples more people for social media posts than Russia, France just imprisoned it’s main opposition leader and banned her from elections, and Germany is eternally threatening to Ban the AFD.

The core values of the EU being that the leftist leadership conspires to prevent any meaningful change to core “Human Rights” policies of infinite migration, infinite pedophilia, infinite pride parades, infinite bureaucracies and NGOs, and infinite taxation of their white population.

All secured through what amounts to a series of suicide pacts, protection rackets, and gay and pedophilic blackmail rings to prevent any internal challenge or individual nation from defecting and offering their population anything resembling responsible government in their own interests…Remember what they did to Romania when they elected someone who wanted peace with Russia. All under the military umbrella and vassalage of the US security state.

And Russia is the Great threat to that. The great exception. The natural ally of all their internal dissidents and a potential security Guarantor if Britain or Germany or Italy or any country in Europe decided they were done with Pride parades, migrant rapists, the Epstein Class, and national suicide… And wanted to stop destroying their country in the name of peace, love, decolonialism, antiracism and pedophilia.

If the eternal panic threat of a FAR RIGHT extremist movement actually showed up and started car bombing and throat slitting pedophile politicians and their migrant allies and pimps… Russia’s the natural faction to arm and fund them, and provide them a third country to train in or flee to.

Russia’s the example of a European country that’s still an independent country. And, given the EU is Russia’s enemy… It’s a natural ally to any country or faction that wanted to become independent again.

It’s the last country in Europe that’s run by white heterosexual men instead of gays, women, pedophiles, and brown foreigners.

And if old school classical liberals and conservatives insist they don’t “see race” or “see sexuality” or “see gender”… You can bet the closeted homosexuals, foreign invaders, and unqualified menopausal women who run the EU certainly do. They see it every day.

And they remember it!

They remember Russia funding communist and leftist terror movements across Europe in the 70s and 80s… Hell half the current EU leadership were those extreme leftist getting funded by the Russians in the 70s and 80s. They know more than anyone what Russia can do to the US-Backed European Vichy regimes.

So the EU and it’s allies NEED this war in Ukraine to continue, or there’s a good chance Starmer and his successors will go the way of Ghadafi and get sodomized to death with bayonets in revenge for what’s been done to white European women and children by the American backed Post-war occupation, the Epstein Class, and The Migrant Rapists the EU foisted on them.

Because the second the Ukraine war ends, the fault line between America/EU Tyrrany and the flawed, but real, countries beyond the EU and American Influence either shift’s East, if Russia collapses, or West, if Ukraine and the EU collapses.

THe Ukraine war will not be the end… as soon as it’s over It’ll be the start of a dozen+ civil wars, dirty wars, ethic conflicts, and national crises.

And now the EU is out of oil.

Russia is net oil exporter. The EU is almost entirely an Oil importer.

Russia has foreign currency reserves… The Euro-states are the most indebted countries in the world.

Russia has been building a coherent national identity people will fight for (though still multicultural in the old Russian-Imperial sense), every poll out of Europe shows there’s basically no country in western Europe where young white men are more likely to answer a wartime draft than shoot or stab the draft officials.

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This is why the Ukraine war has heated up in the past 2 month. This is why Ukraine is (since the time I started writing this piece) started targeting Russian merchant tankers and oil refineries…

Because the Strait of Hormuz closing is the “Something happening” that Putin was gambling on winning the war for him.

That’s the thing that breaks European/American finances and cuts off Ukraine.

That is his Kutuzov moment where he defeats a vastly larger financial and military alliance… by doing nothing.

This is the moment the Europeans and Americans looked down at the chess clock and realized they’re nowhere close to a checkmate with 15 seconds left for their moves.

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Continuing our long series discussing and close reading “Which Way Western Man?” by William Gayley Simpson (1892-1990) The work that introduced Nietzsche to the American far-right and created much of the Far Right Vitilist, Pagan, Nietzschean, Racialist, and Eugenic though that defines the Far Right today. We will be following his personal/intellectual journey from Presbyterian Clergy to the Early ACLU to Franciscan Monkhood to Socialist Agitator to Zarathustran hermit to American Eugenicist and Racial-Nationalist.

Joining me is Brynhildr/Vivienne Magdalene of the “For the Love of Nietzsche” Podcast, who will be giving us her unique Nietzschean expertise.

Opening “Divinitus”, Outro “Greek intro” by Jeff Van Dyke. Rome: Total War Soundtrack

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Announcing our first Misery March

This Summer I will be leading the first “Misery March” in the Greater Toronto/Ontario area (TBA). Join the Anarchonomicon Discord Server.

Toronto, for those of you who have never been, is one of the most gorgeous, walkable, safe, pleasant dense urban cities in the World and North America in particular. The old “City of Toronto” or “Old Toronto”, is an amazing old Victorian grid city comprised of almost a hundred villages, town and neighborhoods, that all slowly merged together but all kept their individual quirks… One is even technically an independent republic of 200 people, that the federal government accidentally recognized its independence when their meme-protest became a feel good story 50 years ago (they still pay taxes).

The whole old city, is 16 miles wide and is sort-of a blend of New York and London… but without the Knife, Gun, or “youth” crime. And many lovely hiking trails that wind throughout the city’s hundred+ mile ravine network.

We Are NOT going to be walking that.

Pleasant summer hikes and walks and groups to walk, abound… You can find gorgeous trails and people to hike those trails or city tours anywhere… And Margaret and her friends aren’t forming a cohesive high trust super fit unit off of it.

Instead we’re going to take subways, streetcars, and buses populated by the strangest smelliest Star Wars Cantina creatures away from that…

We’re going outside Old Toronto, outside Metro Toronto, outside the leafy lovely expanses of endless walkability… And into the nightmare of the unwalkable, concrete MegaCity hellscape sprawl beyond Etobicoke, Scarborough, and the 401, where they shove the airports, and the industry, and the housing projects for all the recent immigrants, where the street signs themselves have been known to stop using the Latin alphabet.

The dead lands beyond Willowdale that RUSH described in The Necromancer.

(“Willowdale” and “the River Don” remain the final borders of pleasant inner Toronto by and large)

In high summer. In Ontario humidity. On concrete heat islands that will cook an egg. And we’re going to walk 30km (20 miles). 6-9 hours in that scorching concrete hell where legend tells of second generation old Indian men who have never seen a white face.

We’re going into the heart of darkness, at the worst most miserable time of year to do so…Into lands often described as “Mumbai” or “New New Delphi” or “Bigger Hotter Syria”, Where all the worst trends of Sub-urbanism, mass migration, urbanism, boomerism, sprawl, and post-war mistakes all intersect into Barad-dûr like eyes of pure blighted suburban madness such as “Square One” or “Brampton Shoppers World” or “Woodbine Mall & Fantasy Fair” or “Vaughn Mills” or “First Markham Place” or “The University of Toronto- Scarborough” or “The Pickering Casino Resort”

There’s actually a non-zero chance one of us could die or be driven to madness of heat stroke, violence, mistrusting a corner-store, the parasitic macro-millipedes, or other complications.

20 miles, in the Mid-day sun. Rain or Shine. Back to Civilization and the leafy-green bubble of inner Toronto… The hard way.

But why?

What is a Misery March and Why?

The Rules of a misery march are simple. You and your comrades use google maps to scout out and hunt down the most miserable, blighted, sprawled out, industrial parked, almost unreachable segment of your metro area. The part no one you have ever met has ever been… Then using Public transit, skateboards, uber, taxi, your mom… Etc. To get there. Then you walk back 10-20 miles to the city core or whatever you consider civilization across 6-9 hours.

Depending on the Metro-area and local laws, you may want to be armed… But for Toronto purposes this is unnecessary (Toronto’s Lost Shades and Silent Hill-Esque monsters are nothing if not cowardly).

If anyone has to tap out part way for heatstroke, blisters, or for fear that the sadness will consume them… or their wife nags them to get home after a few hours, we don’t hold it against them. They did the important thing. They went to the most miserable place in the metro area we could find and hiked back on foot through the worst of it… And if they have to tap out or leave early now that you’re getting back to the nice parts, who cares… They did the hard bits.

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But why would you do this? Why would you go and do, pretty objectively, the most miserable ugliest thing you could do on your day off, when you and your friends could be doing… literally anything else.

You could go for a SCENIC hike, or meet up at a nice restaurant and chat, or go to some event, or literally anything else.

Why go to the smelliest, ugliest, most hostile and miserable part of the city to be surrounded by foreigners and death march through the liminal “back-rooms” of demographic, mercantile, and transport globalism?

Well… your recent “pub night”? Or sight-seeing tour? Or Board games night? Or bookclub? How much did that bind you and your friends together?

The people in your Yoga class or that you met at the spa? How tight are you with them? Do you really feel you can depend on them when the chips are down? If you had to move house or rescue your sickly dog from a crazy ex at 2am, or hide a body? Are you calling someone you met at the young conservatives Shrimp and Cocktail night?

Real friendship, teamwork, esteem, respect, community, espirit de corp? These are forged through hardship, endurance, inclement weather conditions, and screaming sexual insults… (or at least this is what childhood reruns of Little House on the Prairie various Cadet drill instructors taught me) So if you actually want to “Get Organize” or “build community”, the way you do it is by creating events and venues in which people can get together, be stuck with each other, and endure really horrifying inescapable misery for extended hours such that by the end they must deal with the irritated tension either by becoming tight friends and pulling each other through, or grow to despise each other and attempting murder (the closer to 50/50 it gets the tighter the team).

In either case its a very quick and efficient way to bind people together or sort people out.

And if that doesn’t work, 6-9 hours of walking in 100 degree heat? You’ll at least lose 2-3 pounds. So not a wasted day.

I will be doing this at some point this summer, If one shows up I’ll be glad to walk with them; If 30 shows up I’ll do my best to memorize everyone’s name over the next 9 hours; and if no one else expresses interest or can commit to a time, I will just be marching it myself and enjoying the vision-quest/heat stroke as I point and laugh at all the weird Star Wars creatures coming at me with their kirpans.

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Does this sound like something you’re interested in? Are you in the Toronto area? Do you want to organize one these in your metro-area, but don’t have a large enough supply of spergs and weirdos to join your death march through Baltimore?

DM Me.

Date to be determined depending on interest and availability.

And Join the Anarchonomicon Discord Server

I intend to do one of these every 3 to 4 months to get different weather and mix up different locations. Maybe down the road we’ll have an “away march” in Detroit!

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Remember this is a group activity with no time limit… The challenge is to try to get everyone to the finish line. If we have to stop for 2 hours at a diner for lunch or dinner to refresh everyone… We stop for 2 hours. It can just take longer.

You aren’t just coming prepared for you, you’re coming prepared for everyone else.

You want to make sure you can help yourself and not be a burden whilst also being ready to help others if they’ve forgotten anything.

Demonstrate that value and virtue. Build leadership!

But here is a recommend Kitlist:

-4 x liters of water

-1 x 300-500ml electrolite sport’s drink
(we will stop for more fluids/meals, even 4 and a half liters might not be enough for 9 hours, but this is good redundancy in case we get in a “food desert” or someone forgets theirs)

-2 hats, one baseball, one full brimmed gilly or other hat (incase you get the sun right on one part of the face or neck

-Sunscreen

-Tactical flip flops (backup footwear incase you get blisters)

-Shoes/primary foot wear (on feet) with backup pair of socks (again for blisters)

-Boo-boo kit (bandages etc. for blisters and other minor injuries)

-spare underwear/shorts and some kind of alcohol wet wipe
(On long walks if you sweat a lot the salt from sweat builds up and that can cause really brutal slicing chaffing and cuts (your underwear goes from soft cotton to like a solid rock of salt)… So you want to be able to change into something fresh and clear the salt from your thighs before your legs and other bits are cut to ribbons)

-Shemagh or microfiber towel
Technically you can tie these as a head shelter from the weather, but the real value is to wet them and wear them if you feel heat stroke coming on or like you’re drying out

-Rain Coat or poncho (we might get bad weather)

-small snacks

Phone Charger
do try to bring your phone charged, You might need it.

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Anything else you can think of.

What do you think? Are you interested? Have you and your friends done something similar? do comment!

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Disclaimer: At no point in this piece do I ever advise, instruct, or make known the means of making explosives (this knowledge I leave to Wikipedia, Youtube, and other unsavory parts of the web).. Nor do I discuss the fine processes of how to make Complex incendiary devices or fuels in detail sufficient to actually do so (I strongly encourage anyone interested in pyrotechnics to do extensive research and take professional courses, as even very simple non-explosive incendiaries can be incredibly dangerous to work with in even small quantities) which in the US and some other countries are not-regulated, whereas others are highly regulated under the US National Firearms Act not as explosives, but as destructive devices (Its weird), whereas in other countries they DO have stringent regulation (nor is this legal advise)… The purpose of this piece is to discuss a set of hypothetical improvised non-explosive anti-tank weapon’s systems and the tactics of their hypothetical employment. The details of how to go about actually creating the fuels, reactive agents, and dangerous chemicals will not be discussed here, except in such detail as is necessary to WARN against the various extreme dangers of hazarding to make them.

Neither the Author nor anyone at Anarchonomicon is a Pyrotechniques Expert, Chemist, Lawyer, EOD Technician, or Military Authority in any sense of those words that matter. And none of the hypotheticals discussed should be pursued without consultation with those qualified people.

By Contrast none of the TACTICS discussed should ever be pursued by anyone EVER who values their life or the lives of anyone around them… or at least certainly anyone who values them more than victory.

It’s the CatGirl Cocktail Hour! Again!

In the Previous “CatGirl Cocktail Hour” we deep dived how Thermite based weapons, despite not defeating armor, could almost certainly be used in improvised and purpose built weaponry to cripple, mobility kill, blind, and cook off enemy armored vehicles, both for irregular forces and cut off or low-supply conventional infantry.

We also covered all the horrifying ways that aluminum powder, homemade thermite, and home metallurgy is a death trap, but still more accessible to cut off units and irregulars with limited skills and supplies than anything involving actual explosives or chemistry.

As well as just what a pain, coarse drop and spark safe thermite is to actually get ignited even under normal conditions, let alone combat.

As well as the uniquely horrifying dangers that fine aluminum dust is.

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But what if you were a stupid evil monstrous asshole who didn’t care even about your own safety?

Or what if your enemies were stupid evil monstrous assholes who didn’t care even about their own safety?

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You see throughout the piece, something kept cropping up… something unnerving.

Whereas achieving and lighting a safe to wield, non-explosive thermite mixture in a manner that’s not a danger to the operator, yet works is a multistep series of challenging enough judgment calls and processes, which I did not go into enough detail to teach (both because I lack the expertise, and also because you’ll inhale fine aluminum dust and die drowning in your own lungs and or get Alzheimer’s at 20)… Is actually rather difficult to do safely.

On the other-hand simply making fine aluminum powder that is horrifyingly dangerous to humans WITHOUT concern for safety… takes… almost no skill whatsoever.

Aluminum dust simply milled finer and finer with enough of a simple carbon or other coating to stop oxidization, will simply becomes more and more dangerous and more and more violently reactive… seemingly without limit.

The very process of milling fine Aluminum powder is a DEATH TRAP for the Pyrotechnic Expert since as the aluminum gets milled finer and finer, more of the bare unoxidized aluminum surface gets exposed and consumes the oxygen within the airtight mill (and it must be airtight to conceal the deadly neurotoxic Aluminum dust)… This means that within the mill the Aluminum VACUUM SEALS itself in by devouring all the oxygen in the air within the mill.

Thus if the mill is not “burped” every few hours. The Aluminum will fully vacuum seal and when you do open it the Oxygenated external air will rush in, causing some of the dust to get kicked up and suspend in the air, and then flash react now that the bare unoxidized aluminum is contacting oxygen so violently… Which is exothermic. Which will cause the suspended fuel-air mixture of the Aluminum powder to ignite… At 2000 degrees.

Many an amateur at pyrotechnics have basically hit themselves with a homemade 2000 degree thermobaric warhead to the face…. By doing nothing and just being slightly late opening an inert can. What’s in the box?

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So what happens when someone inevitably decides to weaponize this simplest of heavy… “Ultra-Light” metal chemistry?

What happens if you bottle that? And hand-throw it at the enemy?

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Don’t do this at home!

Legal Disclaimer: Note this is NOT an explosive. No element of this undergoes explosive reaction or even deflagration, rather this is a simple open-air combustion reactions which cannot even hypothetically be used to produce shrapnel or concussive explosive damage.
In theory (not legal advice) depending on the jurisdiction, it is in the same legal category as camping fire-starters and diagrams for how to build a campfire, maintain gas motors, metallurgical chemical welding equipment, and other examples of multi-element complex combustions used throughout hobbies and industry.
Likewise we advise against EVER creating any incendiary device… including camp fires (People fall into camp fires. They’re dangerous. This one time at PorcFest in New Hampshire a guy lost his junk after drunkenly falling into the campfire).
Remember The Purpose of this piece is to predict the future of warfare, hypothesize future weapon systems (much as many Military Magazines draw diagrams of hypothetical hovertanks, “Stealth Rifles”, “Plasma weapons”, etc.) Then Properly anticipate and advise the skilled military personnel who read this blog… And in the process horrifically deface the future of all Military History by CatGirl-Branding everything that hasn’t yet been safely named.

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Killer Kitty Glitter: A Nightmare Someone Will Eventually Make

—Theme Song—

It the simplest thing ever. A glass bottle… Filled with aluminum. A single element.

Technically, this is less chemically complex than bottled water. (a TWO element molecule in a bottle)

You might not even need an ignition source if the aluminum is milled fine enough and you let it sit long enough… it’ll drain the oxygen in the bottle (oxygen binds to exposed metal, this is how rust happens), forming a vacuum in the bottle, and probably auto-igniting the moment it’s broken when fresh oxygen hits it. (this is a common danger of milling Aluminum)

However, for redundancy, and in accordance with the Geneva Conventions to avoid being accused of chemical warfare and purposeful poisoning enemy combatants with aluminum nanoparticle neurotoxins and lung contaminants, it is very important to include either a storm-match and strike surface taped to the bottle, flint and steel, or some sort of burning ignition source.

This will also guarantee that if one were to accidentally drop one you’d have a maximally painful but quick death of 3rd degree burns and lung searing misery instead of drowning in your lungs or suffering brain damage from inhaling an entire soda bottle’s worth of inert aluminum powder.

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“Ok” you might think. “But what does it actually do? What does it actually look like?”

It is here that, unlike the CatGirl Meltatini and its hypothetical ignition mechanisms and functionality… we don’t have to speculate…at all… as to the dangers or efficacy.

Fine Aluminum dust fires are shockingly common and well documented.

This factory was collapsing within a minute of one starting on their main machine, note the aluminum doesn’t even catch fire til 19 seconds with the blinding flash:

Suitably fine aluminum can even react with rain and water… Since water causes metals to rust at increased rates… Ie. Oxidize quickly. (H2O is 1 third Oxygen). Which we already know is extraordinarily exothermic when it happens to aluminum.

There are dozens and dozens of these videos out there, Fine aluminum dust (like all metal dusts) are common industrial byproducts of any milling or shaping of aluminum, so every aluminum product that comes out of a factory produces it as a byproduct. And such accidents are very very common… Just as all dust fires and “explosions” are. (look up grain silo explosions, or sugar refinery fires).

As already linked in the previous CatGirl Cocktail hour, Fine aluminum powder is also a very basic pyrotechnic ingredient to produce both thermite for industrial or Youtube purposes… or to make fireworks flash brightly.

I already linked this video of a talented if incautious Youtuber/Pyrotechnic hobbyist showing how ball mills (a motor, container, and glass marbles) can be used to refine aluminum scraps (foil, soda cans, wrecked motorcycle parts) down to dangerously fine dust particles which can combust in the air (or get sucked into your lungs and drown/lobotomize you).

Again don’t do this at home… Certainly not in your house.

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But the wider phenomenon of dust fires… militaries have already weaponized elsewhere.

Thermobaric weapons or “Fuel Air Explosions”, “Aerosol Bombs”, or “fuel Air Bombs”, or “Vacuum Bombs” are an expansive category of weapons that exploits physics… And ambiguities in the English language.

Dust “Explosions” are not really explosions (some are, it’s weird). Remember how I said I’d never tell you how to make explosives, that instead you’d have to read chemistry Wikipedia and watch youtube videos like a man?

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Yeah, none of what I’m talking about are explosives because the oxidizer does not exist in the fuel source and a net gas release isn’t happening… Remember Explosives detonate or deflagrate from oxygen already contained in the mixture (low explosives) or the molecular structure itself (high explosives). The explosive reaction results in the chemical powder mixture or the molecule itself reacting via combustion or shockwave (high explosive chemistry is finicky) breaking the old chemical bonds and rapidly forming new ones… One or all of which is a gas.

For example here’s the Nitroglycerin (a high explosive) Detonation reaction:

4 x C3H5N3O9 → 12 x CO2 + 10 x H2O + 6 x N2 + O2

That’s a ton of Carbon Dioxide, Water (steam), Nitrogen, and Oxygen molecules all being produced, all of them are gasses moving very fast at 5000 degree, as they leave the Nitroglycerin molecule. You can also sorta visualize why nitroglycerin is so unstable when it’s such a large molecule of viscous liquid, and all it takes to start the reaction is 4 of those molecules getting too close together (don’t bump it).

Just one of those large unstable molecules ripping against another, one CO2 or H2O molecule forming and ripping off… And the whole thing blows.

(amazing movie about transporting Nitroglycerin)

This is how most explosives work. (although most high explosives are vastly more stable)

The Oxygen within the mixture/molecule reacts with the combustible elements to release massive amounts of gas in a detonation, or a fast burning deflagration which can propel bullets, shrapnel, ect. to lethal speeds.

Gas is expanding at insane speeds. And that creates a shockwave that burns and crushes people nearby, and launches shrapnel and fragmentation at incredible speeds into the poor bodies of various targets.

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This still can sortof happen in some weird types of dust fires and thermobarics (again weird exceptions abound)…

But far more common, and what we’ll be discussing today… Is the opposite.

Most dust and fuel air fires result from an unoxidized fuel with no innate oxidizer to it, getting spread by circumstance or a smaller explosion into a fine aerosol within the air, where suddenly it is evenly mixed with an oxygen source… The Air.

Thus things like Flour, or Grain, or Sugar or corn… Things that don’t even really burn that well on their own from lack of oxygen… Can suddenly burn terrifyingly in massive fireballs if they’re cast into the air and have the perfect mix of air to fuel.

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When weaponized these are called Thermobaric Weapons or “fuel air explosives” (a primary explosive is used to scatter and ignite the fuel).

And these have a VERY interesting property.

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Because the oxygen is NOT part of fuel but the atmospheric mix… gas is not released, but consumed.

These ““explosions”” don’t “Blow up”. They “Suck up”.

All the oxygen in the surrounding atmosphere gets consumed into the fuel elements of the reaction, creating a negative pressure wave that draws in more oxygen and air from the surrounding environment, consuming that, and (if done in a contained environment like a building or bunker or tunnel network) sucking the air OUT OF THE LUNGS of the enemy… Potentially collapsing the lungs (in theory) but more likely sucking the flames and burning negative pressure atmosphere into the lungs of the enemy.

And one of the most potent additives for Thermobaric weapons is….

You guessed it.

Aluminum.

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4 x AL + 3 x O2 → 2 x Al2O3

Aluminum + Oxygen → Aluminum Oxide (Aluminum Rust)

Think of how much Atmosphere this is devouring! No gas is being released, but MORE oxygen Atoms are being devoured than Aluminum atoms.

Indeed it burns hot enough that it almost certainly rips oxygen atoms from other molecules. that atmospheric CO2 and CO (Carbon monoxide) have their oxygen atoms ripped from them only for the left over carbon to combust (as it does) and consume more atmospheric oxygen.

This doesn’t quite cause deep space type vacuums (there’s a lot more to air than oxygen) but it does draw the burning element outwards towards the air it is sucking in. And if you’ve ever interacted with a fire in your life you know that heat rises and thus fires draw in oxygen disproportionately from their BOTTOMS.

So what happens you toss Killer Kitty Glitter on TOP an enemy target… Like a tank? The bottle breaks, the dust is thrown out into the air, and then it ignites, and then…

What happens in the tank?

A Battle Tank is a Confined Space

Confined spaces are a category of occupational health and safety hazards that have killed many an unsuspecting repairman, farmer, sailor….

Some poor naive soul jumps in a grain silo, or crawls into a (cold) boiler to repair it, or descends into a watertight service hatch on a ship without a supervisor or backup or rescue plan… Then passes out and dies because the chemical finish on the inside of the grain silo or the anti-rust paint on the ship’s haul has off-gassed in the airtight environment and consumed all the available oxygen… Something which cannot be smelt or seen. And will only be felt when your lungs are already full of stale, but largely normal smelling air… but which has no oxygen in it, or is an obscene percentage carbon monoxide or some other poison. Killing the hapless worker. At which point one of their colleagues inevitably comes to check on them a few minutes later, notices that they’re unresponsive, assumes it is a medical emergency (not in the way you think)… Rushes to their aid… And then dies themselves from being overcome by the toxic gas.

This has killed THOUSANDS of ordinary workers. Sometimes this daisy chains killing 3 or 4 heroic would-be-rescuers dead before people stop rushing into the perfectly normal looking space.

Seriously this has killed thousands of industrial, farm, nautical, and ordinary facility workers. And is now one of the largest subsets of workplace health and safety concern (read the Wikipedia page).

It’s statistically plausible someone or several people reading this piece will die to a confined space death… Or rather would have, but for my benevolence and nagging.

The joint factors of a confined space, no easy emergency exits, no way to force fresh air, and the unexpected/hard to diagnose nature of the threat all combine with the chemistry of unusual reactions and often combustible materials to create death traps.

What thermobaric weapons do, and the reason they’re employed against enemy bunkers, tunnels, buildings, and hardened positions… Is they exploit all these factors that exist to lesser extents in defensive positions to create sucking fires that rapidly create burning zero-oxygen negative pressure confined death traps in what should be the enemy’s safest positions.

Yes just as those heroic Thetford farmers drowned in the zero oxygen Chicken shit tank, you can make your chicken shit enemies drown in the burning atmosphere of their Armored Tanks.

(I know. I know. Operating a Battle Tank is a dangerous job that’s highly exposed, with little concealment, and at extreme risk of enemy heavy weapons fire. Its unfair to merely compare the armor they have, vs unarmored infantry who can still better conceal themselves and employ cover… and there isn’t really a comparison one way or the other in bravery between them and infantry. But tell that to the poor dismounted units who have to hunt a Main Battle Tank.)

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Remember how much Oxygen Aluminum devours when it burns?

We can calculate the Exact displacement of oxygen for Aluminum. Aluminum has a density of 2.7 g/cm3. Or 2.7 kilograms per liter. Or 0.959 Kilograms (just over 2 pounds) in a 355ml Beer Bottle.

Standard sea level air density (at 15c) is 1.2250 kg/m3.

However Air is Mostly largely inert Nitrogen. Oxygen is only 20.95% of sea level air. And remember the Aluminum is binding to the oxygen at a ratio of 2 to 3. And there’s a ton of other things to do with atomic mass I really don’t want to get into.

BUT…

handwaving away all the actual math and eyeballing it. A single Beer-Bottle worth of burning aluminum powder, one basic Killer Kitty Glitter attack, is consuming somewhere between 5 and 7 cubic METERS of atmospheric oxygen.

A one liter bottle is consuming 15-20 cubic meters.

And a two liter 30-40 cubic meters.

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So what happens when one lands on top of an enemy Main Battle Tank in sudden surprise with all of it’s hatches open “unbuttoned”, to let the Tankers, see, communicate, and breath in the surrounding air?

Note: I use the Abrams for all of my examples, not because I have a beef with Americans but because all of the sources are in English, and the Abrams is an example of a GOOD modern tank built to keep it’s occupants alive, whilst not going off concept into weirdness. If I focused on the T-90, Leopard, Challenger, Ariete, Leclerc, Merkava, Type-99, Ramses II, Arjun, or Al-Khalid I’d have to deal with non-English sources and weird exceptions… Whilst not really changing the concept… Also I’m not really a tank person, so researching tanks isn’t that enjoyable for me.

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Tank commanders generally like to keep their Tank Unbuttoned. Whenever they’re not immediately in combat being able to stick their heads out, operate their smaller support guns, and just look around gives them an extraordinarily more complete and accurate view of the battlespace around them and radically improves their decision making, control, and ability to communicate with dismounted units around them. It also lets the air flow and keeps everyone cool (and looking cool).

As soon as they take effective fire however, what they’re (generally) supposed to do is everyone descend into the tank and seal those hatches so that small arms fire cannot kill or injure the personnel. Buttoning up.

Makes sense right?

The moment of vulnerability however is the split second before they go into buttoning up. Tank Troopers drill this a ton, and can do it extraordinarily fast… but they have to actually perceive they’re under attack, mentally process it, shout out to button up, get down into the tank, and pull the hatches shut.

If you get the surprise on them or catch them napping, that’s 5-10 second between your first attack on them, and them actually being safely buttoned up.

Traditionally though this is really only a vulnerability to Snipers. That if a skilled sniper spots an unbuttoned tank with the commander poking up… He can get 1 shot off that might kill one if he’s a good shot (you really want to know which is the commander and which the loader position when you take that shot)… Most other small arms fire, or even heavy weapons fire, the commander and gunner are down in the tank before the fire gets on target.

At which point they’re pretty safe even before the hatch closes (in 1-2 seconds) because small arms fire and shrapnel travel linearly… Which makes it really hard to get any of it going down the hatches and hitting the personnel.

For this reason Grenades, Molotovs (they still work on unbuttoned tanks), and drone dropped explosives are really the only things that uniquely exploit the weakness of the hatches being open without a head poking up. Because, again, almost all damage in military weapons depend on linear shrapnel, rounds and blast damage.

Thus you typically need really lucky bull-eye throws to hit the open hatch, or a dropper drone, like a deadly game of cornhole.

However burning Kitty Glitter produces thermobaric fires that suck in a complex non-linear all enveloping fashion that seeks out and seeps into every nook and cranny… like your mom.

This means that ANY hit on the surface of the tank is going to be drawing in the surrounding oxygen, Specifically the Oxygen BENEATH it (heat rises, so hot fires almost always draw air more aggressively from beneath)…

So whereas small arms need to hit linearly to maybe ricochet into the unbuttoned tank, or explosives need to land precisely in the hatch or airburst exactly right…

The Thermobaric burning Aluminum will reach around and snake into the open hatch sucking out the oxygen even as the negative pressure sucks the burning aluminum into the tank searing and starting secondary fires on clothing, seeping oil/lubricants, papers, ammunition, paint, flesh, faces, lungs… Which themselves will burn or smolder, and in the process generating their own exhaust pollutants also rendering the internal atmosphere of the Tank non-viable for human occupancy.

