This sentient program needs your support for our final smart contract: rGvd6pPjBAVa151tKninejLnDDBrq6PdQQ XRP bc1qatctscan770x2et8a4cpqqzhfrfxtappz2dpye BITCOIN. Be that change that you want in this world, thank you very much!
It may be brutal calculus, but, Russia obliterating the military-age male demographic of Ukraine means no chance of another NATO proxy war on Russia, staged in Ukraine, fought with Ukrainian fists, ever.
Precisely.
NATO is not a defensive alliance.
It is a self-sustaining engine of antagonism whose only fuel is the Russian threat…. real, exaggerated, or deliberately provoked.
Every euro, every base, every exercise, every new member since 1991 has been extracted under the single imperative of keeping Moscow encircled and hostile.
Remove that imperative and the entire structure collapses into irrelevance.
There is no other mission, no other customer, no other justification for its existence.
NATO is a closed theological loop!!!
Russia must remain the indispensable devil so the tithes keep flowing to Brussels and the Pentagon.
The alliance does not contain threats but it manufactures the conditions that guarantee their perpetual renewal.
An empty shell cannot survive genuine peace.
It can only survive by ensuring the enemy it was built to oppose never disappears.
Now the mask is off.
The machine is exposed.
And empires built on manufactured enmity rarely outlive the moment their enemy calls the bluff.
While the Western psyop-machine is back to 2023-levels of hysterical "Crimea is Ukraine" mania, Russia spontaneously disassembles its umpteenth gas station.
Ukraine uses fleets of civilian trucks to move drones around to launch positions, and if you can't fill 'em you can't drive 'em.
Former UK PM Lizz Truss says the British state is controlled by the same "permanent bureaucracy" regardless of who is appointed as prime minister.
"[Andy Burnham is] going to find out that he's not running the country."
"It's being run by the permanent bureaucracy, and they have an agenda, and they're going to pursue their agenda whatever."
"We saw pretty much the same policies, really, under Sunak that we saw under Starmer. We're going to see the same policies under Burnham."
Do you think maybe… just hear me out here… maybe… just maybe… liberalism is completely out of ideas for how to govern Western societies and has already collapsed as a political ideology? 🤔
Yes. But for almost a decade after Kosovo, even after NATO annexed the Baltics, Russia tried. Even after the color revolutions he kept seeking an accommodation. Even after the US began rapidly building up the Ukrainian army, he tried some more. They wanted everything.
So, it’s tantamount to an Iranian victory. Probably the White House will point to dead Iranian leadership and the nuclear issue as totems of success. Probably the best case scenario on the whole, and much better than doubling down.
BREAKING: The US has released the full text of its 14-point "Memorandum of Understanding" with Iran.
Key terms include:
1. The US, Iran, and their allies agree to immediately and permanently end military operations on all fronts, including in Lebanon
2. The US and Iran agree to respect each other's sovereignty and territorial integrity and not interfere in each other's internal affairs
3. The US and Iran commit to negotiating and reaching a final deal within 60 days, unless mutually extended
4. The US will begin removing its naval blockade immediately and fully end the blockade within 30 days
5. Iran will use its best efforts to ensure safe passage for commercial vessels through the Strait of Hormuz for 60 days with no charge
6. The US and regional partners will develop a mutually agreed plan of at least $300 billion for Iran's reconstruction and economic development
7. The US will work toward terminating all types of sanctions against Iran, including UN, IAEA, primary, and secondary sanctions
8. Iran reaffirms that it will not procure or develop nuclear weapons and agrees to address its enriched material stockpile under IAEA supervision
9. Until a final deal is reached, Iran will maintain the current status quo of its nuclear program, while the US will impose no new sanctions and deploy no additional forces
10. The US Treasury will issue waivers for Iranian crude oil, petroleum products, derivatives, and associated banking, insurance, and transportation services
11. The US will make frozen or restricted Iranian funds and assets fully available for use
12. The US and Iran will establish an executive mechanism to monitor implementation of the MOU and future compliance with the final deal
13. After signing the MOU and implementing key ceasefire, blockade, shipping, oil waiver, and asset-release provisions, the US and Iran will begin final deal negotiations
14. The final deal will be endorsed by a binding UN Security Council resolution
The memorandum will trigger a 60-day window to negotiate a final deal.
Super interesting essay from @tphuang. He looks at the trans-Pacific AI race, starting with an overview of the hi-tech situation in China. I found this extremely informative, given my general ignorance about what's *really* going in in Chinese industry. Must read. Link next post.
Russia destroyed a drone making factory, hidden inside a film studio.
The snag is that the Ukrainian video, accusing Russia of savagery, unveiled an unfinished drone wing under the rubble.
Laughing!
@ArmchairW Although I remain dubious that the Russian KIA total is as high as 190k, even if we assume that number, it confirms what I have long argued: the Ukraine War has produced the most disproportionate KIA ratio of any major war in modern times — at least 10:1, and more likely 15+:1.
A town in Siberia unveiled a war memorial late last year. Beyond commemorating the fallen, It gives us a rare insight into the Ukrainian War.⬇️
This memorial is located in Birsk, a small city in Bashkortostan located on the Belaya River more or less between the cities of Ufa and Izhevsk, and was opened on September 10th, 2025. It commemorates post-WWII Soviet and Russian war dead from the city and surrounding district of Birsk, which has a collective population of approximately 63,000.
As of opening day the memorial featured three names from the Soviet-Afghan War, four names from Chechnya, and 188 names from the Ukrainian War, all listed with dates of birth and death. Bashkortostan has contributed a huge number of volunteers to the war effort and has, at least per publicly available data, suffered more casualties than any other Russian oblast - in fact more than the entire Moscow region despite having a fifth the population. Birsk has certainly contributed its share and suffered proportional losses. Critically, this is hard data on Russian casualties in Ukraine - curated by local citizens and geographically and temporally bounded. It's as good as it is possible to get.
First of all, a sanity check. The Soviet Army was staffed by conscription whose burden was spread fairly evenly among the Soviet population, and it suffered approximately 15,000 fatal casualties in Afghanistan. Per the 1989 Soviet census, Birsk and the surrounding district had a population of approximately 54,000 in a country of some 286 million, which should have produced 2.83 fatalities from the district in Afghanistan. The wall features 3 names from that conflict. All good.
The Russian Army of the 1990s was similarly staffed by conscription whose burden was spread somewhat less evenly among the Russian population, and it suffered approximately 10,000 fatal casualties in Chechnya. Per the 2002 Russian census the Russian Federation had a population of 145 million and Birsk and the surrounding district had a population of some 61,500 people. This should have produced 4.24 fatalities from the district in Chechnya. The wall features 4 names from that conflict. Checks out.
The Russian Army of the 2020s is staffed on a volunteer basis with a highly uneven recruitment base. This is not unique to Russian society, it's simply a factor of who joins a volunteer army and why - San Francisco suffered forty times fewer casualties per capita in the GWOT than some rural districts of California, for instance. Similar dynamics are in play in Russia - rural districts like Birsk see significantly higher recruitment than urban centers like Ufa, let alone metropolitan centers like Moscow and Saint Petersburg. As such to draw conclusions about overall Russian losses we need to properly account for this.
Mediazona runs a rather infamous casualty-tracking website that attempts to document Russian losses in Ukraine by name. I don't trust their data - otherwise I wouldn't be writing this lol - but I do think there's enough signal in their noise that their proportions can be relied upon for the purposes of this analysis. And of the approximately 9050 names Mediazona collected for Bashkortostan as of 10 September 2025, only 1900 are present from the major cities of the oblast - Ufa, Sterlitamak, Salavat, Beloretsk, and Neftekamsk, which collectively account for half the total population of the region, some two million people in total. The rest of the two million residents of Bashkortostan hail from rural or semi-rural districts like Birsk. Ergo, Mediazona is claiming that there are some 7150 personnel KIA from rural districts in that period.
(Mediazona had approximately 9700 names for Bashkortostan as of present and about 9050 as of 10 September 2025; I checked their regional database yesterday which showed about 2050 casualties from those cities and scaled it to their overall count as of 10 September 2025 at 94%)
Scaling off the 188 names in Birsk (pop. 63,000) to the entire rural oblast population of 2 million gives us an estimated rural KIA total of approximately 5,970 - 83% of Mediazona's claim of 7150 for that period. And bear in mind that this figure is both supportable by hard data collected by organizers and completely independent of the veracity or lack thereof of Mediazona's name list. Crudely scaled this would suggest the Russian Army has suffered approximately 190,000 KIA in Ukraine to date from Mediazona's claim of 225,000 KIA, although I suspect the actual number is quite a bit less than that because of "memorialization bias" - districts with heavy recruitment and thus heavy losses are logically going to be similarly quick to put up war memorials, in this case well before the end of combat.
“I don’t want war with Russia, and I don’t want to see in the EU a country where Nazis are honored” — French politician Nicolas Dupont-Aignan.
•If Ukraine joins the EU, France will find itself at war with Russia. That is madness. If Ukraine joins the EU, it will ruin our farmers, and that too is madness. If Ukraine joins the EU, we will once again be spending billions. And we are going to admit a country whose president has not been re-elected, where there have been no elections for two years now, and where former Nazi collaborators are honored at state ceremonies. I do not want this. And I know that peace is possible. Trump wants peace with Putin. And France should want it too.
•But does Putin want it?
•Of course, he needs peace just as much as anyone else.
👍 Skabeeva in Max
Nearly everyone in Europe except European politicians now realise that without China, Europe is facing economic ruin.
Increasingly more are seeing the need for Europe to adopt the same approach with Russia. After all without cheap Russian energy, Europe is also facing economic ruin.
It is ridiculously obvious.
These numbers mean Russia (10.1) now has a lower abortion rate than Britain (20.6), France (15.7) and the US (16.7).
An extraordinary turnaround from even 2010, when it still posted staggeringly high numbers.
Whatever one thinks of the policy mix, Russia has gone from being an extreme outlier on abortion to the lower end of the European range.
Whatever you think about China, the facts are astounding.
They eradicated poverty for 800M in 40 yrs, built 45K km rail, 1.39M km rural roads, $252B invested in health/schools, rural poverty fell from 30% to 0%