Will 2023 Be "Just An Average Recession In An Average Year" Or Will It Be Transformational?

  I also believe that 2023 will be a transformational year on par with 1989 or 2008... if we are lucky. It could also be on par with 1914 or 1939...

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

It shouldn't surprise us if 2023 turns out to be atypical and disruptively transformational in ways few believe possible.

It seems expectations about 2023 cleave neatly into two camps: the dominant mainstream view is that 2023 will be economically difficult due to a mild recession, but this will be nothing more than a run-of-the-mill recession.

Inflation will likely moderate but remain higher than recent averages. Everything else--politics, social issues, entertainment, fashion, social media, etc.--will continue on whatever path it is currently on.

In other words, 2023 will be much like any other year.

The implicit assumption in the mainstream view is that historical cycles are figments of fevered imaginations. The flow of human history is entirely contingent and follows no pattern or cycle.

The much smaller "outlier" camp sees the potential for a disruptive transformational year.

Those of us who conclude cycles are based on the ebb-and-flow dynamics of credit, energy and human nature and are therefore not just real but consequential despite their predictive imprecision see 2023 as a potential pivot in cycles which entered a new phase in the 2020-2021 time frame.

This cyclical shift isn't a result of Covid or the response to Covid. It's the result of diminishing returns and the exhaustion of the dynamics which powered the previous era: hyper-financialization, hyper-globalization and low-cost, abundant energy.

In terms of human nature, confidence and complacency rise and fall, euphoric greed and panicky fear ebb and flow and as Peter Turchin has demonstrated, order and disorder take turns as reasons to cooperate decay into reasons not to cooperate.

As David Hackett Fischer demonstrated in The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History, systemic increases in price--what we call inflation--sow the seeds of economic, social and political disunity, conflict and collapse.

In his book The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization, Thomas Homer-Dixon proposes a cyclical dynamic powered by the relative costs and rewards of participation in the status quo:

Once the costs exceed the rewards, people lose the incentive to support the status quo with their labor and participation. They drift away (what I term opting out) or reduce their effort to align with the diminished rewards and opportunities to advance their own interests.

The Russian economist Kondratieff famously observed how credit cycles between expansion and contraction, and this cycle powers economic expansion or contraction.

The Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph Tainter outlines a dynamic in which the advantages of adding complexity to a social / economic system are substantial at the beginning but as the returns from additional complexity diminish, the costs eventually outweigh any gains and the system decays.

The success of adding complexity is institutionalized by the status quo, which then clings to this strategy even as the returns on adding complexity become negative and thus destructive.

I call this "doing more of what's failed."

Other systems analysts (Donella Meadows et al.) have illuminated the nonlinear character of systemic transformations. Ugo Bardi calls this "The Seneca Cliff": systems which expanded slowly and steadily can decay and collapse quite suddenly and violently, surprising everyone who took the previous stability as permanent.

Systems follow their own rules, and so unlike politics, our opinions don't change the results.

All of these dynamics are (in my analysis) clearly visible in the global status quo. The rational conclusion is the risks of disruption, disorder and conflict as things decay and fall apart are relatively high.

While some trends and conflicts can last for decades (the Thirty Years War in Europe, the Cold War between the US and the USSR), diminishing returns on status quo "solutions" that no longer work as anticipated tend to unravel on the periphery which then spreads quickly to the core.

Those economies and societies which are hidebound / centralized politically and economically are brittle because they lack the systemic means to adapt quickly and successfully to diminishing returns and seismic shifts in price and the availability of essentials.

Brittle systems that lack the structural means to adapt decay and collapse. This is scale-invariant, which means this is equally true of households, small businesses, global enterprises, nations and empires.

There are many such brittle systems in the global status quo, and to expect all of them to remain stable as diminishing returns start yielding negative returns (i.e. cost more than they produce in gains) and scarcities drive prices higher than the bottom 90% can afford as inflation reduces the purchasing power of their earnings--this expectation is based on a confidence that past trends are essentially permanent and every system in the world today will adapt successfully to scarcity, disorder and the reversal of financialization and globalization.

Maybe this will be the case, but given all the dynamics that are so readily visible, it would be prudent to consider the potential for dominoes falling on the periphery (i.e. in "places that don't matter") will soon be toppling dominoes in the core centers of power and control.