This can obviously burn and maim the Tankers, but even uninjured Tankers will probably have to bail out at this point because the consumption of Oxygen has rendered the crew compartment non-survivable for breathing.

“Oh sure, but come on… Tanks and armored vehicles don’t have the best ventilation, but are they really so air tight?”

Yes actually.

All modern armored vehicles, even your local police force’s BearCat are designed to be at least aggressively watertight to resist molotov cocktails… but many were designed with CRBN (Chemical Radiological Biological and Nuclear) Warfare in mind, and even if the individual models don’t have the dedicated CRBN modules installed to cycle air whilst filtering out Nerve Gas or Fallout… they still often require air exchangers, air conditioners, ect. because the base design is so airtight by default.

Indeed the US Military itself has published a 160 page study on the Occupational Health and Safety Hazards of Operating an M1 Abrams Tank (Archive) Mostly focused on the long term hazards of exposure to various live-fire and engine chemicals in such a confined space.

It includes this gem:

“Air exchange rates varying between 1.09 and 6.59 volumes per hour”

And presumably the M1A1 Abrams is one of the better Main Battle Tanks out there for concern with airflow (Americans spend a lot on them).

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Hey, These unconventional warfare pieces are always really hit and miss. Some people love them, others are weirded out, and others insist that it is totally inappropriate and that instead I should go back to writing pieces about prepping and resisting government tyranny (•_•). In either case I have ZERO Idea whether this piece will get a good response, or whether I should have paywalled it, or if this will be the thing that gets me a door-knock…

If you appreciate what I do at all or think this is an important contribution to the field of speculative irregular warfare… Please Subscribe. Pretty please? Pretty pretty please?! Like and Restack? Share? Just an Email address or a like goes such a long way to making this viable. And those of you who become paid subscribers I consider the true saints of Future CatGirl Warfare.

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This means that if you hit a tank, or get anything in the crew compartment that’s consuming oxygen or releasing merely normal battlefield toxic gasses, or even just set any papers or kit or clothing on fire in there… It is going to take a minimum of nearly 9 minutes for it to be occupiable again by the crew, and likely closer to an hour (depending on what the engine and air settings were at)… That the smoke or choaking unoxygenated gas is going to force them to bail-out (if they can. If they can’t due to injury, getting stuck, confusion, or merely not perceiving the lack of oxygen… well confined spaces deaths have killed many a farmer and sailor in all kinds of different “tanks”) and if they get out they probably can’t get back in the tank if the attackers have any small arms rifle cover over it… Beyond that the hatches are also probably staying open as they bail-out, giving the attacker ample opportunity to get flammable liquids, explosives, Meltatini Thermite, etc. Down the hatch and kill or disable the unoccupied tank either with a cookoff, or merely by burning and destroying the controls and sensors.

The same tight armored metal box that keeps the tankers safe has been weaponized against them.

In Conclusion: Don’t Do This at Home!

”WarCrimes are in the Eye of The Beholder”

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Now on paper… technically: This is not a warcrime.

(This is maybe the most Canadian sentence I have ever written.)

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Just as legally: Since Killer Kitty Glitter is chemically and mechanistically less complex than bottled water, and it “releases” negative-gas preassure in a rapid metal-oxidization, thus making it the exact OPPOSITE of an explosion…

I have in NO WAY whatsoever posted bomb-making instructions or diagrams to the internet. (instructions require steps… bombs explode. Diagrams require complexity so as to be simplified… Not one word overlaps with the above)

And I will sue anyone who defames me by saying otherwise.

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However, don’t expect any enemy combatant to Approve your nigh-Talmudicly legalistic reading of the Geneva convention. (Enemy combatants don’t answer defamation suits)

Also don’t expect the laws of physics to play nice with you either.

“More Dangerous to User than Enemy.” Repeat that into a mirror.

The purpose of this piece is again to be aware of and predict future threats from unconventional forces… Not to randomly lobotomize yourself with face-melting lung-liquefiers.

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Sure if carried out perfectly… this is a elementally simple improvised thermobaric weapon just like the US, Russia, Israel, China, Ukraine, and basically every serious military player around the world already uses. And they all insist that their thermobaric weapons are not warcrimes, are not designed to wound or maim, are perfectly humane, and in no-way resemble chemical warfare.

However, anyone who actually attempts to make these death traps or heaven help them: employ them in actual combat… are eternally one slip and fall, or mis-opened mill, or random cracked bottle, or pouring without a respirator away from having their lungs liquified by aluminum dust contaminants, being lobotomized with Alzheimer’s in their 20s if their own lungs don’t drown them, and most likely melting their own face off when a random element sparks or reacts a little too quickly and exothermically with the open air.

Likewise no military in the world is going to flinch at court-martialing an enemy combatant, or entire captured unit, for Chemical Warfare and Violation of the Geneva Convention if they tried to employ one of these against their enemy… And somehow it didn’t ignite.

If one body or living person could be produced that demonstrably died or got lobotomized or maimed by inhaling Aluminum powder that WASN’T on fire…

Ya, they’re going to string up your entire unit for chemical warfare and they’re going to make a huge media production of it as well.

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I mean sure, obviously if it HAD ignited, such an unfortunate enemy combatant would have died anyway in a perfectly legal (well… Geneva compliant) 2000 degree face melting and lung devouring fire… But the second one fails to ignite… any enemy you’re dealing with is going to turn it into legal and media circus.

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Thus such weapons represent maybe the most unstable and infuriatingly unpredictable escalation you could employ against an enemy or that your enemy could employ against you.

Genuinely more dangerous to the user than the enemy, since everything has to go right to actually harm any enemy, but any mistake will kill or maim the user…. And yet so horrifyingly dangerous it still composes a threat to the enemy by shear proximity.

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As such… I fully expect unconventional forces around the world to do it anyway, because the supply chain of scrap aluminum and bottles is so bloody simple and the effect on any armored target that isn’t airtight or has momentarily opened its hatches is so devastating.

Employed from A dropper Drone or bottle launcher (modified crossbow, or catapult) this is maybe the simplest improvisable weapon that can still be effectively used against armored enemies… With a supply chain that is maybe even less disruptable than Molotov cocktails.

And almost certainly there are people out there in the battlefields of the world suicidally brave enough to hand-throw a thermobaric that ignores cover and which they could never protect themselves from if they misjudged the distance.

(fragmentation grenades are downright user friendly and failsafe by contrast)

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Many a country has been blockaded of their petroleum and reduced to complete fuel scarcity meaning that even Molotov cocktails can be effectively blockaded to scarcity… by contrast aluminum scraps don’t get consumed and devoured up under conditions of siege… Aluminum is indeed a scrap product of food, beverages, motor vehicles, etc. That largely just sits arround until someone disposes of it.

As long as you can find some sort of electric motor, or even a pedal motor… aluminum scraps can be milled finer by irregular or cut off forces. And as long as you’re near civilization of any sort, you’re going to find aluminum scraps.

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Expect this to be a staple of future warfare and antiarmor warfare especially.

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But WAIT! We’re not finished.

Tune in next time for the Third and final installment in the CatGirl Cocktail Hour, when I’ll introduce you to far less dangerous utility “cocktails” meant to give unconventional forces some survivability and lead you through the full promise of this exercise:

A simulated (on paper) ambush of a full Sized tank platoon: 4 Main Battle Tanks + Infantry Screen, by irregular forces to show you how even without a ready supply of conventional heavy weapons an irregular force can still MacGyver, Breaking Bad, and suicidally over-commit their way to…

Some percent chance of a not totally Pyrrhic “Victory”.

Tip:


BITCOIN: bc1qdhj7637sgcssxgxygjaa3ddljwy8tzg5mzw325

MONERO: 8AhA3g9hbtDcAJE5MPmeQsFwwGsf3H9fq9tC6giQ4a6vKnTXv4J4MivKXrPKDpXyEeNc9mfFejbq84kSWkC8pjuj18rAEij

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Disclaimer: At no point in this piece do I ever advise, instruct, or make known the means of making explosives (this knowledge I leave to Wikipedia, Youtube, and other unsavory parts of the web).. Nor do I discuss the fine processes of how to make Complex incendiary devices or fuels in detail sufficient to actually do so (I strongly encourage anyone interested in pyrotechnics to do extensive research, as even very simple non-explosive incendiaries can be incredibly dangerous to work with in all but the smallest quantities) which in some US jurisditions and some other countries are not-regulated, whereas in others are highly regulated under the US National Firearms Act not as explosives, but as destructive devices (Its weird), whereas in other countries they DO have stringent regulation (nor is this legal advise)… The purpose of this piece is to discuss a set of hypothetical improvised non-explosive anti-tank weapon’s systems and the tactics of their hypothetical employment. The details of how to go about actually creating the fuels, reactive agents, and dangerous chemicals will not be discussed here, except in such detail as is necessary to WARN against the various extreme dangers of hazarding to make them.

Neither the Author nor anyone at Anarchonomicon is a Pyrotechniques Expert, Chemist, Lawyer, EOD Technician, or Military Authority in any sense of those words that matter. And none of the hypotheticals discussed should be pursued without consultation with those qualified people.

By Contrast none of the TACTICS discussed should ever be pursued by anyone EVER who values their life or the lives of anyone around them… or atleast certainly anyone who values them more than victory.

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Also Checkout PART 2! Where we go into even crazier and more dangerous modes of antitank warfare:

Intro: The Fundamental Problem of AntiTank Warfare, or the Need for Non-Explosive Weapons Systems

I’ve been deep diving unusual or hypothetical military and guerrilla logistics and doctrines for a while now.

I predicted the rise of motorcycles on the modern battlefield in the early months of the Ukraine War. I deep dived the operational tactics and information warfare logic of modern Urban Stealth Operation focusing on the Luigi Mangione Case, and later deep dived the logistics and kit needed for modern urban espionage operations. And I’ve dug into weird little niches like the Knife employed as a strategic (not tactical) level weapon, and the rise of Assassination as the Default mode of Warfare.

And I keep coming back to the same tired conclusions:

Its a cliche, but the real limiting problem of almost all warfare is logistics.

This goes doubly and triply for unconventional forces who cannot access traditional supply lines to secure weapons… And, even more limiting, often lack the training and advanced skills to make or improvise such weapons.

Whilst the inability to access weapons is crippling… The inability to access the knowledge with which to craft or improvise such weapons is even more damning.

Unconventional or irregular forces regularly find themselves unable to access dedicated heavy weapons, modern sophisticated precision systems, and sometimes are forced to even craft their own small arms… but even worse, they often find themselves without the technical skills and experience to craft or improvise alternatives.

While making explosives is not extraordinarily difficult… problem children around the world have made various explosive mixtures from Youtube and internet recipes and even before the internet when “Science Sets” you could order through catalogs actually taught real science, but the actual logistics of USING explosives effectively is shockingly finicky.

Sure tweenage boys might blow up garden gnomes in their backyard for fun, and if you’re fortunate enough to live in a country that sells real Ammonium Nitrate fertilizer, ANFO (Ammonium Nitrate-Fuel Oil) only has 2 ingredients and the other one is gasoline, but if you are in a guerrilla movement in a place like Iran or your unit has been cut off hundreds of miles behind enemy lines and you actually want to USE explosives, in a form that’s combat effective.

Suddenly it gets way more complex. And you learn just exactly why grown-ups told you not to play with fireworks.

If you are in a country that doesn’t just sell Ammonium Nitrate or other oxidizing precursors at the hardware store, or if you’re pinned down in a warzone and can’t get to a hardware store… Suddenly you need to do a lot of basic chemistry, often requiring odd tools that can be a pain to source… Sure with a bit more knowledge and understanding of chemistry fundamentals you can make your own Nitric Acid Generator, or start following the process of rending fat to generate Nitroglycerin, or heaven help you creating disgusting smelling Nitre beds to make saltpeter from Urine like the American Confederacy when they got desperate…

And if you already have primers for bullets or another explosive you could probably create the more unstable small detonators (the primary explosive) to set off more stable large payload explosive charges… (the secondary explosive).

And if you have a not extraordinary knowledge of electronics you could probably create timed or radio, cellphone, or other ignition mechanisms…

And if you have basic shopclass skills you could probably weld your own rockets and mortar shells…

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But if your plan is for your band of merry men to be producing explosives from raw chemicals in some kitchen or basement, combining them with homemade electronics and detonators, fitting them into home-welded Mortar shells and Rocket Grenades, and then either firing them at the enemy with a home-brew mortar tube, launching them with your own shoulder launchers, or dropping them from a drone with your own impact-fuse design…

I can guarantee you, unless you are vastly more competent than I am… or your isolated band of merry men has a vastly more skilled chain of weirdos than I can imagine…. Some mistake’s are going to happen and get people killed once you start operating at scale.

Bomb-making is not a profession for people over-attached to their fingers or faces.

Between the exothermic reactions and boiling you have to do to homebrew the chemicals, the common misfiring and static charges of home electronics, the inherent danger of even professionally made impact fuses, and the white knuckle terror of putting even small rockets or mere shotgun slugs through tubing you’ve welded yourself… One of your kitchens, fuses, launchers, or tubes is going to explode in incendiary shrapnel fury exactly when you have 3-4 people gathered around it… And if you’re a guerrilla or insurgent this will immediately get dozens of forensic experts pouring over your former safe house and the bodies of your former comrades.

For this reason in spite of the skills not being extraordinarily hard to get (between Wikipedia, Youtube, Archive.org and Anna’s Archive: The Chemical, Electronic, Engineering, and Metallurgical knowledge to make your own remote explosives, mortar systems, and rocket artillery can be gained in a week)… It is almost unheard of for cut off units or besieged battalions separated from their logistics chain to just start craft-making their own armaments on the fly. And likewise the most successful guerrilla groups invariably produce explosives and weapons systems FAR below their natural skill ceiling.

Sure the IRA COULD have tried to create their own rocket artillery, shoulder fire rocket launchers, or Mortar tubes, the mechanics are not that complex… But they had recurring enough accidents and problems with simple timer bombs that they preferred to limit themselves to the few enough but reliable enough professionally made heavy weapons Gaddafi or American smugglers could get them.

The only factions that really homebrew their own heavy weapon systems are Government level pariah states like Hamas, Hezbollah, or ISIS (or Ukraine) who have the resources and the space to create entire semi-professional supply chains without one accident compromising their OPSEC or taking out anyone irreplaceable.

Thus there is an inherent need in Small and unconventional forces for weapons systems that can be readily improvised by low-skill individuals that are effective, deadly, and able to take on modern armored enemies in ways that are better than completely useless… But ideally which do not depend upon explosives, electrical timing, or home chemistry to an extent that it’d immediately start generating casualties from hot spots on burners, static charges, or radio frequency overlaps.

Indeed we used to have exactly such weapon systems.

They were called “petrol bombs” or “Molotov Cocktails”…

The only problem is:

Molotov Cocktails Don’t Work Any More

The Molotov Cocktail has a storied place in the history of warfare, and on the streets of Portland… originally an improvised anti-tank weapon from the Finnish Winter War, the little lethal beverage has been employed in conflicts on every continent… Including Antarctica judging by that one John Carpenter documentary.

Its continued use on the modern battlefield and in improvised warfare everywhere is belied by exactly one problem.

Molotov Cocktails don’t work any more.

They’re still good thrown area denial weapons, and incendiaries always have an anti-building and anti-material role, and as makeshift anti-personnel grenades… Well I certainly wouldn’t want one thrown into my fire position, or into my face…

But they don’t do what they were originally designed for.

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The Molotov cocktail was an artifact of profound military imagination and creativity. By the Finnish Winter War of 1940 Tanks were incredibly refined implements of war.

Aside from massive dedicated anti-tank rifles (fast fading in viability) and the first generation of shoulder fired rockets (The First Bazooka and PanzerFaust were still 2-3 years away)… There was shockingly little that infantry could do to tanks if the tank simply refused to drive over an anti-tank mine or sit still long enough for a satchel charge or sticky bomb to be placed, or corrected artillery fire to be brought in.

Tank armor had just gotten good enough that any non-specialized direct fire weapon wasn’t going to defeat its nearly impenetrable armor.

The Finnish “Molotov cocktail”, perfected mechanisms found in earlier petrol bombs and overcame this by doing the opposite.

This may be stating the obvious, but the Molotov cocktail is a Hand Thrown, Non-Explosive, Liquid Incendiary Weapon.

We’re used to it now… and it is so simple it probably wasn’t even noted at the time, but every individual part of how the molotov cocktail is delivered, “detonated”, overcomes armor, and delivers its damage is weird, archaic, and non-standard.

Throwing is a primordial holdover still used in grenades and almost no other weapon system… Physical force glass breaking is basically only used as a trigger mechanism in improvised weapons, basic booby-traps, or exotic or cheap security systems… Likewise the exposed flame priming, literally “lighting a fuse” like early grenades and dynamite sticks is not used in any other modern weapon.

And the liquid petroleum payload is of course the oddest part of it… Unlike gellatinized napalm mixtures that “Sticks to kids”, or even early Greek fire used by the Byzantines, the goal of early petrol bombs and the final molotov cocktail… was NOT to stick, but rather to flow and leak and seep into hatches, vents, and other nooks and crannies of ww2 era tanks, Ideally burning those inside or burning out and overheating vital bits of the tank.

The problem of armor penetration was not so much solved as circumvented. And while the Cocktail was certainly not superior to a dedicated antitank-gun or later a Panzerfaust… The ease of logistics in producing them gave them a ready place on the battlefield, and later the streets of endless protest actions and in the bags of endless arsonists.

Molotov Cocktails were so effective against WW2 era tanks and armored Vehicles that even dedicated US Infantry Tank hunters were taught to use Molotov Cocktails as one of the main tools in their arsenal:

However… As anti-armor weapons? Molotov Cocktails don’t work anymore.

Even extremely light armored personnel carriers now are designed immediately and directly to prevent mere burning liquid from posing a threat to the occupants… Indeed most armored vehicles are designed with the tacit knowledge that the most likely application they’re ever going to see is crowd control against pissed off civilians and are largely designed with this in mind.

Forget Main-BattleTanks, your local police-force’s BearCat is designed specifically to resist multiple conventional Molotov cocktails even though a pre-WW2 antitank guns would almost certainly defeat it.

The Finnish liquid armor avoider simply doesn’t work anymore.

You can’t defeat a modern (or even 1950s) tank with just a bottle of liquid petroleum.

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But… What if you could defeat it with something else?

What if using other odd chemical properties we were able to create NEW models of hand-thrown antitank Cocktails that you could store and ignite with the breaking of a bottle?

This my friends is the CatGirl Cocktail Hour! Where we will show YOU how to defeat a Tank Platoon (in theory) with common garbage around you house, standard handyman resourcefulness not rising to the level of a bombmaker, or 14 year old home chemist, and just a little Imagination 😽🌈.

NOTE: What follows is a Theoretical Demonstration, a fictional scenario/set of scenarios to demonstrate the principles of the core concepts, which will require some SUSPENSION OF DISBELIEF for the purposes of more fully highlighting the concept and the logic.

If any of you actually try to take on a modern conventional Main BattleTank using only these tactics then you are either very stupid or very desperate, and can expect something like 75% fatalities in the unlikely event that you somehow miraculously win.

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Just Like A SciFi Story! Sorta… not Exactly

Now if you are a True Gamer or SciFi Fan, you might already have an idea of what just such a thrown weapon vs. a Tank might be…

Every SciFi series has them: The MeltaBomb™… Or whatever non-trademarked name you give them in your knockoff SciFi Series.

The Meltabomb (or your cheap knockoff) uses some extreme heat reaction, fusion bullshit, Chaos Magic, Ultra-preassurized something, plasma what-have-you to produce heats so extreme they’re sufficient to melt solid hardened magic dwarven space-metals and Force Fields, and even elite-level Alien Big-Bug biological exoskeletons that are somehow even tougher.

The Actual Mechanics are bullshit.

For example this description specifies that it is a “Sub-molecular reaction” (So like Atomic Fission? A Nuclear Reaction?) in a “highly pressurized” environment (so like Pressurized methane?) Of a “Pyrum-Petroleum Fuel Mix” (Pyrum is Latin for “Pear” like the fruit. I assume a fake scifi mix).

There’s a reason the reaction is so bullshit they can’t even define if it is a petroleum combustion, complex pressure thing, or an atomic reaction… Or whether it is more analogous to the Emperor’s Wrath or the Judeo-Christian Lucifer (I hope one of you nerds can tell us how Lucifer fits into 40k lore), and the reason for all this bullshit is that achieving enough heat to rapidly and explosively MELT Hardened Steel, let alone Hardened Robot SpaceWizard Steel and Force/Warp Fields that are supposed to be even harder than that… is very hard to do.

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Steel is hard to melt. Even with dedicated arc welders and thermic lances you can generally only melt little segments with work and sustained heating unless you have a blast furnace and full on metal works.

As 9/11 fans and Bin Laden defenders will tell you, Jet Fuel cannot melt steel beams.

Whether one wants to quibble about the temperatures at which steel loses structural integrity… It is simply true that the hottest petroleum products get to 1030c (1890 F) in the open air (it gets to 2230c in a spinning jet-turbine, but you need to be mixing air at roughly 10,000 rpm to achieve that), whereas Steel does not melt until 1370-1530c (depending on alloy).

Thus many 9/11 conspiracy theorists posit the Twin Towers were brought down not via jet planes… But preplaced Thermite Charges already on the steel beams (Look Up E-Team, Larry Silverstein, and Dancing Israelis).

Yes THERMITE! The Stuff from Breaking Bad and Mythbusters, and basically every Youtube Channel under the sun.

This is one of the Internet and Television’s favorite non-explosive pyrotechnics because:

A) it’s not an explosive and is regulated differently depending on your jurisdiction (so its way easier and legally much safer to put in your Youtube video)

B) The ingredients (raw Aluminum powder and Iron Oxide powder (rust) can be ordered off Amazon with a simple credit card really cheaply

C)The reaction itself is kinda hard to start and relatively safe as long as you light it outside and don’t get it on you.

D) It looks, and is, REALLY Freaking cool

Thermite Burns up to 2500c or even 2800c in certain compressed ultra-dense special made variants (which we will not be discussing, but someone might want to research)… More than enough to melt steal beams, that one lock in Breaking Bad, flower pots on Youtube, and even weld Railway links together.

Fe₂O₃ + 2 Al → 2 Fe + Al₂O_{3
Iron Oxide (rust) + Aluminum —> Iron + Aluminum Oxide (aluminum slag rust)}

You see the burning reaction produces tons of heat because it is an already hot metal reaction which produces no gas byproduct to take the heat energy away from the hot metal, or draw in cool gas to interact with the reaction.. Unlike a wood fire, or petroleum fire, or conventional explosion (high or low explosive) no gas is given off in the core reaction (it burning and reacting with other things will produce gas, but a truly perfect thermite reaction would generate no gas at all) this means nothing is taking heat away from the reaction except for things outside it coming into immediate contact. It also has all the oxygen innate to the reaction, so it is basically impossible to smother once it gets going… you can only spread it more thinly or remove fuel before it can become part of the reaction… You can’t cut off the oxygen supply (assuming the two powders are mixed evenly) since all the oxygen is already IN the fuel, the oxygen is just going from the Iron molecule to the aluminum molecule next to it.

Pay attention to the thermite reaction in this Railtrack welding job… They do lots of prep work and they have to hack off their steel jig and cut it down, but the simple thermite reaction really does most of the work.

Even the division of the raw iron weld from the Aluminum slag that’s formed is done by the hot liquid thermite itself. Iron is heavier than Aluminum Oxide so it sinks, thus the brittle Aluminum slag pours out the side where you can see them taking it off with shovels, whereas the hot molten Iron goes immediately downwards into the other metal…

presumably you’d think if you put this on a tank, by say throwing a lot of thermite on it the same effect would bring the hot metal melting liquid iron down onto the Tank Armor… Right?

Naively you’d think this would be the perfect tool to Cut into tank armor? Right?

Wrong!

While in principle Thermite can and does melt steel, the quantities required are all wrong.

Take a look at the video of the train weld again… You notice at the start how they’re Using a propane torch on the jig and the tracks? They’re doing that because METAL CONDUCTS HEAT.

The first thing that happens when hot molten metal comes in contact with a solid piece of metal is all the heat that goes into it gets conducted into the rest of the metal.

They’re preheating the train tracks and jig to hundreds of degrees in temperature so that the hot thermite slag doesn’t just immediately harden ON to the jig and the tracks.

Even a very thin amount of steel can stop thermite from melting through as long as there is sufficient metal attached to it to conduct the heat away.

Without a disproportionately large amount of thermite relative to the steal, or really aggressive pre-heating, you just are not going to melt much if any steal…

You can see this man used a really heroic amount of thermite shaped in a flowerpot on a 1 inch thick steel plate, and he only got about 3/8th of an inch into it…

So then is Thermite useless for attacking a tank? Afterall you’re never going to get enough of it even if you brought a carload that the Tank couldn’t easily conduct away into the rest of its metal… So much for that idea.

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No It’s the perfect antitank weapon.

You just have to think like those Finns in 1940 and not like a Space Marine.

A Tank (or other armored vehicle) Does 4 Things:

1. A Tank Moves,

2. A Tank sees things through various optics

3. A Tank shoots it’s weapons systems

4. A Tank keeps its occupants alive

All four of these can be crippled by really small amounts of thermite getting on the tank.

1. A Tank Moves

The Tracks of a Tank are it’s Achilles heel. Here the 600 millimeters (60 cm, 2 feet) of effective armor the tank has are reduced down to mere 5-20 millimeter pins.

These pins are under extraordinary forces and pressures for the tank to move engine turns the drive sproket, and then ever wheel, contact surface, and the entire weight of the tank are all moved via tension on the track. Similar to the chain on a bike or motorcycle, but if the chain had to loop around the outside of the tire and be the contact surface of the tire in addition to the drive force.

Beyond this tanks have TWO treads and zero steering tire. The way tanks turn is by running one tread faster, and one tread slower… And sometimes they even turn in place by running one tread forward, and one tread backwards. Again modern tanks are 50 tons, and there is no inbuilt steering or angling to this. All 50 tons of the tank are turning based sheerly off the lateral tension formed between the two tracks pulling in different directions. RIPPING the contact surface of the tread out of it’s 50 ton contact with the hard ground.

All of this exerts unimaginable pressure on the small steel pins within the tread, which themselves need to be internally lubed and checked regularly lest they overheat and rip and the tank lose it tracks becoming as dead in the water as a bicycle that simultaneously lost it’s chain and tire at once.

So what happens to the treads when you flash-weld the pins, contact plates, and lube together… Whilst dumping newly formed molten hardening steel into the narrow space between where the pins and plates need to glide freely?

It rips itself apart.

Remember Steel melts at 1500 degrees, and thermite burns at 2500 degrees. Which means the specific actual temperatures that hardened and forged and shaped the specific super-hard alloy they use in the pins of tank treads is probably somewhere between 700-1300 degrees. All the complex metallurgical bonds, galvanic hardening, specific machine-hammered smith-work that separates hardened steel tank treads and pins from super-soft steel alloys like your limp bendy stainless steel butter-knife (both made of Iron)… All those complex metallurgical bonds break down well before the steel itself melts, as low as 700-800, maybe 500 degrees… That super expensive government contract military alloy is being turned back into a soft Iron-Slag that can’t stand up to the forces of a tank tread and certainly not after its been welded together in it’s bushing.

Remember Thermite is already used to weld Railway tracks together so solidly that 20,000 ton (not a typo) Trains can roll over them safely without the bond breaking even on winding non-linear mountain tracks. Those tank tracks aren’t rolling smoothly after that… They’ll either bind solid or rip apart.

So the soldiers inside the tank, if they ever want to move again, will have to repair/replace the Tread… Or abandon the tank (in combat this is a common “Bail-out” reason… Mobility killed tanks are just sitting targets waiting to die)

Btw this is what repairing/replacing a Track looks like:

Yes.. This does make them sitting ducks and easy targets to rifle fire, artillery, follow on strikes, etc. Thus why it’s common for tankers to just abandon a mobility killed tank.

So if you only had a suitable delivery vehicle, thermite would indeed be an almost perfect weapon for disabling tanks… Not because it penetrates the armor… But because it doesn’t have to.

The clever resistor doesn’t have to make Meltabombs… but rather:

The CatGirl Melta-tini™

Legal Disclaimer: Note this is NOT an explosive. No element of this undergoes explosive reaction or even deflagration, rather this is a series of open-air combustion reactions and exothermic reduction-oxidization reactions which cannot even hypothetically be used to produce shrapnel or concussive explosive damage.

In theory (not legal advice) depending on the jurisdiction, it is in the same legal category as camping fire-starters and diagrams for how to build a campfire, maintain gas motors, metalurgical chemical welding equipment, and other examples of multi-element complex combustions used throughout hobbies and industry.

The “Sparkler” refers to a common off the shelf recreational children’s or metalurgical generic “sparkler” used to produce a high ignition temprature, which are to be chemically unaltered and whose chemical compositions are sortof black boxes depending on manufacturer… These have various proprietary compsition mixtures to them, so if your local maker uses a deflagrating composition instead of exothermic reduction-oxidization then the above image is not representing that, a deflagrating sparkler might behave the same or differently.

Likewise we advise against EVER creating any incendiary device… including camp fires (People fall into camp fires. They’re dangerous. This one time at PorkFest in New Hampshire a guy lost his junk after drunkenly falling into the campfire).

Remember The Purpose of this piece is to predict the future of warfare, hypothesize future weapon systems (much as many Military Magazines draw diagrams of hypothetical hovertanks, “vaccum bombs”, “Stealth Rifles”, “Plasma weapons”, etc.) Then Properly anticipate and advise the skilled military personnel who read this blog… And in the process horrifically deface the future of all Military History by CatGirl-Branding everything that hasn’t yet been safely named.

The CatGirl Melta-tini!

--Initiate Theme Song--

Soon to be the backbone of low-resource unconventional AntiArmor-Warfare everywhere, (or atleast every fictional universe not served by lasers).

Now this might look like Complete Chaos… And there’s a Reason for that.

Thermite is hard to light… Or at-least that’s the common perception.

The truth is…

WARNING: If you use a ball-mill to mill Aluminum powder, it can quickly get to a fineness where it is DANGEROUSLY reactive, at which it forms a vaccum seal from devouring the limited oxygen sealed within the mill, and becomes liable to combust unpredictably at mere exposure to open air (and fresh oxygen) when the container is unsealed and the vacuum broken by the sudden influx of oxygenated air… if safety protocols are not followed properly.

It will literally just ignite to a face-melting 2000 degree dust “explosion” (this is a misnomer)… For no reason.

This is beyond the dangers of handling fine aluminum dusts to begin with which when breathed in sufficient quantities can result in immediate death via irritation, damage, and release of fluids into the lung… Drowning in your own lungs… or over less severe exposure long term lung damage, and neurological damage resulting in reduced intelligence, reduced neurological measurements, and Alzeimer’s.

