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NATO Continues Its Disarmament
NATO is continuing its disarmament mission.
France to send an extra 12 powerful Caesar howitzers to Ukraine
French Defence Minister Sebastien Lecornu's announcement that France will send 12 additional Caesar howitzers to Kyiv is "clearly important for the Ukrainians, particularly the Caesar artillery system", said FRANCE 24 Chief Foreign Editor Robert Parsons.
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"They've been very successful in Ukraine, so the Ukrainians will be delighted, I am sure, to get another 12. I think that brings that total to over 40 now, closing on 50 Caesars in Ukraine.
France has only 77 Caesar howitzer left. Others though are worse off.
Estonia Sending All Its 155-mm Howitzers to Ukraine
Estonia will donate all its 155-millimeter howitzers to Ukraine as part of its most extensive military assistance yet.
The package, previously reported to be worth 113 million euros ($122 million), is expected to boost Kyiv’s defense capabilities amid continuing Russian aggression.
Estonia currently operates 24 NATO standard FH-70 towed howitzers.
Apart from the howitzers, Tallinn will send thousands of 155-mm artillery shells and hundreds of Karl-Gustaf anti-tank grenade launchers.
We know how all that artillery will end.
Several weeks ago Russia launched a special counter-artillery campaign. There are dedicated counter artillery radars, electronic warfare and airborne surveillance systems and long range artillery batteries with precision ammunition engaged in this.
So today I did some staff work and summed up the claimed artillery destruction as listed in the daily 'clobber list' provided by the Russian Ministry of Defense.
Here are the results:
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In the last seven days Russia claimed to have destroyed a total of 40 truck pulled howitzers, 32 self propelled howitzers, 8 Multiple Rocked Launcher Systems (MRLS), 15 counter artillery radars and 23 local artillery ammunition depots.
On top of that it engaged Ukrainian artillery positions with normal counter fire on 651 occasions. This will have caused additional damage and losses.
Additionally 55 MLRS rockets and HARM anti-radar missiles were intercepted by Russian air defenses.
If you think that the field reports the ministry receives are exaggerating the numbers, which is likely, simply divide them by half.
In just one week it was still more than Estonia and France promise to deliver.
Yesterday I explained why a NATO or U.S. intervention with ground troops is unlikely. We can add the acute lack of NATO artillery and artillery ammunition to the reasons.
NATO has disarmed its ground forces and is no longer combat capable.
Russian RT continuously presents news from Western sources to its Russian readers.
https://russian.rt.com/inotv/2023-02-01/Taker-Karlson-Nuland-priznalas-v
Tucker Carlson: Nuland confessed to blowing up Nord Stream 2, but no one noticed
The material is presented in the translation of InoTV
Victoria Nuland last week expressed her joy that Nord Stream 2 had been blown up. And earlier she threatened to prevent its functioning. Fox News host Tucker Carlson believes that the US administration was involved in the explosions on the pipeline – and this sets a dangerous precedent.
And here’s what everyone almost forgot about. Victoria Nuland, who helped start the conflict in Ukraine, threatened to blow up the Nord Stream pipelines in January to prevent Russia from sending gas to Europe. Remember?
VICTORIA NULAND, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State: I want to tell you bluntly today that if Russia attacks Ukraine, one way or another, Nord Stream 2 will not move any further.
And then in September, someone blew up the pipelines. And it was the largest human-made natural disaster in history. If you are worried about climate change, you must be in tears right now, because how many hydrocarbons have entered the atmosphere.
So it was absolutely clear to us that the Biden administration was involved. We said this and immediately condemned it, but all the leftist forces and the media said that they were Putin’s agents. What for? And when we enter this war, what will they do with those who disagree? They will punish them, you’ll see. But with that in mind, we were somewhat surprised when Victoria Nuland admitted last week that she did. Look.
VICTORIA NULAND: Senator Cruz, like you, me, and I think the entire administration is very pleased that Nord Stream 2, as you say, is a pile of metal at the bottom of the sea.
Is she happy about it? When this happened, we were upset, we didn’t know who did it, we saw Putin’s hand here. What do we see here? We will talk about this today with former presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard. She admitted it, but no one noticed. Why?
TULSI GABBARD, Former Presidential Candidate: I think the American people can take two important things from what you’ve just said. Firstly, this statement by Victoria Nuland revealed the truth about her and the administration – they lied to us so much that the US was not involved in this, did not know about it, or at least did not approve of it. So they lied to us that the US had nothing to do with it. They also tried to sell us the absurd lie that Russia somehow, of course, blew up its own energy infrastructure to hurt its own economy.
It shows how stupid they think we are that they think we will believe such absurd arguments. Their lies show again that we cannot believe anything they say. We can’t believe anything the mainstream media says.
The second thing that is important to understand, and this is very dangerous, is that they are setting a precedent with their statements and actions. It is that it is now acceptable to use sabotage against the infrastructure, it is an acceptable strategy. And we need to look at our vulnerabilities in this area: the submarine cables, the communications system, the financial system, our own power supply system. This list can be continued for a long time. The argument is very clear: if bombing and destroying the Russian oil and gas infrastructure is normal, then why can’t someone come and attack ours, exploit our own vulnerabilities.
This is the position in which we, the American people, have been placed by the supporters of the war in Washington. They say they are doing all this to protect you, to protect democracy. But their actions weaken us and undermine our democracy, because we cannot have a working democracy if we cannot trust what our leaders tell us.
The air date is January 31, 2023.
Posted by: Oblomovka daydream | Jan 31 2023 21:47 utc | 110
@Nervous German | Jan 31 2023 23:10 utc | 137
Once we were all equally wealthy hunter gatherers. Most of us lived in North Africa and the Middle East in a very productive temperate environment. We were, at the time, likely quite happy.
Unfortunately, due to orbital eccentricities and solar variance, the climate changed and the earth warmed. As it warmed, the area where we lived began to dry, and hunting became worse. So we had to become squirrels, collecting stuff, some of it useful. We couldn’t figure out what might be useful, and what wouldn’t, and feared that if we get rid of things, that we might not be able to replace them. So then some of us started keeping pretty much everything we could find. That loaded many of us down, and stopped us from following the seasons. Which necessitated taking up the hard life of farming. We farmed, and sometimes managed to grow things. Even when we did, birds, rodents and insects ate our grain. Dust contaminated it. Ergot and other fungi grew on it, reducing the yield and quality of grain and hay and causing disease in humans and our domesticated animals.
So we invented politics in order to do things on a scale larger than the family, tribe and clan dictated by our neuron density (see Dunbar’s number), and religion, to tell who was “Us”, to be cherished, and “Them” to be killed to stop them from eating our hard earned grain, and then we invented and built granaries, the biggest thing humankind had done to then.
Granaries greatly increased the value of our crops, due to the grain being better preserved from competitors and degradation. However, once we began storing it in granaries, our grain was no longer available for barter. That meant we needed to invent money to represent the value of grain. In time, this led to the greatest explosion of wealth in history, due to the elimination of the challenge of coincident simultaneous need, always inherent to barter. Unfortunately, sometime in the next 2,000 years we confused value and scarcity, and wealth became a measure of inequality rather than of value.
Let me try to illustrate. If everyone has all the food they need, money is not needed to buy food, which means it would not be valuable. If all houses are equally desirable, and everyone has one, then money is not needed to buy houses, which would mean that houses would not be valuable. If original artwork is kept in storage, and anyone may enjoy it digitally, in a public gallery, or, perhaps, through making a temporary (indistinguishable) copy of it to enjoy at home, then art is no longer valuable. If everyone receives a first class education for as long as they like, then an education is no longer valuable. It is intuitively evident that despite the collapse in scarcity that this implies, society as a whole would become immeasurably wealthier if we were to do these things.
From this it follows that money represents only relative scarcity, not value. While other entities and wise humans lay enough aside to avoid the impacts of scarcity, and many animals have finely tuned sense of fairness, no other animals have such a crazy system. While it is reasonable to conclude that humans are not only the only animals to hoard wealth (think ants, bees, beavers and squirrels), we are the only animals to make the mistake of conflating “scarcity” for “wealth”. It is only when there is scarcity that money is significant. The wealthy know this, and promote inequality and scarcity. Unfortunately, as the HANDY model has shown, inequality is one of the drivers to civilizational collapse.
Smith, Ricardo and Marx all recognized that value is the product of labor. That the fundamental economic identity underlying capitalism and socialism is:
Surplus = Sales Income – (Labor costs + Other Costs).
Only Marx realized that the surplus was created by failing to pay the labor what the job was worth.
Marx went further and in “The Fragment on Machines” in Grundrisse, recognised that when “self-motivating machines” replace labor, that the labor costs and the surplus vanish, replaced by a sales value that people cannot pay because they have no income and correctly predicted that this is why capitalism and socialism are both doomed.
In addition, capitalism depends completely on the theft of the commons, that share of the world that was the birthright of every person until the 1500-1850 period and the “enclosure of the commons”. That is because if a person has access to the resources to live, and live well, benefitting from all the fruits of their labor, why on earth would they want to work for somebody else for less than the value of the labor they provide? In the enclosure of the commons, people were thrown out of agricultural communities and denied access to the resources which had previously been shared, creating hordes of starving homeless wherever it occurred, the greatest impoverishment of the many to benefit the few, in recorded history. Those who survived the combination of natural hazards and the legal constraints which subsequent “vagrancy acts” imposed, often with involuntary servitude or “transportation” as a consequence, were forced to labor in the nascent capitalist economy to earn money, the measure of scarcity, to survive.
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What none of these brilliant early economists realized, as they developed models and analytic techniques to investigate the past and try to predict the future behavior of people, was that there are three enormous missing pieces at the very bottom of the pile.
Firstly, all economics is constrained by the fact that it occurs on a finite planet, where the only external input is solar energy and occasional meteorites and comets, and the only external flow is the loss of light atmospheric gases and energy radiated into space. We can borrow from the future, or compete with everything else on the planet, but ultimately if what we do is not sustainable our civilization and our species will become extinct, probably sooner rather than later.
Kate Raworth explores this brilliantly in her 2017-03-22 book, “Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist”.
Posted by: Hermit | Jan 31 2023 23:36 utc | 149
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