My Jewish friends often joke: “I heard that there’s this secret Jewish power broker society - how do I join?”
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There’s a book called How Civilizations Die (and Why Islam Is Dying Too) by David Goldman. He proposes that most of the Jewish pogroms were caused by some Western “tribe” deciding they were God’s new Chosen People. It then became uncomfortable to have the old Chosen People around. And he gives examples, including how Poland, for instance, decided in the 1300’s that they were the martyrs of Christianity - and shortly thereafter began the Jewish pogrom there. Likewise the French claimed during the 30-Year War that “God was French” - and the pogroms started.
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Here is my review of David Goldman’s How Civilizations Die. The review was written in 2013, and I noted in it, “The author sees the United States and Israel as exceptional states, as both have largely kept their faith and maintained a sustainable birthrate to carry them into the future.” A decade further into the 21st century, his prediction for Israel appears to be holding up, but I’m not so sure about the U.S., which has a fertility rate of 1.7 births/woman as of 2023 and church membership having fallen from 71% in 1975 (and about the same, 70%, in 1999) to 47% in 2020.
I guess the big risk may be that the Cult of Gaia or the Church of Equity will declare themselves the New Chosen People and decide to dispense with those who dare dissent.
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Gotta start our religion before they do. 
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I find this prospect to be altogether too likely (the process of expanding these cults is well underway already). I am (literally) afraid to say such “religious/ideological conversions” greatly increase the risk of nuclear war erupting over Ukraine. As others have observed, Putin casts this struggle to be, in part, one of traditional Orthodox Christianity against a Godless, immoral and blatantly aggressive West. He has expressed a live-and-let-live attitude - saying only “bless you, do as you please, but we are not going there”.
Given prevailing Russian attitudes (which Putin expresses but I don’t think he needed to originate or coerce into being) as a result of NATO’s aggressive expansion eastward - after having solemnly promised to not do so - it is clear that this is, indeed, an existential issue a large majority of the population. If Americans are willing to die for anything beyond their mobile phones and access to social media, I am unaware of it. Having visited the former USSR in 1980, I can report that “The Great Patriotic War” remains a living memory in that culture. Patriotism, dead and despised in the West, is alive and well in Russia and this suggests the continued existence of their country is, indeed for them, a hill worth dying on. If we had a sentient, as opposed to senile, leadership, they would recognize that we have created the mirror image of the Cuban Missile Crisis to 1962, writ large. It is reckless and endangers us all.
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It may be that future historians (assuming Biden fails to start a global thermonuclear war over the borders of the Ukraine – he has failed at everything else, for Goodness sake!) may see the sub-replacement birth rates in the West as the ultimate highly-beneficial triumph of Darwinism.
Average fertility rates are … averages. Lots of women are now too Woke to waste their time having babies. Consequently, those women’s genes are being removed from the gene pool. Instead of “natural selection” being a very slow process, humanity may see a very rapid (2 - 4 generations) change in the human race, with future generations being primarily the ones who have the forward-looking mentality that values children and thinks about the future – with little room for the scourge of Wokeness.
Just a hypothesis, of course.
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The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has issued their preliminary report on the MIG-23 crash in Michigan on 2023-08-13. Here is Juan Browne (blancolirio)'s analysis of the report. Unlike a number of other commentators, Browne concludes the rear-seater was absolutely correct in commanding ejection when he did, as the altitude and sink rate of the plane at the time were such that even a second of two later would not have provided sufficient time for the pilot’s parachute to inflate before hitting the water of the lake.
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This is actually slightly misstated. It should read,
"Video for the first time shows a destroyed Western Challenger-2 tank. I am sure there have been others; they just haven’t been shown. In real wars both sides get to shoot.
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What struck me was “Western”. Who says that instead of “British”?
That’s the phraseology you normally see in anti-Western propaganda.
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I would not concur. That is the phraseology of those on the other side. It is not necessarily anti-Western propaganda. The Serbs often use it, eg., when talking about the betrayals they have experienced at American hands, including WWII and the 1999 Balkan “war”, which was really a disruption of a stable nation into small components that were then turned one against the other. Those are not the same things.
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Are TPTB getting ready to throw Zelensky under the bus?
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Almost half a million of Ukrainian volunteers are using this application to share audio/visual observations of missiles and drones. This is a crowd-sourced radar!
Here’s an example Kh-101 trajectory:
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All the right people tell us it is necessary for the US to borrow money from China to send to the Ukraine because we have to defend “democracy” – even though the Zelensky regime bans opposition political parties, jails opposition politicians, controls all media outlets, cancels elections, and dictates Church matters. But that is “democracy” compared to the autocracy of evil Russia where the cancer-ridden dictator Putin rules with an iron rod.
Perhaps in this case all the right people have it wrong about what constitutes a “democracy”. Maybe their eyes are closed?
Dances With Bears » THE BULL MISSED THE RED FLAG IN THE RUSSIAN PROVINCIAL ELECTIONS (johnhelmer.org)
“In the countrywide poll held from September 8 to 10, Russian voters elected 33,000 regional parliament deputies and the governors of 21 regions. Average turnout was 43.5%.”
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Both sides appear to not have use of hardened aircraft shelters:
Oddly, hardened aircraft shelters were a big thing among Soviet client states.
Would not protect against a medium bomb or missile. But would easily defeat a Russian Lancet or one of the small UA drones.
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