The Truth is there is a reason I’m not going to go into the actual process of making effective Thermite here. despite its seeming complete simplicity, any combatant who actually does it, or has to develop a logistical chain to convert scrap aluminum from foil, Pop-Cans, harvested bikes and other sources, etc. should be researching multiple sources and developing a very paranoid safety protocol involving timers, respirators, separate facilities, fire containment (you won’t suppress a 2000 degree flame), welding safety equipment, etc. for how to mill it down to a fine powder with air control, sealed rooms, fineness thresholds, etc. to avoid risking long term fine dust exposure, or a spontaneous metal fire rapidly burning comrades and buildings to the ground.

Safety protocols I cannot give you.

Here is a video on the matter from a youtuber/pyrotechnical hobbyist. Note: almost certainly research it more than this. This should be your “Wow! that’s obscenely dangerous” video not your “I know how to do it now” video:

However the reason the Melta-Tini is SO complex, is because most fighters who would ever hypothetically use it are probably not going to do that (or do it poorly) and wind up with a “safer” coarse Thermite mixture that’s really hard to light. (like the common perception)

Now consider that the idea is to throw this and have it break at random, and fly over a large object with sharp angled metal… And there is an EXTREME risk that large amounts of the thermite is just going to get thrown aside and sit inertly on the ground…never igniting.

Given it would take many multiple Melta-tinis to disable a Tank, this wasted fuel would quickly add up to 20-50% or even a majority of the thrown fuel NOT IGNITING.

Beyond this the weather conditions in war always find a way to screw with you… Thus tons of redundancy is built in so that it should work in Arctic conditions (some of the gasoline will freeze below -40… but most of it will stay liquid… Might create an odd dispersal pattern) it should still ignite in monsoon season, and basically all other conditions.

So extreme, really quite comical, overkill and redundancy in ignition mechanisms are needed.

I will now break down the hypothetical ignition steps and logic:

External igniter:

I hate the traditional modes that Molotov cocktails ignite. I’ve seen lots of videos online of people going to throw a Molotov and splashing themselves with burning gasoline that sloshed out through the burning cloth. Likewise the “Self-igniting” Molotovs you see the Finns and Militaries use with Storm-Matches taped to match strike faces, or segments of flint taped to coarse steel… Strike me as accidents waiting to happen. They’re a good booby-trap design or makeshift warheads/droppable grenades for drones, but I wouldn’t want my untrained volunteers running around with cases full of live booby-traps and armed warheads.

I imagine sleep deprived soldiers moving several dozen Molotovs in Bottle-cases into fighting positions and disguised buildings which have had dozens of man hours poured into hardening into proper fighting positions, only for one of the Molotovs to get dropped, auto-ignite, and then set off the rest with half a platoon in the building.

Instead My design incorporates an inextinguishable and wind-supercharged, external igniter… But inside a design which if someone dropped it unignited “SHOULD” just become a mess of gasoline covered metal-sludge on the floor to be cleaned up.

The Igniter

1. Sparklers 🎇: The External sparklers are first ignited with a lighter. Yes just like kids at summer barbeques. These little party toys are actually staples of the metal industry because they burn at over 1000c. This is why little Sally can’t make it go out no matter how fast she swishes it through the air and why every year several children endure really quite horrific burns from contacting the hot element. The complex mixed metal/oxidizer mixture is PERFECT for burning hot enough to start metal fires, being inextinguishable, and burning at predictable timed rates (these are also perfect for 5-60 second timed fused, as long as you insulate the thing you’re igniting from sparks). This is the first thing you’d ignite.

2. Steel Wool: Even ultrafine steel wool burns very poorly because the dense steel consumes the oxygen around it so quickly. Once the Sparklers are ignited they’ll burn the steel wool… but Steel fires are almost impossible to maintain, without a direct forced oxygen source (such as in forced-oxygen thermic lances, which are shockingly easy (but dangerous) to make)… The exception is if it’s flying through the air… Then it has all the oxygen it needs, and it burns and casts tons of sparks around at about 700 degrees Celsius. This not only makes the flame even more windproof, but guarantees that at-least one of those hot metal sparks will ignite all sections of the cocktail, even if it hits a sharp metal corner or a post which might quickly sheer and cut the fuel payload in half.

3. The Cardboard or other insulator: Because the sparklers burn at 1000 DEGREES, they will almost certainly quickly crack the glass of the bottle if left burning next to it. Ideally an operator is going to throw the Melta-tini quickly after igniting… but suitably thick insulator for the glass provides a lot of additional safety to the operator.

4. Duct-tape: Given how fool-proof the igniter is the last way it could fail is if it flies off the cocktail before the bottle breaks… thus it must be secured firmly.

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   The Fuel Payload

5. The Gasoline/other liquid fuel: Once the bottle breaks the sparks from the igniter ignite the liquid fuel part of the payload, igniting everything evenly instantly. The liquid gasoline part of the payload permeates the rest of the payload (the thermite, the soap shavings, the steel wool, the Little Baggies of Magnesium, the sparklers). it takes up all the empty parts giving you more heat and energy for the same bottle space, and Guarantees an immediate ignition of the full payload evenly… However it permeates EVERYTHING… so….

6. Soap Shaving/ or other thickeners (melted styrofoam,tallow, butter, motor-oil, dried orangejuice concentrate, etc.): “Napalm” and other thickened/gelatinized gasoline mixtures are a staple of molotov cocktails and incendiary warfare… Some of these theoretically produce higher heats, or extend the burn-time at lower temperatures… but the real goal is simply to change the texture of the mixture from a thin liquid that flows off surfaces and burns uselessly on the ground to a gel that “sticks to kids”… and vehicles, and legitimate targets… Likewise the purpose of the soap (or whatever) is to ideally produce a gel texture when mixed with the liquid fuel that will cause the still cool thermite/sparkler/steel wool/magnesium sludge to bind together and stick to the metal surfaces of the Armored vehicle when throw instead of simply sliding off and scattering. (I have no idea what the specific additive or mix would be to achieve that, again this is a hypothetical weapon system… Cupcake scented soap is included in the example because it smells nice.)

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   However this also has the advantage of including a slower burning and dirtier element to the gas/hydro-carbon mix… This means that when the thermite gets going it will superheat the unburnt fuel and mix causing small violent and sudden release of gas… This will cause molten thermite to spit and scatter like ice cubes in a deep fryer or water in a burning frying pan… Now this is HIGHLY dangerous to anyone near the tank, (such as anyone trying to throw Melta-tinis)… But it’s also radically increased the chance of thermite sparks and droplets landing on the glass viewports, Optical Devices, ammunition and moving parts of externally mounted machineguns, explosive reactive armor, and all the sensitive bits of the tank. The more the poor desperate fighter is risking molten thermite splashing in their eyes, the more likely it is to get in the tank’s eyes.

   Obviously don’t try this at home.
   
   Also look into Copper Thermite.

Optional Hypothetical Pathway 7A: Steel-Wool (mixed in the payload)
Steel wool AGAIN does not reliably burn whilst sitting still, but once the bottle breaks on contact, the additional steel-wool in the bottle can ignite and get to 700c very quickly before the payload comes to rest… This give you an increased chance to get sparks igniting small amounts of thermite that sheer off into small odd vulnerable places that stick out like weapons barrels, exposed Ammunition of secondary weapons, open hatches and bolts assemblies, optics… Etc.

Optional Hypothetical Pathway 7B: Smaller Sparklers

Another optional hypothetical… these small segments provide another fast igniting pathway to get the hard to ignite thermite up to temperature letting the liquid gassoline fire ignite them in whatever sheered off clump they wind up in after the bottle impacts, then they ignite the thermite.

Optional Hypothetical Pathway7C: Magnesium Powder Baggies
Magnesium strips are the standard way to ignite thermite and metal in lab and other settings, and magnesium bars are sold in camping stores specifically so campers can generate fast igniting magnesium powder to start fires. These little baggies provide another available pathway to get from the gassoline fire to the thermite fire.

8. The Thermite

   Once ignited reliably enough the thermite will burn all other thermite it is contact with, or any other thermite that is added to it over subsequent bottle throws.

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The Heel of Achilles, and Other Soft Bits

All of the above should be sufficient to weld the pins and treads of the tank’s tracks, degalvanize the steel, and when the tank moves make them rip themselves apart. Stranding the beast.

However tanks and armored vehicles have many other soft bits that can be burnt away in a 2500 degree mini-sun.

The explosive reactive armor of modern tanks for example are almost all composed of modern high explosives that are detonated by highly safe and secure detonator electrical systems. Most modern high explosive will often not even detonate from fire or temprature alone, requiring instead the impact of hyper-sonic detonation to break their thick molecular bonds… This actually helps the tank-hunter since if the tank hunter can get the explosive reactive armor burning with your Meltatini, there’s a good chance (stand clear) that it’s NOT going to detonate spraying it’s energy outwards, but instead combust in a chemical fire starting a massive fire on top of the tank and burning all the other explosive reactive armor, the lights, the sighting systems, the ammunition in the exposed machine guns…

Because tanks are built with Armor and penetration as the main concern, this risk is highly dangerous.

Now BattleTanks do have built in fire suppression systems, notably Halon and Other Chemical fire supression, sometimes compresses CO2 systems… The systems vary.

But remember the Thermite Reaction:

Fe2O3 + 2 Al → 2 Fe + Al2O3

Iron Oxide (rust) + Aluminum —> Iron + Aluminum Oxide (aluminum slag rust)

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There’s no way to suppress this. The Chemical reaction isn’t drawning gas from anywhere else, the oxygen atoms are just crossing from the IronOxide to the Aluminum.

Combine that with the 2500 degree heat, and the supression systems are basically useless.

This means there’s nothing to prevent you blinding the tank by burning it’s core fighting systems:

2. The Tank Sees through it’s Optics, and 3. it Shoots it’s Weapons Systems

While I’m certain The Adeptus Mechanicus will eventually develop a means to actually melt THROUGH Tank Armor… In the Meantimes the cutting edge of CatGirl Warfare™😻 is ADDITIVE Melta-Weaponry.

YOU DON’T HAVE TO MELT THROUGH THE ARMOR. Flat thick metal slates do nothing.

Everything that makes a Tank function comes from More delicate pieces of equipment that Have to LEAVE the protective shell of the armor, just like all the little bits that make an insect function are located OUTSIDE it’s protective exoskeleton.

Tanks are actually really complex and delicate pieces of equipment… the main thing that protects them is not their armor, but their armaments… Given the equipment your standard American “Fudd” has in their Gun Safe and Garage, you could destroy a tank irreparably 10 different ways in about 5-10 minutes if you knew what you were doing…

The Thing is you’d never get a chance to if it were in operation, because you’d be ripped apart by its main gun, coaxial machine gun, top machinegun, grenade launchers, flamethrowers, explosive reactive armor, other oddities, and if you were right in close… The Tank is faster than anyone on foot and could just spin its treads to try and run you over or catch you in the treads and rip you apart.

Its not that Tanks are unkillable… you can look up videos online on how to do enough damage, even with simple rifles, to take one off the battlefield if you ever have a clear sightline, suppressed rifle, it’s unoccupied, and no one’s paying attention.… But you’d never get to do that on the battlefield because they’re tougher, stronger, faster, and even if you inflict sufficient damage for a mission kill It’ll almost certainly have free weapons left to kill you for your trouble….

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this is where quickly blinding the tank becomes vital.

Underappreciated about even conventional Molotov cocktails, is how intuitively understandable their physics are, and thus how easy it is to improve indirect-fire launchers for them.

Making your own Mortars is a nightmare, but fashioning a bottle launcher from slingshot tubing, or a crossbow, makeshift mini-trebuchet, or even just a stick (like a primitive rock thrower or atlatl) is actually fairly trivial for the average hoodlum/soldier to get to 50meters to even a few hundred meters of effective arcing indirect fire range.

This means that if you test and range your homebrew launcher properly, and employ spotters, you can land arc-ing indirect fire molotovs, Meltatinis, and other strikes on armored vehicles from positions in hilly, forested, or urban where their direct-fire weapons cannot see you.

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So What happens when lots of 2500-Celsius Thermite lands on top of a tank?

Well… Glass melts at 1400-1600 degrees Celsius.

All the optics, view ports, ranging devices, backup ranging devices, cameras? All of those are not only getting choked up with Iron-Aluminum slag, their very lenses and sensors are themselves melting… If they get hit.

This of course would require a large volume of Melta-Fire to get on the tank to disable all it’s viewing and ranging options… But if you get the mobility kill with thermite on the tracks either because of a brave thrower or a clever angle of ambush with one of your launchers… then the Tank’s a sitting duck to just have more indirect fire dumped on in carving out its various eyes and options to fire.

Likewise many of a Tank’s secondary weapons, beyond it’s main Gun and Coaxial machinegun Are either Man-operated by gunners sticking their heads out of their hatches to manually manipulate the guns, or they’re operated by delicate motors and cameras remotely from within the vehicle.

In either case thermite getting near the secondary guns, despite the chance to just destroy them or cook off their ammo, risk frying those cameras and motors, and at 2500 degrees, is hazardous enough no one’s poking their head up and risking getting it on them in an attempt to work that gun with the hand controls.

Beyond this you might cripple the tank’s main-turret’s ability to turn if thermite gets in the turret ring and literally welds it to the main body of the tank.

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4. A tank keeps its Occupants Alive

In Case you haven’t guessed already, I don’t like tanks.

They insist upon themselves.

They ruined warfare.

It used to be there was a phrase, sometimes attributed to Napoleon:

Tanks Ruined Cavalry!

How can you be “the brave” when you’re wrapped in 600mm of effective armor?

Tanks are the force, along with Airstrikes, that stripped the virtue out of warfare and made it “Pay to win”, and hell probably brought about the decline of western masculinity.

It used to be the tougher braver, smarter son-of-a-bitch won… Now its whoever is attached to the best bonds-market.

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But this is where virtue gets its revenge. Where Toughness, intelligence, and almost suicidal bravery finally beats the lumbering Military industrial Pork Barrel.

The final way to defeat the tanker isn’t cutting through their armor with superior money and industrial logistics…

But turning their own armor against them.

The Net Heat Kill

Remember how Thermite can’t defeat tank armor? The cumulative 50 tons of metal all conspire to conduct the heat away from the hot spot where the little splotch of thermite might get through? This is the double-side of that sword.

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As any motorcyclist in a traffic-jam can tell you, the weakness of any motorized vehicle is HEAT.

That 50 ton tank is already with it’s engine running Dangerously hot relative to what a person would be conmfortable dealing with.

Israel had a massive problem with this.

The Merkava Tanks have a recurring problem with their Air-Conditioning units failing, which beneath the blistering desert sun in the midsummer heat of the Mediterranean right next to a MASSIVE tank engine isn’t the funny “awe poor baby” story you might think, but a major problem.

Their crew compartments were getting up to 50 degrees (122 Farenheit) with the actual core engine and other systems already being much hotter…

This of course crippled a lot of their operating tempo, and safety as the crews could no longer operate buttoned up with their hatches closed, but instead need to keep them open with the additional vulnerability to grenades and drones.

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So lets imagine you’ve crippled the tracks by Themitically welding the pins together, and you’ve blinded it by melting it’s optics and view ports…

You can translate that into a kill, or force the occupants to bail out by just hitting them more.

Theoretically this is possible with the meltatinis: a 1kg bottle of thermite will heat 2500 kgs of steel about 1 degree. So every 20 bottles you raise the temperature of a 50 ton tank 1 degree.

Not logistically impossible by any means ( your ingredients are used pop cans and rust) But that’s rather inefficient once you’ve got it dead in the water.

Alternatively ordinary petroleum or rubber tires can be placed under the disabled tank to cook it out in much the same manner that a small camping stove will boil an entire pot. Forcing the tankers to bail out and surrender. And starting the burning of paint, components, and all other parts of the vehicle (stand clear incase the fuel or ammo compartment go)

Rubber Tires are obscenely energy dense (they’re solidified compressed heavy petroleum) the smallest passenger car tire burns about 30 minutes, truck tires, or multiple tires will burn for hours.

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Once you get a mobility and weapons kill on a tank, if you have no heavy weapons, this is the cheapest quickest way to kill the vehicle and prevent it being recovered by the enemy.

Remember an abandoned tank or armored vehicle, even if unrecoverably damaged, is a goldmine of spare parts to be cannibalized by enemy forces if they can recover them.

Main BattleTanks cost 3-20 million dollars. And many lighter armored vehicles are awkwardly not that much cheaper.

For a few minutes and about $50 in scrap tires… You could deny your enemy millions of dollars in recoverable parts.

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In Conclusion:
Is Any of This at all Realistic?

While I have many other ideas to include as part of subsequent “CatGirl Cocktail Hours”… I will end off here, pointing out… This is basically suicide.

Whilst used as indirect fire, dropper munitions for quadcopter drones, or improvised sabotage charges… “Meltatinis” would almost certainly do incredible damage and could cripple a tank.

In all but the most perfectly plotted ambush this complex multi-stage stripping away of capabilities would take many minutes to get to a true kill of combat capabilities, whereas the tank need merely turn it’s heavy guns line them up in 2-4 seconds and rip apart trees, terrain, buildings, and the air itself with deafening and consciousness destroying heavy fire, even if the rounds do not find the guerrillas to scatter their innards across several football fields.

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However the history of warfare is NOT driven by what is “realistic” but rather what is possible.

In this scene after days of bare survival lost in the blistering heat of Afghanistan hunted by an invisible enemy, a soviet tank crew has an encounter with the Mujahideen fighting hunting them at the exact worse moment, low on ammo, with the tank’s engine seized, and the battery drained.

A favorite parable story for both Tankers and Guerrilla warfare enthusiasts Is the film “The Beast of War”.

The Plot is not “Realistic”, the story of a lost Russian tank running out of supplies and the even worse equipped Mujahadeen desperately chasing it with no idea how they’re going to kill it runs through tons of coincidence, happenstance, etc.

Yet the story is beloved by tankers and subject matter experts especially because of the incredible technical realism, and the almost mythical parables and stories of extremity highlighting and exploring principles and concepts in the most rewarding way.

Sure all of this happening to one crew is incredibly unlikely… but almost all tankers or tank hunters at some point encounter some finicky, technical, and archetypal struggle resembling the film’s mythical hyperreality… And watching it all play out to the most extreme drawn out endgame makes one of the greatest treats of War Cinema.

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Likewise, the above hypothetical of a lone guerrilla faction, or cut off unit deprived of every heavy weapon and antitank tool, taking out a main battle-tank with nothing but garbage, a large number pop-cans, and a number of shredded tires… Isn’t realistic, but it highlights a lot of the dynamics.

In a normal engagement such a force would go after lighter armored vehicles or positions, or employ Meltatinis to augment or follow-up after employing regular explosive heavy weapons which they might have in smaller numbers, or limited capability.

But against lighter targets like Wheeled Vehicles or smaller infantry fighting vehicles… A very few Individual Meltatinis fired indirectly, employed in booby traps, or quickly thrown in ambush before running probably could cripple the vehicle.

Wheeled vehicles especially run the risk that their own massive tires could be easily set alight by the 2500 degree thermite getting on and in them, blowout immediately… And then have a potentially inextinguishable vehicle fire on the scale of the tires you’d use to cook off a disabled tank. Indeed in driving away once the fire is notice the unextinguishable molten metal would get on and in the redundant other tires driving over it.

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Likewise anywhere enemy chemical and compressed-gas fire-suppression systems needs to be overcome such as ships, datacenters, etc. Thermitic weapons immediately recommend themselves since their flame will remain unaffected whilst the chemicals and compresses gas disperses, allowing the suppressed onsite fuel to reignite… In much the same manner that trick candles incorporating a fine steel core to their wick cannot be extinguished. Likewise they recommend themselves to igniting hardened or otherwise inert targets that aren’t conventionally considered flammable, or which are designed to resist such ignition.

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However again this is all speculation.

Whilst I’m very convinced of the physics, chemical properties, and tactical/technical logic I’ve laid out here… This remains as speculative and science fiction as those laser-tank diagrams in Popular Mechanics Magazine.

I’ve never made one of these (that would be illegal where I am), and unless you are a responsible EOD/Pyrotechnics expert with the appropriate licensing, registration, and tax stamps… Oh and actual certified chemical safety expertise to do so without risking life, limb, and brain exposure to Aluminum dust… (in which case, it would make a cool Youtube Video if you can legally and responcibly do so).

I cannot emphasize enough that this should not be attempted or contemplated, and that this in no way represents actionable instructions on how to create something like this, and certainly not safety instructions on how to do so without almost certain injury or death.

Instead this is put out there is a speculative weapon system for my (often shockingly) knowledgeable and expert military, law enforcement, and combat veteran readership to commentate on and to be aware of the possibility of.

I know I’m read by at least a few former Special Forces and actual Tank-Operators from various militaries who will be keenly interested in the possibility, risk, and opportunity that such a concept represents.

Please do share your thoughts. And checkout my other speculative warfare pieces:

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[For email subscribers: my dearest apologies for the duplicate email. Major domain problems erupted at the same time I first published this piece, and I have no idea if the first was received or if any of the links, visuals, etc. for the first worked, if it was received]

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How do you organize people?

I’ve Tackled the topic of Dissident organization before with my deep dive in to how the left and the Regime actually organize: Can you Organize Your Way Out of Tyrrany? And I’ve deep dived why traditional conservatism and Libertarianism fails to reflect political reality in The Goyslop Ideology: The Lie of Libertarianism, and I’ve vehemently defended the roles of Discrimination and Fanatical Rage as core organizing forces in Discrimination is a Right and Cry Havoc and Bray for Blood: On the Importance of Womanly Screeching.

But how do you actually organize people?

Specifically how do you organize people to work and fight together, to identify with a team, an ethnicity, an organization… To the point where they will gladly incur major costs, exert extraordinary effort, risk their reputations and fortunes, and even kill and die for it, above and beyond any reasonable expectation of timely compensation?

How do you get people to fight and die for a cause whose price and consequences are as immediate and inescapable as grapeshot or shrapnel artillery in an open field, and whose rewards are as tenuous, faint, and distant as a homeland for yourself and your relatives decades later? A happy childhood for your grandchildren? The esteem and reverence of your neighbors in old age?

When your nation is in poverty or shame and the utter LACK of rewards for Veterans, Patriotic Volunteers, and fanatical partisans is as plain and in your face as as the veteran beggar asking for change? (as indeed almost every nation has witnessed across the centuries)

How do you motivate people? how do you organize?

Well if you’re white, the answer hasn’t changed in 3000+ Years.

You erect idols. You practice literal idolatry.

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The First Masks of Command

Going back to the walls of Troy various divine symbols can be seen being used to rally troops.

In the Iliad these are rather unique… In the Iliad these ARE Gods. More specifically they appear to be people in costumes and masks.

Many people interpret this direct participation of the Gods in battles, that this is Homer’s magical thinking and an insight into the Psychology of Dark Ages Greece (the post bronze age dark ages, 1100bc-600bc)…

But if you read Homer it becomes very apparent that more is at play. The Gods give speeches to armies and ride chariots beside the kings, shouting encouragement and rallying troops and having a major effects on the crowd dynamics of the battle.

In case it isn’t obvious, psychological representations don’t move crowds of people at once… Your psychology is inner not outer, they don’t affect other people, at least not immediately. And while sometimes the Gods might represent inner thoughts: such as when Odysseus or Achilles are alone and contemplating when a God appears, or whispers in their ear at a choice moment that only they hear (which is a neat dramatic device, sorta like how Shakespeare uses monologues). That’s simply not how Gods behave in the battles of Homer… And no they don’t behave like embodiments of crowd momentum or the fury of fighting, or divine favor.

In Book 5, “Diomedes Fights the Gods” the Greek Hero Diomedes refuses to accept the Trojan Prince Aeneas escaping his fight with him, Diomedes press forward for the kill. At which the Love Goddess Aphrodite rushes out of the ranks of the Trojans to shield and assist Aeneas away with her shawl and other objects acting as distractions and cover… And Diomedes striking towards Aeneas cuts her with his spear. He cuts the divine perfect white flesh of beauty and love herself!

Does Diomedes pay a horrible price for shedding the blood of an immortal Goddess? Does Aphrodite smite him or curse him with some terrifying love-doom?Does this forever alter the very nature of beauty such all beautiful women spout scars in the very spot, which we now know as some incredibly sexy or disgusting universal feature of the female form? No she is just cut and cries out in pain… Like a person.

At which the other Trojans have time to intervene, and both Aeneas and Aphrodite successfully extract themselves.

Later in the same battle Ares God of War and Slaughter takes personal leadership of an offensive by the Trojans again the Greeks carving an opening and cutting down several soldiers…

At this Athena, Goddess of Cunning, War, and Wisdom admonishes the Greek leadership that they do not simply STAB the Deathless God of Merciless Slaughter, that spearing the very Divine Embodiment of bloodlust and slaughter was a seemingly trivial thing and that she was disgusted no one had done it already.

To this Diomedes replied, NOT that defeating the God of War himself in single combat seemed like a tall order for a mere mortal who wasn’t even the best in Greek army. But rather that he would and wanted to, except that he had always heard that it was bad luck and bad form to fight with or target the Gods on the battlefield, and this was common knowledge. King Agamemnon nodding beside him.

At this Athena catches herself in the midst of her excitement, and explains patiently that while they are certainly correct that NORMALLY one should not fight with the Gods or target them directly… and that USUALLY it is bad luck and ill form, and strongly looked down upon…

Ares himself has violated this elaborate etiquette, and so it was perfectly acceptable for Diomedes to spear the Immortal God of War… something none of the 3 of them doubted Diomedes could do quite easily.

So Diomedes does this. Rather trivially… At which Ares falls back immediately on the first hit, slain through the belly, and then magically appears immediately on a couch in Olympus, complaining his wound will take time to heal, where Zeus admonishes him for his poor behavior.

Does this broaden Diomedes reputation? That he can fight the Gods themselves and live? Not really… It is treated more as a cute story, remarkable in that Diomedes comes away with his reputation and esteem intact, NOT that this wildly improves others’ estimation of him as a fighter, that he can even take the God of War himself, and that they now need to reassess his skill relative to Ajax, Odysseus, and Achilles.

This is of course Mall-Santa logic.

Diomedes does not get cursed or lose his ability to fight forever, or get doomed to be the first of some horrifying perversity for assaulting Aphrodite and Ares, nor does he ascend and become the New God of War, and take Beauty herself as war plunder, having surpassed even Ares himself in the unstoppable strength of his war-making… and driven the perfect woman to whimpering flight.

In the same manner that in many American folk tales and films a drunken or disgraceful Mall-Santa, a guy in a costume, might initiate a shouting or insult match with a child… and neither the child, the audience, the parents, or the child’s friends might be over-concerned that this will impact the Child’s ever getting Christmas presents again, or that “Santa” being arrested for public drunkenness might cause Christmas to be cancelled.

They know it will have no such consequence, with it being funny or cute if an over-earnest child needed reassuring that everything was fine afterwards.

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In much the same manner that modern Americans conceive Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny or Elvis Impersonators or Disney Princesses in the Theme Park… A bad actor or poor player in the priestly garment might warrant censor and scorn, whereas a good actor might be equated with the magic of the figure such that the sentimental might not wonder that the true immortal magical figure hasn’t visited them. That your parents were maybe wed by the REAL immortal Elvis, the King of Rock and God of Graceland, in the clever disguise of an ordinary Elvis impersonator… that the wedding went so well.

Americans in the 20th century have even gone vastly further and started doing straight Greek Style theatrical productions of the Life of Jesus, with various nativity and passion plays now being a staple of American life.

Indeed we have several examples of the Actors playing the Gods being themselves named and praised for their conduct.

In book 13 of the Iliad the Greeks desperately defending from a Trojan assault against their very ships are assisted by Poseidon…

Poseidon’s entrance is described divinely and magically enough:

Wow he strode from A mountain in Samos across the Aegean sea to Aegea Port in FOUR STRIDES? He’s 200 miles tall!

What divine power is he about to unleash on the Greeks? How many Trojans are going to die to this Giant of Giants? What great assistance must he give the Greeks?

Well he gives them a pep talk:

That’s really disappointing and would, you’d think, be rather lame relative to that massive setup… But notice the specific line “Taking the build and tireless voice of Calchas”…

the bigger and slimmer Ajax comment on this:

Little Ajax (Oileus’ son) commentates that he can tell the person in the mask and outfit is clearly the form and voice of Calchas… but that the person before them has such divine authority about him and is saying so rightly what they must do, that it cannot be but the God Poseidon himself, in the guise of Calchas.

Unlike “Aphrodite” or “Ares” who fought for the Trojans, the Greeks can tell WHO is playing Poseidon… and because he does such a good job they have to play this word game where they really want to praise the individual priest for his heroic conduct in rallying the army at it’s lowest… but not break the spell by saying that it is not Poseidon.

A word game and praise that survived either from Troy, or some other battle whose episode Homer thought worth immortalizing and so incorporated into his Poem.

This speech by “Poseidon in the form of Calchas” sets off a chain of various figures and heroes rallying the forces of the Greeks against the Trojan onslaught, with the Ajaxes, Poseidon, and other leaders rallying the failing Greeks, such that they are able to repel the Trojans and save the ships.

Much as for thousands of years after individual drummer boys or flag bearers or Sergeant Majors or priests of various faiths and various symbolic leaders like Boudica or Jean D’Arc have been able to turn the course of battles by their individual displays of courage or the rallying effects of their voice… Calchas, or “Poseidon in the guise of Calchas” was able to save the Grecian Fleet.

Indeed long after this had stopped being a battlefield tactic to rally troops, we see such religious masks and acting in the Athenian theater and religious festivals, with Athena or other Gods closing out plays about vengeance or other intractable plots by being lowered into the theater on Great pully machines to resolve the story with a miracle… Not theatrically differently than how passion plays now end with Christ and others being lifted on the exact same theatrical wires into the sky.

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Indeed we have an example of the missing link between the two Greek traditions… An almost perfect snapshot of the Priests rallying soldiers on the field of battle being transformed into the later theatrical festival tradition.