In my analysis, the dominant dynamic is always natural selection. Our opinions and projections don't change anything. What divides the systems that endure and become stronger and those that decay and collapse is their evolutionary vigor, which is a function of decentralized competition, transparency, sharing of information and experimentation that is rewarded rather than punished.

I cover these dynamics in my book Global Crisis, National Renewal: A (Revolutionary) Grand Strategy for the United States.

Simply put: systems that view dissent and disorderly churn as threats will decay and collapse because the most powerful forces of adaptability are dissent and disorderly churn.

It shouldn't surprise us if 2023 turns out to be atypical and disruptively transformational in ways few believe possible.

Lessons from Japan - Japanese Decline: The Full Story (Video - 23')

  As we enter 2023, the rise and fall of Japan may be a harbinger of things to come for the world.

 First China, which is on the verge of following on Japanese footsteps: The closing of the American technology pipeline, the rapidly evolving shape of the age pyramid and the bursting of a giant real estate bubble. 

 But at a higher level, the whole world now resemble the Japan of 1989: The end of a growth period built on the global supply chain and semiconductors. Financial assets running ahead of real assets with the consequent creation of a giant market bubble ready to explode just as the lack of energy and raw materials makes the next growth cycle impossible to quick-start.  

 It goes further as the West, just as Japan did in the 1980s, decides to invest massively in the wrong technologies which will hamper instead of foster the next growth cycle. In the case of Japan, it was the 5th computer generation, rockets and robots which all came to little more than the Sony Aibo dog while absorbing huge amount of capital. 

 Now it is our obsession with green technologies which are neither green nor leading to the "better" world people expects since you simply cannot run a modern, efficient economy based on diluted and intermittent energies such as wind and solar. Or electric vehicles which although they may be ideal for some limited applications are in no way capable of replacing our current fleet of cars and trucks. 

 It takes insight and foresight to chose wisely how to aim in the right direction. The Japan of the 1950s and 1960s displayed this skill and created a prosperous country. The Japan of the 1980s and 1990s completely lost its mojo and crashed what was on the verge of becoming the most prosperous economy in the world. With this in mind, it is sad to see the whole world rushing head first into a blind alley which unlike Japan capable as it was to keep its social stability in the storm, will necessarily fare much worse as the clouds gather and the waves rise from 2023 onward.

 

Why EU Leaders Dread A Ukraine Peace Process

  The article below is interesting because it highlights the chasm in Europe and the risks of implosion. Not for what it says about Ukraine. 

 It is also irrelevant about Ukraine. What the Europeans fail to understand, except maybe Macron and possibly Scholz is that Ukraine is existential for Russia. Kiev was the original capital of the Russ and the Eastern part of the country is still called Novo Russia. Either the Russian army wins the war and Ukraine is dismantled or the Russian army loses the war and we are staring at the possibility of a Nuclear exchange. The third path for negotiations has now been preempted. This will be decided by the middle of next year. My bet on this one is on the first outcome in spite some systemic incompetence displayed by Russian generals until recently.

 By then, the global South will be drifting further away from the dollar based balance of the last 70 years. Saudi Arabia just opened the floodgates. A cold Winter will highlight the nonsense of the Western energy policies although Europe will probably double down on its carbon taxes. Absolutely everything will be taxed, they just need the money.

 With or without black swans, social peace will crumble in most developed countries. It is already starting in Paris and Berlin although you wouldn't know if you just read the news. Developing countries will go bankrupt in drove or/and stop paying their dollar denominated debt which will be too expensive anyway. 

 And then China... Tensions in the Pacific but no war, the Chinese army is not yet ready. Real Estate bubble popping but no financial crash, the control of the CCP is just too absolute. Still the end of growth and the stranglehold of the US on technology will impact the country badly.

 Interesting times indeed await us in 2023. I expect a mix of 1989 and 2008. Let's hope we don't get 1939 or worse, that 2023 creates a name for itself!

Authored by Yanis Varoufakis via Project Syndicate,

After the 2008 financial crash, the European Union only papered over the internal North-South conflict that emerged, and the war in Ukraine has produced a new East-West divide. Once peace arrives, both fault lines will only grow deeper, uglier, and impossible to ignore.

