My Sensing turned slowly my view towards IRAQ. The Western way for US Air force to enter Iran and the whole of West-Asia. In Iraq some slow changes were visible.
But a Professor made a Video that showed a pretty good strategic change there and not only there.
So i asked GROK, to verify it and answer some request of mine.
The GROK-link is for users on X readable.
I made an X-post of the video + my comments (short) and as response to the Video-Post, a summary.
Iraq Just Crippled America's Entire War Strategy | Prof. Jiang Xueqin: June 10, 2016:
"This exchange cost the US well over 200 million not counting air defenses, and aircraft mission cost and the like. Could be as high as $400 million — anyway, a lot of money".
A lot of money to you and me, certainly. But not to the Pentagon, which - remember - has NEVER been successfully audited and which occasionally admits to having lost a few trillion down the back of the sofa.
Besides, as Mr Trump sees it, when you are $40 trillion in debt, why sweat the small stuff?
One of the staple themes of Victorian and Edwardian comedy was how, when an aristocrat or plutocrat faced financial ruin, their one absolute rule was to keep spending - or even crank it up. The moment they cut back, creditors would converge like a flock of vultures. But any of the good and the great who went on spending recklessly maintained their credentials as being above mere money.
There is a nice example of this on a small scale in Oscar Wilde's "The Importance of Being Earnest", when Algy has eaten all the cucumber sandwiches that Lady Bracknell insists on. The butler is despatched urgently to buy more cucumbers, but returns empty handed protesting that there are none to be had "not even for ready cash" - clearly the absolute last resort. Normally a gentleman or his servant would never stoop to handling actual money - a convention that today applies only to the monarch.
An old saying went somewhat like this: if you're in debt with the bank for a thousand dollars, that's _your_ problem. If you're in the debt with the bank for a billion dollars, that's _the bank's_ problem. Problem is, for Trump, the Pentagon and the MIC, that money ain't Tiberium from the Command & Conquer computer games - it does not transform magically into materials, steel, composites, rare earths, electronics et al. all stuff the US desperately lacks. It's a very common knee-jerk reaction for the average American - and Westerner - brainwashed from birth to relate to the world in terms of its monetary cost.
Very true. Some argue that debt means nothing, as "we owe it to ourselves". That's not true, of course: debtors (including governments) owe it to creditors, whose aim is to foreclose and acquire more property until they have it all (as in a game of Monopoly). Others say that a government can always print any amount of its own currency - which it can, but eventually inflation will bite, and bite hard.
I have seen people (often Americans) claim that the US armed forces are the most powerful in the world because more money is spent on them. They don't understand that a $13 billion aircraft carrier is no more than a liability and a coffin for 5,000 people. But it is funny to see the notional cost go soaring up when they attempt to fight a war against a real enemy. This morning I read that Iran destroyed 12 F-35s in their hangars. That would be about $1 billion right there.
As for the "old saying", you may be thinking of this (in those days, a million was worth something):
"If you owe your bank a hundred pounds, you have a problem. But if you owe a million, it has".
- John Maynard Keynes, as quoted in The Economist (13 February 1982), p. 11
Keynes was brighter than he is usually given credit for nowadays. As a great admirer of Bertrand Russell, I treasure this remark:
"Keynes's intellect was the sharpest and clearest that I have ever known. When I argued with him, I felt that I took my life in my hands, and I seldom emerged without feeling something of a fool. I was sometimes inclined to feel that so much cleverness must be incompatible with depth, but I do not think that this feeling was justified".
- Bertrand Russell, (Autobiography Ch. 3 : Cambridge, p. 69)
The false equivalence "more expensive = better" is so ingrained in a consumerist mindset it is difficult to stray for it, even though there's been thousands of examples of it not being even remotely true (seems the latest victims of this fairy tale are companies who invested heavily into AI, only to find out that the tokens they need to buy to get access to a model that, more often than not, delivers very sub-par if not completely bogus results, are much, much more expensive than the paychecks of people they removed in favour of AI itself). It's an article of faith just like the proclivity for an extremely wasteful and inefficient lifestyle. Expensive lifestyle = better lifestyle, and having to chug dozens of antidepressants and painkillers to cope with it, well, it's part of it, no?