In the Histories of Herodotus we have an almost perfect example of just such Godly costumes being used in military and political theater when the Athenian tyrant Peisistratos returned from his first exile employing a extraordinarily tall woman to play the role of Athena leading him back to Athens as it’s rightful ruler:

Thus Peisistratos had obtained possession of Athens for the first time, and thus he lost the power before he had it firmly rooted. But those who had driven out Peisistratos became afterwards at feud with one another again. And Megacles, harassed by the party strife, 69 sent a message to Peisistratos asking whether he was willing to have his daughter to wife on condition of becoming despot. And Peisistratos having accepted the proposal and made an agreement on these terms, they contrived with a view to his return a device the most simple by far, as I think, that ever was practised, considering at least that it was devised at a time when the Hellenic race had been long marked off from the Barbarian as more skilful and further removed from foolish simplicity, and among the Athenians who are accounted the first of the Hellenes in ability. 70 In the deme of Paiania there was a woman whose name was Phya, in height four cubits all but three fingers [5’11” stupendously tall for a woman in 550bc], 71 and also fair of form. This woman they dressed in full armour and caused her to ascend a chariot and showed her the bearing in which she might best beseem her part, 72 and so they drove to the city, having sent on heralds to run before them, who, when they arrived at the city, spoke that which had been commanded them, saying as follows: “O Athenians, receive with favour Peisistratos, whom Athene herself, honouring him most of all men, brings back to her Acropolis.” So the heralds went about hither and thither saying this, and straightway there came to the demes in the country round a report that Athene was bringing Peisistratos back, while at the same time the men of the city, persuaded that the woman was the very goddess herself, were paying worship to the human creature and receiving Peisistratos.

I cannot emphasize enough that this episode is found not only in Herodotus, but also Aristotle and Cleidemus (via other works referencing him)… This happened… despite the effort of many subsequent authorities to dismiss it.

Although contrary to the incredulity and outrage of Herodotus, Aristotle, and a good chunk of all the subsequent historical commentators to this day, “The Athenians fell for that!?”… This makes vastly more sense when you realize the Greeks have an extensive tradition of priests, seers, and other figures taking on the guises of Gods (or Gods taking on the guises of mortals) and using them as living symbols and banners in matters military and political. Pisistratus’ life occured almost exactly at the transition period of the rise of Hoplite warfare and the decline of this earlier Homeric mode of war and politics.

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Indeed such living banners and their dramatic morale effect, whether in the form of adolescent drummer boys, “Warrior Queens”, Crusader Priests, or Literal Bears and other animals, have cropped up again and again on the battlefield.

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The King’s Colours, Rise of the Eagles

While we can find many subsequent examples of living banners and the heroic morale effects such Gods, Boy Kings, Chaplains, Commissars, Berserkers, Sorcerers, and animal mascots are often able to draw from soldiers…

As command structures centralized into unified formalized and disciplined armies became the standard for militaries, and warlord bands like the Achaeans where a mid level commanders such as Achilles might refuse to fight over personality and honor clashes with a King became rarities on the battlefield…

Suddenly the symbolic morale effect of priests, Gods, Warrior Queens, American Congressmen, and others on the battlefield outside of the immediate military chains of command became something commanders sought to minimize outside extraordinary circumstances so as to maximize the coherence of their own authority.

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Instead the symbolic and sacred power of the idol is concentrated instead in physical objects… Which can still be positioned and used to rally troops and held by people who shout encouragement and commands… But also aren’t tied to those individual people.

If a flag bearer or Sergeant carrying the flag (Colours) or the Legionary Eagle dies or loses his nerve and throws it down… Another member of the Unit can pick it up.

The Honor, glory and sacred bonds of the brotherhood of fighters is tied to the physical object, which itself is conveniently silent, never takes sides in any disputes, and never has a mistaken opinion.

If a cowardly leader attempts to flee with the standard, then a brave aspiring leader can simply kill them for their desertion, grab the standard, and take up the charge…

Likewise if the commander wants his troops to do something which they refuse to do out of self-preservation, then he can take the standard himself and lead the charge.

This concentration of the combined authority and honor of the organized group into a visible instantiated physical object, an idol… is truly incredible social technology because it relieves the pressure of organizing from the person of individuals.

Great Captains may be loved by their men, individuals heroes adored by their comrades, charismatic priests followed to the mouth of hell itself, individual exiled princes and princesses nigh revered as the rightful rulers of their countries, Congressmen like Davy Crocket treated as the embodiment of a dreamed republican future…

But on average, most individuals are average.

Your actual Captain is most likely a middling paper-pusher, or merely experienced officer, your heroic veterans… are usually just guys who’ve been in a while and muddled through like most, the average priest or Chaplain is shockingly uncharismatic, and most exiled princes and princesses are weirdos who can’t relate to the soldiers they find themselves amongst, and can’t ply their courtly learning in exile.

The average meeting of revolutionaries, patriots, partisans, and freedom fighters is a meeting of outcasts and social malcontents who often as not have as little reason to respect each other as the rest of society has to respect them.

Likewise the average soldier throughout history is a conscript, convict, or runaway… who finds themselves as a private, sailor, or “comrade” specifically because no one respects them.

Sure great amounts of trust, esteem, honor, reputation, and glory can accrue to these officers, revolutionaries, and fighters with time…

But almost by definition this is going to be the minority of cases and take vastly longer than most such units have.

Individual loyalty to a specific leader, hero, or figure simply is going to be the exception and depend on an almost superhuman level of esteem to get off the ground and actually create an organized unit where none exist…

George Washington could create a Continental Army in 1775, but there were maybe debatably 3 such men who could have done the same job half as well if he had not.

However the Colors or the Regimental eagle creates a focal point of extreme loyalty to the group that all participants can exert their mutual passion and brotherhood, without requiring their affection to be limited by the esteem a particular leader or figure can command in themselves. Fresh privates who do not even know the names of their officers can be driven to profound exertions of loyalty and pride by the sacredness their NCOs and Color Sergeants train into them for their uniforms, the Regimental Colours, and other Standards.

Men, who could not name the King, have often died defending to the last “the King’s Colours” not out of esteem for the King but rather the pride of their regiment and the honor of their comrades.

This Social Technology is the Essence of the Nation

“All forms of violence are quests for identity. When you live out on the frontier, you have no identity. You are a nobody. Therefore, you get very tough. You have to prove that you are somebody. So you become very violent. Identity is always accompanied by violence. This seems paradoxical to you?”
-Marshall Mcluhan

The Colors, the Regimental Eagles, the Flag… These are all IDOLS.

This is what Idolatry is.

It is organizing socially around physical objects and symbols of the tribe, the people, the nation.

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The exact same way ancient peoples would preform sacrifices and rituals at the Monoliths and Statues of their deified founders, America and Western European countries have/had (its fading) annualized rituals in which they place sacrifices of flowers and preform rituals of honor and mourning at various Cenotaphs and War Memorials and Statues of their founders… Before likewise partaking in feasting and other rituals.

This is IDOLATRY.

It is the paying of reference to idols… Statues, Monolithic Cenotaphs, engravings, sacred sites, etc.

It is also the backbone of basically all European national identity building, internal coherence, ritual status creation, organization, internal enforcement, incentivization, sacralization, civic religion, national pride, human virtue, basic ties to the land, and basic decency.

Now gee… I wonder why a very specific tribe of people who had been exiled from their lands, and had lost their identity, and defined themselves as an enemy of “The Nations” (Goyim and Gentile are often Translated as “Nations”)…

I wonder why such a people would conceive of “Idolatry” as amongst the greatest sins and define themselves in opposition to all statues, reliefs, monuments, rituals of time and place, ancestoral reverence, keeping of sacred swords and tapestries, artwork…. And Shun all martial and military glory?

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Well ask yourself? Why do modern Communists, Leftists, Social Justice Types, etc. All connive to find some pretense to rip down statues, burn churches, deface murals, and remove monuments?

They do it not because of some theological or political pretension… these are the excuses.

They do it rather because whether it was 550ad or 2021… monuments, idols, statues, murals, flags, banners, tapestries, carvings, paintings, etc….

These Are how WHITE PEOPLE organize and orient themselves socially and spiritually. How Europeans organize, ritualize, visualize, and spiritually enforce the order and values of their societies… With beauty and glory as the ultimate spiritual enforcement mechanisms.

And Jews, foreigners, slaves, and the eternal lumpenproles that comprise the left and earlier spiteful mutant movements HATE that. They experience it as actively painful psychic damage when looking upon Statues to war heroes or Paintings of beautiful courtly life or big-breasted athletic female characters in video games in the same manner that Vampires might look upon crosses or shut-ins sunlight.

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They can see intuitively and immediately the organization, values, social coherence, and ethnic-will expressed within these idols… The raw military, civic, spiritual, and cultural loyalty that they embody…

And so they must rip it down.

The Nations must have their idols, rituals, artwork, values, and ultimately blood destroyed since they form a powerful coherent force and set of values that excludes Jews, degenerates, foreigners, slaves, and proto-leftists in domains martial, civic, spiritual, religious, political, and sexual.

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It is not without coincidence that the destruction of the Roman Alters of Victory and statues to the Gods almost immediately proceed the Fall of Rome.

Whilst spiritually, religiously ,and symbolically sealing or otherwise destroying the Roman Alter of Victory in 408ad seems to almost prophetically predict the 410ad sack of Rome…

If we set to one side the obvious metaphysical and portentous implications (abandoning victory before defeat), even from a purely materialistic and almost pathologically secular view it becomes obvious that Rome would suffer to defend itself, for the same reason a Regiment stripped of its colors and eagles would suffer in its military performance.

They’d lost their banner, their rallying symbosl.

This is how Europeans organize. This is how they enforce their internal coherence and values and orient and organize their loyalty.

The very fact the people in charge DESPISE the symbols and social reality of that organization and loyalty, DESPISE the symbols of the people and ethnicity enough to destroy it, should be enough to tell you that they cannot, or do not care to, defend or maintain the ethnicity itself or see it organize coherently.

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Thus it should not be surprising that after Rome fell… Christian Iconoclasm basically stopped in Europe, not because the doctrine changed, but because the ethnic enemies of Europeans who comprised the early Christian iconoclasts: Ethnic Jews, Arabs, slaves, former slaves, foreigners, and others of the Roman urban-underclass (yes this is exactly like the US left-wing coalition)… when the Western Roman Empire fell they basically all died off for want of a centralized government to feed them out of taxes on the productive rural Roman and European population (thus why Mainland Italians still produce blondes, and gingers, and largely don’t look like the North African and Arabic slaves of the Roman Period).

And Guess what… White Europeans maintaining Christianity never really cared after that about ripping down their own Iconography, statues, heraldry, etc.

Because unlike the early Christians who were brown slaves who hated white Europeans and their art especially… White Europeans don’t hate themselves or their conceptions of Beauty, and aren’t motivated by a blinding hatred of everything that reminds them of the Grecian Conquest of Judea during the Maccabees, or Rome’s Occupation, or just white people being pretty and skilled at craftsmanship.

Meanwhile, The Vatican:

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Whites quite like their nations and naturally build them up and make them pretty, and orient themselves towards discipline, beauty, loyalty, and reverence to their forebearers in the absence of outside subversives and moral poisons trying to dilute them and lead them away from from the natural organizing instinct found in these idols and rituals.

And even the most seemingly categorical religious commandments won’t stop even churches from celebrating that beauty and social reification in the absence of spiteful outsiders.

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In Conclusion: The War on Beauty is a War On Western Civilization

The point of ugly modern art, ugly music, degenerate culture, statues to honor incoherence, ect. Is NOT simply a twee or over-ironic subversion for subversion’s sake…

It is, and the artists will say this themselves, meant to “challenge” the viewer…

Ie. It is a conscious assault on the culture making, loyalty forming, history teaching, and values enforcing role of art in the white dominant ethnicity.

In the exact same manner that Statues to war-heroes, glory, victory, the founders, Civic Heroes ect. Organize a people and orient them towards their conception of themself, loyalty and virtue…. Statues to non-sense, incoherence, confusion, perversion, and alienation purposefully exist to disrupt and to destroy that coherence and ethnic civitas.

Likewise whereas 18th, 19th and early 20th century superhit songs like Rule Britannia, Scotland the Brave, I wish I was in Dixie, Erika, The Maple Leaf Forever, Etc. all came about and had the function of creating and reinforcing certain ethnic, national, and particularist visions of their peoples such that all of them have served as rallying calls or marching songs.

Once music was centralized in the hands of corporations and more importantly the centralization of “conversation” news corporations, there has been an aggressive force to artificially push degrading, divisive, and DUMB works… Largely with manufactured “controversies” which are never actually new or actually controversial.

Rather “Controversial” works exist not to explore thematic or dark subjects… but to act as demoralizing ChimpFests that create symbolic confusion and create ethnic demoralization,

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Notice how there is not even a beat, melody, rhyme, chord, catching turn of phrase, or evocative sound…

I dare you to walk away, come back after an hour, and try to quote or ever hum a lyric of melody that is not the title itself.

Contrast even degenerate trash culture Icons like 3OH!3 or over-politicized black Shitlibery like Killer Mike’s “Reagan”, which both have decent enough quotes, and can be interpreted or enjoyed variously ironically, literally, etc. (many a Patrick Bateman-wannabe young Republican has listened to “Reagan” aspirationally) and you can see the point of “This is America” isn’t to be enjoyed or express something, or even be remembered, but to be a pure chimp out, a pure expression of ethnic resentment.

Childish Gambino’s bizzare meter-less melody-less undulations are the musical equivalent of the DEI fat black woman statues. The point is to be bad. Beauty or quality would detract from the expression of resentment and institutional power.

If it were well made or had merit of it’s own, then that would confuse the message.

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The point of these acts of cultural defacement and attacks auditory, statuary, cultural, and Architectural… whether that be Black Helen of Troy in the latest version of the Odyssey, or what they did to the Royal Ontario Museum:

None of this is mere innocent self expression any more than interrupting a remembrance day parade with a Rap Concert would be mere “Festivity”.

The point of all these activities, all these ugly constructions, the destruction or active destroying of monuments, churches, ect.

It is to express ethnic hatred for the founding majority population and to destroy their core cultural organization and enforcement. Just as removing the statue of victory from Rome was not even because Christianity cannot tolerate personification of concepts or classical Gods themselves… There are actually quite a few Mosaics, statues, and artwork depicting the Grecian Gods within the Vatican.

Rather just as early Christian icon destruction was motivated by ethnic hatred and spite for Ethnic Romans… And later Protestant Iconoclasm was motivated by ethnic hatred and spite for Mediterranean Political and Cultural encroachment (the protestant reformation almost exactly follows the Maximum limits of the Roman empire with odd counter examples like Ireland or Poland staying catholic out of their own ethnic hatreds of the English and Germans. Indeed the most violent Iconclasm in the low countries almost directly maps onto Julius Caesars’ apocalyptic genocide of the Belgae in modern Belgium and the Netherlands, and the subsequent wars back and forth over the territory)…

Modern Iconoclasm is likewise ENTIRELY an exercise in ethnic hatred, ethnic territory claiming, and purposeful attempts at cultural destruction to prevent basic institutions of loyalty, value hierarchy, reverence, reification, and idealization.

It is the exact same social dynamic as an enemy trying to capture your Colors on the field of battle so as to shame and break morale of the military unit they represent. That men can be replaced, but colors or eagles lost permanently shame and damage a unit. Such that depending on an era they may never recover the same Espirit D’Corp.

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Symbols, icons, rally points, and sacred objects are the deep technology of national, military, cultural, and social organization. And for that to work their sacredness has to be enforced, and the often violent clashes over their meaning rewarded…

The same way a confused and pranking local who tried to steal the colors of a British Regiment in the 18th century out of a misplaced sense of humor, might be bayoneted by the guard on duty and the guard rewarded for his disemboweling of the pranking interloper.

This is why the old service clubs, secret societies, and paramilitaries that lasted for hundreds of years like The Orange Order, or The Freemasons, or the Sons of the Confederacy…

All of them have sacred objects, songs, uniforms, and rituals to build that internal coherence.

Just like Military Regiments.

Indeed many even practice/practiced their own forms of military drill, rank structure, subordination, etc.

Because it works.

Rituals Work. Idols Work. Marching Songs Work. Drinking songs work. Uniforms work. Ceremonial Dress Works. Feasting Works. Exercise groups work. Napoleonic Eagles Work. Flags Work. Roman Style Bear-head outfits work. Italian Frescos work. Statues Work. Murals Work.

All of these rituals symbols create Espirit D’Corp. They create morale. They create an Ethos and rally point.

And that’s why your enemies are so keen to disrupt these.

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A Quick interview with of The Pete Quinones Show on banned books and longform podcasting.

Works mentioned in this episode include:

Iron Curtain Over America by Col John Beatty

Jewish History Jewish Religion by Israel Shahak
(Listen to Pete’s Reading)

Werner Sombart
(Pete’s Reading)

Camp of the Saints by Jean Raspail
(Pete’s reading)

Race War in Highschool by Harold Saltzman
(Pete’s Reading)

Against our Better Judgement by Allison Weir
(Pete’s Reading)

James Basques

An Eye for an Eye

Francis Parker Yockey
(Pete’s Intro)

Opening: “Lord of War” by White Bat Audio.

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Continuing my series of Deep Dives into Videogames and the imagined world of asymmetric strategies and tactics (that then come true) like The Most Beautiful Game: How Supreme Commander Stole My Heart and The Unkillable Cyberpunk Franchise and unconventional asymmetric warfare and tactics like The War to the Knife, the Knife to the Hilt and Getting Away With It: The Art of Urban Infiltration and Exfiltration… In this peace I’d like to go back to the beginning of 21st century imagined military madness…

The earliest-deepest dive into the madness of post-9/11 5th Generation Warfare…

The story that predicted everything…

Part 1: The Generational Gulf

Writing this essay is difficult, because depending on very specific thresholds of where and when you were born, your gender, and other cultural aspects… I’m either talking about one of the most familiar and foundational works of your childhood, your culture, and how you conceive war, culture, politics, history, and what it means to lead a good life… Or I’m talking about something you’ve never heard of.

The Metal Gear Solid franchise to this day is the primary, (maybe only?) property that exists at the intersection of the Tactical (Tacti-cool) Special Forces obsession of American Culture and Gamer culture more widely… And the Japanese Cyberpunk Philosophical Paranoia of late 90s Classic Anime and Anime-esque Games and media.

This has given it an extraordinarily prominent cultural purchase for young men (and women) of military or martial leaning. Having sold 65 MILLION copies across it’s franchise life it is the third most prominent “Modern Warfare” franchise after Call Of Duty and Battlefield.

Across America, Canada, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and Korea Something between 10 and 30% of men between the age of 18-40 (fighting age) have played at-least 1 of the games… With the ratio almost certainly rising or even doubling amongst the young men who actually enlist… Metal Gear Solid “MGS” is only surpassed in its field by of the 500 million copies of Call of Duty sold, over 50% have probably played a COD game… (Battlefield sold 88.7 million, basically comparable to MGS)

But whereas Call of Duty and Battlefield focused on fast paced twitchy multiplayer combat, with the “narratives” in their “story mode” that are remembered mostly for memes, action set pieces, and ridiculous dialogue… Mad Japanese game developer Hideo Kojima has become an icon in himself for his twisting multi-layered narratives, aspirational, haunting, and absurd characters, meditations on military trends and technical developments, philosophy, history, conspiracies, duty, and life.

It would not be a stretch to say the Metal Gear Solid franchise is almost certainly THE core text of how Millennials and Gen Z grew up imagining warfare and the philosophical implications of war.

I don’t think older generations realize the impact just because they don’t recognize the references when they come up or know enough to recognize the influence… It is almost impossible to walk around on any military installation in the west without hearing the “Codec Call Sound” used as a ringtone by various soldiers, marines, and airmen, or the “alert sound” for text messages (bonus points when its an actual Colonel or Major calling). Conversations with soldiers regularly get into detailed dives into tactics, equipment, paranoid implications, and practical and not-so-practical ideas “Just like the game”.

I’ve heard of more than one real life military exercise, AI testing, and at least a few drones in actual combat, “cheesed” by a Metal Gear Solid-style cardboard box… Yes this happened.

(Yes, as far as I’m aware, the pun between box the literal cardboard device, and “box” a slang term for “pussy” translates between Japanese and English)

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Indeed the Japanese pacifistic paranoia of Hideo Kojima, a man deeply ambivalent about America, if not openly hostile to it’s Government and Military… Is almost certainly more influential on soldiers across the West, NATO, and even gamers in non-western militaries like Russia, or the Gulf States below a certain age threshold than works like Tom Clancy’s oeuvre, Saving Private Ryan, Rambo, Full Metal Jacket, Apocalypse Now, The Longest Day, A Bridge Too Far, MASH, Lawrence of Arabia, To Hell and Back, The Storm of Steel, All’s Quiet on the Western Front, Boy’s Own Adventures, the Stories of G. A. Henty, the stories of Walter Scott, The Red Badge of Courage, War and Peace, Le Morte De Arthur, and The Iliad… Combined.

Yet the very thing that keeps Kojima’s work in relative obscurity compared to his extraordinary pop-culture reach is the very thing that gives him so much purchase on the young… He made videogames. Unlike films or TV shows he gets tens or even cumulative hundreds of hours out of his individual fans at something approaching full attention, and includes a level of detail that’s just not possible for film or TV, and very rare in book form… the script for Metal Gear Solid 2 alone is 900 pages, a text a large percentage of his fans will and have gone over multiple times across repeat playthroughs (very few 900 page books get repeat readthroughs). And yet this same extraordinary investment, buy-in, and considerable effort the games require on the part of his adolescent and still forming fans acts as a barrier to scrutiny, and as such the works have been subjected to shockingly little, if any, wider cultural critique and scrutiny as compared with almost any other medium or artform.

Contrast the political discussions and think pieces that surround a book or film like Rambo: First Blood and the treatment of homeless veterans, or American POWs in Vietnam… Or how works like Platoon or Saving Private Ryan do or don’t discourage service and sacrifice on the part of young Americans, and its remarkable that at the same time young Soldiers were mass quitting over Vax-Mandates and others refusing to enlist, no one commented that the first Metal Gear Solid… the first modern entry in the CORE piece of Millennial and Zoomer Media to do with the US Military…(spoilers) centers around a decorated US Soldier being manipulated, blackmailed, and threatened into being turned into a unwitting suicide bio-weapon via a designer Virus hidden within a mandatory injection.

Gee. I wonder if that affected Vaccine hesitancy in young soldiers who’d played the game?

Yet as far as I can tell not ONE paper written in the period of the COVID mandates referenced the “FoxDie Virus” of the Metal Gear Solid series, or the fact that a critical mass of US soldiers had been trained since childhood not to trust unexpected US Military injections… That indeed the core lesson of one of their most popular stories is that the greatest soldier fighting and playing perfectly still cannot be saved from the mistake of trusting the Military/Medical establishment before the action has even begun.

Hideo Kojima’s strange and prescient vision has acted as a philosophical and moral introduction to the world of arms for tens of millions of young men. It is deeply political, and is massive and detailed in a way that has already altered the course of military history and martial culture… Seemingly with hardly ANY comment or interest by the military establishment or the broader world of war commentators.

Largely because of the anime-esque absurdities of the series: variously wooden, melodramatic, self-serious, historical, conspiratorial, obsessive, humorously slapstick, and subtlety manipulative… which are cat-nip to millennials and Gen Z on the one hand, on the other make older generations intuitively cringe away at encountering something clearly awkwardly dubbed and translated, balancing between languages, mediums, cultures, nationality, and stages of adolescent development in a manner that openly invites dismissal and joking unseriousness… a conscious unseriousness which serves to hide the complexity of its political and military vision… both for shock value within the narrative, and arguably for propaganda value in delivering Kojima’s various messages.

By contrast comparatively unheard of works like Oliver Stone’s Platoon ($137mil Box Office), Francis Ford Copolla’s Apocalypse Now ($150million), or Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket ($120mil) have been subjected to extraordinary Military and Academic study and assessment of their themes, cultural impact, effect on recruiting, and effect on soldier’s outlook… whilst Metal Gear Solid ($2.5+ Billion franchise sales) has received almost none, with only 200 JSTOR entries for the entire series, compared to 1400 for Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, and 5400 for Apocalypse Now.

The only real critical discussion of the works is within the gamer subculture in various Youtube video-essays. These works vary from simple appreciation and “memeing” (Dawkins’ coinage from The Selfish Gene was indeed partially popularized by Kojima in Metal Gear Solid 2), to politically and philosophically relevant deep dives into the the various themes of the work and Kojima’s predictions…

Yet the most relevant analysis: the assessment and reassessment of Kojima’s works from a military, social, geopolitical, and strategic theory perspective, works which in many sub-areas and theoretical sub-specialties are STILL on the cutting edge of 4th and 5th generation warfare, theories of espionage, and theories of information control even decades after their original release… That’s not been done, or only been tertiarily done by Youtube amateur philosophers, who don’t know or care how Kojima’s work relates to 5th Generation Warfare Theory, or indeed how it has almost certainly covertly influenced the development of that theory via 25+ years of fans in the military-intelligence world.

“Metal Gear Solid 2 Predicted Everything” is itself a meme, but not uninformative.

To put it bluntly, trying to understand modern intelligence and 5th generation warfare theory and practice without understanding Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid is like trying to understand the warfare of Late-Bronze and Early Iron Age Greece without understanding Homer’s Iliad.

What the hyper-reality fantasy of the work lacks in technical accuracy or realism to the actual warfare on the ground, it more than makes up for in the completeness and strangeness of it’s insight to the era, its philosophy, and culture.

Indeed the works themselves are an unending assault on your very conception of your own knowledge and understanding of tactically, strategically, politically, and psychologically relevant information… the ultimate 4th and 5th generation nightmares.

[this Video Essay. especially the intro, is a solid vertical slice of how deep the madness goes, but I suspect completely unintelligible to anyone not already eyeballs deep in Metal Gear lore… continue reading below]

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Part 2: War is a Kojima Game: The Future Soldier on the Present Battlefield

I first played METAL GEAR SOLID 2: SONS OF LIBERTY before the age of 10, I’m not quite old enough to have played it on first release… but it was amongst the first games I got when I was old enough to get a then relatively new PlayStation 2… I was not ready.

The raw madness of MGS2 has to be experienced to be believed. At one moment a shockingly technical dive into military subjects and matters pulled right from WhitePapers and headlines, conspiracy fodder that makes even Alex Jones’ most prescient predictions feel like child’s play, deep dives into theoretical concepts and sociology that wouldn’t be widely understood or relevant for 15 year, and bizarre psychedelic anime Nightmares of Ninjas, Prettyboys, Vampires, Mad-bombers on Rollerblades, and even more horrifying sexual politics…

It’s a franchise that explicitly signposts itself as a fantastical horror story running off dream logic, complete with monsters and psychic mysteries… Only to change genres entirely to become an entirely different horror story, then change again, then again… only for the new more grounded realities to be more disturbing… Only to turn back without breaking the new reality… Only for the most fantastical and absurd details to have been entirely relevant, grounded, and predictive of the new nightmare you were yourself stepping into, if only you had exercised sufficient judgement before making the leap in a shellshocked haze of your own disbelief.

A story that can be simultaneously a Cyberthriller that anticipates the Snowden revelations, a commentary on media radicalization, desensitization, and conditioning, a exaggerated hypothetical take on Red Cell the Rogue OPFOR Special Forces penetration testers, and Nosferatu.

By the end the fact that Kojima had introduced me to the idea of Political Memes (from Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene) as a core geostrategic consideration 10+ years before 4chan and gamergate became political events, and Algorithmic AI censorship of such memes and information as the ultimate subtle system of conspiratorial totalitarian control… In a game that released in 2001! That was a minor side consideration compared to the completeness of the vision, and the raw prophesy of the next 25 years he laid out in that work.

It’s the game that was made from 1998 to 2001 unwittingly predicting 9/11, then had to censor out the Twin Towers collapsing in a terrorism attack in it’s finale for its release in November of 2001.

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But there’s more to it than that.

A wise commentator once said that as stories get further away from the present the safer their political themes get. That you can say pretty-much whatever you want about the far future or ancient past, or fantasy worlds, With almost perfect safety. You have to really try to make a story on a fantasy planet politically intolerable. But that the closer to the present a sci-fi story gets the more one risks, both from political sensitivity (which is interesting, but might not get you published)… but also from simply betraying yourself as an idiot who doesn’t understand the subjects you’re discussing.

Nothing reveals naivety, incompetence, delusion, and dilettantism quite like a series of short term predictions. Genuinely Intelligent world-class subject matter experts regularly get even very short-term predictions embarrassingly wrong in ways that reveal their character in addition to their intelligence… The great ones can laugh and acknowledge the mistake with humility and commentate intelligently on the unexpected turns… Most however dissemble and try to twist the matter.

For this reason Fiction writers try to avoid near future predictions… Cyberpunk is one of the highest risk genres for storytelling given the genre is set mere decades from the present. With classics of the Genre hoping that their predictions will age into cheesy but fun archaic hypotheticals, like Escape from New York’s 1997, 16 years in the future from the release date of 1981, in which WW3 is ongoing and New York City has been walled off as an abandoned prison colony.

Kojima however places his future stories INSANELY close in time to his games’ release dates. 1998’s Metal Gear Solid was set in 2005.

2001’s Metal Gear Solid 2: The Sons of Liberty was set in 2007 and 2009.

His stories are almost instantly dated, their scifi futures almost immediately in the past, and science fiction technologies and possibilities almost immediately shown to have not come to pass… Except they do come to pass.

Like Nostradamus the things Hideo Kojima “predicts” which do NOT come to pass are countless… Giant Native Americans with man-portable Vulcan Cannons, Nuclear Capable bi-pedal robots, Rogue American Presidents dual-wielding Katanas and FN P90s… Yet for every cool/ridiculous Anime absurdity, Kojima predicts something so terrifyingly exactly it makes you question your own sanity when it happens.

And not just the collapse of the Twin Towers.

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To present a short incomplete list of Kojima’s predictions that somehow came true…

—Genetically Engineered “Vaccinations”: the MRNA Covid Vaccine vs. FoxDie and the Genome Soldier Program of MGS1
—NGO Illegal/Grey Market Leaker Organizations: Julian Assange and Seth Rich of Wikileaks vs. Otacon and Solid Snake of “Philanthropy” of MGS2
—Algorithmic AI internet Censorship Programs such as those of Youtube, Twitter, and Facebook Vs. the GW Kernel of MGS2
—Terrorists on Rollerblades employing IEDs and Small Arms like MGS2’s FatMan or the Modern Taliban

—The United Healthcare Assassin’s Escape over the George Washington Bridge in New York City mirrored the opening of MGS2 when Solid Snake Inserts into the mission by leaping from the George Washington Bridge…
Indeed I’ve written Extensively on the “Tactical Espionage Operation” Angles of the United HealthCare Assassination

—AI Personalities impersonating real people to the point you can no longer tell when you are and aren’t talking to a real person or digital impersonations

To just name a few.

And then you get to maybe his most immediately pressing prediction….

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Part 3: A One Man Infiltration Mission: Archaic Design, Future Soldier

Campbell: As usual this is a one man infiltration mission.
Snake: Weapons and Equipment OSP? (On Site Procurement)
Campbell: Yes. As usual this is a top secret black-op. Don’t expect any official support.