This is not a polemic about whether Russia can be trusted to respect any future peace treaty with Ukraine. Nor is it a commentary on the merits of ending the war by diplomatic means. It is, rather, a reflection on the latest European paradox: While peace in Ukraine would help stem Europe’s economic hemorrhaging, the moment any peace process begins, the European Union will be divided by an internal East-West fault line, which is bound to reawaken the EU’s earlier North-South conflict.

A credible peace process will require difficult negotiations involving the world’s great powers. Who will represent Europe at that high table? It is hard to imagine Polish, Scandinavian, and Baltic leaders ceding that role to their French or German counterparts.

In the EU’s eastern and northeastern flanks, French President Emmanuel Macron is considered a Putin appeaser ready to impose on Ukrainians a reprehensible (to them) land-for-peace agenda. Likewise, setting aside Germany’s long-term reliance on Russian energy, Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s standing as a torchbearer of Europe’s collective interest has been damaged further by his €200 billion ($212 billion) fiscal defense of German industry – the type of tax-funded protective shield which Germany vetoed at the EU level.

Meanwhile, French and German elites pour scorn on the idea that the EU might be represented in any peace process by the likes of Kaja Kallas, Estonia’s Prime Minister, or Sanna Marin, her Finnish counterpart. “The moral crusades of the Ukraine war maximalists are fashionable now but they will hinder, not help, any peace process,” was how a German official put it to me.

So, the question remains: Who will represent the EU in any future peace process?

Had the EU seized upon the massive banking-cum-debt crisis of the post-2008 era to democratize its institutions, Europe might now be credibly represented by its president and foreign minister. Alas, as things stand, European citizens and national leaders would cringe at the thought of being represented by Charles Michel, the EU Council President, and Josep Borrell, the EU foreign policy supremo. Macron and Scholz, alongside almost every other European president or prime minister, would surely object.

The optimistic view in Brussels is that, despite its lack of legitimate envoys and military weakness, the EU will carry considerable weight in any negotiations because it is the economic powerhouse that will pay for Ukraine’s reconstruction and be the arbiter of any process by which Ukraine joins the EU single market, customs union, or even the EU itself. But is such optimism justified?

The EU will undoubtedly pay huge sums and orchestrate any postwar Ukraine accession process. But there is no reason to think this will guarantee the EU an influential role during the peace process. In fact, there are good reasons to think that the EU’s role as the main funder of Ukraine’s reconstruction will divide and weaken the Union more than even the crisis a decade ago.

The EU’s own European Investment Bank estimates the cost of Ukraine’s reconstruction to be around €1 trillion – the amount of the EU’s budget over the 2021-27 period and 40% higher than its post-pandemic recovery fund, NextGenerationEU. Already hamstrung by its domestic €200 billion plan to shore up Germany’s collapsing industrial model, and the €100 billion Scholz has earmarked for defense spending, Germany lacks the fiscal space to provide even a fraction of that sum.

If Germany can’t pay, it is clear that the other EU member states can’t, either. The only way to pay for Ukraine would be for the EU to issue common debt, retracing the painful steps that led to the recovery fund’s creation in 2020.

Pressed to deliver the cash, the EU might well go down that path, only to find it leads to vicious acrimony. True, EU leaders agreed on common debt during the pandemic. But inflation was negative at the time, and all EU members were facing an economic implosion as lockdowns killed demand across Europe. Once peace prevails in Ukraine, they will need to agree to even more common debt to fund Ukraine’s reconstruction at a time when interest rates have quadrupled, inflation is rampant, and the economic benefits to EU members are bound to be grossly uneven.

Spain will question the fairness of shared debt when German companies get the lion’s share of Ukraine’s reconstruction business. Poland will protest loudly when Germany and Italy announce that, with peace restored, they will be buying energy from Russia again. Hungary will sell its acquiescence to any Ukraine fund dearly, demanding even more exemptions from the EU’s rule-of-law and transparency conditionalities. In the midst of this bedlam, the old North-South (or Calvinist-Catholic) divide, on the merits of fiscal union, will return with a vengeance.

Germany already fears that France will insist on permanent, and fairly regular, issuance of common debt, which the German political class will resist, and not only because the German Constitutional Court has already ruled against the idea. The deeper reason is that the fiscal union France seems to favor would require German conglomerates to abandon a practice that is in their DNA: accumulating US assets that they purchase on the back of the large net exports to America made possible by stagnant German wages and underpriced natural gas.