Those F-35s you mention, as most Americans would never be able to understand, will not be conjured magically into existence again just by sacrificing another billion dollars to the gods of military procurement in the Pentagon holy site; there's production lines that do not exist anymore, trained staff that's nowhere to be found, materials of which the US has none. The damage is much, much more than a billion dollar's worth.
(Or maybe less, after all, they ARE a perfect example of an abysmally overpriced piece of rubbish)
EDIT: Just remembered an anecdote from many years ago that, I think, fits right in. Back then, there was this extremely complex multiplayer space simulation game called EVE Online. One of its players was especially infamous, he would waste thousands of real life dollars into the game, buying the most expensive items, the biggest and baddest starship, the most powerful weapons and so on. And then behave aggressively, attacking other players with no warning, raiding their space stations and so on - "griefing", I think's the word for it. Problem is, he was rubbish at it, and better players would often demolish him without spending a single dime. His reaction is what it's all about: he openly mocked other, better players for having had to learn to play, 'cause they could not afford losing as much as he did. "I'm too rich to bother having to learn anything", if that's not the most quintessentially American thing ever, I don't know what it is.
Yes; maybe the saddest thing about the USA is how money came to be the sole yardstick and criterion of value.
“As the sociologist Georg Simmel wrote over a century ago, if you make money the center of your value system, then finally you have no value system, because money is not a value”.
– Morris Berman, “The Moral Order”, Counterpunch 8-10 February 2013.
In a kind of Gresham’s Law of morality, the worship of money drove out all other values: honesty, honour, loyalty, integrity, courage, respect… Today all of those are objects of mockery to many.
And partly because the founders, with the best intentions, abolished titles of royalty, nobility, and gentility! Wasn’t it better to look up to kings and queens, dukes and marchionesses, than billionaires and TV personalities? Let alone rich vulgarian criminals?
Gustavus Myers’ book “The Great American Fortunes”, published a century ago, pulls no punches.
“It was a society essentially built upon money; consequently he who was dexterous enough to get possession of the spoils, experienced no difficulty in establishing his place among the elect and anointed. His frauds were forgotten or ignored; only the fact that he was a rich man was remembered. And yet, what is more natural than to seek, and accept, the obeisance lavished upon property, in a scheme of society where property is crowned as the ruling power?”
“Each had to fight, not merely to get the wealth of others, but to keep what he already possessed. If he could but frustrate the attempts of competitors to take what he had, he was fortunate. As he preyed upon the laborer, so did the rest of his class seek to prey upon him… Thus it was that many capitalists, at heart good men, kindly disposed and innately opposed to duplicity and fraud, were compelled to adopt the methods of their more successful but thoroughly unprincipled competitors… The workers, for the most part, instinctively, morally and intellectually, knew that this system was wrong, a horror and a nightmare. But even the capitalist victims of the competitive struggle, which awarded supremacy to the knave and the trickster, went to their doom praising it as the only civilized, rational system and as unchangeable and even divinely ordained”.
“Through all of these pages have we searched afar with infinitesimal scrutiny for a fortune acquired by honest means. Nor have the methods been measured by the test of a code of advanced ethics, but solely by the laws as they stood in the respective times. At no time has the discovery of an ‘honest fortune’ rewarded our determined quest. Often we thought that we had come across such a specimen, only to find distressing disappointment; through all fortunes, large and small, runs the same heavy streak of fraud and theft, the little trader, with his misrepresentation and swindling, differing from the great frauds in degree only”.
Where oh where were the F-35s? Well, given the maintenance-hours-to-flight-hours ratio, there would likely be more than a few in the hardened aircraft shelters that were hit. At circa $100 million per F-35B, the one strike alone might have cost the US a few $ billions.
A billion here, a billion there, and after a while we’re talking about money even a billionaire can’t help but notice.
The Special Combat Operation in Iran is turning out to be America’s reprise of Athen’s 413BC expedition to plunder Syracuse in Sicily.
It’s almost as if Bibi wanted to destroy the US, not Iran.
The video in the middle of the article is ~99% AI-generated. I would say 100%, but I prefer leaving a 1% safety margin.
Yes, Julian, The US is falling in a trap.
My Sensing turned slowly my view towards IRAQ. The Western way for US Air force to enter Iran and the whole of West-Asia. In Iraq some slow changes were visible.