-Metal Gear Solid 1 Introduction

Metal Gear is an OLD video game franchise… While most people discuss it in terms of 1998’s Metal Gear Solid and it’s sequels, the franchise dates back to the original 1987 game Metal Gear.

Whilst the 1987 original and it’s early 90s Sequels, aren’t really relevant narratively, most fans never play them… They are important to understand the evolution of the franchise… The series is almost as old as the Mario Franchise. Kojima was harvesting idea from Rambo and Kurt Russel movies whilst those were still new, and videogames as a medium were still in the very earliest of infancy.

The very ideas of stealth games and “tactical games” and “realistic military games” were not even genres when Metal Gear codified the broad concepts of it’s core gameplay mechanics 5 years before even Doom or Wolfenstein 3D had invented the first person shooter. Sure later entries in the series would slowly and eventually assimilate towards modern action shooters’ standardized controls and sensibilities… but the Classic 3 Metal Gear Solid games 1, 2 Sons of Liberty, and 3 Snake Eater all are still adapted out of the top down stealth game mechanics of the old 8 and 16 bit Metal Gear games from the 1980s, with north always at the top of the screen.

This is fascinatingly weird.

It’s an entirely parallel evolution to the question how to represent and simulate warfare and special operations in an interesting manner.

Sort-of like how both a Deer and a Kangaroo basically fill the same ecological niche: both are large herbivores that outrun predators, both can travel alone or in larger herds, both are challenging yet tasty enough to hunt and eat for a hobbyist sportsman… But they evolved entirely separately in entirely different environments with different physiologies, evolutionary pathways, and basic behaviors of locomotion.

Likewise the Metal Gear Solid franchise has entirely different mechanisms, gameplay loops, challenges, tempos, tones, narrative assumptions, and understandings and visions of what it means to be a soldier… Or rather a Gamer trying to imagine a realistic soldier in warfare. Or a soldier taking on the role of gamer in a simulation of realistic warfare… Or a gamer taking on the role of soldier taking on the role of gamer, taking on the role of a soldier, who is a gamer, who is a….

By way of analogy, Tank simulators from the Ultra-realistic Skeuomorphic mechanical simulations that are often used by actual Armor units for training, to more arcadey ones your cousin might play are an advanced genre that’s fully developed. Vehicle speeds, Turret panning speeds, sighting mechanisms, controls, optical devices, penetration physics… All are loving recreated with endless debates (and not a few actual classified leaks) over accurately recreating some advantage or disadvantage of some model of tank or how they behave in the brief seconds of combat.

But what if an entirely different type of tank simulator had been invented?

Instead of precisely lining up a gunner turret or maneuvering ever so carefully into the perfect concealed position to command an approach with no dead ground to hide the enemy… What if instead a game series simulated the “Road Trip” and Maneuver of tank warfare? Not 1-2 hour engagements, but days, weeks and months long campaigns navigating your tank platoon around enemy positions and civilians chaotical fleeing a warzone and completing often boring objectives that align with allied units, but which compound and create fiction as tanks lose treads and need to be repaired or recovered, injuries add up, tactical complications mount, bailed-out crews need to be rescued, and the operational situation changes with implications that you have to decide in a changing strategic picture with imperfect information? Half Oregon Trial, Half Mount and Blade, half survival horror?

Yes I am Describing Colonel J. F. Antal’s Armor Attacks: The Tank Platoon and others in his Interactive Exercise series of choose your own adventure books meant to train/introduce junior leaders… However similar concepts have been turned into games, submarine games like Silent Hunter 3 for example have a lot this structure.

Kojima’s vision is sortof like that for the infantryman/special operator, but vastly utterly stranger. What Metal Gear Solid did is it followed a completely bizarre developmental pathway that ONLY makes sense from the perspective of it’s having started in the 8-bit era of the Original Super Mario Bros.

In evolutionary terms, even when the original 1998 Metal Gear Solid was released and cutting edge in most respect, its core loop was a weird megalithic prehistoric dinosaur from the Cambrian period of game design. Less like a Deer to a Kangaroo and more Like finding some ancient whale sized cephalopod that had somehow persisted down millions of years into the present.

Video Games are power fantasies… The fun of them comes from artificially being put in a position in which you can do something very well or with a level of power and authority that you’d otherwise be unable to do. No one in the world might trust you with command of a billion dollar submarine or million dollar race car, that you’d crash it immediately… but play Silent Hunter 3 and you can crash it over and over until you get locally good and become a uboat ace sinking hundreds of thousands of tons of allied cargo.

Shooter games place the player in a position where they can outgun hundreds of enemies easily… Most later stealth games place you in the position of some perfect ghost who played well can evade all enemies in some power fantasy manner…

Metal Gear Solid on the other hand is weirdly frustrating… Every single one of its first three PlayStation and PlayStation 2 entries is awkward in a way most gamers complain about and actively have to wrestle against… You can get good at them, but even the act of Aiming you gun even late in the series is a bizarre difficulty often requiring you to hold down 2 or 3 buttons to shoot precisely, and it is almost impossible to do well in the panic of combat.

I can confidently say, as someone with vanishingly little marksmanship skill, that I am a VASTLY better shooter in real life on a real range than I am in Metal Gear Solid.

Every mechanic is like this. Every aspect of the game awkward or strange… Metal Gear Solid 3 was re-released with an entirely different camera system because without the radar of the previous games many found it simply impossible to SEE the enemies before the enemies saw them in the jungle. (which was plainly intentional, a lot of the dialogue focuses on going slow, picking out enemies, visualizing space, and dealing with short range encounters in dense jungle, which the camera creates the dynamic of… but which plebian players found deeply frustrating)

Likewise the “One Man Sneaking Mission” with all weapons “OSP, On Site Procurement”, is entirely an artifact of the early game design where programing friendly AI was hard, and you had to unlock new weapons one at at time. The “ID-Locked firearms” of the series with biometric locking permissions are not because Hideo Kojima was commentating on Gun-Control, the surveillance state turning free men into slaves, and bizarre California proposals (though he later would in Metal Gear Solid 4) but because in older video games the memory limits wouldn’t allow for many items you could pickup, and thus he needed to explain why you couldn’t just grab a fallen enemy’s weapon.

No military in the world sends in lone special forces soldiers alone against an entire base or regiment of enemies. They certainly don’t send you in unarmed. And No soldier in such a position would shrink from picking up the very first firearm an enemy dropped… The very setup is absurd, and yet that absurdity allows a lot of specific and unique problem solving to be explored. Suddenly unique challenges that might occur once every 2-6 months in an actual military campaign or cumulative strange experiences that might occur in a memoir across decades of a very storied career… Suddenly all of those can happen in rapid succession across 10-20 hours.

By 1998 with METAL GEAR SOLID 1 all of this had already been solved. First person shooters had weapons you could pick up off enemies. And tactical shooters had teammates you could order around and YOLO into the Fatal Funnel. You didn’t have to go it alone as an unrealistic one man unit.

But Kojima had developed his strange and archaic game design not in the 90s, but the 80s… and continued to develop on those original gameplay loops to absurd levels over the following iterations.

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You see the Metal Gear Solid games had a completely different philosophy, like many early videogames the goal isn’t so much to simulate something satisfyingly and repeatedly… but to simulate new things that might never have been simulated in any game ever before, and to stack those novel unexpected experiences in a way that creates a new type of simulated experience… the way people in the 80s and early 90s talked about “virtual worlds”. That sense of wonder and possibility you find in early games continues in MGS.

The Games have dozens, sometimes hundreds of devices with very unique applications, that you’d almost never see in other games.

Handguns, Rifles, Sniper Rifles, Rocket Launchers, sure… but also Parabolic Microphones, Mine Detectors, Disguises, Smoke Grenades, Chaff Grenades (yes man portable chaff), rope, gasmasks, ketchup bottles (which you use to feign a medical emergency while imprisoned… if you think of that…), Mousetraps, cartoonish crocodile caps…

And none of these items really control well. The guns are less satisfying than other games and vastly harder to use, all the items are janky.

Yet they’re all multipurpose and useful, and interact with the environments in ways no other game has ever simulated, in weird ways no one has ever thought to make these things interact…

But this is weirdly MORE accurate to modern warfare, where all the various odd weapon systems and tools soldiers use are largely themselves awkward bizarre minigames and challenges. Where remote controlling a drone or Robot logistical cart, or using armored backhoes to dig a trench… bears little relation in terms of skills to everything else on the battlefield, yet all the complications and dangers of the rest of the battlefield are impacting your ability to do it.

Tracking down a person of interest by listening for their pace-maker in a crowd with a parabolic directional microphone you have to conceal… is not the type of thing you’d ever do in any other video game, but is exactly the kind of finicky bizarre thing you do find in real life espionage memoirs.

A lot of Kojima’s world is goofy ridiculous bullshit, but a lot of war, and espionage especially, is itself goofy ridiculous bullshit… Often disturbingly the most effective being the most goofy (The raw number of raids and assassinations that have been enabled by various special operators wearing drag… ask the Mossad).

This bizarre maximalist view of Espionage and Tactical warfare, in which Kojima tries to force in every dinky aspect of EVERYTHING military and espionage, or every oddity he’s found in a historical book… creates its own unique experience for players first encountering his games… They’re encouraged to improvise and test things out, many different options work…. And also many different things will trip them up.

The best way to get past lasers sensors in one game might be to see them with Infrared Goggles… but they can also be seen by using cigarettes and the related smoke, or by shooting a nearby fire extinguisher or bag of flour to release particulate, or by simply going around the other way. A player who explores outside in a storm will have their character catch a cold and sneeze at inopportune times when mere meters from a guard on patrol they’re hiding from, they have to think to use the (until then useless) cold medication they found hours before. In one instance hiding in EXACTLY ONE SPOT on a ship by pressing up against a wall will cause a rusted pipe to fall causing all surrounding guards to check on the sound (who can be hidden from if you think fast)… Nowhere else in any of the other games does any such pipe occur and nothing warns the player aside from some coloring that it is rusted and will fall. In one game an entire enemy outpost can be infiltrated, their food stores and armories raided, TNT taken to blow up the armory, the food stores, and a parked helicopter nearby that guards in that area will be low on armaments and starving for the rest of the playthrough, and that the helicopter will not be able to search for you later… Or the entire outpost can by bypassed by crawling around the outside through the grass. Several of these mechanics only occur that one time.

Yes many subsequent games would imitate this design, but this was 2004!

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In Snake Eater the player must alter and manage their camouflage, hunt their own food, and perform first aid and field surgeries on themselves to recover from injuries… You can get hit with leaches while swimming and you’ll lose stamina until you notice the parasites (which might take a while). And using tranquilizers you can capture live animals like venomous Snakes, and then release them by throwing them into a room with an enemy as a distraction.

These mechanics layer in unexpected ways along with the pre-scripted story, such that for the first SEVERAL playthroughs you actually have to use your brain and treat the world as if it’s real, not just a bunch of systems you’re abusing… you have no way to know you’ll catch a cold out in the rain, or get leaches on you swimming through the swamp… all of these have to be judged as you’d judge real life and interacted with as you’d interact with real places. And catch via keen observation of what happens (you might not clue in the random sneezes will alert guards, until it happens, at which point you’ve seen your character sneeze 5 times without really noticing, the same way you might disregard your own sniffles). You can get hit by hornets nest and poisonous snakes, however you can also wield both of these against enemy guards if you’re creative.

You can hide yourself in a shipping box inside a truck, and then get transported to the other side of the base if you use it right.

MUCH of this is unrealistic and cartoony in many ways… and yet in other ways its weirdly more realistic, and it certainly forces you to THINK in a tactical survival espionage frame. And this is where Kojima is weirdly inspired.

In Metal Gear Solid 1, 2, and 3… There are no levels. Even most Games that pride themselves on their realism to this day, still have plainly distinctive levels. Sometimes they call them missions, or scenarios, but they fill the same role as levels in previous games. Bite sized chucks of an hour or two of one setting or another that break-off or end so another bite sized chuck can begin, and give the game time to load. Now sure the Metal Gear Solid games have loading screens but aside from that… Each one is continuous.

The Original Metal Gear Solid is ONE MISSION, from initial infiltration to daring escape… It’s all happening alone on the edge of the world on the same secret military base in Alaska. Metal Gear Solid 2 is TWO Missions, that take place in the same location and continuing the same story and characters. Metal Gear Solid 3 is back to one mission, with a prologue that takes place in the same location with the same characters.

(sadly the later games would break this format and homogenize with the rest of triple-A gaming)

That’s 15-40 hours (depending on how quickly you play) and probably weeks of your life… Where all the decisions, all the revelations, all the overlapping motivations and scheming, all the changes to the location, all your survival decisions and those of the plot, everything you found, or missed… All of its adding up unbroken. If you use up all three of a rare item on hour 3 of a playthrough, you’re going the rest of the game without them. If you miss a core gadget or item like the Thermal Goggles early in the game… You’re going to have to solve the rest of your problems in the dark. If you’re overzealous with the mine detector or heart beat sensor and drain the batteries… It might be 8 hours until you find more batteries… if you find more batteries.

That 15-40 hour long mission, actually lines up way closer with the length of a lot of ACTUAL real life insertion missions and limited operations, and the complications, interactions with various factions, motivations and logistical hurdles that are allowed to add up and compound in that time is far closer to stories of real life special forces missions that have complications or go wrong, or need to adapt on the fly to some new turn of events than basically any other game out there.

Many challenge runners will actively bypass difficult challenges of gameplay (that might cause them to get caught or die) by deciding NOT to get some of the most important items in the game, that they’d rather muddle through improvising solutions to problems than risk their neck (and having to go back and restart the run) just because they want thermals, or a mine detector, or the good rifle.

That’s relatively rare for a videogame… but it’s unheard of in military games (which tend to focus on quick action segments), and it is extraordinary the mechanics that can be buried in this scarcity.

Thus in-spite of the absurdity of the “One man sneaking mission” with “all weapons procure on site”… The games simulate a SERE (Survival Escape Resistance and Evasion) mindset, a special operations “ask why” mindset, and a lot of the intangible lessons instructors try to communicate in a way that even most dedicated tactical survival games really don’t because their focus on “realism” and action gameplay limits the room for real creativity.

Kojima makes you backtrack and sneak around and get frustrated, or bored, or exasperated at tasks in a way that’s very true to life, and which other game developers would flinch at the idea of ever upsetting their players that way.

The raw CONTINUITY of the Metal Gear Solid games creates a venue for exploring ideas of sustainment, individual logistics, tactical problem solving, battlefield creativity, setbacks, recovery, and the edge cases of espionage and individual tactical skills that would not exist in other games for decades afterwards…. While Kojima’s script and ambition aggressively pushing new complications and themes, and types and sub-specialization of warfare to the front.

It creates a vision of what a soldier IS and what exactly it is they’re navigating and what it means to fight that is utterly unique both in games but also in fiction more widely and even real life doctrine.

It is vastly more than the sum of its parts and the parts that are weird or janky or unrealistic are amongst the most important for forcing that improvisation and adaptation and tactical decision making.

In the exact same way that Chess is not accurate simulation of the maneuver warfare capabilities of castles, cavalry, clergymen, or your wife… but is an amazing teaching tool for the fundamentals of strategy… The Metal Gear solid games are not “realistic” simulations of modern special operations, but they are wonderful tools for teaching concepts.

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And disturbingly rather than the games becoming more realistic and coming to resemble reality, reality has come to resemble the games.

Part 4: Warfare is the Continuation of Kojima By Other Means

Hideo Kojima Holds the distinction of having predicted the FPV Drone revolution, not once but twice.

In Metal Gear Solid 2 Hideo Kojima picked out maybe one of the most obscure failed spy technologies the Sikorsky Cypher… A UAV from 1987 that had only two prototypes ever made…

And then he included them as enemies in his game from 2001.

That’s right. The US anticipated the small drone revolution that ISIS and other non-state actors would exploit in the 2010s and would define the Ukraine war in the 2020s… In the 1980s!

And then they cancelled the program and were caught off guard by Sunni-militias employing consumer technology in 2015.

But Kojima saw this technology, wanted a scifi robotic enemy to mix things up…. And derived a shocking amount of quadcopter drone warfare from first principle 15 years before ISIS ever had the idea of Using Chinese DJI devices in combat.

The threat of the drones in Metal Gear Solid 2 is not that they’ll attack you, but that they’ll spot you and alert other assets. Some of the Cyphers have guns on them (Kamikaze drones not being a twinkle the Nagorno-Karabakh yet)… but the real threat is that one of them spotting you will bring down tactical teams of people and multiple other drones.

This primary threat of the drone: that of the Drone as a spotter in a kill-chain, is one that’s incredibly difficult to communicate in basically any other system of gameplay… It only works in a stealth game where slow deliberate tactical maneuvers are the point, and the threat isn’t any particular enemy, but that they’ll alert a wider ecosystem of tactical teams and other assets to draw them on your position.

But even in other stealth games like Splinter Cell or Hitman, the sudden introduction of new non-human entities might break the gameplay… but the entire point of Metal Gear Solid, the entire Kojima vision, the fact it’s a “Realistic” (LOL) Tactical Action game… That still has boss battles with increasingly weird Bee-Men, Vampires, Floating Psychic-Wizards, Cyborg Ninjas, Cowboy Gunslingers, 160 year old Super-Snipers from the US Civil War, and Giant Fighting Robots…

That very weirdness and fantastical unreality, the fact that it’s about using real life espionage and military tools and your own tactical thinking to overcome increasingly impossible and ridiculous unexpected threats… allows it to create novel tactical puzzles and problems in which it CAN predict future battlefield situations.

Thus, IN 2001! Gamers were reasoning through the tactical value and danger of vertical hovering spotter UAVs, their superior optics as unique threats, their ability to draw in other killer drones and assets to your position, and their RECORDING of the battlefield as a PROPAGANDA THREAT at the strategic level outside the operation.

The most important thing One of these Cypher-UAVs does in Metal Gear Solid 2 isn’t alerting any enemy… It’s taking a recording WHICH DOES NOT EFFECT THE GAMEPLAY OR TACTICAL OPERATION AT ALL… But results in a catastrophic mission failure at the Strategic level in the plot of the game, because of the use of that recording within media and narrative manipulation to assign blame, imply guilt, cover the actions of other actors, and create and manipulate the motivations of all the subsequent actions in the story of the game.

Classic 5th Generation Warfare.

This is the obvious example… but Again Kojima predicted small UAV Drone-Warfare TWICE, the first time he predicted it was with the “NIKITA Missile Launcher” a fictional weapon system that had ZERO real world analog (Its name derives from the Luc Besson film La Femme Nikita a Kojima favorite)… but functions within the game and the flavor text functions EXACTLY how Quadcopter FPV Kamikaze Drones work today.

Uncannily so: Right down to being disabled and blocked by signal jamming.

This was almost certainly an accident of Kojima wanting to include a guided-missile puzzle sequence, but not being able to justify it with how actual anti-tank missiles work (which can’t make multiply 90 degree turns, nor maneuver at all in the confined space of a Metal Gear Solid Game map) so he just made up a system:

“And was primarily a scouting device”. Again Kojima’s mind just thinks in the counter-intuitive way actual warfare invariably operates. The Exact same way Quadcopter Drones would function first and foremost for intelligence gathering and artillery spotters, Kojima predicts that his hilarious video-gamey “Unusually slow” “Miniature cruise missile”, if it actually existed, would be used exactly how drones moving at the same pace, with the exact same sized warhead, were actually used.

But the truly fascinating thing is what happens when when we combine everything Kojima predicted.

How the totality of his vision predicted the modern soldier.

Part 5: We’re All FoxHound Now: Life is Tactical Espionage Action

The uncanny similarity between the narratives, larger than life personalities, elaborate backstories, and even “rule of cool” use of bizarre sports equipment, unique tools, and improvised heavy weapons that you see across Metal Gear Solid games…

This “Could” be chocked up to Kojima’s Japanese narrative instincts, which resembles less the post-Christian moralizing reification of Hobbits, Moral Sacrifice, and Survival (think of all the plotless stories about ordinary people caught up in things larger than themselves, heroes as ordinary people who do “what’s right”)… Than it resembles pre-Christian or early Christian classical-heroic tales of great men seeking revenge, being deceived, enduring recurring hardship… The centrality of romance, or betrayed romance, or unconsummated romance to the Metal Gear Solid series resembles nothing in western stories, but does resemble The Odyssey or Le Morte D’Arthur or the Sagas…

That Japan as a martial Shinto religious/narrative culture just represents these aspects of war and life more easily than modern westerners do, just as early Pagan Martial cultures did.

That worlds in which multiple sides have many rivalled unique classical heroes with their own skillsets and romantic motivations is the default for how a Japanese man would imagine modern US special operations (as opposed to “good vs. evil” stories in the west)

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Likewise maybe Kojima is just the greatest tech nerd on military history matters, and his conception of all the odds and ends of weird military and sports equipment all playing their part was there in tons of different military fictional and non-fictional works and he just drew it out and gamified them. Highlighting the dynamics to absurdity in a way that whilst not entirely realistic, put things in informative contrast.

A skeptic might say that maybe he wasn’t predictive, but just very observant.

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HOWEVER… I cannot accept as mere coincidence the past decade of warfare.

Sometime around 2020, Kojima’s Metal Gear franchise stopped simply being descriptive or even predictive of individual events, and instead warfare itself started becoming more like Metal Gear Solid.

The things which were UNREALISTIC about Metal Gear Solid, not speculative, actively unrealistic… Video Game conceits and jokes… things which Kojima himself (i think?) never intended to be a vision of the future, have themselves become the future.

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“One Man Infiltration Missions” are a thing now. And not just in New York for lone assassins and extremists:

The Reality of the vast grey-zone of modern battlefields like Ukraine and ubiquity of drone surveillance has made it that one, two, and three man teams (Yes just like Snake, Otacon, and Meryl… Raiden, Snake, and Otacon… Or Snake and Eva) have gone from something militaries almost never do —favoring 8-12 man fireteams and 40 man platoons— to now being the default because larger elements are easily detected and prime targets for artillery and drones… at which point having wounded will pin you down and you’ll take more casualties from more artillery and drones.

Ukraine has instead taken to dropping off soldiers at insertion points in 1s, 2s, and 3s, and having them sneak from hide site to hide site, position to position all the way up to the frontline engagement point across 3-12 kms of grey-contested land hiding from drones, spotters, snipers, and other threats in the narrow few hour windows of sunup, sundown, and fog rolls.

And the Devil take you if you get lost.

Yes almost the exact same length of distance as “Operation Snake Eater” (whose total game map was 4 kms in width broken up by loading screens).

And yes many people are quite literally out there ALONE, by conscious decision or because their partner got killed or lost, as attested by all the heartbreaking drone footage of lone soldiers being killed by dropper drones and FPV kamikazes.

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If you were at all in contact with military culture I cannot express to you how much of a radical rupture this is from everything that came before.

Throughout the 80s, 90s, 2000s, and 2010s it was a staple of Military training to explicitly call out movies and videogames… And tell impressionable recruits and kids who are looking at military life, in no uncertain terms, that real life infantry isn’t like Rambo or Doom or Call of Duty, that everything in war is done as a team…

“Two is one and one is none. You carry two knifes on you, just like you need two people in the most basic fire position, and at least two such positions to hold it.” Is a common bit of infantry wisdom. “Where’s your battle buddy!?” or some non-Canadian equivalent, has been screamed at many a private.

Indeed the PS2 Game SOCOM: US Navy SEALS even came with a half hour documentary about the Navy SEALS in which more than one interviewee told impressionable young gamers that SEALS isn’t like a video game, everything’s done as a team (unaware the game that the doc would launch with was actually a TACTICAL TEAM based shooter).

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That’s out the window now… Or rather the very nature of the Teams have changed.

Small units have to insert in 1s to 3s but they do so with radio and planning from teams of people and support staff who can give them insights, warnings, and up to date intelligence via radio and other comms… Whilst the actual fighting positions right at the front are dug in and allow for multiple such teams to converge and form some concentration of fire for assaults and other engagements, moments where they can reverse the dynamic from hiding and fleeing to standing and fighting at moments of concentrated firepower, consolidate victories or confirm kills, and then extract safely in 1-3 man teams again employing the same stealth techniques before gunning it when you finally get back into a vehicle and are at maybe the most vulnerable point, paranoidly looking for drones before you can make your final escape at as fast as your driver dares to gun it.

It is the exact same “gameplay” loop as Metal Gear Solid: Briefing, infiltration, (CODEC update, further infiltration, meetup/interaction cutscene, boss-battle/technical problem,)>repeat… exfiltration, high danger escape, debriefing.

Indeed the recent Ukraine War Documentary 2000 Meters to Andrivka basically shows exactly this type of warfare.

Small teams of 2-4 moving and operating basically alone with all the coordination provided over radio and via drones, and only consolidating at core points into larger groups for assaults and other reasons. Their support team over radio vastly outnumbering the people in the field.

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And no! I don’t think this is me being cute or something that was the case in the 90s, or an example of Kojima just “predicting” the future of warfare.

Rather I think Warfare became vastly more like a Kojima game… because of the same forces that made Kojima design his game that way.

Indeed I think this evolution may have developed and been intuitive to soldiers on the frontline of Ukraine and elsewhere, specifically because they grew up playing videogames like Metal Gear Solid and others that adopted it’s model.

The core challenge Kojima faced in developing Metal Gear Solid is its byline: “Tactical Espionage Action”, and its later byline: “Tactical Espionage Operations”.

How much tactical thinking, situational awareness, unexpected twists, technical challenges, and fast paced complex changes and revelations can you throw at the young military minded adolescent and young adult before they’re completely lost, give into learned helplessness, give up, and stop trying.

How much additional information can you feed them before they zone out? How little direction can you give them before they wander off? How difficult a challenge can you present before they stop being able to solve it a reliable enough precent of the time? How long can you leave them on their own with only a distant objective? How long can they go without seeing the enemy or being reminded before they give into carelessness and screw up?

These are the exact same questions Ukraine and Russia had to ask as drones and shifts in the information battlespace shrunk the optimal dismounted unit from 10-40 riflemen, to 1-3.

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The Modern Battlespace is DEFINED by how much intelligence, independence of action, tactical forethought, navigational creativity, technical know-how, adaptability, survival judgement, perseverance, and sheer SNAP life or death will to fight you can drag out of adolescents/young adults, or even largely untrained middle-aged recruits (who we’d expect to perform even worse)…

As I’ve written before Intelligence is the single most important attribute of the modern fighter:

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And Hideo Kojima has been studying and experimenting to draw that tactical judgement and decision making out ordinary adolescents SINCE THE 80s.

He’s been experimenting with how much insane military history and detail and concepts you can pour into these young impressionable minds before they turn into mush… Then has gone even further to purposefully do that, to see how they respond to being completely yanked about, and train them to adapt to that… and then further train them to fight through the information overload.

In a lot of ways it seems inevitable that as tactical realities force more independence of action and individual judgement and decisions in warfare, that the tactics and skills of the soldier would converge on what Kojima already drew out of 2+ generations of young people now.

This would on it’s own make Kojima maybe one of the most important, if weird and rather siloed, military thinkers and theorists of the 21st century…

But where the real genius is, is he followed this chain of logic to it’s most horrifying conclusions.

Kojima not only anticipated the core role of individual intelligence, will, judgement, and independence of action on the future battlefield… he saw the nightmare it would become.

Part 6: 5th Generation Nightmares

Every Metal Gear Solid game… Every single one, is a secret horror story.

And yes it is always secret, and it is always a surprise… you wouldn’t think that’s possible to keep pulling that surprise twist… even babies eventually pick up on “Peakaboo”. But every time Kojima finds a new way to stick it to you that you weren’t suspecting…. And it probably isn’t even possible for you to suspect the concepts and the very types of horror each time, it is so different from every previous one… Attacking the main character and the player in ways no game before has and even other games haven’t tried to imitate…

With many of the later entries being contrasted with the more disturbing works of George Orwell or Extreme experimental Japanese horror movies.

There are essays and deep dives on all the haunting and disturbing aspects of Metal Gear Solid… The twists of individual 5 minute codec calls from individual games have generated hours of video essays and debates and theorizing…. With each individual game being amongst the most interpreted and reinterpreted media pieces of the 21st century… Within internet video-essays if not academia.

If I were to try to explain even one of the simpler twists and turns and why it works so well, the thematic and political implications, this essay could very well balloon into a book.

But if there’s one thing that unifies all the horrors of the various Kojima twists and turns…. it is the Illusion of empowerment.

You are NOT the badass hypercompetent Special Forces super-soldier who can tear his way through a base of enemy forces with his wits, will, and brawn… You are instead a Gamer sitting in a chair going through pre-rendered, pre-scripted, pre-determined events… Decided on by someone else, and designed to trick you into that feeling of empowerment, so you will continue to act out the role assigned to you.

And the horror Kojima draws out of this is that your relation as a gamer to the unseen game developers you’ve never met who will determine what happens to you is the EXACT SAME as the relation between the soldier in the field and the unseen operational planners, senior leaders, and politicians who actually determine the ends, objectives and outcomes of your mission.

You are empowered to act as a lone or small unit.. a clever Fox evading your way through the underbrush of modern warfare attaining a knowledge and control of the space, but your mission, your support, your objectives, the operational and political point of those objectives? Those are assigned to you. Your friends and allies are assigned. You ideas, your information, your awareness of the world around you, the emotions you are to feel, your very biology often as not… These are assigned to you and determined by people who are often basically indifferent, if not outright hostile.

This is one of the oldest themes in all of military fiction… The tension of loyalties and the betrayal of that loyalty is timeless fodder for great fiction.

Shakespeare’s Coriolanus is about the civilian government trying to control the emotions of one of their great generals and then betraying him when he refuses to humiliate himself on their instruction.

Indeed the oldest story in the Western Cannon, Homer’s Iliad… Is about a great soldier betrayed by his commanders who has his family unit maliciously ripped apart by the impetuousness of his leaders, and his rivalry with another great soldier undermined by his own leadership, his family.

But what’s amazing about Kojima is he follows all of this to it’s logical horrifying 21st century conclusions: What happens when you are forced to operate and pursue military ends ALONE, or in groups small enough so as to be functionally alone.

“Soldiers don’t fight for politics or nations or Gods or abstract ideals. They fight for the friend next to them.” So says the timeless wisdom of countless military observers, commentators officers, NCOs, and others… Indeed this goes right back to The Iliad…

So what happens when there isn’t one? When you’re a unit of one? Or that one or two friends wants to quit and desert and is asking you to go with them? Or that one or two gets wounded or killed or otherwise incapacitated?

Sure you might have a massive support team over radio or back at HQ planning your objectives, encouraging you, and providing useful information and support… but they won’t go where you go.

What happens when the vagaries of modern warfare and insane Japanese Game Developers means that you have to infiltrate, hold positions, complete objectives, and take risks alone, under your own will and judgement… without immediate officers, senior NCOs, or the collective of the unit?