So, unless President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act changes Germany’s mindset by raising a protectionist barrier around the United States that kills off German net exports to America, any negotiations to end the Ukraine war are bound to aggravate the EU’s East-West divide – and then reignite the old North-South divide.  

None of this should be surprising. After the 2008 financial crash, the EU only papered over the North-South fault line that emerged. The war in Ukraine inevitably produced a new East-West fault line. Once peace arrives, both fault lines will only grow deeper, uglier, and impossible to ignore.

Data shows there’s no climate catastrophe looming – climatologist Dr J Christy debunks the narrative (Video - 50')

 Cool down, the atmosphere is not warming as fast as some people would like you to believe. Here's the details:

 

It’s Time to Pay Attention to A.I. (ChatGPT and Beyond) - Video 26'

  The progress ChatGTP represents is simply astounding. As a text based language program, it has no consciousness but the achieved level of apparent intelligence is surprising and the possible applications are mind boggling. It will obviously change a lot of things as it is now but it goes beyond that considering the speed of progress. 

From my experience with ChatGTP we are at most a year or two away from a kind of intelligence indistinguishable from human intelligence. And still no awareness but how far behind can it be? 

 

The Fifth Estate

 

 https://www.piratewires.com/p/the-fifth-estate

Dangerous alliance. In 1787, Edmund Burke said there were “Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters’ Gallery yonder, there [sits] a Fourth Estate more important than they all.” The notion of some vital power beyond our government was imported to the New World, and today constitutes a core belief of the American liberal: there is no free people, we’re often told, without a free press independent of congress, the courts, and our president. But throughout the 20th Century thousands of media outlets gradually consolidated, and by the dawn of our internet era only a few giants remained. These giants largely shared a single perspective, and in rough agreement with the ruling class the Fourth Estate naturally came to serve, rather than critique, power. This relationship metastasized into something very close to authoritarianism during the Covid-19 pandemic, when a single state narrative was written by the press, and ruthlessly enforced by a fifth and final fount of power in the newly-dominant technology industry.

It was a dark alliance of estates, accurate descriptions of which were for years derided as delusional, paranoid, even dangerous. But today, on account of a single shitposting billionaire, the existence of the One Party’s decentralized censorship apparatus is now beyond doubt.

A couple weeks back, alleging proof Twitter acted with gross political bias, and in a manner that influenced U.S. elections (!), Elon Musk opened his new company’s internal communications to a small handful of journalists. They set immediately to breaking a series of major stories that have rewritten the history of Trump-era tech. Long story short, Twitter leadership lied to the public, relentlessly, for years, and everything the most paranoid among us ever said about the platform was true. “Trust and safety” is a euphemism for political censorship, with “expert” teams comprised almost exclusively of the most radical, joyless grievance studies majors you ever met in college. Their goal is to reshape American politics by dominating the bounds of what the public is permitted to consider American politics. In these efforts, they have mostly been succeeding.

The Slow Strangulation Of The World Economy

 The vision of the WEF will fail. It is anti human and eventually people will resist it as they are doing in China. But likewise the example of China shows that the Government also leans how to control people better and impose totalitarian rules. Neither democratic nor totalitarian states are a given for our future but they are both possibilities... and right now, we are not heading in the right direction.

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via DailyReckoning.com,

I was visiting with a friend recently and she was recounting her early panic over COVID. She has kids and loves them. As a mom, she believed her first duty was to protect them from the bad virus that was floating around. She went into full freak-out mode, keeping the kids indoors and spacing them out. Her heart never stopped racing.

One day, she looked out her window and saw that her neighbor’s dog was loose on her front lawn. She ran outside and started screaming at her neighbor to get that dog off her lawn immediately and never allow such an outrage again.

Why?

Because she had heard on CNN that dogs carry Covid. She believed that the dog was spreading Covid around and that this would waft through her windows and infect her kids.

Now, this is a brilliant woman, educated at a prep school that no normal person could afford and attended a top school before becoming a partner in a firm that serves only high-end clients.

Moreover, she is herself brilliant and stable, and not politically left-wing at all. She is sober and strong. But Covidophobia snagged even her. Simply amazing.

I had not remembered the weeks during which we were supposed to hate on people’s pets. We can add that to the endless litany of nonsense we’ve been through.

The Fauci Effect

Why the attack on pets? Well, the frightening Fauci in August took a day or two to work with his co-author from the National Institutes of Health on an academic article explaining the bigger picture. The problem, they explained, began 12,000 years ago. That’s when humankind started farming, killing land animals, and moving around from place to place.

That caused disease to spread! So they say. It only got worse once we got to cities. Then everyone started mixing. Icky germs were everywhere. Next thing you know, we spread smallpox and cholera and god knows what else.

Humankind was dooming itself with its ridiculous ambition to do more than live in a hut by the river and grab fish to eat! We are very, very bad.

That’s the origin of COVID, they wrote, which is why we need a “new infrastructure of human existence.” This will require emptying out the cities, getting rid of pets, abolishing large events, and forbidding people from meeting in groups in restaurants and things. Only once we massively reduce the population and go back to a state of nature can we fully conquer disease.

This is their vision. It’s pure insanity. Worse than Marx. Worse than anything even the nuttiest philosopher from the ancient world ever wrote. Worse than the devil himself.

And yet this was the guy who was practically running the world for the better part of two years. He was not only scripting the pandemic response. He was in charge of social media. He was in charge of economics. He was in charge of technology. He was the totalitarian dictator for the U.S. and really for the whole world by influence.

Nonstop Wreckage

It’s truly hard to imagine how it came to be that this pest ended up dismantling the whole of the Trump administration. He was the terrifying guru that even Trump could not swat away. As a result, Trump fell in the polls and lost, taking the House and Senate with him. The economy was wrecked. The Constitution was abolished.

Now we have terrifying inflation without end. In many parts of the world, people are having to choose between eating and heating. School kids are behind by two years. We’ve lost three years of lifespan just in the U.S. The whole country is utterly bankrupt. Trade is wrecked. Business is demoralized. 5.8 million people are missing from U.S. labor rolls right now.

What an unspeakable disaster. Even writing this, it sounds like fiction. It’s not. It’s our reality, and it is getting worse by the day.

Media won’t discuss the fullness of the calamity. Mostly we just pretend as if life is normal. What else can we do? Well, there are substances we can take, and millions take them if only to lessen the pain. They lead to early death. Excess deaths are through the roof right now, as ill-health spreads across the land.

Oh, but won’t the Fed save us? They are raising interest rates. The 30-year mortgage is at 6%. The demand side of the housing market is in free fall. The supply side is suddenly flat. Prices are still rising. This is what an inflationary recession looks and feels like.

Faucian Economics

I’ve never been one for conspiracy theory but one would have to be stupid not to see that there is something of a plan here. They are attacking cities, enterprise, economic growth, and even procreation too. How? In every conceivable way.

I’ve given up trust, all trust, in these people, their plans, and even their products. They are dangerous. Their vision of the world is even more so.

We used to say that socialism cannot work. What does that mean? It means that it will only make people poorer and more miserable. But what if you have an ideology that is actually intended to do that? Can Faucian economics work? Yes, if you mean to reduce the population, spread misery, end progress, abolish all comforts, empty the cities, cause people to freeze to death, and only allow what’s left of the population to live off bugs.

We need to get real. These people are truly up to no good. They have gotten their way. What’s more, the gang that did this is not subject to the voters, so elections might not make a bit of difference, even if they turn out well.

The Root of the Problem

The real problem is much more fundamental. It is structural. It is philosophical. It can be defeated but not through the usual ways. In the meantime, we really need to wake up, all of us, and recognize that nothing is normal anymore.

Surviving this period in history will require cleverness and courageous action. We simply cannot ignore the trends all around us and expect to survive.

It’s bad enough to realize the utter stupidity of the policies that are wrecking the world. It’s worse suddenly to realize that they are not stupid at all but rather the product of a diabolical mission to ruin civilization itself.

But in truth, it is all deliberate, I’m sorry to say. The people who run the world today have no interest in a thriving social order and civilization.

The means to survive them is to outsmart them.

Bioweapons Expert Speaks Out About Novel Coronavirus

 It looks like the dam is breaking and what we have been explaining for almost 3 years is coming out in the open. (Click the title to access the full article.)

Bioweapons Expert Speaks Out About Novel Coronavirus

By Dr Mercola

Story at-a-glance

• Francis Boyle, who for decades has advocated against the development and use of bioweapons, suspects COVID-19 is a weaponized pathogen that escaped from Wuhan City’s Biosafety Level 4 facility, which was specifically set up to research coronaviruses and SARS
• According to Boyle, the COVID-19 virus is a chimera. It includes SARS, an already weaponized coronavirus, along with HIV genetic material and possibly flu virus. It also has gain of function properties that allow it to spread a greater distance than normal
• At the beginning of the pandemic, the incubation period for COVID-19 infection was still unknown, but estimates ranged from 14 days to 30 days
• Prior to the pandemic, the U.S. government had spent $100 billion on biological warfare programs since September 11, 2001, up until October 2015
• Curiously, even while there had been only a limited number of reported cases of COVID-19 infection in the U.S., the U.S. military had designated several detention sites around the country to quarantine Americans, should the situation take a turn for the worse

Let's Prosecute Fauci - By Elon Musk

  The best and most powerful statements are sometimes the shortest!

 Thank you Elon for being different and speaking the truth!

 

by David Stockman

Now that the GOP has taken control of the US House investigative committees, we must pray that they will have the courage of their convictions and the intellectual clarity and steadfastness to pursue the nation’s god-forsaken descent into public health totalitarianism to the very bottom of this great folly. So doing, they need to name names.

Stated differently, the unspeakable stain of the Covid tyranny requires the very opposite of the “pandemic amnesty” that the craven poltroons at the Atlantic suggested recently. That’s because the precedent was such a grave affront to constitutional liberty and capitalist prosperity that those responsible should be exposed, hounded and shamed, and prosecuted where warranted, so that future power-grabbers will forever be reminded that tyranny cannot be imposed with impunity. Continue reading

Now about Twitter...

 "Startling fact of the week: Twitter’s senior ranks of content moderators included over a dozen former FBI and CIA agents and analysts who let child porn run loose all over the app while surgically removing any utterance contradicting the government’s claim that mRNA “vaccines” are “safe and effective” — not to mention the effort this elite crew expended against anyone objecting to the Woke-Left’s race and gender hustles. Wouldn’t you like to know how much they were paid? Probably more than government work."
 

The Prospect of Nuclear War Is Getting too Close for Comfort

  I agree. Incompetence and hubris are taking us step by step to the edge of the cliff. The war will not happen when people decide to go to war but because they have no other option. The risk for 2023 has never been higher!

 

Guest Post by Paul Craig Roberts

Biden Regime Secretary of State Blinken has blocked negotiations between Russia and Ukraine by declaring it is US policy to drive Russia out of the reincorporated territories, including Crimea.

Biden’s announcement that the US will use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear threats, and the knowledge that US nuclear weapons are deployed close to Russia are forcing Putin to abandon his no first use of nuclear weapons pledge.

In other words, unlike the 20th century Cold War, today there is a hair-trigger on nuclear war. People who say nuclear war is impossible because there are no winners are out to lunch. Wars are the product of humans, and humans are emotional and stupid. They make mistakes hand over fist. Error is the human way.

During the Cold War, US presidents assured the Kremlin that the US had no intention of initiating a war.  Today this assurance does not exist.

A Russian official has charged that the CIA and NSA were involved in the attack by drones deep inside Russia. So here we see the total validity of my warnings that Putin’s Goody Two Shoes behavior invites more and more reckless provocations.  It is the inability of Putin to understand that Russia is at war with Ukraine and the US/NATO and that his “limited military operation” is nothing but his own delusion that is leading to nuclear war.

The United States government has now attacked Russia twice, not counting the attacks on the former Russian territory Russia has reincorporated, such as https://www.rt.com/russia/568031-melitopol-hotel-ukraine-himars/ .  The attack on the Nord Stream pipelines and now drone attacks deep inside Russia are beyond Ukraine’s unassisted capability.  Washington feels comfortable in these reckless acts, because Washington has dismissed Putin’s declared, but never defended, “red lines” as meaningless.  https://www.rt.com/russia/567993-us-ukraine-attacks-deep-russia/ 

One wonders what is wrong with Putin and with the Kremlin in general that Russia forever complains but never acts. It should be self evident to the Kremlin that the longer the conflict and anti-Russian propaganda continue, the harder for the West to bow out.  Prestige and predictions are at risk. a network of relationships develops. Powerful interest groups such as armaments corporations acquire  stake in the conflict. With Ukraine facing defeat, there will be agitation for committing US and European soldiers.  At first the claim will be that only one division is needed to bolster Ukraine at this or that point.  Then to save that division another will be needed.  We saw it all in Vietnam.