But a Professor made a Video that showed a pretty good strategic change there and not only there.
So i asked GROK, to verify it and answer some request of mine.
The GROK-link is for users on X readable.
I made an X-post of the video + my comments (short) and as response to the Video-Post, a summary.
Iraq Just Crippled America's Entire War Strategy | Prof. Jiang Xueqin: June 10, 2016:
My X-post->https://x.com/OccupySchagen/status/2065023316650328110
Professors Video->https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8w8aJpH6bNE
My remarks (including GROK's->https://x.com/OccupySchagen/status/2065025264933896503
GROKS session:->https://x.com/i/grok?conversation=2065019899118788839
Just saying.
Cassandra.
"This exchange cost the US well over 200 million not counting air defenses, and aircraft mission cost and the like. Could be as high as $400 million — anyway, a lot of money".
A lot of money to you and me, certainly. But not to the Pentagon, which - remember - has NEVER been successfully audited and which occasionally admits to having lost a few trillion down the back of the sofa.
Besides, as Mr Trump sees it, when you are $40 trillion in debt, why sweat the small stuff?
One of the staple themes of Victorian and Edwardian comedy was how, when an aristocrat or plutocrat faced financial ruin, their one absolute rule was to keep spending - or even crank it up. The moment they cut back, creditors would converge like a flock of vultures. But any of the good and the great who went on spending recklessly maintained their credentials as being above mere money.
There is a nice example of this on a small scale in Oscar Wilde's "The Importance of Being Earnest", when Algy has eaten all the cucumber sandwiches that Lady Bracknell insists on. The butler is despatched urgently to buy more cucumbers, but returns empty handed protesting that there are none to be had "not even for ready cash" - clearly the absolute last resort. Normally a gentleman or his servant would never stoop to handling actual money - a convention that today applies only to the monarch.
An old saying went somewhat like this: if you're in debt with the bank for a thousand dollars, that's _your_ problem. If you're in the debt with the bank for a billion dollars, that's _the bank's_ problem. Problem is, for Trump, the Pentagon and the MIC, that money ain't Tiberium from the Command & Conquer computer games - it does not transform magically into materials, steel, composites, rare earths, electronics et al. all stuff the US desperately lacks. It's a very common knee-jerk reaction for the average American - and Westerner - brainwashed from birth to relate to the world in terms of its monetary cost.
Very true. Some argue that debt means nothing, as "we owe it to ourselves". That's not true, of course: debtors (including governments) owe it to creditors, whose aim is to foreclose and acquire more property until they have it all (as in a game of Monopoly). Others say that a government can always print any amount of its own currency - which it can, but eventually inflation will bite, and bite hard.
I have seen people (often Americans) claim that the US armed forces are the most powerful in the world because more money is spent on them. They don't understand that a $13 billion aircraft carrier is no more than a liability and a coffin for 5,000 people. But it is funny to see the notional cost go soaring up when they attempt to fight a war against a real enemy. This morning I read that Iran destroyed 12 F-35s in their hangars. That would be about $1 billion right there.
As for the "old saying", you may be thinking of this (in those days, a million was worth something):
"If you owe your bank a hundred pounds, you have a problem. But if you owe a million, it has".
- John Maynard Keynes, as quoted in The Economist (13 February 1982), p. 11
Keynes was brighter than he is usually given credit for nowadays. As a great admirer of Bertrand Russell, I treasure this remark:
"Keynes's intellect was the sharpest and clearest that I have ever known. When I argued with him, I felt that I took my life in my hands, and I seldom emerged without feeling something of a fool. I was sometimes inclined to feel that so much cleverness must be incompatible with depth, but I do not think that this feeling was justified".
- Bertrand Russell, (Autobiography Ch. 3 : Cambridge, p. 69)
The false equivalence "more expensive = better" is so ingrained in a consumerist mindset it is difficult to stray for it, even though there's been thousands of examples of it not being even remotely true (seems the latest victims of this fairy tale are companies who invested heavily into AI, only to find out that the tokens they need to buy to get access to a model that, more often than not, delivers very sub-par if not completely bogus results, are much, much more expensive than the paychecks of people they removed in favour of AI itself). It's an article of faith just like the proclivity for an extremely wasteful and inefficient lifestyle. Expensive lifestyle = better lifestyle, and having to chug dozens of antidepressants and painkillers to cope with it, well, it's part of it, no?