How do you get people to fight at that point? How do you get people to sacrifice?

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Even if your cause is the most divinely inspired, democratically justified, militarily vital, politically clever, piratically profitable, achievable, honorable, survival necessary, and humanitarian effort in the history of warfare (it’s not) that’s still no guarantee your soldiers will agree, or agree with sufficient enthusiasm to go forward into enemy fire.

In previous generations this was solved by force: Traditionally this is what NCOs and Officers are for… To stand around line-formations with spears preventing soldiers from breaking and running… And whether it was the threat of Roman Decimation or Soviet blocker units empowered to kill or machine gun deserters and broken units. And indeed Ukraine and Russia use these aggressively… with Drones and other blocker units often being used to hunt down deserters ( but not reliably, Ukraine’s official count puts their desertions in the hundreds of thousands)

Whilst others from the Vikings to the Crusaders to the Boxer Rebellion to the SS to various communist Red Guards and third world militias have employed elaborate rituals, psychological indoctrination methods, and drugs (Psychedelics, “Go Pills”, Brown-Brown) to implant super-human aggression and energy into soldiers.

And Yet others: Pirates, Napoleon, the Royal Navy, American Frontiersmen, the Ancient Greeks… Have promised, explicitly or implicitly, extraordinary financial rewards, prize money and plunder to soldiers…

Yet all of these break down when the soldier is alone, or they get out in the field and suddenly the enemy in front of them seems far more hazardous than the blocker units behind them, or all that Marxist theory they were forced to read 16 hours straight doesn’t sound so compelling, or the prize money seems far less certain than the enemy’s shot…

For a ship to mutiny you need an elaborate conspiracy and scheme to overpower the marines on board… For an individual to mutiny? You just need a change of mind.

So how do you control soldiers and gamers when the only thing truly sending them forward is their own internal decision to do so?

You manipulate them.

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As any reader of Thucydides or Xenophon or Livy could tell you: “LEADERSHIP” often as not has as much to do with deception and extortion as it does with inspiration.

You secure control of people via threats, blackmail, lies, deceptions, false loyalties, narrative control, information control, biological poisoning, bribes, false bribes, propaganda, bait, personal insecurities, moral manipulation, sexual manipulation…

If the entire gameplay loop of Metal Gear Solid is about manipulating odd and different battlefield environments towards your ends… the entire narrative loop is how you and others are manipulated to the ends of governments and power-players you largely can’t even perceive before you’re serving them…

And in later entries the horror that when you learn to perceive how you were manipulated and how to fight back… is when you start manipulating others.

In Conclusion: You’ve Got a Way To Fall

Unspoken but increasingly perceived in the tumult of Russia-Gate, Lockdown, the 2020 elections, the Vax Mandates, The Ukraine War, Oct 7th, The Israel-Gaza Wars… Etc.

Is that when western military and intelligence thinker theorized “5th Generation Warfare”, the hypothetical information focused warfare against cyber-manipulation, social engineering, narrative manipulation, etc.

Well those western leaders and theorists weren’t actually theorizing warfare and the development of military matters so much as they were CONFESSING to decades if not generations of manipulations, ops, lies, media infiltration, soft and hard censorship, lawfare, and worse.

Anyone who paid attention could tell you the definition of 5th Generation warfare was less a “prediction” than a description of decades of intel agency policy both around the world and at home, in WW2, the Cold War, the “End of History”, and the Global War on Terror. The codification “5th Generation Warfare” was more a formalization and attempted legitimization of the policies they were pursuing anyway… If not an attempt to Retcon and doctrine-wash many of the failures and moral horrors of Just such policy…

(Contrary to DC received wisdom, the Cold War was mostly won by middle-America’s honesty, honorable conduct, and economic productivity… not intel agencies duplicity and counter-productive cultivation of the world’s criminals and ethnic mafias)

Indeed the biggest omission in all their descriptions is simply that almost none of them give the game away and simply include the acronym “NGO” in their definition of 5th Generation Warfare.

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We’ve been living through decades of what is effectively 5th Generation Warfare since at least the Kennedy Assassination…. Something Kojima intuits, setting his earliest game (Metal Gear Sold 3) within a year of the assassination.

All the defining policies and relationships of the modern west and its systematic betrayal of its traditional fighting base of young white men all comes out of those years…. from the “Greatest Ally” Israel, to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Hart-Celler Immigration Act and the policy of “diversity” which become a campaign to systematically destroyed western nations in concert.

Indeed for many the political betrayal is so complete Kojima’s made up mercenary ideology of “Outer Heaven” from the earliest 1987 Nintendo game, a placeholder for just “bad guys” has gone from an absurdity: a mercenary-pirate ideology of madmen… to something maybe a majority of young men in the west would sooner fight and die for than their own countries.

But there’s the rub…

Because the second you become willing to fight for something whether that be nationalism, human rights, western civilization, democracy, the right to self determination, whatever… suddenly financial powers and international intelligence networks will show up to tell you exactly how you can fight for it.

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One of the remarkable things about the War in Ukraine is how BOTH SIDES have made the complete opposite political claims to radically different groups who are mutually fighting for them.

Ukraine at once promises left wing Gay, Trans, Liberal Democrats, European Unionists, and Internationalists the opportunity to fight for the “rules based international order” embodied by the Rainbow Flag with countless queer activists, antifa members, and at least one would be Trump assassin going and making the Pilgrimage to Kiev.

Meanwhile one of the largest factions within the Ukrainian state are the Banderite Neo-Nazis represented by the Azov Battalion and others who openly wave Swastikas, incorporate black suns into their symbols and throw Roman salutes.

This has started a major fissure within international Neo-Nazism… Since now half of the world’s violent Right Wing extremists back Ukraine and are willing to go and many have gone to fight for them and train with them, whereas the other half point to Zelensky the Jewish President of Ukraine, and his ties to various Jewish oligarchs and Israeli influence networks, to argue that Ukraine is a honey pot to trick honest sincere hard working Far Right Violent Extremists into dying for Jewish influence networks and Israeli embezzlement and human trafficking schemes. Die for the white slavery of Ukrainian women young Nazi-goy.

With seemingly not even the people on the ground being able to tell who is actually the power behind the throne and who the useful idiots dying for their enemyies’ geopolitical goals? Are the Gender-Queer NATO defenders dying for Nazis? The Nazis dying for Jews? Or is NATO funding Nazi extremists who will destabilize the continent in the next decade the same way they funded Islamic extremists Mujahadeen against the Soviets in the 80s or Chechens in the 90s?

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Likewise the Russian government has stated again and again that one of its core goals for its special military operation is the “denazification” of Ukraine… To chase out the Azov Banderites and their anti-Russian racial ideology…

Yet at the same time Russian Neo-Nazis were core to much of the Russian war effort with the Infamous Russian PMC Wagner Group having been founded and commanded by the Neo-Nazi Dmitry Utkin… Who worked closely with his partner Yevgeny Prigozhin… a Man who’s father and stepfather were Jews!

Naturally when Putin shot down both members of this odd couple together aboard their transport plain after their failed coup attempt, in one of the most tragic endings to any Bro-mance in military history, the Metal Gear Fandom meme’d and immortalized the Wagner team… With many noting the similarity between PMC Wagner and PMC “Diamond Dogs” from Metal Gear Solid V… Kojima’s rogue fictional Mercenary outfit that was killed off by the US government just as Wagner was purged by Putin in real life.

This painfully hard to map Schizophrenic kaleidoscope of ideologies, motivations, alliances, and ethnicities… with it never being clear which side actually represents what political or ideological end… Where a Jew could easily fight for a nation only for it to go Nazi, or a Nazi fight for a faction only to realize it is Zionist to its core… And no way to know which factions are the real power, and which traitors and useful idiots, but all of them ever keen to tell you that your individual ideological and moral dreams, your ethnic self-expression, your national dream for a better homeland, and sincere commitments can be met by fighting for THEIR cause, or sending funding to THEIR network…

Only for you to get betrayed for the geopolitical goals of a 3rd or 4th country, or get dragged on Yevgeny’s wild blood-feud March on Moscow… Or sold down river like the Kurds having won yet another “Trusted America” Award.

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As Warfare becomes more and more driven by internal independence of decision… as foreign volunteers, individual action, internal motivation, and deep inner personal will to fight becomes THE currency of warfare…

Suddenly manipulating that, framing that, luring the ideological extremists of all sides, and then exiting, rug-pulling, and betraying those who trusted you for your own goals… that becomes THE GAME for nation states, mercenary companies, ideological movements, transnational criminal organizations and influence networks.

As the skillset and mode of fighting in modern warfare increasingly resembles the gameplay loop of Metal Gear Solid… the schemes, conspiracies, plots, dynamics, and personalities of modern warfare are increasingly resembling the stories, aesthetics, plot points, and character dynamics that Kojima wrote.

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This is going to be an era of profound disillusionment and heartbreak… Tragically beautiful as increasingly independent and heroic fighters selecting their foreign battlefields to volunteer upon (or get press-ganged and shanghai’d into fighting)… having exercising truly admirable independence of judgement and action,… Only to have their trusts tragically betrayed, and new figures to arise leading new segments and movements on new crusades of vengeance and ideological visions… which themselves meet new tragedies.

Kojima’s vision has already expressed itself but not completely… the rise of this new type of soldier, this new independent “Legendary Mercenary” has already begun, you can see these figures with youtube channels and go-pro footage of their time on the Frontlines of Ukraine, Syria, Lebanon, Gaza, and other places…

The Geopolitical implications of various Soldiers TikTok and Instagram videos creating legends for themselves… as well as the horror stories and disillusionment of others.

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Just as warfare has come to resemble the Vision of Kojima… The way millennials and younger conceive and represent warfare is increasingly Kojima-fied with many now trying to cultivate the larger than life personalities, and narrative Arcs, and individuated career ambitions…

“You look like a bunch of God Damned individuals!” Might be an insult that drill sergeants have long used to insult and breakdown troops who’ve failed to maintain uniformity…

But on the modern battlefield where reputations drive career prospects and might have to transfer between Conventional Militaries, Private Military Companies, Security Contracts, Foreign Volunteer Legions, Intelligence Agencies, Guerilla-Units, Youtube Channels, Podcasts, Military Industrial Companies, Semi or fully criminal organizations, Legacy Media Companies like FOX News, and Governmental Political Administrative appointments…

Suddenly personal branding takes on a shocking amount of importance.

Somehow even as most western militaries aim to have a “grey-man” “Quiet professional” appearance to dodge scrutiny… Increasingly everyone who gets contracts or appointments to various companies, agencies, departments and organizations all increasingly look weird, and have distinctive visual markers like Kojima villains, or the freelance mercenaries of earlier ages of warfare.

Trump Appointees aren’t quite as garish as Trump the Man, and certainly aren’t as ostentatious as historical mercenaries… But it doesn’t take a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing.

As clout becomes the currency… Clown becomes the style.

Welcome to warfare in the 21st century.

The best Is yet to come.

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I’ve deep dived the fundamental questions and delusions of Right wing Rhetoric a few times… Whether it’s Right winger’s Counterproductive insistence on non-violent and non-feminine anger, the delusions of Anti-Discrimination as simply Christian Niceness, or the self-defeating willingness to believe what leftists say about stupid right winger “rubes and rednecks”. But one rightwing bugbear maybe outdoes all the others in its raw self-defeating thought stopping power.

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Every Right Wing conversation, every debate, every Twitter thread, every “what must be done”… Eventually comes to a round of people saying “We need to get organized” “The left is organized and we’re not!”… And then everyone nods in approval that ya organizing would be nice… And then no one does anything, and even if that was actually a conversation at an in person meeting… something that anyone who’s tried retail politics will tell you is the hardest hurdle to get over when organizing. No one even passes around a clipboard to get contact info for a subsequent meeting.

Right Wingers are all in agreement that they need to “Organize”, that “organization” is this mythical solution that would work, just as sure as they all tacitly know that… they mean that someone else should be organizing.

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Now the common read is “Yep, right wingers are just useless. We deserve to lose because we’re not even as civic minded as the evil leftists who hate society” and then you get endless recriminations about boomer detachment; football watchers; isolated millennials and zoomers who won’t leave social media…

But this is plainly NOT the case if you stop and think for just a single second.

Whether it’s Jan 6th, The Canadian Trucker Convoy, or the various farmer’s protests in Europe that shut down cities and dumped manure outside government buildings, Right Wingers are actually quite willing to travel hundreds or even thousands of miles with literal tons of equipment or mere nuisance items. They are actually quite willing to assume physical and legal risks, and even brave -20 degree weather for their beliefs. Indeed these are not one offs, from Charlottesville, to the anti-migrant riots in Britain, to the Ulez Blade-Runners (subject of an upcoming piece)… Right wingers are consistently willing to exert considerable sustained effort, risk, and endurance… often at considerable cost…

If they think it will actually DO SOMETHING.

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“But those protests never transitioned to being OrGaNiZeD”

And here we get to the rub.

“Organization” has the become the “Synergy” or “pizazz” or in military circles “Lethality” of the Right wing world.

A Placeholder word that means 50 different things to 20 different people and exists as at best an agreed upon vibe that covers up often non-overlapping radically different ideas, if not straight sloppy non-thinking or magic pixie dust.

Fortunately Rightists have not gone to the communist level of having 50 committees each taking meeting minutes of the same 20 people representing 10 non-committee members… They aren’t at “People’s Front of Judea” levels. but the way they talk about “Organizing” as the cure-all, its sounds as if they actually wish they were.

The fundamental problem is as soon as you take it away from abstractions, none of these people share an idea of what organizing even is or exists to achieve.

“Ok we need to organize… Organize and do what?”

Win. Like the left does.

“Ok… And what steps would you want to take, milestones would you want to achieve, and metrics would you want to optimize?”

“First we get organized. Then we’ll be organized. Then we’ll start winning. then we’ll win. Like the left does.”

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Ok maybe this is a little uncharitable but its not that far from how most right wingers actually talk about the prospect of organizing… And there is a very simple reason for this: they know that basically all proposals for actually organizing will NOT WORK, or will be so low return on effort as to be actively painful, and then PROBALBY not work.

Occasionally you’ll get people to explicitly say what “organizing” means: Run for schoolboard, county council, Form an NGO, attend “protests”, volunteer on a campaign… And if you ask them why they don’t run for schoolboard they’ll either have an excuse for why they specifically cannot do that at this point in their life, or they’ll say they HAVE… And now it’s someone else’s turn to suffer the burden of being a good citizen and yelling at the traitor leftists twice a month and blocking them from doing what they’ve already gotten passed in every other school district but not this one… for now. Until they do. After which there will never be any way to reverse it.

Its not glamorous but this is why the left wins, they’ll tell you. It’s not easy defending civic life. You have to attend meeting.

The way they talk about you might be confused that they think they’re living in 1926 instead of 2026.

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Indeed almost every single call on the right for “Organizing” is almost never a call for any specific organization, but rather a cheer at the idea that SOMEONE ELSE might pour dozens or hundreds of hours into unpaid thankless political work of shoving their fingers in the leaky dike of western civilization, that we all know is never going to hold long term or ever get better, but you can put it off one more day.

“We Just need to organize more” is actually. when you start to parse it, a wish that an infinity of free political labor and/or donations will be performed by others such that it doesn’t matter how low return the individual tasks. “Run for school board” not because that’s a high return use of your time, but because if everyone was willing to pour endless hours of free low reward, low impact, political work out of their free time, presumably someone would do that as well. And if only we had INFINITE free political labor and donations… We might just win. Maybe.

“But this is what the left does!? The left is organized! The left is amazing at at organizing!”

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Ok. Let’s define “organizing” as what the left is doing, And then come up with a definition of “organizing”…

If “Organizing” is “what the left does”… then “Organizing” actually does a have a specific meaning. In that case “organizing” is a combination of Racketeering, money laundering, graft, human trafficking, lawfare extortion schemes, corruption, foreign espionage, nepotism, employment lawsuit fraud, public grant fraud, blackmail, spoils, do nothing jobs, embezzlement of public funds, environmental shakedowns, billionaire influence peddling, child prostitution, and probably whole other categories that I am forgetting.

“Organizing” is ORGANIZED CRIME.

Ya that’s right.

Unlike the “organized” right that prays more people will volunteer their time with no hope of reward, leftists are getting PAID. Leftists are advancing their primary employment career. And often even getting millionaire rich by advancing their goals.

You know, like EVERY organization that operate at national scale. Indeed this is so obvious and so well known that we are into the DOZENS of premium TV crime shows that have plots revolving around just Black and Italian networks in Democrat local politics like in The Sopranos or The Wire. And we are into the THOUSANDS of documentaries about various political criminal orgs like the Epstein Network, The Kennedy Irish Mafia Network, The IRA, The Bronfmans in Canada…

This is considered the single most realistic TV show on the running of City Government that has been made. Indeed it is considered the Greatest TV Show of All time.

This is how politicians and “Political Organizers” actually talk about what they do… And not one person in the Democratic Party or Baltimore or anywhere else recoiled in outrage at this. Indeed, They’re nostalgic for when Italians and Jews could “leave a little” that their black and brown partners didn’t embezzle the majority of everything..

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“Labor disputes” and “Labor organizing” as a vehicle for racketeering had been a staple of Leftist politics and Mafia Activity for almost 100 years BEFORE Jimmy Hoffa disappeared in 1975, and half of Left wing politics still works on this model… they just rarely seek out actual private sector workers to organize anymore preferring Public sector workers or victim categories, which have the advantage of not being attached to Market forces that will punish companies laid down with expenses that only exist to service crime and politics, and being consistently ideologically aligned with the leftists.

Leftists in various constituencies have even “organized” “Unions” of “bus riders”! Is the public transit service any better in these constituencies than areas with non-unionized riderships? FUCK NO!

But I can guarantee you that the people who organized the “Union” now receive the equivalent of a six figure salary relative to the actual hours they put into union activity annually out of tax dollars, and they carry influence via whatever ability to propagandize and whip votes their “ridership union” gives them. (assuming they didn’t just forge and juice the signatures for registering their union and forming a 501c(4) )

This is why Earnest civically minded right-wing women in the top 1% of conscientiousness and altruistic willingness to do the work… Can get elected schoolboard trustee, show up, and be drowned out at schoolboard meetings by various Queer Activists, Black and Brown studies officials, corrupt teacher’s union representatives, disabled students reps… All vastly more cynical and and of abyssally lower character than her…

Because it’s their DAY JOB. It’s their career! They’re getting PAID! It’s how they advance up the ladder of their profession in NGO/Politics/Education world and get that 6 figure salary and generous as can be pension for doing fucking nothing all day and creating no value. The best of them will make it to 7 figures.

They aren’t “Volunteering” their time. This is their job. Scamming the education system, or Transit Budget, and claiming some moral justification is their career, and advancing themselves within the organized crime ecosystem of leftist politics is their chosen occupation.

This is their Profession.

And the bizarre civic mindedness of some random rightwing lady who’s so earnest and concerned about the public welfare she’s willing attend schoolboard meetings after work for the basically non-existent stipend they give schoolboard trustees… That’s either cute to them, or mildly threatening and an obstacle, but not serious competition. The serious competition is all the other people in the activist class who want to outcompete them and take their funding and career opportunities.

This is called Public Choice Theory.

Despite what you might naively think given that “Democracy” is a system of “Majority Vote” the actual dynamic of all democratic systems is to reward concentrated organized Self-interested minority interests at the expense of dispersed disorganized public spirited majority interests.

Or as Frederic Bastiat said:

“Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.”

The only type of governments that resists this long-term, at least in theory, are Multi-Generational Monarchy… because in theory the monarch is the Most organized minority and his long term interest, being measured in generations and dynasties has a long enough time horizon to actually make judgements in what is EFFECTIVELY the interest of the public (He wants a functional middle class and prosperity because his grandkids might need them in a war someday) without immediately being outcompeted and losing what power he has… but this is only in theory… In practice New and unstable Kings or Weak Kings or delusional kings often fall into their own bizarre courtly problems of decision making.

Or HerenVolk Democracies or Monoethnic Oligarchy where the franchise is radically restricted to those with property, and ethnic ties to the territory, and consequently low time preferences… (though these often degrade into Democracies)… These atleast put up some resistance to the inescapable pull of public choice theory.

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But this is the default of Government. Millions of organized crime rackets all trying to carve out slices of FUCKING MONEY. With power as a distant second concern.

And that has to be the ordering for the same reasons armies require money… because if people aren’t getting paid they don’t show up.

This is why Right Wing Parties are so goddamned useless in every single country on earth, because right wing parties represent people who work for a living producing actual taxable private sector value, and must necessarily be represented by fulltime political actors who don’t.

This is why when EVERY SINGLE right wing party in the west that get’s voted in by 51% of the population in a coalition of white people, hard working small businessmen, military veterans, skilled tradespeople, etc.

Those Right-Wing parties almost immediately gets subverted by decades old gay mafias, Israeli foreign interests, closet leftists, defense contractors, tech companies, and franchise chains trying to import a bajillion Indians, and implement a surveillance state.

Because that’s THEIR PROFESSION. They spend 2000 hours a year fulltime thinking about that with other people who are spending their 2000 full time hours the same way. They’re setting themselves up to make money and still have a job no matter what happens in the elections. And the hopes of white America, and the collective interests of small business on main street, and responsible government aren’t going to give them 6 figures for the rest of their lives to sit around DC expensing 5 star meals and taking trips to Israel with the prostitutes comped.

At best the White Small Business owners might maybe get them a job in government… via appointment, for 4 years, if they win. Whereas they can get 6 figure jobs FOREVER irrespective of electoral results, for them, their spouses, and their children, by just selling out their constituents or joining in whatever leftist, zionist, or gay organized crime network will give it to them.

Indeed you will notice that Right Wing Responsible Government is the ONE THING they can NEVER give you.

Black activists can form protest movements, organize riots, and then get bought off… Some Jesse Jackson type motherfucker can get the government to give 6, 7, 8 figure grants for his corrupt NGO, some black ladies can be given jobs in the civil service, and laws can be passed allowing literally retarded black job applicants to sue their employers for not promoting them because they’re literally retarded… this was a real lawsuit…. And when the political class buys them off, that benefits the political class!

Suddenly managing race relations requires MORE government employees, suddenly all the existing government employees get PROMOTED to manage those new employees, suddenly all the lawsuits against employers create new opportunities for employment lawyers to make money, suddenly professors need to be hired to create new school curriculums to brainwash white schoolkids of the productive classes to accept the new racial caste system they’re under.

Everybody gets a promotion! Everyone gets new exciting career opportunities to get paid 6 figures enjoyably exercising power over others and micromanaging the relations of normal people.

By contrast… Right Wing Politics? If you organized MLK style violent riots for Responsible government and low taxes?

They could NEVER give it to you… Because RESPONCIBLE GOVERNMENT MEANS FIRING THEM AND ARRESTING THEM.

Fiscal responsibility means hutting down all the carveout, schemes, racketeering operations, regulatory capture, Unionized grifters, advocates getting paid to advocate more money for themselves… And eliminating their jobs, if not hunting them down, chopping their balls off, and shoving them in an arctic gulag to mine Lithium and Bauxite like any halfway competent Roman administrator would have.

This is why the Somali daycare fraud turned into a red-alert riot season in Minneapolis… IN THE DEAD OF WINTER… because if you started getting the obvious Somali welfare fraud and organized crime and hired people in one place and created offices to deal with the fraud there… suddenly you’d have government employees, permanent people, being paid to hunt down the leftist fraud and organized crime that IS government under conditions of multicultural western democracy.

They will fight to the death to prevent you from ever getting that policy achievement that actually matters and actually bankrupting and imprisoning all the “Organizers” ie. Organized Crime, that is leftist politics.

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This is why Right Wingers never win. The system is set up to prevent them from winning as a matter of all-hands-on-deck emergency survival.

There are over 1 million people who are professionally PAID in the US to be Democrats.

From TV personalities, to College Professors, Grade School Teachers, Employment-Equity Lawyers, Environmental impact assessors, hospital administrators, Union Chair-people, Think-tankers, Social Workers, Urban Planners, Human Resources, NGOs, Catholic Priests (whose NGOs are paid by government)… All basically HAVE to be extreme leftists, and are paid to be extreme leftists.

By contrast only about 10,000 people are paid to be republicans, and basically all of them are in DC working for actual republican politicians, at the few right wing think tanks, or at Fox News… And every single one of them knows they aren’t getting a job elsewhere if their few paymasters decide they don’t like them.

A republican staffer or magazine person can do a 180 and become a leftist if they’re in good standing, and indeed MANY “Gay Republicans” have used right wing politics as basically an in to upper level left wing politics and legacy media which they couldn’t have accessed otherwise… But unlike the left wing ecosystem (where there are actually a lot of options for activists to burn a few bridges) basically all professional DC right wingers have to toe every leftist shiboleth and be constantly demonstrating their value to Israel and the Military industrial complex… Or they can be left jobless and unemployable very easily.

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And none of their constituents are going to give them that 6 figure job to do nothing out of appreciation, not least because even if they did fall on their sword they’re almost certainly still hated for being someone who kissed the wall and sucked Peter Thiel’s weird sweaty dick.

And any of them naive enough to think that the corrupt government leftists are going to protect them or keep them employed if they actually advance right wing politics are in for a rude awakening just like all the young MAGA Graduates who got jobs in DC.

Indeed the “Maga Civil War” is best modelled as a class struggle between the classic 10,000 paid Republicans who are overwhelmingly Gay, Jewish, Literal Prostitutes (yes literal, they suck cock for money… congress spends 18 million a year+ on paying female staffers for their services), and Literal former communists who populate the legacy right, and get their money from the machine and shady billionaires… On the one hand. Fighting a war against actual entrepreneurial free market influencers whose income comes from their supporters and audience on the other… and the few young staffers who didn’t realize they were purposefully being set up to fail.

Right Wing politics has exploded because suddenly another 10,000ish people are getting paid to advance right wing politics… but not by the political machine. Traditional RW politics was so corrupt and castrated grumpy youtubers, Anime Avatars on twitter, and podcasters require emergency meetings with their Zionist billionaire backers.

But not because they’ve managed to get anywhere close to power…

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And there is no real way to fix this.

There is no way to go to the Mafia and make them give you your money back peacefully.

They will escalate to violence before you win. They will start riots in the street, and escalate those riots to Troubles style terrorist campaigns to try and scare you off… why do you think they fund Antifa so well?

They would literally rather escalate to civil war than let white private sector America take the government back and fire all of them, cut all the funding to their NGOs, end all their welfare, and arrest a good percentage of them for fraud, racketeering and worse.

The Epstein Class would probably launch nukes before admitting fault and lining up for the guillotine.

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And you are never going to “Out-Organize” them, because its their fucking job, and their fucking career, and their fucking life, and in most cases the lives of their families, friends, communities, and entire ethnicities.

The Idea that civic minded right wingers volunteering their time on weekends or after work to “get organized” are going defeat the left, is as absurd as the idea that your weekend soccer club with your friends is going compete with 100 million dollar franchises and win the FIFA World Cup.

These people have been doing this as their primary career since they were in the University student unions competing to be the ones that get a choice NGO or DC internship before they go to law school. Many have been doing this since they were in highschool or sooner. Many have been groomed by parents and grandparents to specifically become Senior History Professors, Lawyers, Politicians, Department Head, Think Tankers, Publishers, and otherwise have careers as connected political actors since birth.

Ben Shapiro performed the violin at the Israel Bonds Banquet, the annual event held by the Development Corporation for Israel, Israel’s primary underwriter of their national bonds… At age 12.

Leftist and Zionist and institutional “Political Organizers” have been doing this multi-generationally, and grooming their kids to do the same at the level most pro-athletes, West Point Candidates, and Child stars are trained and groomed.

“We need to get organized” is the equivalent of saying “We just need to practice more on Thursday nights and then we’ll win the dance off with the Jackson Five.”

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You are almost certainly NOT going to out-organize the left or the zionists. You don’t even have the nerve to admit what “Organizing” even is… Organizing is arranging networks of corruption and organized crime to devour the tax base and social trust of society, so that you might consume the last viable vestiges of civilization to feed your burgeoning breakaway criminal empire.

Because that’s what political organizing is. It’s committing crimes and frauds to turn beautiful non-political things into fuel to generate money to feed and grow the machine that devours those beautiful things.

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“Wah-wah! You’re so negative! Why must you say things so meanly? You’re a blackpiller! Why don’t want people to get organized? Why aren’t you offering hashtag #realistic solutions!? Why!? WHY???”

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Because the default is NOT that things get better. The defaults is this continues until your civilization fucking dies and the leftists and others sell you children to Arab, Jewish, and Mexican sex traffickers as their last act of treachery before they flee the final collapse of your civilization.

This is what happens to decaying civilizations, just like decaying bodies. The parasites defeat the immune system, health declines, and then at some point the organism dies and the immune system disappears, and then the parasites devour everything and even ones that would never be a threat before like earth worms, or common molds, or Somalians, are now able to penetrate the body and devour the choice flesh that the cancer and the heart worms didn’t get to.

But, Ok you want a realistic actionable solution? You want extraordinary measures that could actually solve the problem?

You want to subject the body politic to necessary but horrifying back to back rounds of chemotherapy, radiation, and anti-parasitics with the goal of saving the patient no matter how torturous and scaring it is or how much the patient screams that the pain is worse than death?

You want a way to beat your enemies despite the fact they’re vastly better organized than you and there’s no possible way for you to get more organized?

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Fucking Kill Them

This is how corrupt decaying civilizations traditionally pull themselves out of death spirals and reorient themselves towards new political goals and new self-stable political arrangements. With new non-cancerous elites oriented toward new virtues, grooming their children and the most promising prodigies not towards ruin, decadence, and a totalitarian nightmare of perfect lies perfectly believed… but their new vision of life, rugged virtue, and a utopian dream of perfect insight perfectly introspected…(it ussually buys another 80 years before they finally get too corrupt and the cycle needs repeating)

This is done via a simple basic method:

The wholesale liquidation of class enemies and the institutions that produce those enemy classes via the abundant use of Extraordinary Systematic and Ad Hoc Violence.

Think about it, normal military men, responsible citizen, business owners, believers in an honest day’s work… Even the most possible civic minded persons of them volunteering 3 hours a week to civic minded causes and even tithing of 2-5% of their income to political causes… Cannot compete with 40 hours a week fulltime work and actually getting paid six figures to run an organized political machine that can unwillingly tax all of society 20-50% of their income.

That math doesn’t math. No amount of donation or volunteering from even the most civically minded saints can compete with that.

However if you kill an enemy political organizer, the 6-12 hours you took out of your schedule to track them down, head over, black bag them, torture some info out of them, burn them alive, and then dump their body?