Will Putin finally realize that Russia is at war when Moscow goes up in smoke?

That would be a bit too late. Putin now admits that he waited too late to intervene in Ukraine, thus giving Washington time to build a Ukrainian military force.  So why wait too late again?  Can Putin learn from his mistakes?  My fear is that Putin is unrealistic and does not comprehend the likely consequences of his Goody Two Shoes behavior.  Putin’s restrained behavior gives the green light to greater provocations from Washington. These provocations are accelerating. Russia needs to use the force necessary to quickly end the war before it spins out of control.

Some years ago I wrote that Russia was disadvantaged, because Putin and the Russian liberals overestimated the humanity of the West.  Now Putin says that “we may have realized too late” that Russia was being deceived.  Nevertheless, he is still willing to negotiate and to be deceived again.  Russian liberals, alienated from the Soviet government, were easy victims of American propaganda presenting the US as a light unto the world.  This has had a disarming effect on the Russian ability to comprehend the West.  https://www.rt.com/russia/567979-putin-biskhek-press-takeaways/

The Kremlin complains endlessly but never acts.  Russia complains to the UN Security Council that weapons supplied by the West are used to hit Russian schools and homes.  Why does Russia think the Security Council cares or will do anything about it?  The real question is why does Putin by pulling Russia’s punches permit Ukraine the latitude to use the “foreign-supplied” weapons?  The Russians are too diplomatic to say “West-supplied.” Russia says there will be legal consequences for the war crimes in the future.  Why not military consequences now?  Until Putin gets serious about the war, provocations will continue their escalation.  https://www.rt.com/russia/567994-ukraine-warning-western-arms/

Another mistake Putin is making is not having a large professional standing army.  Notice how long it took for Russia to mobilize 300,000 soldiers for reinforcing the “limited” operation in Ukraine.  This should have taught the Kremlin something, but no, Putin announces no further need for more mobilization.  Consequently, if the Ukraine situation does spin out of control Putin has nothing to fight with except nuclear weapons.  Perhaps Putin fears domestic opposition from Americanized Russian youth that the Kremlin permitted American-financed NGOs to indoctrinate unhampered for years, or perhaps the Kremlin is “saving money.”  How does Putin reconcile his statements that the West seeks the destruction of Russia with the absence of a large professional Russian army?  That leaves him with only the nuclear option.

Commentators scoffed at my warnings that Western intervention in Ukraine was cooking up nuclear war.  Now Jens Stoltenberg, the NATO Secretary General says “I fear that the war in Ukraine will spiral out of control and become a major war between NATO and Russia. If things go wrong, they can go horribly wrong.” Amazing how long it took him to realize that.  With dumbshits like Stoltenberg and the American neoconservatives running the show, how can war be avoided?

To come back to my 8 year old question:  Why does Putin refuse to act and bring the conflict to a quick close before it widens out of control?  The “limited operation” has not limited anything.  It has expanded the war into attacks on Russia herself.  Foreign Minister Lavrov has admitted that Washington and NATO are “directly involved” in war against Russia.  How can the Kremlin make such an admission and do nothing about it? How provocative will the next attack be?  Why not go ahead and win the war before the next provocation happens?  Yes, I would rather  Russia win the war than for the conflict to escalate into nuclear war.  Until recently, Ukraine was a part of Russia for centuries. During the 20th century Soviet leaders attached parts of Russia to their Ukrainian province.  These Russians were suffering under the neo-Nazi regime established by Washington in 2014, formed independent republics and asked to be returned to Russia.  This legitimate request is no basis for a nuclear war.

Washington and Europe need to consider that sooner or later Putin will have to act if US/NATO keep pushing him into a corner.  The harder and further Putin is pushed, the more limited his options. As Stoltenberg now realizes, the situation can spin out of control.  Are American neoconservatives capable of this realization?  Does Putin realize the situation is spinning out of control because of his inaction?

I was involved in the 20th Century Cold War.  I helped President Reagan end it. The situation was never as dangerous as the current situation.  In those days there were still intelligent people in Washington.  Today there are none.  In those days no one doubted that the Soviets would act. Today Russia is seen as all talk and no action.  Consequently, push is coming to shove.