Those F-35s you mention, as most Americans would never be able to understand, will not be conjured magically into existence again just by sacrificing another billion dollars to the gods of military procurement in the Pentagon holy site; there's production lines that do not exist anymore, trained staff that's nowhere to be found, materials of which the US has none. The damage is much, much more than a billion dollar's worth.
(Or maybe less, after all, they ARE a perfect example of an abysmally overpriced piece of rubbish)
EDIT: Just remembered an anecdote from many years ago that, I think, fits right in. Back then, there was this extremely complex multiplayer space simulation game called EVE Online. One of its players was especially infamous, he would waste thousands of real life dollars into the game, buying the most expensive items, the biggest and baddest starship, the most powerful weapons and so on. And then behave aggressively, attacking other players with no warning, raiding their space stations and so on - "griefing", I think's the word for it. Problem is, he was rubbish at it, and better players would often demolish him without spending a single dime. His reaction is what it's all about: he openly mocked other, better players for having had to learn to play, 'cause they could not afford losing as much as he did. "I'm too rich to bother having to learn anything", if that's not the most quintessentially American thing ever, I don't know what it is.
Yes; maybe the saddest thing about the USA is how money came to be the sole yardstick and criterion of value.
“As the sociologist Georg Simmel wrote over a century ago, if you make money the center of your value system, then finally you have no value system, because money is not a value”.
– Morris Berman, “The Moral Order”, Counterpunch 8-10 February 2013.
In a kind of Gresham’s Law of morality, the worship of money drove out all other values: honesty, honour, loyalty, integrity, courage, respect… Today all of those are objects of mockery to many.
And partly because the founders, with the best intentions, abolished titles of royalty, nobility, and gentility! Wasn’t it better to look up to kings and queens, dukes and marchionesses, than billionaires and TV personalities? Let alone rich vulgarian criminals?
Gustavus Myers’ book “The Great American Fortunes”, published a century ago, pulls no punches.
“It was a society essentially built upon money; consequently he who was dexterous enough to get possession of the spoils, experienced no difficulty in establishing his place among the elect and anointed. His frauds were forgotten or ignored; only the fact that he was a rich man was remembered. And yet, what is more natural than to seek, and accept, the obeisance lavished upon property, in a scheme of society where property is crowned as the ruling power?”
“Each had to fight, not merely to get the wealth of others, but to keep what he already possessed. If he could but frustrate the attempts of competitors to take what he had, he was fortunate. As he preyed upon the laborer, so did the rest of his class seek to prey upon him… Thus it was that many capitalists, at heart good men, kindly disposed and innately opposed to duplicity and fraud, were compelled to adopt the methods of their more successful but thoroughly unprincipled competitors… The workers, for the most part, instinctively, morally and intellectually, knew that this system was wrong, a horror and a nightmare. But even the capitalist victims of the competitive struggle, which awarded supremacy to the knave and the trickster, went to their doom praising it as the only civilized, rational system and as unchangeable and even divinely ordained”.
“Through all of these pages have we searched afar with infinitesimal scrutiny for a fortune acquired by honest means. Nor have the methods been measured by the test of a code of advanced ethics, but solely by the laws as they stood in the respective times. At no time has the discovery of an ‘honest fortune’ rewarded our determined quest. Often we thought that we had come across such a specimen, only to find distressing disappointment; through all fortunes, large and small, runs the same heavy streak of fraud and theft, the little trader, with his misrepresentation and swindling, differing from the great frauds in degree only”.
Money is not an issue for The Empire: they can print any amount of it. What is critical, is the physical stuff - the MIC can’t print that.
I agree. Donald Trump is one big tit. Tell Chappy I said pspsps. 😺
Where oh where were the F-35s? Well, given the maintenance-hours-to-flight-hours ratio, there would likely be more than a few in the hardened aircraft shelters that were hit. At circa $100 million per F-35B, the one strike alone might have cost the US a few $ billions.
A billion here, a billion there, and after a while we’re talking about money even a billionaire can’t help but notice.
The Special Combat Operation in Iran is turning out to be America’s reprise of Athen’s 413BC expedition to plunder Syracuse in Sicily.
It’s almost as if Bibi wanted to destroy the US, not Iran.