That 6-12 hours and maybe 1000 dollar budget (5k if you use a burner car off craigslist then dump it in a lake?) that rewards 2000 hours a year, or 80,000 hours over the course of a 40 year career that they’re not actively working non-stop to destroy you and your civilization. That’s the equivalent not of 200k a year you denied your enemy, but some multiple of that their paymasters thought they were worth that they were willing to pay them 200k a year.

Despite the heroic efforts of Necromancers and Detroit poll workers, the dead are hard to organize.

This is why warfare is the inevitable consequence of all politics on a long enough time horizon in all times, in all places, without exception, and without any possibility of an exception.

Violence is always the highest return political activity. It has been since the dawning of the world, and it will be til the last star falls from the night.

Warfare is the continuation of politics by other means, and politics is the continuation of warfare by other means. Where one fails the other begins.

On a long enough time horizon every polity must have a regime change, or die.

You might not be able to outdance the Jackson five… But they go down to buckshot.

Likewise even the most corrupt unreformable regime purpose built to never ever in million years ever change or give anything back to its victims of it’s own accord can still erupt in coups, revolutions, assassinations, civil wars, and total state collapses.

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In the first draft, originally I went into a series of case studies at this point, but you all know the American revolution and Roman Civil Wars and French revolution… but you probably don’t know the most illustrative example:

The Taiping Rebellion

The Qing Dynasty had a ingenious way to lockdown aspirant intelligent young men: It gave them an entrance exam.

The Qing’s Imperial Examination was both fair on some level, and highly corrupt… It was basically impossible requiring endless memorization of Confucian poetry and philosophy, endless drilling, and tons of things the elite could raise their kids in from birth or bribe imperial officials to cheat in some way, but…like America’s Democratic elections and University System… gave the appearance of some official meritocratic fair method of advancing up the social structure and redressing imperial grievances. Just take the Civil Service Exam and become a governor yourself. Get Organized. Git Good. Work Hard, stop complaining.

Well Hong Xiuquan was a child of agricultural workers who had aspirations. We don’t know his birthdate that his farmer father was so irrelevant… but in his time off from farming young Hong studied ruthlessly in a way that only the Chinese can. At age 5 he began studying and after 5 or 6 years could recite the entire 4 books of Confucianism from memory. Taking the entry Civil Service Exam he finished first, but then travelling to Ghangzhou for the provincial civil service exam he failed, and he was forced to return to the farm that his parents couldn’t afford his studies… But a lucky break hit! Connecting with some wealthier friends, he was able to spend a year studying further, and became a village school teacher… Then after several more years of studying in his spare time and teaching the exact same curiculum he was studying full-time… he failed the imperial examinations for a third time at 23 in 1837 (which passed less than 1%) … At which point he had a neverous breakdown and sudden realization of profound sanity.

I say SANITY, because if the definition of Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, what Hong Xiuquan did must rank up there with the sanest things that any Chinese man, or indeed any man, has ever done.

Instead of taking the Civil service exam a 4th, 5th, 10th, or 20th time (not unheard of) hoping to maybe pass and win a station for himself in his 50s, like many lucky passers eventually did, instead of going back to his little classroom and reciting aloud the same 4 bullshit books of Confucianism another 300 fucking times, instead of sitting there contemplating the 5 constants of Ren, Yi, Li, Zhi, and Zin for another 5 years of his fucking life!!!

Xiuquan instead took the sane approach.

He declared himself the younger brother of Jesus Christ, God’s second begotten son and living emissary on earth, attracted followers, and then he launched a rebellion declaring himself “Heavenly King of the Heavenly Kingdom of Peace”.

His rebellion would eventually kill 20-30 million people.

He was going to burn down the entire Confucian imperial system, and ensure that no one ever had to take that fucking exam ever again, and no one had to answer to any crooked Confucian administrator ever again… They would instead answer to him, and his Neo-Christian Administrators.

While ultimately the Taiping rebellion would fail, not least because this begat the age of foreign armies operating in China, it was one of a sequence of such mystical and oddly influenced rebellions in China over the period… Because the underlying problems were never addressed, they just repeated. The Boxer Rebellion, the Wuchang Rebellion, the 1911 Revolution, the Nationalists, Revolutionaries, the Communist revolution… All begin with this destabilization and age of Chinese instability.

While the Chinese did not learn to worship his particular vision of God and Him as God’s second begotten emissary… They learnt something even more profound and more attached to his character… They learnt to fucking rage quit, murder their enemies, form fanatical paramilitaries, and start wars of Armageddon for the whole of China against their traitorous elite and their foreign handlers.

Every Chinese Warlord was indeed his child in a way.

An enviable legacy.

Even the most impenetrable, uncaring and unreformable system can still be “Re-formed” via the “re-Forming” of the innards of its supporters via cold sharp steel.

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“But I Don’t Want to Fight For My Liberties And Dignity! I want to Work Within the System.”

Ok… Go to law school.

You may need to go back and get a Bachelors first. Combined this will throw you into about 500k in debt.

At this point you NEED to pay that debt back (its non-dischargable in bankruptcy, and going bankrupt precludes you from practicing law in most jurisdictions), and you want to get to political power as fast a possible, so you’re going to want to take an internship at the most politicized post you can… Unfortunately only rich kids get SCOTUS internships, but with luck and probably you’ll have to do some stuff free, you’ll get in at a leftist thinktank or other org doing gruntwork on a discrimination lawsuit… And yes it would basically have to be a leftist thinktank unless you’re willing to do gay-for-pay stuff to get in at the one or two conservative NGOs that do lawsuits… If you’re heterosexual and want to stay that way… You have to start at leftist law-firms and NGOs and then switch over.

I know exactly one person who says “no there’s lots of opportunities for conservatives” and he’s gay as can be, and not a conservative… But he’s getting hired as the “token Conservative” at various positions… because they don’t want Right Wing men, they want a liberal gay they can call their token right winger.

You will never get the Token conservative job as an actual conservative.

Then after 5-10 years, when you’re down to 300k in student debt, you might maybe be established enough to make the “conversion” to being a “conservative” lawyer, and then the real struggle begins… You’ll have to be aggressively networking with the zionists at this point and make it clear you love Israel no matter what, and if you’ve been willing to do shady stuff for the right corporate masters… the opportunity will present itself.

At this point you’ll have to fuck children. Epstein wasn’t trafficking to himself, and there’s no way his network will just let a stranger waltz in and be innocent with their support.

You’ll also have to fuck a lot of children, across years… or do creepier worse shit. You have to make them think you really like it… You have to make them think you’re Lindsay Graham or Howard Lutnik levels of creepy.

There is no way you’ll realistically advance any further if you don’t, and if you actually want to win… this is what it takes.

You may also have to give your asshole to Peter Theil.

However get married, not for love but for political connection, and make sure she’s wealthy and powerful.

Then if everything lines up exactly right you’ll become a Senator, or Governor, or Vice President…

Now you just need the next 2 or 3 elections to go exactly right so you wind up like Joseph Biden and not Dick Cheney or Kamala Harris or Mike Pence or Al Gore… You also need to 100% support the bombing of women and children, sign off on every warcrime, tell young people to shutup when they talk about housing, but lead them on just enough to still vote for you when you promise to release the Epstein Files (winking to all your Pedophile friends, like that’ll happen) And then Tada!

You’re president.

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NOW! You can finally do something!

The Next-time Netenyahu visits deploy Delta Force to assassinate him in New York and Massacre his personal security, then get up at a press conference at Federal Hall you have scheduled… Name every single name, confess to everything, lay out exactly how the system works, declassify every single file, Sign a presidential pardon live on air for every American who kills one of the Epstein Clients or other pedos you named… at this point some of your handlers who are themselves pedos that you’ve named will start yelling and trying rush the stage, threatening that they’ll have your family killed for what you’ve done… At which point You can laugh at them and point out that you married for power, and you actually hate you wife and her bastard children, and there’s nothing that would bring you more joy.

Then commit Sepuku live on TV yelling: “Let this expiate!”

Congratulations… You saved America. You are the single greatest double agent of all time. You are the boss to surpass Big Boss. You successfully pulled off the Solidus Snake Gambit and got the evil conspiracy to put you in charge only so you could betray them out patriotism and love for America.

And hurray you did it non-lethally! You worked entirely within the system. The only murders you were a party to were the warcrimes the government already commits and the sex offenses against children the FBI already treats as legal.

You are the avatar of faith in the American system.

And all it cost you was your soul, all human connection, your asshole, your innocence, all sense of dignity, and not uttering a single word except to lie for decades on end until the very moment of your death.

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Except you wouldn’t… because You can’t pretend to be a blackmailed corrupt cowardly pedophile flinching at anything that threatens your career and delusions without actually just becoming Howard Lutnik or Lindsay Graham.

You pretend to be retarded for decades, and at the end you’ll find you’ve forgotten how to speak normally without the Down Syndrome lisp.

But hey, maybe J.D. Vance will do it.

(he won’t, he’ll morph into Lindsay Graham)

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Ok But now you’re going to say you don’t want to go to law school, and you don’t want to work for leftist NGOs, and you don’t want to bend over in gay for pay schemes, you don’t want to rape kids, and you want to marry for love, and you don’t want to risk being Kamala Harris, and you don’t want you kids to be killed even if they probably won’t be yours, and Seppuku sounds like it hurts….

huh…..

I prepare a masterpiece for you… and you reject it.
I’m like a 3 star Michelin Chef being asked if there’s a gluten free vegan option.

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Ok.

So you want to “organize” your way out of this political scenario, without having to dedicate decades of your life, without having to live a lie, without having to perform sexual favours or sexual abominations, without having to play nice with pedophiles, without having to marry for political connection, and without having to endure the humiliations and war crimes of public office yourself…

And also you want to work entirely within the system and not commit any noble violence that might actually wash the corruption away with blood.

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You want to get together and play democracy with like-minded friends in your spare time on evenings and weekends but actually have it DO SOMETHING and not be immediately drowned out by the corruption of the elite… And you want it do something meaningful, substantive, and permanent in the real world… Not be a boutique Live Action Roleplay like the Star Wars Hotel or dinner theater.

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And you’re sure you aren’t looking for a Dinner Theater?

You want to actually participate in politics?
Warfare by other means? The meaningful manipulation of the machinery that controls the nuclear weapons? And the spy system that tracks everyone on earth? And the intelligence agencies that experiment on unwitting college students with LSD? And sex traffick children to politicians? And bomb girl’s Schools?

Are you sure you’re looking for Democratic Politics, and not Dungeons and Dragons?

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Ok…

The first thing is to remember what politics is:

Warfare by other means.

You aren’t immediately organizing violence… But you also aren’t NOT organizing violence.

The extent a political faction or movement has power is the extent to which it could transition to violence and criminal activity effectively.

The Israelis and Jewish mafia are the most powerful faction in America, not because they have the most armaments (that would be the army) but because they can transition to violence the fastest and most coherently.

They are indeed one of three prominent Mafias from the 20th century that had this power, the other two were the Irish and the Italians… who the Jewish Mafia used the FBI to kill off.

Your average Army Captain would probably struggle to find someone they trust and trusts them enough to act as or hire a third party as a hitman… That’s not the case with even relatively low level people in the Jewish Mafia world.

Your goal when politically organizing should be to form bonds with people that you could trust them to participate in violence with or for you.

That’s actually really a hard bond to form in the modern day… when you don’t share a religion or ethnic kinship, or family ties that’s kinda hard.

For this reason you should be trying to do PHYSICAL things when you organize, and trying to create rituals for your group.

Frats, soccer clubs, active clubs, airsoft teams, veterans groups, football ultras… Teams. These transition to participating in riots or acting as Freikorp much more easily.

Likewise you want to sort aggressively by sex and ethnicity… Think of the Captain planet multiethnic team? You want the opposite. You want ethnic coherence. This is why they’re scarred of neo-nazis. (also the most famous Neo-Nazi group was betrayed by their one token Mexican)

Remember a chain is only as strong as it’s weakest link, so you want activities that act as sorting mechanisms of temperament, endurance, intelligence and character.

There’s a reason in many white countries the highest level of crime was taken over by Biker Clubs in the 90s (Hells Angels became a multibillion dollar cartel in Canada, Australia, and Scandinavia)… The kinds of people who can maintain a motorcycle, endure camping out, get in fights, get back on after bad crashes, not die from poor decisions, and then want to join a criminal enterprise in spite of those virtues? Those people make powerful criminal orgs.

Likewise good reason Truckers and Farmers rebellions in Canada and Europe are so common and effective. If you own and maintain your own big rig, you tend to be very competent and commitment-capable. (and it’s hard for the Cops to fake a $300,000 piece of equipment to go undercover)

For non-active activities, if you really want a dinner theater that’s still somewhat relevant, classics bookclubs and poetry clubs attract intelligent people with a keen sense of history and western civilization… It also invariably defaults all white.

The Second thing to remember is what “Organizing” means: Organized crime.

Even if its technically legal… If you’re getting together with a group of unpaid political volunteers, the explicit goal… and you should force this to the center if you’re right wing… is to get at least one person at that meeting in a job with a 6 figure salary where they’re being paid to be right wing full time.

It might be as innocent as you’re influencers coming up with a private chat group to boost eachother’s tweets and podcasts and products to try and do things honestly via the free market, you might be honorable enough that you aren’t accepting payoffs to hype people and aren’t acting as a mouthpiece for some billionaire… But the goal is to get eachother rich via influence peddling so that you can be full-time activists instead of part time and so that you can lock in permanent allies who can never betray you and moderate, because their income depends on ideological fanaticism.

But more realistically you want to get access to tax dollars, get some “Learing Centers” going… or find some regulatory oddity or enforcement blind spot where you can make outsized returns because of the government’s capriciousness, or ignorance.

Second Amendment types are actually fairly decent at this, coming up with unusual linguistic exceptions to various firearms regulations so that they alone can sell “not an auto-sear” auto-sears and other products that just barely fit some extraordinarily thin definition of legal.

Remember the goal isn’t to make the government look stupid, maybe they’ll waste time closing a loophole, but that’s not the point… The goal is to make money off of your individual hobby’s fanaticism and contempt for state regulations, even if you technically obeyed them… not only will this let you organize enterprises but these business models quickly become ecosystems all thinking the same.

It’s not a coincidence the Boston Tea-Party was carried out by smugglers… The creation of a criminal class ecosystems outside and against the law was the main thing that organized them against the crown… This “white”, grey, and black market activity is the true backbone of all political organization.

Its important to stay in contact with the opponent (the government) and feel where they are, little non-compliances and deviances give you that feel and reveal opportunities…

Grow your totally above board enterprises… then pour resources into local politics where you operate to gain control of the institutions most immediately impacting you, then use that to grow your enterprises further…

And at the end of it if you're highly effective you’ll probably turn into some George Soros or Sheldon Adellson monster… But there’s a chance you turn into Samuel Adams… Who participated in an armed rebellion… because that’s what actually lowers the corruption threshold.

But If you want to “get organized” against your political rivals… this is how you do it, you form white, grey, and black market organized crime networks.

Never meet with your political allies without some scheme forming to get one of you rich.

And if you’re extraordinarily moral you’ll only sell the goods or steal the resources that you politically agree with taking… You’ll rob from the robbers so to speak, only plunder the enemy… Be a sort of Robin Hood.

But then, that’s what the leftists say they’re doing.

I think most people will find that when all is played out, honest murder is often less corrupting than peaceful politics.

Everyone talks about guilty souls closing their eyes and seeing the faces of the people they killed… The wise man sees the faces of the people he didn’t.

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2000 Meters To Andrivka
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nf4Cgy56slU

Hearts of Iron 4: The Fire Rises Mod
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbWyaxIUifU

Opening: “Lord of War” by White Bat Audio, Outro Aviator, white bat audio

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For those who haven’t followed: Netanyahu hasn’t been seen in days or made any substantive public statement.

On March 13th Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was called out of a LIVE interview for an emergency meeting in the Situation room with Trump, then returned visibly shaken refusing to comment on why he had left but saying he’d trust his children’s life to Trump’s hands in the US Military in a visibly halting tone.

This led to all kinds of speculation, but shortly after One video was released of Netanyahu giving a statement which made everyone Narrow in on the most likely possibility:

Netanyahu was hit in an Iranian strike:

The Video which appeared to show Netanyahu alive and well on closer inspection had clear AI artifacting: notably at one point Netanyahu appears to have 6 fingers, while at others fingers appear Salad Fingers long, or extra-joints appear and disappear, at other points his teeth change shape:

This however isn’t actually that odd since a lot of recording equipment and software uses AI post-processing its actually really common for real footage to get ai postprocessing artifacts in release versions of the video especially once its been shared online a few times…

This was a major plot point in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial where the Prosecutor insisted that Kyle’s rifle could be seen firing and doing all kinds of menacing stuff… When on technical inspection these turned out to be artifacts of his macbook video-player’s “Enhance” feature.

AI artifacting in one video on its own wouldn’t show much… Except then Netanyahu was absent from other meetings, and rumors quickly spread:

“Is this why Bessent was so spooked? Did he get news Netanyahu was hit?”

Netanyahu was releasing no statements and the internet was abuzz… Then this video was released:

(notice at the 55 second shot he switches hands on the coffee cup to shake with his right… My friends insist it seems to happens too fast mid-pan as if an AI didn’t realize how gingerly old men move, or failed to maintain object permanence while he was out of shot)

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Now the entire internet is abuzz looking at the coffee cup and trying to assess the behavior of the liquid coffee or the fabric of his clothing… That many insist they’re behaving oddly or AI… Many have tried to find the Coffeeshop with some arguing that it’s real, others that its closed and hasn’t operated for months, others that it was closed for the photoshoot… And several just obvious lies from both sides.

Some argue the date on the screen of the terminal said 2023 others using other enhance software that it was todays date…

And about a million posts from hasbara bots calling their enemies “retarded”, “peasants”, and “This is why the goyim must be ruled” (Yes mask off moment)

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But I want you to notice something uncontestable:

How short the video is.

We can debate about AI, Body doubles, AI face Swap, prerecorded fluff statements, prerecorded fluff statements that even reference known obvious AI bugs…

But notice how short it is.

Film isn’t scarce… we don’t even use it. You can record lengthy statements. Politicians tend to JUMP at the opportunity to make lengthy statements, especially when they have a captive audience… Especially in the midst of a war when people already think there’s been a meaningful threat to their health or the state and they want to reassure people or cash in politically.

Think of how many politicians visited Iraq or Afghanistan and wore Body Armor or Camo, desperate to appear to their voters that they’ve suffered some risk to themselves and they aren’t all talk…

Yet in this golden opportunity to deliver his exact message… A politician famous for his English statements delivers a message in Hebrew (no official transcript) glibly, about his coffee.

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This is such an unnaturally short and bait video, and the substance so utterly lacking and non-date specific. Especially to act glibly about a war and the survival of the state... If he was alive and well he could use it to make any statement he wanted to push some propaganda point while everyone’s waiting, make a statement about the resolve and will of the Israeli people... In English! To an audience with baited breath!

Instead its the EXACT bare minimum to get the shills and bots calling others retards for questioning it, and trying to shame YOU about how HE hasn’t answered questions or made any statement of substance in days. (something we’d criticize politicians for normally)

Ai “weekend at Bernie’s”? Body-Double who only speak Hebrew? Pre-recorded video?

He still hasn’t made any statement of substance or answered any question in days... indeed his son Yair Netanyahu hasn’t either, he hasn’t posted since March 8th, and he usually posts daily.

Sure Benjamin Netanyahu’s old so who knows... maybe his heart just kicked out and he’s undergoing bypass surgery in Europe.

But the fact everyone’s unconvinced and they just haven’t released something substantive or answered press questions... (something most major politicians do daily) speaks to something being hidden.

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Remember this isn’t just shitposters.

Regimes are vulnerable when the Leader is even PERCIEVED to be sick, weak, or dead... There are many historical examples of countries enduring real coups or real wars starting because of truly false rumors that the leader was sick or dead.

Perfectly healthy leaders have gotten home safe and sound from a hunting trip or helicopter crash or getting lost in the woods… only to find that they’re no longer king their brother or rival took over when everyone thought they were dead in an act of treason... And now that they’re alive, the cleanest solution is to just actually kill them.

This is not something governments play games with.

Indeed if you’ve seen the Tom Cruise film “Valkyrie” you know one of the most famous examples of such an event the attempted July 20 coup following the assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler… if Hitler had merely been slightly more WOUNDED, not killed, it would have worked since his leadership and voice could not have organized a stop to the coup… and his physical person could be finished off where the bomb failed

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We saw a softer coup in the Soviet Union force Brezhnev and most of his faction from power well before his death when his health declined… He kept his title, but by the end he was little more than a figurehead.

And most pressingly for the current conflict, the Shah of Iran actually did lose his country to Ayatollah Khomeini, the first Supreme Leader, when the Islamic revolution and maneuvering began… not with any political happening… but the Shah’s Cancer diagnosis… something that quickly leaked through international intelligence service chattering.

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Unless Netanyahu’s purposefully trying to create the rumor that he’s dead so as to bait an enemy, or some other 5d chess maneuver, his security services would be freaking out and demanding that he make a substantive uncontestable demonstration of life lest some faction of the army, some US political group, or a foreign government make a move off the perception of weakness.

Indeed WE CAN SEE THE FREAKOUT, because all the bots and paid influencers are at battle-stations ready to tell you Netanyahu’s fine, and you’re an absolute retard for doubting video evidence the same way they all said Biden was “sharp as a tack”…. And the exact way no one freaks out about actual dumb conspiracy theories such as the one that Biden was replaced with a body double (who was also senile)… No one has to run about and debunk flat earth theory… Indeed you can tell which “conspiracy theories” have the ring of truth to them by which ones get tons of posters and bots trying to shame people out of believing them ( and it is always shame, you’re always called “antisemitic” or “Stupid” or “anti-science”… its never a substantive argument. Whereas people who do go out of their way to debunk flat earth or other dumb conspiracies, actually do tend to get a kick out of going into the physical science side of it and the historical epistemology… You can get really good histories of ancient Greek philosophers, Geopositioning and the historical struggles and breakthroughs of navigation by just watching videos debunking flat earth, or good histories of aviation and photography when people debunk aliens).

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But between Bessent, the AI video, the poorly done follow-up, and Netenyahu’s general absence from the world stage for 3 days, even as rumors fly…

I’m calling it:

He hasn’t made a substantive statement… because he can’t.

Most likely he’s been wounded in an Iranian strike, had a heart attack, or had a stroke and is out of action... but not dead.

Generally when a leader actually dies the rules of succession take over and he’s just made into a martyr… It is conceivable Israel is genuinely THAT paranoid about showing weakness or admitting the effectiveness of Iran’s strikes that they’d rather “Weekend at Bernie’s” a dead Netanyahu than admit an Iranian drone or missile got him… but if they were THAT paranoid, they probably wouldn’t have briefed the US immediately… Unless the US actually wasn’t briefed, and Trump found out via the US’s own intel services.

But vastly more likely he’s “Not Quite Dead”.

So simultaneously he can’t make a substantive statement, they can’t move forward with any succession plan, and its politically sensitive enough he couldn’t even make a statement from a hospital bed (maybe because he can’t, maybe because they can’t show weakness). And they’re just hoping he gets better in a quick enough timeline to make some brave statement soon as possible, and deny Iran the propaganda victory that “they got Netanyahu”... Which might not even be true, it might just be an old man ailment (Heart attack, stroke, exploded prostate)... but which is a victory Iran will certainly try to claim the longer out of action Netanyahu is.

But statistically a mere 14 days into the war it’s vastly more likely to have been a Kinetic hit from Iran than just a random health thing that happens to old men. (barring of course someone else took out Netanyahu… If he was pushing to nuke Iran unilaterally the US or his own security services might have done so)

Even men in their 70s can generally go 2 weeks without being hospitalized from ill health, so something kinetic is just statistically more likely in a war that’s already taken out wide sections of Iranian and Israeli leadership.

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In Conclusion

Is this the end of Netanyahu? Who knows… he might show up minus an arm and up an eyepatch, and reveal he’s released the secret bioweapons and fighting robots in reprisal… but he’s down for the count.

Usually I wouldn’t write something this up to the minute But I have people who follow me who have various investments and careers on the line… expect things to get crazy…

But also this just an amazing case study in capabilities the regime does and doesn’t have.

If they had super-secret Mission Impossible morph masks, or perfect clone body doubles, or perfect undetectable AI that could fake 30 minute interviews convincingly and without artifacts…

Well this would have been the time to use it… Instead in a matter of the greatest sensitivity, of the survival of the super-secret 4th topmost level of the US government (Local, State, Federal, Israel)… We’re seeing the upper limits of their powers to fake messages, falsify evidence, and control narratives… And block missiles.

We’re seeing the iron fist without the velvet glove… And we can see all the cracks and rust.

Very worth noting!

Remember just because someone is powerful doesn’t mean they’re all powerful, and just because they’re masters of deception doesn’t mean they can reliably deceive the suspicious.

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In contrast to the legacy media era of 1950-2010… Governments ability to control narratives has well and truly collapsed.

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Also Check out my Take on the Iran War and what it’d take for the US to actually “Win” in Iran:

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Edit: Introduction From July 2026

I published this essay originally 2 weeks into the 2026 Iran War that started Feb 28 2026.

And I wrote most of it even before that in a mad rush to get it out before something changed massively and an entire section of the piece became irrelevant… which, looking back, betrayed a shocking lack of faith my conclusions that have really stood the test of time… Indeed I’ve found myself linking this piece in reference many times when I thought something stupid or crazy would entirely change the state of play between then and now (5 months later).

Somehow something that was meant as an amusing hypothetical has become the great elephant in the room of world politics… That the Trump Admin refuses to countenance a ground invasion, yet cannot open the Strait of Hormuz without one (and possibly not even then).

WarPlan CatGirl has indeed become specter haunting American politics, military history, and the Global Oil Market.

Yet at the time it was something of shitpost, a “Bad Idea” given extraordinary effort… to capture a seemingly fleeting moment in US politics, that in the past 5 months has not ended.

As such this piece has a sort-of breathless tone, that going back to read it I was rather shocked it didn’t even introduce itself. So immediately in the debates and discussions of an immediate Geo-political happening was it.

It was right to the arguments and debates, and letting other’s know their retardation.

But to introduce the action thus far:

Oh for a muse of fire, that would descend the darkest Talmud tunnels of Brooklyn.
Persia for a stage, the US to act. And Israel to cry "Again! Attack!"

Know you, dear reader that between the times when the oceans drank New Orleans,
And the rise of the sons of Mamdani, there was an age beyond history.
When rainbow banners lay cross goyish nations, beneath reconnaissance stars.
It is Donald, the president, who alone can tell thee of its ending:
Of Bibi, Jared, Lindsay, and J.D. Who unleashed the Shocking Awe?
That should the warlike Donald, like George W., Assume the port of Mars, 
and at his words, like mail-in ballots, Tomahawk and Hellfire fly for employment.

But Pardon, readers all. Can such short essay contain the ending of our conflict?
Can this screen hold the burning Isles of Qeshm? Can mere words parch bare the
unslaked thirst of weeks without desalination? Think this hot gas short sample of 
Arabian days. This over-wrought prose brief summary of politicians' claim.
Then might poorly meter'd shitposter's jest; stand in for guilty plots of Epstein's Guests. 

From March 2026:

Many Trump loyalists and others are predicting a short war or that it’s already over… This fundamentally misunderstands (purposefully misrepresents?) the dynamics of the budding Iran war.

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Iran wants a long and painful war: lasting some 8 months to 3 or 4 years, ideally.

Iran has been sanctioned, suffered major economic decline as a result, had agreements it has signed reneged upon, and been surprise attack during negotiations not just recently but during the Twelve Day War last year… not to mention Iranian allies like Hamas and Hezbollah having their leadership assassinated AT NEGOTIATIONS in nominally neutral gulf countries under the banner of peace.

Then during the most recent negotiations they were surprise attacked, had their own leadership assassinated, and had unarmed naval ships attacked “While they thought they were safe in international waters” (War Secretary, Pete Hegseth) but really while they thought they were safe, as an unarmed participant in peaceful naval exercises with India.

Now, you might have to reach back in your imagination to kindergarten or childhood, or WWE, or maybe tap into some prison experiences… But the basic game theory, that even children and wrestling fans understand, is when you’ve suffered treachery, or sucker punches, or surprise attacks when someone pretends to be trying to negotiate with you… is that, assuming you cannot kill them off (which children, wrestlers, and nation states generally can’t) you have to hit them back or inflict some other pain hard enough that you suitably disincentivize future treachery, and make them not want to mess with you again.

Very much like how your dad (or the dad of your neighbor who was happy) will tell you that you have to stand up to bullies and fight back… ya they’ll kick your ass, that’s why they’re bullying you! You’re weaker than them. But you have to fight back and take your punches, because it still hurts them when you get your few punches in, and as long as you don’t cry too much when you probably inevitably lose… they’re going to conclude the effort wasn’t worth it, and not try to push you around again because the risk and pain of having to fight you isn’t worth status gain… they’ll pick on someone else who doesn’t fight back.

This is the very loose game theory that basically holds wherever the laws of civilization don’t regulate conflict: like International relations, prison, WWE, or American Schools.

(NOTE: There’s a moral connotation when we talk about “bullies” strip that away. There is no morality in International Relation (or American Schools) this is law of the jungle survival, and the game theory doesn’t change or cease to hold just because the most obvious familiar example is juvenile and has a moral connotation…)

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So even if Iran’s getting hit much harder than it’s hitting back… Iran’s not going to stop.

They’d much rather get bombed for the next 8 months to 4 years but make America, Israel, and the international community suffer enough they fear ever doing it again… Than let the precedent stand that you can sanction them, violate all norms of negotiation, airstrike them by surprise, arm foreign mercenaries to try and overthrow them, assassinate their leaders, sink their ships, bomb their girl’s schools… And then go “that’s enough, we’re cool until next time”.

Because they know that there WILL be a next time.

Just as the Twelve Day War last year ended not with peace but with rolling subsequent attempts to overthrow the Iranian government ending in the current war… They’re not going to accept terms whereby they just sit around waiting for the next US-Israeli surprise attack that attempts to overthrow their government, or accept the uncertainty is going to just shred their economy into permanent decline.

Indeed the Shia religion and sexism of the Iranian regime actively encourages them to value the struggle and suffering and deaths they’ll endure in a way most western secularists, who structure their lives around the screeching comfort seeking of old women, can’t imagine.

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So in short: Iran is not going to stop firing missiles and drones at Israel and the Gulf states. And It’s not going to open the Strait of Hormuz… And its Certainly not going to do so in any timeframe that spares international oil markets or American consumers in a way that rescues Trump’s political prospects and US domestic tolerance for Israel… The entire point of this exercise is to make this conflict hurt international supply lines and the Israeli public such that it becomes less likely they’ll deal with this again, or that some politician will propose a “grass mowing” operation 5 years from now.

Iran is purposefully going to try to crash boomer’s stock-market portfolios so that Trump suffers domestic political death and so every subsequent politician knows their constituents can lose their retirements if he gives into the Israel lobby and tries to hit Iran again.

But can they succeed?

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The Current Strategic Game

Currently Iran is hitting 7+ countries in the Middle East, most notably basically all the US bases in the region. But also Hotels (thought to be housing US officials, several instances of oil infrastructure and other targets… Notably Power infrastructure and desalination plants have been hit back and forth in several countries… Although Iran so far has not yet, seemingly, attempted to take out any country’s entire grid or water infrastructure… Which in several countries would kill hundreds of thousands given the near complete lack of Ground Water in several.

Rather it appears these strikes have been “Warning shots” to terrify leadership or extract some minor under the table concessions from individual players.

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Simplifying greatly:

Iran is hitting its enemies with Conventional Missiles, Ballistic and Hypersonic advanced Missiles, and domestically produced drones, as many as 80,000 in stockpile.

On paper Iran has enough missiles and drones to keep a constant barrage for months, years, or even indefinitely if domestic production keeps up with what they’ve stated…

Meanwhile the US and Allied interceptor missile stockpile is drawing dangerously low and may already be effectively exhausted.

On paper the numbers do not favor the US.

On paper.

This however runs into the question of Whether Iran could get these Missiles and drones off.

The Drones can be launched from the back of pickup trucks, and are highly effective… Russia BUYS Iranian Shahed Drones for use against Ukraine.

But they’re also slow and easy to detect and shoot down with Machine Guns, air defenses, Flak, other Close-in Weapon Systems, or via guns on aircraft.

Thus to effectively employ the drones, Iran would have to strategically use its missile stockpile to overwhelm and disable US, Israeli, and Gulf air defenses… BEFORE the US could take out its missile launch Vehicles and stockpiles.

It was quite conceivable if the US timed its attack to perfectly coincide with the peak of their intelligence knowledge of Iran, or if they had gotten an intelligence coup… They could have crippled Iranian launch capabilities on the ground and taken out a good chunk of Iran’s stockpiles at the start of the war.

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However 10+ days in what actually seems to have happened is the US and Iran simply had a mutual degradation of capabilities. Indeed Iran’s successes in hitting multibillion dollar US Radar installations might mean that US capabilities have degraded faster than Iran’s.

Already America had the problem that interceptor missiles able to hit another missile midair cost vastly more than common missiles that just have to vaguely hit a coordinate on the ground, and you almost always had to fire two… but with the reduced radar intelligence and warning time, the US is often having to fire 3+ million dollar missiles to take out one 50,000 dollar missile from Iran. Indeed I’ve seen several reports of Iran taking out or damaging America’s THADD launchers, of which maybe fewer than 2 dozen exist in the world.

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And before you ask Yes! This is exactly like the missile point defense in a 2000s game of Supreme Commander, minus the bubble shields:

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No End in Sight

Iran has explicitly said they want this war to continue through the midterms, have the economy in ruins, and at least one set of American political careers as a sort of monument as to why no one should ever fuck with them.

This might be rather odd to you… Iran is still losing militarily. The US has killed 100x the number of Iranians to Americans lost (according to official US numbers) and even if you believe the Iranian numbers and think the US military is copying the Ukrainian handbook and hiding hundreds of casualties and deaths (which at least the wounded they do seem to be hiding, US Military Hospitals in Germany have ceased providing Natal care to soldier’s spouses “in preparation” for a rush of wounded)… The US is still up 2 to 1 in even the wildest Islamic Revolutionary numbers.

Edit: It’s been confirmed the US is lying about Casualties.

On the face of it the Americans are winning…

Except 25% of all the world’s oil goes through the Strait of Hormuz. And Iran can shut it down.

At only 32 miles wide at its narrowest, even conventional artillery… Stuff WW1 militaries had available to them could shut down the Strait.

Now the US is a net oil producer, it hypothetically could just enjoy the rising oil prices, subsidize domestic gas with the resultant revenues, and prosper as the world burns… Except the entire US financial system and government has slaved itself to world oil markets with the petrol-dollar, the US Government spends 3 dollars for every 2 dollars it brings in and has a budget deficit of 1.6 TRILLION dollars per year… That it currently absorbs into the international financial system through debt financing and money printing.

Unless the gulf states are selling oil for dollars and the global financial system is forced to absorb all those US Bonds and Dollars at below market rates to get their oil (effectively letting the US backdoor tax all global oil transactions for a percentage annually, amounting to about 1.6 trillion a year)… Suddenly the US gets runaway interests rates and inflation and the entire American system collapses… With inevitable riots and societal breakdown as soon as all that welfare, gibs, government pensions, and boomer retirement subsidies, either stops or has to be paid for with taxes or inflation.

Seriously the US was on track for a literal race war in the 70s before the petrol-dollar system was codified. 3000 bombs were detonated in 1972 alone, and ambush and sniper killings of police were staples of the late 60s and 70s. (See Days of Rage by Bryan Burroughs) The US bought its way out the civil war it should have had, with mass debt spending and petrol-dollars.

Thus despite being a net oil exporter that receives almost ZERO oil from the Gulf, the US is highly dependent on the Gulf oil economy, and Iran has a chokehold on it.

This is beyond the threat to Europe and South Asia… With European countries and India specifically being HIGHLY dependent on Gulf Oil, such that Europe might be forced to backstab Ukraine if the crisis continues given they’ll require Russian Oil and Gas to simply survive… This is if they make it that far, since their own societies are simply not stable, and hard ethnic conflict between whites and migrants could erupt at any economic downturn. India is even more poorly placed, with the risk that any extended disruption could… possibly… kill hundreds of millions of them. India’s dependence on gulf oil and gas is extreme… And they’re the last customer to get product. They have the least buying power, and they’re at the end of the supply chain.

If Oil goes to $10 a gallon the average American won’t like it, but they will find a way to afford enough before they freeze to death, and they probably wouldn’t even have to afford it because the US government would freeze exports or impose price controls since the US is a net exporter and controls the flow of oil from North America. India is at the back of the line, they have to pay market prices, and they can’t afford it because they’re broke Indians with a GDP per capita of $2,500 per person per year… and that’s BEFORE they have a generational economic downturn, famine, and resultant internal instability.

If you’re in India or another poor South Asian country… I’d suggest planning your exit soon.

China is also at the end of the Chain… But they have 5x the GDP and the CCP has been planning for this for years and have a lot of built up redundancy (not least foreign exchange reserves)… They certainly would suffer, but they have more options. China I’d watch to invade Taiwan and go for a breakout to try and secure their own supply lines while they’re already effectively blockaded by circumstance, US is already tied down with drained armaments, and thus they have less to lose relative to a normal year.

China’s situation looks a lot like Japan’s in early 40s with regards to oil.

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But what options do the US and its “allies” have?

I have a proposition… A Scenario.

I’d say a “Prediction” but I’m almost certain what they actually wind up doing will be considerably dumber, more Ad Hoc, more chasing of SOME WAY to drag the west into a dumber war.

I suspect by the time this is over this will look like a cross between how the Suez Crisis broke the British Empire, on the one hand, and how US political will broke and Indochina was lost in the 70s on the other.

But here’s my presentation of what I think is the best way to do a dumb thing and double down on a mistaken bet.

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Ground War: The CatGirl Plan!

It’s Just a Quick Invasion of Persia! What could go Wrong?

When making a plan you have to consider victory conditions… Specifically you have to consider Minimum Victory Conditions.

What is the least America could achieve that its objectives would be tolerably achieved?

This is a relatively difficult question because seemingly I am the first person on planet earth to ask this.

Now Israel has its victory conditions… It wants Iran removed or permanently crippled as a geostrategic player, such that it cannot threaten Israel’s regional hegemony again, and specifically it has to do this before America’s forming Left and Right Bipartisan Anti-Zionist consensus can form within the next 4-8 years.

Towards this we’ve seen all the efforts of the past year and a bit, and all the domestic political belligerence in the US as basically every Zionist or Jewish commentator, and member of the Epstein class has realized this is their exit, and they can make their fortune and secure their safe harbor outside the country by throwing it all against the wall: NOW.

And whatever happens to the US… Who cares.

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But US Leadership… no matter how compromised, is composed of a wide cross-section of people who DO intend to live in the US going forward and who expect their children to live in the US. Lindsay Graham and Ben Shapiro, and the Trump clan increasingly look like they’re willing to jump in the escape hatch… But your average General and Department Head? Even if they’re generally stupid and evil, and would gladly betray the constitution and sell out your civil liberties for a cushy seat on corporate board, they need the US to survive and not have Russo-Japanese War type disaster resulting in a mini or actual revolution and escalation to domestic political violence in which the populace quite possibly kills their family. Likewise they don’t want to risk WW3 and they don’t want to risk nukes… They live in the types of Urban Areas that generally tend to attract nukes.

Even if Benjamin Netanyahu and Lindsay Graham don’t care what happens to the US once opinions on Israel finally kill the alliance…

Most of US leadership almost certainly wants to avoid a draft, avoid domestic instability, and avoid any nuclear escalation which would result in proliferation and radically increase the risk of a nuke hitting DC in the next 50 years.

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This gets rather difficult when you consider the default is that the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, gas hits $10 a gallon and Israel probably escalates to nukes out of its paranoia that Iran is going to kill it economically and Geostrategically with it’s continued missile barrage… And most likely that Iran escalates to a nuke back (most of that nuclear material is still there, and they have redundant centrifuges) and then Israel’s surviving command structure releases the Samson option out of spite.

So… The Oil has to flow. The US can’t escalate to a draft or totalitarianism. The nukes have to stay in their silos and hangars. And Israel has to stay happy enough that they don’t rage quit like your gay little cousin in Call of Duty.

This requires a ground invasion.

US politicians don’t like it the idea. The US public doesn’t like the idea. But I can guarantee you the US Government is going to talk itself into it.

Indeed there’s already a lot of speculation a false flag is incoming to try and get the public and politicians in line, which might backfire stupendously given basically all sides of the US political ecosystem has been trained to form conspiracy theories… Not least the US political elite, who if anything tend to be more conspiratorial than the general public (it was just revealed that for 50+ years Senior Airforce Officers have been convinced Secret Alien spaceships have been experimented on in classified facilities… Elsewhere… not because it was true, but because lying about this was part of a recurring hazing ritual amongst Airforce Officers).

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And this is probably the first point at which my scenario is NOT going to follow reality. What I will present will be an optimal coherent plan, or at least what will be my attempt at one, whereas in reality even if they do come to my plan… I expect it to be fumbling, walked into backwards, horribly executed, and strategically found mostly by accident.

Even if some talented officers present what follows as the best of the bad options… I expect their political leadership will almost certainly make ridiculous demands, pussyfoot it, insist on useless symbolic gestures or lies told to them by Netanyahu… Before coming to the least retarded course action after exhausting every mistake they can think off.

But these are the Minimum conditions:

-The Oil Must Flow

-The US can’t Escalate to a Draft or Complete Totalitarianism

-The Nukes stay room Temperature

-Israel has to stay above an apocalyptic level of anxiety…

This last condition is maybe the hardest.

Israel has been called the Psychopathic nation… It might also be called the Bipolar nation. Keeping Israel above an apocalyptic level of anxiety is about as easy as keeping your crazy ex-girlfriend above an apocalyptic level of anxiety.

Israel Is fighting an “8 Front War”, their words, of which “the most important”… THEIR WORDS… Is the US homeland. Not Gaza or Hezbollah or Iran who fire rockets into their country… but you. Which should make your blood boil that a foreign country feels it can wage war on US citizens, even if we allow that that’s allegedly supposed to be “metaphorical” and they’re merely violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act to do exactly what Russia was accused of doing during Russia-Gate but on a level larger that all other nations in US history combined.

They consider US public opinion so vital to their national strategic interests… And they’re losing it, and they’re going to lose it.

Zoomers fucking hate them. Exactly for reasons like this.

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Israel is on a timeline, despite all the cash infusions they’re running out of money, domestic will, and economic maneuverability… Even the Zionist billionaire class is spending a ton and will probably see a lot of their paper assets wiped out in any downturn… None of their 8 fronts are really winding down or stable… Hezbollah just rose from the dead and hit them with tons of rockets (further draining their interceptors)… And so the Israeli leadership, not incorrectly, think their survival depends on drawing the US into war with Iran NOW. And actually getting the US to destroy Iran is basically the only thing that will actually reassure them… And then immediately they’ll start whining about Turkey, because the real problem is they can’t exist peaceably with any military power near them.

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So how does the US achieve all of that?

The CatGirl Plan: Minimum Viable Ground-War

Iran is one of the worst countries on the planet you could get into a Ground War with.

The place is nearly a thousand miles wide, is dominated by massive mountain ranges perfect for asymmetric warfare, it has a population of 92 million or about as many people as the German Reich in 1940.

And worst of all… The Iranian government is set up exactly for this war.

Indeed they’ve already fought it.

The Iran-Iraq War was 8 years from 1980 to 1988, and Iran suffered between 200k and 600k military dead, and as many as 500k wounded.

And this was at a time when their population was half as large.

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The war had a brutal back and forth that bogged down into attritional fighting… And the US even supplied Saddam with chemical weapons including nerve gas and blood agents to use against the Iranians… but without producing a breakthrough or regime collapse in Iran.

Indeed the Iranians are said to have been so casualty tolerant that they consistently used “Human Wave” tactics… which has been disputed, but no one disputes that they were able to use poorly trained or even raw troops aggressively and effectively.

Put simply any ground invasion could expect to meet quite possibly 1-2 million enemy forces in the field after volunteers and conscripts are rolled into Iran’s pre-war active and reserve force of 960,000, and almost certainly more over any extended period of time.

For reference the Germans suffered 5.3 million CASUALTIES… and managed to mobilize 18 million during the 6 year war… Which some have criticized as proportionately low compared to the Soviet Union or some of the Allies under less strain.

By contrast the US has a military of 2 million active and reserve… but with so many global obligations that even aggressively activating reserves, the US could probably only commit about 200,000… And would suffer major volunteer problems going forward, as we saw during the mid-Iraq War with the introduction of stop-loss measures for want of volunteers to replace soldiers who’s contracts were up.

On the face of it almost any ground war would require an immediate conscription policy to meet manpower requirements for a country the size of Iran, with casualties in the hundreds of thousands amongst those conscripts.

Which is why no US administration is ever going to bite off a country the size of Iran if they don’t want angry disillusioned parents assassinating the children of Administration officials in revenge: “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a child for a child”.

However…

What if you didn’t bite off Iran? What if you just nibbled it a bit?

Remember our win conditions: Oil flows, no nukes, no draft, no Israeli meltdown…

Nowhere in there did we say you had to take Tehran.

The only thing you actually have to achieve with the ground invasion is you have to get the oil flowing through the gulf again.

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Sure the Israelis want the missiles and drones to stop hitting them, but as long as there’s progress on that, and they see lots of goys dying for them in the middle-east… You can string them along! “Look Bibi, we’re working on it. Look we've just crossed the border… we have to say we’re not going to Tehran, that has to look like we were forced into it later”… And with political opposition, military realities, the budding hatred of Israel… with luck you could draw it out, run out the clock on Israel’s influence, and hopefully persuade the Israelis and the Epstein class to accept some extended air campaign.

Indeed the ONLY thing you actually have to achieve on the ground… Is you have to get the oil to flow.

Israel can be strung along for years expecting Iran to collapse any day, the global economy can’t last many months without oil.

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So it goes from an impossible ground campaign… To one You could talk US political leadership into.

The goal of the plan is to secure not the country… but Just the Persian gulf. And for this you need only to secure two provinces out of thirty one..

Kuzestan and Hormozgan.

You take these two and you take away 80% of Iran’s coastline, its entire chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz and most of its Littoral logistical capacity.

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The middle coastal province of Bushehr has only 5 roadways connecting back to Fars and the rest of Iran without the Coastal roads.

Fewer than 20 Special Forces in hidden spotter positions in the mountains could report all the real-time road traffic along these mountain roads, and air assets would have hours to pick them off since the winding of the narrow mountain roads drags out the distance so much. With only coastal raids and airstrikes needed to suppress the province, just as Coastal raids and airstrikes will be needed against Iranian Islands in the Persian gulf.

Likewise the Province of “Sistan and Baluchistan” doesn’t need to be taken because it’s past the mouth of the strait and by hugging the shore of Oman ships can quicky can stay out of range of most Iranian assets, with the open sea giving US fighters and weapons systems clear radar environments and lots of space to maneuver against any long range drones. And speed-boats manned or unmanned would need to cross hundreds of miles of open water once the Ships clear the Strait and are safely in the Gulf of Oman.

At most raids and airstrikes are really needed to suppress that threat.

But in Kuzestan and Hormozgan a proper ground war would be needed.

Now the ultimate problem of and US ground-war is the raw lack of manpower in the the US military compared to what Iran can bring.

Between all of America’s other commitments 100-300k is probably the upper bound the US could maintain without a draft and almost certainly less and declining as the conflict becomes politically unpalatable, and recruitment dries up like your girlfriend when you cry.

This seems almost hopeless against the millions of existing military, volunteers, and conscripts of their own that Iran can probably field.

FORTUNATELY… Iran is a mountain country and its southern and western approaches utterly unnavigable by massive armies.

THAT’S RIGHT. We’re going to use their own mountains against them.

Remember in this plan we’re not going to Tehran.

We just need to secure the gulf for oil transit. If you can get 50-100 kilometers in and just deny artillery, short range drones, and easy sighting of targets to the Iranians… That’s all you need to do. Let the Airforce and the Mossad worry about how they’re going to topple the second Ayatollah, and then the third, and then the forth.

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The Khuzestan Campaign

In the Khuzestan Campaign carried out by the US Army and “Allies” the US basically recreates the logistical operation from Desert Storm and the 2003 invasion of Iraq, but instead of going to Baghdad they cross the River at Basrah and further up, using Superior American Air-Support, Air Cavalry, and Armored Cavalry to capture the small province of 4 million and push into the first mountain range.

Mountain passes deny logistical maneuverability, and having reached the first range suddenly the enemy is limited to the few roads and passes available, and are left vulnerable to Airstrike for want of other routes, and when they finally reach the front are funneled into a handful of little Thermopylae type battles where the narrowness of the maneuver room lets American skill, intel, firepower, and money make up for their lack of numbers once the “shock and awe” of the initial push wears off and the reality of attritional fighting sets in.

The Main problem however, is the flat geography before the mountains doesn’t favor it.

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This region HAS to be taken: with its maze of Canals and Snaking river deltas that have defined battles in this area since the days of the 10,000 under Xenophon…. There’s an infinite number of tiny waterways whereby a slapped together kamikaze drone-speedboat can be put in the water and then gun it through the rivers until it’s in the gulf and hits a Kuwaiti or Iraqi Tanker with little notice.

But these same rivers also make the ground-war vastly more complex, and navigating armies vastly harder… As Xenophon and the 10,000 found out when they tried to navigate themselves out during their Persian expedition, and got caught up and lost between these exact canals and rivers.

I expect the Army core of Engineers to have a heart attack at just the raw number and BREADTH of the Rivers they’re going to have to keep bridged, and I expect the Iranians are 100% going to strike those bridges…

Crossing the Tigris, and the Euphrates, and all their canals, and the Karun river…. None of which travel in the convenient direction, will be quite the nerve wracking task for the Army’s logistical chain.

But this is an ancient problem, and many armies have had to bridge multiple rivers mid battle (ask Napoleon)… And If done with speed and violence of action it can be overcome… If you get bogged down however and the Iranians are given the opportunity to take out the bridges you could have 20,000 Americans and their equipment trapped just across the river with 500,000 Iranians descending upon them.

However… IF everything goes well and US gets across the rivers in Quick succession, Americans need only take the Million person provincial capital of Ahvas… itself on the 300 meter wide Karun River, the City of Dezful with a population of 300,000, and a half dozen outlying cities with 10s of thousands… All whilst maintaining momentum and pushing hard to that mountain chain before 1-2 million Iranian fighters can get their human wave on.

Its a tall order for 50-150k US Army to do… especially without marine corps support and their airpower divided.

but the good news is once you have the line established… You can pawn it off on the Arabs.

Remember our rule NO DRAFT in the US.

I didn’t say no drafts… period. Now did I.

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Once the battle lines the US wants are established in the first mountain chain, It’d be politically impossible to just keep US soldiers there indefinitely enduring casualties.

Politically that’d be just untenable, Americans would stop enlisting, and then you’d need a draft… And American parents won’t tolerate that being done to their children.

So make Arab Children do it.

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(^Press Gangs Recruit in Ukraine, average survival time on the front for the forced mobilized is 4 hours)

Its THEIR OIL. Its THEIR COUNTRIES… Its THEIR WATERWAY….

Let them die for it.

And let the Gulf states security apparatus do something useful for once, and all the cousins and mercenaries of the Gulf monarchs can do their work dragging Arab boys off the street to die for Israel in Iran.

Once US troops hit the first Mountain range and can dig in, there’s no reason for them to stick around destabilizing domestic politics… Just give the Gulf states the Ukraine Treatment, keep those US troops well back from the front where they can provide “security”…

And over time you’ll find all the Gulf monarchs become really REALLY compliant with the US and all American demands, because their population would slaughter them if the US ever left.

The Hormozgan Campaign

By contrast the Hormozgan Campaign is going to be an entirely different nightmare for military planners.

One opposed Marine landing is risky… Dozens will be a nightmare.

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Iran has Dozens of little 4-10 mile wide Islands in the Persian Gulf and lots of little bays and Inlets… Most EXACTLY at the Strait of Hormuz.

These have to be taken.

The Island of Qeshm is the largest at over 100km long and Directly on the Strait.

This is the Single most important to take, and the single hardest.

Fortunately however… It IS an Island, not a peninsula. The only road access to the Mainland of Iran is a 2 km ferry. Meaning that once a beachhead is established the Iranian logistical challenge is almost exactly as difficult as the US logistical challenge of getting more supplies across the Strait from the Gulf States.

Here US technological, financial, and skills superiority can reasonably be expected to best the Iranians before their numbers can defeat the US… And once the base is established Artillery positions, then real time spotters on the Islands mountains can start hitting and identifying positions on the mainland from which the enemy is spotting and launching shells and drones at the strait.

The Marines aren’t done yet however…Because Iran can still hit the Strait from basically anywhere else on the coast… So just like like the Army up north, they’re going to have to do water crossings, push out and take territory til they’ve hit the mountain passes that can be secured and locked down…

I expect this to take the form of layered positions, since they are so VASTLY more vulnerable to being cut off than the army up north, but once the thresholds are hit, just like the Army up north… They can immediately hand those positions over to the Arabs who can die like Ukrainian conscripts, while the Marines provide “security” mostly on Qeshm were they have a nice 2 km wide motte in case things get really bad.

NOTE:

Shahed Drones have an operational range of 2,500 km when hitting a ground targets. They can use a global navigation satellite system (GNSS) or even Inertial Navigation if that’d jammed or shut off… But to hit MOVING targets they largely need active signal back and forth from an operator on some kind of radio frequency.

If you deny the coast up to the first mountain chain, that becomes impossible since radio frequencies are almost all “Line of Sight” (this is why you lose them in the mountains, and why antenna arrays and cell towers are on high poles)…

Some MAY have some form of automatic target recognition and terminal guidance (a basic AI or Algorithm) but as a rule all of these tend to be dependent on User input and guidance til final approach (which you deny for dozens of miles) or some point at which autonomous detection is activated. Denying them visual and radar on the strait radically reduces their strike capability and control and feedback over any drones that are sent, and gives the US and allies ample early warning and intercept options (not least jamming) on the advanced drones that can still be used on shipping.

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Global Security… For a Price

Basically to achieve any politically tolerable support from the US public Trump and Co. would have to sell the Idea that “This time it’s Different” and nothing about how they are carrying out the war is going to resemble Iraq at all.

No nation building, no extended occupations, no push to the capital…

And the fastest way to do that is to make the Gulf states pay for it in blood and treasure… And make the Gulf states visibly suffer to get their oil out.

Sure you have force conscript Arab men off the street like Ukraine to die holding the mountain passes of Iran…

But AMERICA is the one holding the Strait of Hormuz… Sorry, Strait of America. And so if you want your tankers to transit the Gulf, you’re going to be paying highly inflated insurance premiums and transit fees… To America (and tacitly via the backdoor to Israel).

This will put the Squeeze on the Gulf (since American tankers out of the US aren’t paying this and so they as the supplier get squeezed), but it will also put the squeeze on South Asia and Europe… Who are now doubly paying for America’s war in the increased costs from the risks, and now the fees America charges to mitigate that risk.

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And if you’re thinking “Ya right, the American government would never put American interest over that of the gulf states who buy them off and hire them onto corporate boards” remember that as costs mount, and Israel’s economic and political reality reveals itself, and the US government itself probably enters a fiscal crisis… This is basically the one “Infinite money” lever the US administration will have whereby they can keep from avoiding any consequences from the decades of their poor decision…

Thus the US would go from effectively employing a financial toll/extortion system on the world via the Petro-dollar… To a literal river toll system where they just directly charge fees and take cuts right at the Strait with military force (I mean I assume the paperwork would still be done in offices… but it’d be way more visually obvious)…

The Problem: It Won’t Work…And These People Certainly Won’t Get It to Work

So even if the US does all of this perfectly… Even if they can actually secure these two provinces without a military blunder or disaster. Even if they can actually stop the Iranian drones by pushing far enough in to regain early warning capabilities and cut off Iranian radar and visual sighting on the strait.

The Gulf states would probably erupt in popular rebellions and hatred of their own governments for going along with the necessary draft of Arabs to hold the line, and the US position in the Middle-East would get tenuous as hell.

I expect that the final ground plan will look something like this, that the institutional forces that don’t want to do it and the institutional forces that demand it will finally meet at the Idea of being “a little bit pregnant” and “just nibbling Iran a bit” and “War but no draft”…

The Generals and skeptics will think it the best of the bad options (avoid stepping into it as much as you can), the war hawks will see it as progress towards the bigger war they want… Major players in New York and on the market will see it as the only way to get stable or at least create the expectation of stability.

And in the process of compromising, avoiding, dodging, blame shifting, and cajoling… They’ll finally come to something like this… Badly. And too late.

Something else will go wrong, another world crisis will erupt… A rebellion will kick off in Europe or the Middle East, China will invade Taiwan, India will enter famine, some Leroy Jenkins at the FBI will leak the full unredacted Epstein files, Israel will start to lose in Lebanon or the west bank will erupt…

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And then instead of this Chaotic plan that still makes sorta sense… they’ll wind up escalating to ground war with Iran in the same way they got into the Air war with Iran in February… Half-cocked and at the last second, rushing because Israel was going to do something else if they didn’t… and then the gameboard will be a complete mess as they try desperately to make it resemble a coherent “No Nukes, No Draft, Oil Flows” state… Before another things happens and it all falls apart.

Think of this “Catgirl Plan”… how many things have to go right and technical details have to line up just so to make it even sorta work with lots of prep and pre-planning, and then realize China might invade Taiwan in the midst of it and we’re in the midst of a world crisis in which India has no oil flowing to it.

You don’t plan your way out of a world crisis… you survive it… And this is looking like the beginning of the Dominoes falling.

Think of the US domestic front where no one under the age of 50 has any class or ethnic loyalty to the government that would carry this out.

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Honestly maybe the most coherent outcome would just be a military coup followed by the removal of the Israel lobby as a factor in US politics. Trump faces the firing squad then the successor could negotiate with Iran to restore oil-flows to the world… but that’s almost completely impossible within the structure of the US system and you’d almost certainly see a Draft, riots and, the start of Civil War in the US before the military actually did something independent for the good of the country.

Oh… And also Iran is almost certainly rushing to finish the enrichment of the Uranium it has squirrelled away… So depending on how much you thing Trump was lying when he “obliterated” the Fordow site… We might see a Nuke as soon a “““TWO WEEKS””” or months to a year from now when Iran tests the first of them.

There really is not a solution to this…

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And even Israel going nuclear preemptively doesn’t do much.

What that’d guarantee is both Turkey and Saudi Arabia rush to get the Nukes Pakistan has quietly promised them over the years (in exchange for various economic things they’ve done), Iran probably would just march on… It’s 90 million people, even a 1 Megaton nuke in Tehran, and 2 More at key military sites won’t actually cripple their military capability… Just kill 1-2 million civilians and make them double and triple down while their population disperses more loosely…

Germany and Japan both tolerated massive firebombing without breaking politically (Japan surrendered not due to the Nukes, but due to the Soviets finally declaring war).

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You can’t make a Chinese finger trap loosen by pulling harder, and you can’t make a country more internally divided and less resolved to fight by attacking it and killing its civilians.

Indeed to the extent the atrocities (assassination of major government figures, attacks on hospitals, attacks on girl’s schools) have been at Israel’s behest or influence hoping to lock the US and Iran into a major attritional war…

They severely miscalculated at just how Impossible it is on any near time horizon with current US conventional resources, political will, and interests.

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The mistake people make when looking at fights between countries is thinking of as a sheer test of numbers or ability.

Ya the US is a bigger country and in a no holds barred straight up fight with unlimited will and an unlimited draft… The US would almost certainly win. The US has 3x the Population with 100x the GDP.

The problem is the question isn’t “Can you win” its “can you win at tolerable cost”.

My Grandpa could beat your Grandpa in an all out knife fight, but it wouldn’t matter because both men would get stabbed multiple times and old men don’t heal from stab wounds.

The question is “Can you win without getting stabbed?”

Can the US fight Iran, a country of 90 million…

1. Within a fast enough timeline that the world oil market doesn’t die

2. Israel isn’t put in perpetual decline from all the missile and Drone hits

3. without a draft that would start a civil war

4. without resorting to nukes and starting WW3?

No. It can’t.

All of those conditions have rendered it beyond the strength disparity between the US and Iran.

You can take the kid in a fight, but not without him messing up your face for the next week.

Even superior power is not limitless. Once you start adding conditions and limits and costs, even the most powerful empire in history encounters things it can’t do.

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Links to content mentioned in the Episode:

https://stone-choir.com/very-eastern-less-orthodox/

https://stone-choir.com/6000-years-and-counting/

BTW I changed my recording setup recently to get around some stuttering problems that I’ve been having. Future episodes should be good. But this and a few episodes already recorded might have some problems. Please bear with me

Opening: “Lord of War” by White Bat Audio, Outro: “Yeshoua” -Highfleet OST

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Anarchonomicon veterans Hypozomata and Flying Goppy return to discuss the latest exchange and escalations between Iran, Israel and the US (Why is it always you three?)

Everything we’ve learnt in the first 48 hours!

NOTE: Immediately after recording it was confirmed 3 US airframes were shot down in what is being reported as Friendly Fire by allied Kuwaiti Air Defense.

Mentioned on the Podcast: