by Ollie Richardson for The Saker Blog
As I have now come to expect, some of the comments posted beneath my last article (and if to be honest, beneath any geopolitical article published on a so-called “pro-Russian” website) refer to an imagined scenario where human beings are just doomed – completely doomed. In context, the comments I speak of go along the lines of “Yeah, the Russian leadership might be smart, but the war hawks in the West are crazy enough to just start a nuclear war, to just press the red launch button on a whim!”. I mean, of course, nuclear weapons are a very real thing, but they are categorically not triggered by emotions. I will try to explain why.
I will started by saying that it is possible to psychoanalyse the poster of such comments and produce a fully-fledged report specific to that person, and thus save time explaining complicated phenomena in international relations. In fact, I could end this article right now, since I have already implied that a person projects his or her own internal environment onto the external world (e.g. “I’m a victim, and we’re all doomed!”). But instead I feel that it is more worthwhile and less provocative to simply explain the very basics of analysing post-9/11 geopolitics by using an example.
There are two boys of the same height and weight. Neither of them has had any professional training in any martial art or boxing. They are raw, so to speak. They are instructed by a neutral (vetted) referee to fight each other in 5 minutes, but not to kill. So we have 2 boys and 1 referee, who will only intervene if he judges that either boy is close to being killed. Both boys are checked over by the referee before the fight begins, so that neither of them has any bladed weapon or anything that may give an advantage.
Now at this stage, when an observer is asked (having seen the boys for the first time) “Who do you think will win?”, the answer isn’t exactly obvious. If this observer is asked the same question after 30 seconds of fighting, it becomes slightly easier to answer because they will have seen the boys in action, but it’s still not a fact that their prediction will come true, since their interpretation of the fighting has an element of subjectivity in it and is ultimately dependent on their level of education. For example, it would be surprising if the observer projected boy Y as the winner, having watched boy X knock boy Y to the floor 3 times in 30 seconds. It would look like the observer already had some knowledge of both or either of the boys and thus predicted that boy Y would weather the storm and come out on top.
In other words, the forecast made by the observer before the fighting has started is dependent on already-adopted scientific paradigms – such as the laws of physics, their own fighting experience, probability models, etc. They most likely would not be willing to bet their house (or mortgage) on boy X or boy Y winning, since their level of certainty hasn’t crossed the threshold established in their minds, which is also based on already-adopted scientific paradigms (do we see a pattern yet – how processes are interconnected?).
Now let’s adjust the scenario – let’s remove the referee from the equation. Now we have the same 2 boys, who are told by their class teacher (let’s just assume they are obedient pupils who will do as the teacher says) to have a fight in 5 minutes. They are not checked over before the fight – it’s possible that they could have a knife, brass knuckles, or even a gun. In this new hypothetical scenario, the observer’s position (remember: the observer is just plonked in front of the boys, they didn’t have the chance to observe them in the 5 minutes before the fight was announced and started) hasn’t actually changed, since there is an equal chance that either of them could have a weapon. If in the previous example the referee checked the boys over and, relatively speaking, gave a guarantee that both were unarmed, then in this scenario there is uncertainty vis-à-vis both of them. And after watching 30 seconds of fighting, the observer is again able to offer a more reliable prediction. It’s likely that no mortgage will be gambled here either.
In geopolitics it would seem that things more resemble the “30 seconds of fighting” scenario described above, first and foremost because we already have some knowledge of events that have happened in the past. I.e., today is not the first day we have heard about “China”, “Russia”, “Iran”, “America”, etc. However, some may already have some knowledge, but it’s not for sure that everyone will. Thus, how can it be said that someone’s 1 hour of a maths class before they dropped out of school can be equated to another person’s solid Wall Street portfolio? In other words, I am directly referring to what is coined as Wittgenstein’s ruler. One person who has observed on social media the Syrian war since the beginning may not tell the same story as another person who also observed the Syrian war on social media for the same amount of time. How accurate a story is will be discovered over time, when the same person recounts the history of different theatres (Ukraine, Libya, Georgia, etc).
So, this leads us to a question: would the observer gamble their house after watching the boys fight for 30 seconds – referee or no referee? A possible answer may be “it depends on how confident they are”. And this would indeed be true – moreover, only the observer knows for sure how confident they are. But what if they were asked “would you gamble 20 bucks?”. Of course, the stakes, and thus the level of risk, would be less. The observer chooses the wrong boy and loses $20? It wouldn’t be anything grave; it’s only a bit of beer money. Thus in this case the observer would theoretically be more inclined to gamble. And here is the first reason why the “doomsday” commenters cannot be taken seriously, because they risk absolutely nothing tangible if it turns out they are wrong. They can just post their “prophesies” like a man spreading his seed, with zero care about the consequences, enjoying not being responsible. How can anyone’s forecasts in relation to high-level affairs be believed if they don’t put something physical/of value on the line as collateral? This is a massive problem in today’s “analytical community”, where articles that offer “good” advise to governments have become an example of cyber fly-tipping.
Let us now speak in the context of today’s geopolitical reality. There are 195 countries, and the average of the size of their territory is 767,731 sq km. Real life is like Lord of the Flies, where their main aim is to survive – to eat, to drink, and to have shelter, and to pass on genes. By recognising this simple fact, which is actually just the essence of life, the observer already has a solid foundation for forecasting activities. For example, the observer can confidently ascertain that a country is not going to seek to destroy another country if the former is certain that the latter’s response will be equal in magnitude, if not more intense. History knows no example of a civilisation that consciously slit its own throat. Through costly calculations, yes, but never purposefully.
So how can a country be sure what an enemy’s response will be?
If in the past on-the-ground reconnaissance and spies were used to assess a competitor’s defence/offense capabilities, then today most of the processing is delegated to technology. Why? Because the concept of deterrence was rewritten the moment the atom bomb was invented. If in the distant past the most devastating weapon an army had was a trebuchet or longbow archers, then today it is a nuclear warhead. The difference is that with the former it was only the army that was in direct danger – troops may be killed. By the time an army had been overpowered and started to think about retreating, the enemy could pursue them and annex or raze to the ground captured settlements. The sequence of events was very linear and more serial. Today, due to the “fruits” of industrialisation and scientific discovery, the manner in which we communicate has become very truncated, and thus less time consuming. Warfare as we knew it has become something only seen in museums. No longer does country X declare war on country Y and send troops towards Y’s territory (creating a line of demarcation).
The abstract structure of a country’s response in 2019 may be (ordered from highest to lowest risk):
- Nuclear weapons – guaranteed 100% (or more) mirror damage to the enemy’s country;
- Specialised non-nuclear weapons – designed to eliminate the enemy’s army assets whilst remaining within the framework of international law;
- Regular ground forces – used to legitimately liquidate armed proxies, but not the enemy’s army;
- Public opinion influencers – tasked with socio-economically engineering, usually through state-owned media, NGOs, and general cyberspace meme campaigns.
As long as nuclear weapons remain in the arsenal of a country, a government will always prefer to exhaust the lower risk options. It must also be stressed that the damage these weapons can inflict is only imagined, for the same reason that the observer doesn’t know which boy will win the fight before it has started (no state has ever used a nuclear weapon against another nuclear state), hence why I always insist that warfare today mostly takes place in the mind (more about this later).
Let’s use a real example – the Syrian war.
America is not able to guarantee that firing a nuclear warhead at Russia will go unanswered, neither at the stage of the US missile leaving the North American continent nor at the stage when it will have hit Russian soil. In other words, Capitol Hill knows very well that in this scenario Russia would pre-emptively wipe the US off the face of the Earth. Hence why America prefers to use proxies and carry out “colour revolutions”. Putting the fact that Israel dragged the US into the Middle East aside, both Russia and America have regular troops in Syria. An agreement (or rather, concessions) was made between the US and Russia in order to keep things stable so that their respective socio-economic situations back home receive minimal damage – “we will stay on this side of the Euphrates and at Al Tanf, and you can have the West of the country”. This does not mean that Russia and America are in cahoots – on the contrary. It means that both are nuclear superpowers and both are thus unable to overpower each other. Russia would kick America out of Syria if it could. But it can’t, or to be more precise – it can, but it would be a completely pyrrhic victory.
A simple way of understanding what’s happening in Syria is to understand that a deterrent is not supposed to be used. Here is the Oxford Dictionary’s definition of this word:
But what’s going on today is much more complicated than just a child being sent to the “naughty step” every time he/she misbehaves. Of course, ideally the parents wouldn’t feel the need to punish their child in this way, so there is thus a preference to condition the child into behaving in the desired way without actually physically punishing the child, since the “naughty step” loses its scariness over time.
In geopolitics, this is where public opinion influencers come in handy. In Russia’s case, such influencers are Russia Today, Sputnik, Tass – all English-language state media. These agencies act like a mirror reflecting the West’s ugliness back at itself, highlighting the vapidity of daily life, mocking it in a way that says “Hey, you may have been told horrible lies about our country – please look at your own sh*thole before taking the bait”. RT has an operating English-language TV channel in America and Britain, and one in French based in Paris. Sputnik has a branch in most countries of the world now (by the way: a fresh neoliberal attack against Sputnik arrived on June 14th 2019). Long story short – Russia turned the West’s propaganda manoeuvres into a large Zugswang, like stepping on many rakes at the same time. Don’t believe me? Check the Internet rankings over the past 10 years. America, as was said above, uses “colour revolutions” and NGOs to achieve the same effect, although America tries to present it’s liberal media proxies as “independent”, because otherwise the US will look completely ridiculous the next time it accuses Russia of influencing this or that “democracy”.
Continuing with our Syria example, it is necessary to understand that while it doesn’t benefit America to be involved in a war of attrition in the Middle East (AIPAC is too powerful, sadly), it makes the most of the situation anyway and uses it to hurt Russia. But what happened in 2014 was very serious in terms of international security: America opened the Ukrainian theatre, which played out at the same time as the Syrian, Yemeni, Afghan, Iraqi, Palestinian, etc, and later Venezuelan one. I.e., America uses all these theatres to hurt Russia in one way or another, and to additionally complicate things, America is now obliged to hurt China too. If the objective is to give the IMF the keys to a foreign country’s central bank, the aim is always to land blows on rival nuclear superpowers. So, if to cut to the chase, America’s aim was to drag Russia into a well-prepared trap in Ukraine (the Russian army crossing the border and killing its compatriots) and prevent it from entering Syria. Hopefully, since I’ve written so much about this topic in the past, we should all be aware of how Putin skilfully dodged this bullet and created the Minsk Agreements, which allowed Russia to enter Syria by freezing the Ukrainian theatre (bringing Crimea back into the bosom of Mother Russia) and ensure that the West incurs costs as a consequence – bonjour social unrest and economic ruin due to the fragmentation of the Western bloc (US + EU vassals), aka Yellow Vests, 5 years later.
But for Russia, it’s not enough that it recovered from the damage inflicted by the CIA Gorbachev-Yeltsin fifth column and found a way to enter the centre of the great game – the Middle East – in 2015. What matters is guaranteeing the development of the state, and in order to do this the current global order, where the UN is an American puppet, needs to be overhauled. Having a comprehensive arsenal – from nuclear weapons to public opinion influencers – and the benefit of hindsight (especially in relation to what happened to Yugoslavia and Milosevic), Russia was in a strong enough position to begin this overhaul. Step 1: S-400 deployment in Syria. I wrote about the Russia-Turkey dynamic in my last article, so I won’t cover this again here, but I will, however, affirm that the likelihood of a Turkish mistake had already been taken into account by the Kremlin before that fateful day.
As a result of this miscalculation by the West, Russia is now able to go to battle in the biased UN, whilst at the same time chairing its own “UN” (military, economic, and scientific cooperation with the S-400 as the cornerstone of the new defensive-minded [multipolar] world order), which will serve as the backbone of Eurasia, regulating military reactions in accordance with international law. Now the S-400 is even in Turkey, calling this country’s NATO membership into question, and all of this happened without a single shot being fired by the Russia state at the Turkish state.
Now I want to talk about a connected topic that I have touched on before, but not in detail, because it’s so complicated that I hadn’t yet found a simple and digestible way to explain it. Recall that in the past I have spoken about supercomputers, or more precisely – the Russian Ministry of Defence’s. As a reminder, here is the proof that is exists, and here is a key quote (emphasis my own):
“A ‘colossally powerful’ supercomputer installed at Russia’s military headquarters helps the country’s armed forces tackle emerging threats by analyzing previous conflicts, such as the Yugoslavian war and the like, Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu said.”
And yes, Russia deliberately flaunts its assets so that all parties understand intentions. You might ask “But the Pentagon surely uses one too, right?”, and the answer to this would be in the affirmative. Take a look:
As we can see, the description says:
“…Sierra is purpose-built for an entirely different mission: nuclear weapons.”
So we can see that the little schematic for the structure of a country’s arsenal I wrote above, consisting of 4 points, isn’t that far from reality, even if it might seem extremely oversimplified. The purpose of these supercomputers is to give the Russian Ministry of Defence/Pentagon a range of options vis-à-vis the great game. In essence, the use of nuclear weapons will only happen if the sender can be sure that the enemy and its allies will not strike back. Hence why America has only bullied Africa states up to this point, since the operations to conquer these lands don’t demand the use of Enola Gay 2.0 – the simple aircraft carrier plus proxies combination has been able to get the job done up to this point.
And it should also be mentioned that the EU (which today essentially represents German, not US, subordination) also is obliged to have a supercomputer, since America just withdrew from the INF treaty (and Trump in general would benefit from the EU’s disintegration), thus throwing Berlin under the bus.
I myself am certainly not a mathematician, and so I never dared to even write a simple equation that the supercomputer’s algorithm may use. 
However, recently I discovered an academic piece of work that opened my eyes to what Russia is perhaps capable of.
The document is 7 pages long (I have a full copy), and the Internet preview shows only the first 2 pages, but for the purposes of this article I think that this will be sufficient enough. So what is it? It is a scientific piece of research entitled “A Model of Information Warfare in a Society Under a Periodic Destabilizing Effect” and was produced by 3 different Moscow universities (published in 2016). In basic terms, Russian scientists created algorithms to explain how information is disseminated, and conclude that “a short-term increase in the propaganda intensity does not have long-term consequences”. Here is an example equation from page 4:
It’s complicated? That would be an understatement.
Why is this relevant to nuclear doctrines? Because modern warfare is based on calling perceived bluffs. Similar to how we don’t know for sure if a man who walks down the street with his hands in his pocket is concealing a gun, the deployment of a military unit to a certain zone can either be carried out in the name of an “exercise” (bluff) or preparation for an actual hybrid provocation (like the US’ downing of MH17 via the Ukrainian Army’s hands to justify the sanctions – which in reality are anti-German – policy).
Russia needs (and has) the corresponding tools in order to probe adversaries and remain one step ahead not only on the physical battlefield, but also in the cyber battlefield. And it is thanks to these tools that Russia managed to prevent what would have been the 3rd bombing of Syria by the US, in 2018. The mainstream media was already broadcasting the White Helmets propaganda videos, showing “bombed hospitals” and “Assad barrel bombs”, and paving the ground for more US/French/UK bombing (Trump needs these occasional controlled strikes in order to soften up his own domestic position and to economically blackmail Russia vis-à-vis other theatres). But the Russian media, in response, kept repeating “the White Helmets have begun filming a staged chemical attack”. America even sent a warship to the Syrian coast to make the threat credible, but it turned out to be a bluff, because Russia outmanoeuvred the US in the information space, having learnt from the previous 2 instances, by making any attack completely useless (“We predicted you’d stage a gas attack, and one actually happened, so now ordinary laypeople will not swallow the ‘bad Assad’ pill, and may even start to question the MSM narrative more”).
So in short: the Ministry of Defence’s supercomputer helped Putin to keep the US (and Israel) on the ropes and prevent the domestic situation from deteriorating (America wants Putin to look weak in front of his own people, paving the way for a coup d’état; the Nemtsov false flag was a failure since society did not come to the streets).
I am not trying to say that specifically these scientists wrote the algorithm of the Russian Ministry of Defence’s supercomputer. What I am trying to say, however, is that we can see a real life example of what work the Russian scientists are doing within the framework of “hybrid war”, and can thus use it to at least imagine what is going on in the defence industry. And, most importantly, it’s possible to explain to the doomsayers that international relations does not work like a light switch – on/off. The responses available to a nuclear superpower – whether it be Russia, China, or the USA – are much more diverse than just “bomb” vs “don’t bomb”. As we have seen, the main weapons of the US are armed proxies, a cyber fifth column, and sanctions. And at no point during the last 10 years have things escalated beyond point No. 3 (the use of regular ground forces in the framework of proxy warfare) in the schematic outlined above. Everyone wants to survive, remember?
Lastly, the media – both mainstream and independent – in general likes to exploit fear porn to increase the number of clicks and advertisement revenue. They will say “War with Iran around the corner”, and then the following week report “Trump imposes more sanctions on Iran”. A good general rule is that if a website tries to convince you that war is days away, then it is safe to say that it’s nonsense. In fact, the Internet “news” space has in general become a parallel universe, where we now have so-called “deep fakes”, which testifies to the increasingly complex task of algorithm creators. I will end this article with two quotes from Jean Baudrillard’s book “Simulacra and Simulation”, which I feel express very well the nature of today’s “hybrid” warfare:
“We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.”
“It is dangerous to unmask images, since they dissimulate the fact that there is nothing behind them.”
Ollie.
Great article, somehow I now feel much safer!.
Thanks for a great read, Ollie. Now I need to go away and try and synthesize it with the thesis outlined by Israel Shamir here: http://www.unz.com/ishamir/do-spies-run-the-world/
What we are watching becomes more and more surreal by the hour. For instance, the recent antics in the Sea of Oman took place just prior to US Congress voting on a resolution to refuse to allow Trump to sell several billions worth of arms to KSA and UAE. That vote looked likely to pass in favor of the resolution until, just in time, the tide was turned by a fortuitous couple of “explosions”.
Conspiracy or coincidence?
Just what exactly are those super computers really analysing?
The West has been meddling in Iran for at least 100 years, so what’s happening today is merely a continuation of this process. Israel’s existence is always dangling by a thread, so Tel Aviv cannot afford to rock the boat (excuse the pun) too much, and the US will not put its own economy at risk either. Supercomputers here are, in some respects, a very, very intense version of the stock market, since international relations is basically concentrated economics. They project what the socio-economic landscape will look like in 5, 10, 20, 50, 100 + years. The “drama” like the Kerch strait incident and the Iran tanker Mossad false flag are simply physical manifestations of what today have become normal processes. We are not in the era of paper pacts being signed and lasting for decades. A country can violate another country’s border and return back to base all in the space of 30 minutes, and still remain “partners”. I.e., warfare has become ultra-fluid, and reaction time has become ultra-truncated. It’s partly for this reason why Russia planted the S-400 in Syria – it acts as an adequate/flexible regulator of IR processes; the UN has become too rigid and sluggish.
I can expand on all of this in a future article. My biggest problem is finding simplistic ways to explain hyper complex things, because it’s clear in my head, but it can become lost in translation the moment I commit it to paper.
Thanks for bringing into light the supercomputing subject. The successful efficiency of Russia’s recent military operations and new weapons development made me always think about a breakthrough in computing capabilities and/or programming/mathemathic science/modeling.
In new weapons development, think of hypersonic systems. I mean -guided- hypersonic weapons. The challenge here is usually seen as a meta-materials one, to tolerate extreme conditions, or engines to reach high speeds, but the truth is that such materials, engines and industrial capabilities to produce them and produce something with them exist since the space race era. The key in the new hypersonic weapons are sensors, actuators, combat computers and software that, being affordable to mass-produce, also have to process/predict much more information in way less time and with much more precision than any other autonomous or semi-autonomous weapon before, and connect/command/fuse peripheral systems with ridiculous latencies.
When dealing with Thanatopia, Talmudistan and the stooges in the glorious West, particularly the Imperial pipsqueak bombadiers in the late UK, and the ruling elites therein, one does not need a super-computer. One merely requires the services of psychologists expert in dealing with serial killers and other psychopaths, and moral ponerologists, ie those practised in dealing with spiritual Evil. As far as Iran is concerned, war might come accidentally, but in the meantime Bibi and his psychopathic servants have a great opportunity to spew hatred, murder Iranians through the sanctions, and bully the rest of the world to go along with their genocidal thuggery. The next definition of the universal New Supreme Crime of ‘antisemitism’ will be to say anything that does not contribute to the crucifixion of Iran.
The “west” may have been meddling, but as Shamir points out, we now have another meddling force, and it has it’s own agenda, outside of that of the group known as the “West”. What that agenda is exactly is unclear, and given the nature of those involved, if Shamir is correct, it will remain unclear. Whose actions put the holes in those two ships? A state actors, or that or an extra-state group running an entirely selfish agenda for its own benefit?
As for supercomputers being an intense version of the stock market, that particular arena is notorious for it’s failure to properly inform the market which frequently reacts in ways that are irrational, leading to serious errors of judgement and resulting corrections, often involving the vaporisation of vast amounts of “wealth”. God forbid our national leaders would use that sort of process to make decisions about the use of force, because that analogy for wealth is human life in your comparison. High speed decision making does not compensate for the lack of accurate data on which those decisions are made. In fact it exacerbates the problem because of modern humanities tendency to defer to technology over common sense judgement. In that respect Mulga down thread nails the problem.
Your view of the US reluctance to put it’s own economy at risk for Israel’s benefit is one that seems overly optimistic based on my reading of this: http://www.jrclifford.com/TM-Creature_for_Jeckyll_Island.pdf and subsequent events.
Who owns the Federal Reserve? Who owns the owners of the Federal Reserve, and what is their relationship to the project that is Israel? That needs to be understood and included in any model or equation used to predict future scenarios and outcomes.
Computational models work fine as long as all of the inputs to the system being considered are accounted for in the model. When you have inputs and relationships that are not included in the system the outputs are unreliable and thus unsafe. That holds true, whether it is a simple vehicle cooling system circuit or any other system up to the one you are describing.
@ eagle eye
… ” who owns federal reserve ? ” …
FED is private bank , owned by 10_12 influental banker families.
They print $ , as their product , and sell it to usa bankers. Usa government is not owner of $ printing facility. $ is not owned by usa , but is owned by FED.
” usa deep state ” is owner of fed both and usa government and usa as country.
… ” who ownes owners of fed ? ” …
” usa deep state ” is ruled by ” ” world deep state ” , as is all world ruled by them.
Above ” world deep state , may be some other levels , but on top is satan-el.
Satan-el is first angel created by God , and mighty one angel. Unfortunately fallen.
Earth as planet , and some cosmic space above is called under-heaven. Special zone teraformed for living space of mankind.
Above under-heaven barrier is cosmic space , inhabited by cosmic beings.
But duty of satan-el is to discipline mankind and let them learn their lessions ,
of evil and good. Purifying from commited sins , and realising purpose of time spent on earth. Purpose of life on earth. And purpose of life in universe.
… ” that needs to be understood and included in any ( simulation ) model ” ..
Well , i doubt it is in usa army supercomputer model ,
but sure it is included in rusian army supercomputer model.
No model is worth electricity it consumed , if it did not include equation of God’s will. So usa army computer stops blonking when is confronted with such equations , as usa army programmers do not belive in God and His plan.
… ” God forbid our national leaders would use that sort of process … ” …
As i previously mentioned , usa national leaders do not make such decisions.
They just follow orders from ” usa deep state “.
Pentagon generals just play games with their many supercomputers , hours spent crunching equations , but decision is from above , from ” usa deep state ” .
… ” high speed decision making does not compensate for lack of accurate data on which those decisions are made … ” …
Well , actions , wars , decisions were made 100 or more years ago , when there were no supercomputer , but decisions made then , are still active now. In progress.
So no accurate data are needed to usa now , when they just follow century old plans. Old decisions were made by ” world deep state ” and still they are running.
I can reduce this whole article to a short phrase.
Who is more powerful, a woman God or a man god?
Get the answer wrong and lose your life, get the answer right and preserve your life.
99% of the people would get this answered wrong, so how do the 1% react once the 99% is gone?
They react very slowly, making certain all resources they need to advance human evolution are in place, tested, and ready to go.
So, on your mark, get ready, and………………………oh gees…..wait another 50 years to to get said resources in place.
See the problem yet?
Excellent article again. Unclog’s a lot of Geopolitical issues in a simple manner.
The equation is not as complicated as it looks. It appears to be hopelessly complicated whereas, in reality, it is merely extremely complicated.
I imagine our side has similar equations. But of course, our equations have extra terms to evaluate the effect on the only democracy in the Middle East and to optimize outcomes for same.
So you see? Our equations are better.
Which is the only democracy in ME? Please don’t say Israel as I am sure we both know that it is apartheid. And to expand this, can you name at least 1 democracy in the whole world? Yes, there are none.
Actually from a mathmatical point of view the equation(s) consists of only 8 to 10 variables, with some of them looking co-dependent. So not really that complicated.
Th4e Gods Upon the Earth have only one equation- I am > You.
True! EGO is the Enemy.
EGO = Separation of consciousness into various heteronomic particularities heedless of any Universality.
Sad. And Stupid.
But SO engrossing and seductive as to possibly end the whole human affair in the Universe, on this little rock…if incompleteness (always there! Always!) and therefore non-living (machine) computing error decides because the living deciders simply cannot compute ………….and abdicate that responsibility to a vast room full of machines…crunching away on INCOMPLETE…therefore flawed data.
Panpsychism Rules, OK!
Ollie, I would like to comment on your boxing example. My best friend asked me one day (we were teenagers) had boxing gloves and one day he insisted on us having a sparring match behind our apartment building. So, who wins? I was lucky enough to land a fluke punch on his chin and dropped him down. Needless to say he got up extremely upset and wanted to continue, while I refused. We never punched again (each other).
Now, in the days of my childhood we studied boxing techniques as well as ju-jitsu, so at least we had some theoretical knowledge. We also did some shadow fighting.
This brings me to your article: you can’t count on easy win because you never know (my friend thought that he can knock me out just because he trained at the club and I was lucky to prove him wrong).
Great article.
@Anonius
Because of this the President has experts who’s main role in fact is to instill a feeling of everything under control, usually if things go bad, the peeps on the street will pay the bill, while the ones who posted both President and Experts know they cannot loose.
And to further catch the lucky punch, just fight often and the outliers will thin out, again beneficial return secured.
Conclusion:
Liberalism in tandem with capitalism has been invented for the sole purpose to process along these lines – punch often, fight often and the ‘top dogs’ will cash in at the maximum theoretical rate.
Perhaps only matched by drug-, organ- trafficking and dealing – but let’s see – what miracle the two models have synergistic affinity to each other !! The whole is more than the sum of it’s parts.
It’s because of this the beacon of the world has been rightly titled ‘Exceptional’
Now something has gone wrong – they are still seraching – how could it happen ?
Thought provoking and interesting article .
Given the slow but steady progress of de-dollarization, I wonder if the supercomputer can predict when the decline of global reserve status of the dollar will reach tipping point and the western multi trillion indebted western ponzi banking system will collapse.
If this happens we all die. I bet my balls. If the current system is deconstructed without paralelly constricting new one (and Russia and China alone don’t count) me, my family, you, your family and another 5 + billion souls will take dirt nap in the space of 6 months.
Who’s going to be around to bury that many? Looks like it will be more like a Tibetan ‘sky burial’, and happy days for the scavengers.
Noone will Berry the dead. They will rot where they have fallen. Has anybody buried the bodies in Mosul or Raqqa? I am all for a change, profound and extreme, but this really can end with 5 bil taking dirt nap in short span of time
Which reminds me-the US scumbags have the gall, the psychopathic hypocrisy, to attack Russia and Syria for bombing the jihadist vermin in Idlib, the al-Nusra butchers who the lying Western propaganda presstitutes still call ‘rebels’, complete with the usual staged ‘White Helmets’ filth, yet NOT ONE Western presstitute dares to compare Idlib with the utter destruction and mass murder inflicted on Mosul and Raqqa by US carpet-bombing. Has Satan ever created a species of filth lower that a Western presstitute?
It must be close, given the manic aggression of the West in every arena, in Hong Kong, the Persian Gulf, Syria, Gaza, Ukraine, Venezuela etc. With eleven trillion of bonds already under negative interest rates, a phenomenon once described as simply impossible, and further interest cuts from Central Banks coming thick and fast, well, it looks like she’s about to blow. What can’t go on, won’t go on.
We are close, really close and we all dodged a bullet at the end of March. Maybe the summer will be relatively calm but normally the autumns can be pretty bad.
This is an excellent article – challenging. ‘History knows no example of a civilisation that consciously slit its own throat.’ Yet all great civilizations eventually disappear. The process may be a long one, with many ebbs and flows. A common thread running throughout history is power (manifested as interest). It is the underlying motivation for war. Other cultural factors might change, but not power. Interest cuts across all apparently unifying principles: family, kin, nation, religion, ideology, politics – everything. We unite with the enemies of our principles (eg the first and second world wars) because that is what serves our interest. It is power, not any of the above concepts, that is the cause of war.
It is the one thing we will destroy ourselves for, as well as everyone else. When core interests are threatened and existential threat looms nations go to war. There can be no compromise on these. As a result every nation/civilization eventually gets the war it is trying to avoid: utter defeat. This applies as much today as any other time in history. Deterrence doctrine, made for the 20th century Cold War, for which it arguably worked, is irrelevant in the 21st and will ultimately fail us. Deterrence can no longer prevent the scenarios where Mutual Assured Destruction might have to be resorted to. We will soon face the scenario where (unlike the Cuban missile crisis or Euro missile crisis) one protagonist will not be able to step back from the brink, blindly stumbling into a situation they cannot de-escalate. All that is left is Deterrence’s fall-back position – annihilation. Sometimes by complicating something that is simple we fail to see reality. But we can’t change what we hide from. Consciously or unconsciously we slit our own throats.
https://www.ghostsofhistory.wordpress.com/
The problem today is that the ruling elites in the USA, Israel, and many in the West (it is CERTAINLY true in Austfailia) are ignorant morons, with many of the features of the classic psychopath. Those are (among others) insatiable greed, gigantic egotism, total disinterest in the fate of others or outright detestation of others, and a love, to the point of theological conviction, of violence, destruction and killing. The situation is far the worst in the USA where the ruling elites are so brainwashed with the Exceptionalist Kool-Aid that they have been driven insane with rage at China’s rise to global economic supremacy. That rage, basically racist, and culturally contemptuous and supremacist, is exacerbated by the Zionazi control of US politics, which adds the extra dimension of Zionazi rage to the brew. Having spent centuries working assiduously to control the West through its morally corrupt ‘elites’, the Zionazis find the prize taken from their grasp. Controlling the global hegemon is one thing-controlling a crumbling dystopia, while the Chinese have the ‘antisemitic’ audacity to treat you as just one human community out of many, is simply intolerable.
Interesting article. The equation seem more complicated but also similar to a degree to the Black-Scholes option pricing formula widely used in stock option trading.
I take issue with the idea that you can separate “specialized’ nuclear weapons as being distinct from any other nuclear weapons, in the sense they they can be used without crossing the firebreak between conventional and nuclear weapons. (And how can the use of nuclear weapons remain “within the framework of international law”?)
2. Specialised non-nuclear weapons – designed to eliminate the enemy’s army assets whilst remaining within the framework of international law;
Once nuclear weapons are introduced into a conflict against a nuclear-armed adversary, it vastly increases the odds that a progressive escalation towards full-scale nuclear war.
You state: “In essence, the use of nuclear weapons will only happen if the sender can be sure that the enemy and its allies will not strike back.” it is an illusion to think that any computer can provide such a certainty.
I watched the “Super Computer” video you reference. The video asks if a nuclear missile “would launch properly”; “would it reach its target” “would it explode” . . . missiles launch the warheads and they are very testable. Missiles can launch dummy warheads, which is done routinely when missiles are tested. Neither one of these requires a supercomputer. The video asks if the warhead will explode and implies that it might not be “reliable”. Bomb-makers and war planners use the word “reliable” in a different sense than does the public; “reliability’ with a warhead is not about whether or not it will explode — they know that it will. Rather, it is about how close to the expected explosive power or “yield” the bomb will explode. They know the plutonium pits used to detonate US nuclear weapons will remain stable for at least a century, in terms of their ability to detonate. The question is what the yield will be, because war planners want that to be precise, in order to plan for blast damage to hardened targets, like missile silos.
Deterrence is based upon the idea of unacceptable retaliation, but what is “unacceptable”? One city? Ten cities? 100 cities? Deterrence requires all parties to remain rational 24/7. Is that a human characteristic? Deterrence requires that the adversary be known, that a “return address” is available to target. Deterrence will work until it doesn’t.
You cannot use a computer to reliably plan for human reactions. Garbage in, garbage out . . . Only fools who don’t understand this will allow their decision-making process to rest in the hands of a computer. If this is the course we are now embarked upon, then the image you use at the top of the article, taken from the “Terminator” movie, will be quite appropriate. Skynet will be making the decisions.
“You cannot use a computer to reliably plan for human reactions”
Yet that’s exactly what’s happening (humans are very predictable when viewed on a long enough time scale)….
But yet, the sales of Russian TOS-1A MLRS, to Saudi Arabia, are not yet, controlled by computers.
They are, rather, still controlled by the greedy (it so happens) ,born, Russian Kleptocracy.
It’s not good but…
It is…
The truth.
From the Houthi perspsective, it’s a bad old world and the Russians are making what was horrendous worse.
Multipolar Brave New World?
BS
It’s a rich man’s trick.
Ollie Richardson sure raises some important questions with mostly good answers. But the supercomputer angle is exaggerated, IMO.
I can only surmise, but I have reasons for confidence in my guess.
Computers can only do specific types of analyses, and super-computers are probably not a big improvement for questions in geopolitical-economic and hybrid warfare. Historically, real geopolitical decisions are based on days-long gaming by real people, senior experts who have accurate and in-depth knowledge of their adversary. Computers are a shortcut for certain questions, are excellent for covering a greater extent of questions, and for having a checklist which ensures important matters are not ignored, but ultimately these are human decisions which defy rational analysis. Super-computers make AI more relevant, and I assume nation-states have tried to incorporate some of the 25+ flavors of AI into their analyses, but I would be surprised if AI can deal with the irrationality of special interest groups and of human psychology. Mathematicians have a term for systems which are wholly predictable based on the starting conditions. And probably there’s a different term to describe systems where the initial conditions are beyond description, and also escape being confined into algorithms. Finally, if one knew the types of AI, the initial conditions, and the assumptions which “the other side” uses, then that would become the grounds for a higher level of analysis, but at the expense of reliability and confidence.
Needless to say, it’s clear that Russia, China and Iran are playing in-depth chess, while we have to wonder how the Empire can be so stupid, arrogant in the face of the many obvious train wrecks that are happening. That’s a question better answered by conspiracy experts (Meyssan, etc.), criminal psychologists, evolutionary psychologists (MacDonald, etc.) and by the few honest spies – who will never talk in public, of course.
Many thanks, Ollie for this enlightener article.
I´ll quote the last sentences, are marvelous:
“We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.”
“It is dangerous to unmask images, since they dissimulate the fact that there is nothing behind them.”
Kind regards..!
As Zappa said , the curtains will be drawn aside, behind being a brick wall.
And of course such headlines as this today in a national press are surely designed to close out rational thinking and promote confrontation….and even preemptive action…..perhaps?
“Putin’s cronies: Russian leader meets tyrants and dictators as he attempts to stamp his authority on Asia and the Middle East while Iran’s president issues nuclear warning”
The irresponsibility……..
The presstitutes at the Austfailian ABC ranted about Iran ‘leaving’ the JCPOA, WITHOUT a single mention of the US abrogating the Agreement and imposing murderous sanctions. Lying, hypocrite, scum, as ever.
The human race can be doomed in ways other than by nuclear warfare, although that is always a threat.
Doing good might actually be doing harm, quite unintentionally. “The road to Hell is paved with good intentions” is an old saying.
In the last ten thousand years, human civilisation has made giant strides in terms of providing food, shelter, and general well-being for most of the human population. Other species have suffered, or been wiped out, often without notice or awareness, but sometimes with glee and sense of achievement (e.g. eradicating certain diseases, ridding ourselves of unwanted plants and animals). The environment too has suffered: land, sea and air have been polluted, plant and animal species have been “unnaturally” selected for survival and growth – by humans! – and the human population has multiplied umpteen-fold.
So now we have global warming, long denied by the fossil-fuel industry. We have nuclear radiation, slowly but surely increasing and spreading in our atmosphere. We have genetic engineering that gives us the ability to alter the genomes of life, without our knowing the full cionsequences of what we do. And we have artificial intelligence and the ability to now render most of human life redundant: more and more sophisticated engineering to perform repetitive jobs, but also to carry out more and more sophisticated calculations at breathtaking speeds.
These new ‘Horsemen of the Apocalypse’, with ever-increasing speeds may already be unstoppable in their careering to disaster.
War may be unnecessary. It may well be least of our worries.
Well said, David. We are stuffed, as they say. You left out the prime concern of The Club of Rome’s ‘Limits to Growth’ Report. They saw pollution, rather than resource depletion, as the most proximate catastrophe, and, in the 70s, they predicted the crisis to occur in about forty years. Bingo! Right on schedule. Of course our fate was sealed when the Rightist reaction that set in after the Powell Memorandum of 1971 forced neoliberal capitalism on the world. That most toxic form of capitalist parasitism, where only The Market ie the money power of the rich, is recognised as a legitimate human institution, and slowly consumes every other human, social individual, collective and governmental, endeavour and enterprise, turning everything in existence into a mere commodity, to be bought and sold to the highest bidder, has hastened and ensured our self-destruction. As the Marxians and even some Keynesians predicted, neoliberalism has brought nothing but ever growing elite wealth (driven by the psychopaths’ insatiable greed and egomania)mass poverty, inequality, unpayable debt and ecological devastation. The one country that has resisted neoliberalism, China, where the State still controls The Market and the rich elites, not the other way about, is now faced with truly psychopathic hatred and aggression, simply because its system has brought hundreds of millions out of poverty, unlike the West, which has driven just as many into it. When a demented UK ‘Labour’ MP can compare Huawei to IgFarben, the Nazi producer of Zyklon B, you know that you are witnessing radical Evil mixed with outright racism, and a desire to perform in public, to better sell his tawdry wares as a hate-monger. He must want a job at the Guardian.
1
WORLD
15 JUN, 19:21
US increases cyber-attacks on Russia’s power grid – New York Times
NEW YORK, June 15. /TASS/. The US special forces have escalated cyber-attacks on the Russian electric power grid, the New York Times informed in an article published on the newspaper’s website.
According to the newspaper’s sources among US officials, the US is attempting to implement programs that can gather information on the Russian power grid and, allegedly, placing crippling malware inside the system. “It has gotten far, far more aggressive over the past year,” one of the sources cited by the New York Times claimed. “We are doing things at a scale that we never contemplated a few years ago.”
“Since at least 2012, the United States has put reconnaissance probes into the control systems of the Russian electric grid,” the article says. “But now the American strategy has shifted more toward offense.” “It is intended partly as a warning, and partly to be poised to conduct cyberstrikes if a major conflict broke out between Washington and Moscow.”
“The critical question impossible to know without access to the classified details of the operation is how deep into the Russian grid the United States has bored. Only then will it be clear whether it would be possible to plunge Russia into darkness or cripple its military a question that may not be answerable until the code is activated,” the article states, adding that this action by the US “also carries significant risk of escalating the daily digital Cold War between Washington and Moscow.”.
What can one say….?
Nothing. The New York Times said everything they wanted to tell. The question remains : who will believe that ? They have freedom of speech, do they not, why shouldn’t they uncover such a “secret” initiative for the whole world to see, moreover when Julian Assange waits to be extradited to the same US because of using the freedom of speech, uncovering secrets for the whole world to see ? Guys, I think we are grossly taken by our nose, so relax, nobody sane in his mind will ever tell such an event pointing at himself as initiator. The Lügenpresse Kriegsführung has turned another page we may have to learn, the Chaos Street is becoming an Avenue.
One could say juggling and tight rope walking concurrently are hazardous to ones health, pretty much like the scenario you just described.
This is American cyber terrorism in everything but name.
But in the unreality that is the American Matrix, when the United States launches offensive cyber attacks on other nations, that is not considered cyber terrorism or an act of aggression. See the Stuxnet Virus, made by the USA and Israel.
In fact, the Americans predictably will play the Victim Card and claim in Orwellian fashion that “XYZ nation hacked our elections”!
America is a nation of sociopathic liars, with a fundamentalist belief in their own entitlement and Moral Exceptionalism.
In this sense, Donald Trump is the perfect ruler for the United Snakes of America.
So, Russia is falsely accused by vermin like Rachel Madcow of preparing to bring down the US electric grid, in order to freeze Merkins, while, in reality, the USA has long been the aggressor, and Russia the victim in this field. Will Madcow apologise? In your dreams! As the Snowden revelations showed, the USA is by far the most aggressive cyber bullyboy and intellectual property thief, but the presstitute vermin state the absolute opposite, and no amount of truth will ever make these fake news harlots change their dirty tunes.
Humans are much less rational than the author seems to assume. People are animated by complexes, the personal shadow, and the collective unconscious. The influence of the unconscious is unknown to most.
Those that describe the US and its craven allies as monkeys juggling hand grenades, or should I say nuclear weapons, are correct and warning us.
To trust the future of humanity to supercomputers that run software written by human beings is folly, insanity. The slightest miscalculation in the software, a bug (or a feature?) could lead to a miscalculation of human action from which there is no return.
On top of the above the US will not forswear first use of nuclear weapons. What will happen if Iran sinks a US aircraft carrier? The US will cast it as another 911. People near buttons are taking about using nuclear weapons. We are supposed to tell ourselves it is idle talk to not be afraid?
I cannot help but inject: How about a nice game of chess?
While relevant I think the author makes the mistake of using logic for prediction and ignores the human factor that can upset that impeccable logic in a flash.
The “Doomsday Machine” -Confessions of a nuclear war planner by Daniel Ellsberg outlines some of the dangers both historical and present.
The Neocon evangelical desire for Armageddon, the same from Talmud Zios, the delegation of nuclear launch ability to numerous geographical military types at a surprisingly low level of authority and the pure theatrics of the ‘football’ the briefcase with Nuke codes carried around by some apparatchik accompanying the narcissistic President added to the present US brinkmanship all up the ante for wackjobs, mistakes, communication errors, not to mention pure accidents.
Diplomacy is presently dead in the USA. Minor incidents can become major and there is no way to turnback beyond certain undefined points.
On one hand, I agree with you Ollie. If we were really dealing with sane players what is described would be true. And I would imagine that many Russians would agree with this because they live in a country with a sane and competent leader. But, I live and grew up in the belly of the beast, so I am at times see signs that these leaders of my country are not all exactly what I would call sane.
I grew up in a small rural town in the American South, which meant that they had a lot of Protestant sects. Among these were the people who were really obsessed with the Bible’s Book of Revelations and the End Times. I left that place and its people and their beliefs behind me a long, long time ago, but I was I suppose in the front row of the beginnings of a movement that has since grown. Today I believe that sects of a similar theology now comprise something like 10% of the Americans, maybe more. Someone can probably look it up and find a number that’s closer than that wild guess.
The short version of what these sects belief is that Book of Revelations is a how-to guide to Second Coming of Jesus Christ. This of course happens after Armageddon. So, while many sane people would not welcome Armageddon, these sects view it as an essential step that must be achieved before they all rise to Heaven to meet God in The Rapture. This is also why these sects support Israel so strongly. Its not because of any great love for Israel or the Israelis, but because the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem is another sign from Revelations that tells the faithful that the world is on the path laid out in Revelations.
These sects are concentrated in the Republican Party. They also tend to be politically active, since they believe that they are on a mission from God to bring this all about. Thus, this 10% or so of the population has some effective political power within the Republicans. They’ve been a core piece of the Trump movement. They’ve elected members of Congress and I believe the Senate. Gov Huckabee from Arkansas ran for President from these sects. His daughter is Sarah Elizabeth Huckabee Sanders, who just recently resigned from the Trump administration after serving as his public spokesperson.
And, there was a Mike Pompeo from Kansas, who first got elected to Congress from Kansas, then Trump appointed him Director of the CIA, and then made him Secretary of State. Secretary Pompeo is known to speak of his strong religious beliefs and specifically of the Rapture.
Thus, while I agree with Ollie’s fine bit of logical reasoning, there are at least some people high in the American government and the American military who are members of these sects, and thus they belief that they are following a roadmap from God where first the Israelis rebuild the Temple and then later there is Armageddon, and then all of the faithful who by then have caused probably billions of deaths rise up in the Rapture to meet God, who I presume will be asking for a few explanations as to what the heck just happened and why has St. Peter been working so much overtime at the gates.
It also seems possible that Pompeo and others like him see Trump’s poor poll numbers and low re-election chances as meaning that this is as close as they are likely to get for awhile to having the sort of power to cause all of this, thus creating a now or never attitude within them. A sane administration would not want a war right now, as it would likely drive another stake into the heart of a second Trump term.
I hope not. I really hope that Putin doesn’t end up playing chess with pigeons and instead finds a few sane people on the American side who can over-ride the Pompeos. We did after all survive the people like Gen LeMay in Cold War 1.0. Perhaps we will survive again and it will be as Ollie describes. But, America has changed greatly from 1960 to 2020. Kennedy had served in WW2. He fought in what must have been tense actions on a plywood torpedo boat (PT-109) which made night raids against the Japanese navy in the Soloman Islands. Kennedy would have had a constant reminder of this during times like the Cuban Missile Crisis as he suffered from a bad back from the time when his PT boat was exploded out from under him. And not just Kennedy, but much of America’s leadership had served in WW2. OK, yes the Soviets defeated the Nazis, but a wide swath of America did get first hand experience as to what war was really like. Today, we have Trump and an American people who’ve never seen war and think it looks like a movie.
This is why one should not place too much faith in the interpretations of the bible, no one rises to meet a god in the rapture?, instead gravity takes hold of ones body and the senses are lost to its collapse, the lights eventually go out and nothing more than a deep sleep ensues, or at best one becomes an occasional invisible ghost who has limited powers depending on whom they are persuing.
Once a myth becomes a perceived reality, rumors fly and dreams die. And this is the foundation of religion, bent twisted truths that quickly and unexpectedly turn into nightmares, all the while the promise’s of keeping the dream alive is all that is allowed to be discussed in religious circles. Its simply not true by the laws of gravity. if anyone “escapes” gravity, it is purely by mistake and at the same time on purpose.
Except there are many prophecies in the Bible which will come to pass. Why would an anti-Christian world follow the Bible script, like the mark of the beast etc, and events leading up to, and beyond, Armageddon?
Go and read the prophesies of Jesus – you don’t have to believe them at this stage – but see if the world doesn’t do what must follow in those prophesies; keep an open mind.
Sorry to explain computers here, but “supercomputers” just do things faster – not smarter. Sometimes doing things faster enable you to do things better – but analyzing human behavior tends not to be one of those things. Analyzing past human events is even less likely to be useful, since you have no way of knowing for sure what humans will do in the current situation, since there are too many variable for even a supercomputer – or more precisely, an algorithm – to deal with. So people have to use other people – analysts, psychologists, spies or whoever – to try to predict what other people will do.
As it happens, it’s fairly easy for humans – not computers – to predict what other people will do. Not necessarily who will “win”, note. That is because who will win depends on what some people call “heart” – their determination, level of fear, and numerous other psychological factors which are hard to quantity for one person, let alone a country.
But predicting what people will do – or try to do – is not that hard, especially if you’re dealing with a relatively limited number of national leaders – not whole countries. Just look at what their motivations seem to be – usually fairly obvious based on their previous actions – and look at where their “profit” is in terms of those motivations.
In other words, we know what Israel wants – Iran gone, hegemony in the Middle East, the Palestinians out of “Greater Israel”, etc. We know what the military-industrial complex wants – more profit. We know what the neocons want – to be in charge of US policy and the US with world hegemony, so they can imagine themselves the “rulers of the world.” We know what Trump wants – the benefits of being President, which are ego-boo and the chance to make billions of dollars in real estate deals once he’s out of office.
Given all this, we can predict that some events have to be attempted. We don’t know if those attempts will be successful because it depends on the ability of the opponents to out-maneuver the actors mentioned. Thus Russia forestalled Obama’s *six* attempts to start a war with Syria between 2013 and 2016. But those attempts *were* made: three with UN Resolutions vetoed by Russia and China, and three direct threats to attack Syria – one in 2013 which Putin prevented by getting Assad to get rid of his chemical weapons, another in the fall of 2015 when Russia directly entered the Syrian conflict, and again in 2016 when Russia explicitly said that anyone attacking the Syrian military would be shot down. It was only Putin’s skill at out-maneuvering Obama that prevented Syria from being a destroyed country today.
Thus, we know that an attempt to start a war with Iran is “inevitable”. That doesn’t mean an actual war with Iran is “inevitable.” It merely means the attempt will be made and in fact is continually being made if we regard all the alleged “bluster”, sanctions, etc., as “preludes” to such a war rather than excuses for other motivations such as distractions. We’ve seen these efforts quite clearly before with regard to Iraq and it would seem the exact same playbook is being applied to Iran, and by the exact same parties.
As I’ve said before – repeatedly – the one big stumbling block with regards to getting a war with Iran started – from Israel’s point of view – is Hezbollah in Lebanon. This is not speculation. The economic effects of a Hezbollah attack on Israel with hundreds or thousands of missiles are pretty clear. No country as small as Israel wants to suffer those effects if it doesn’t have to. The question for Israel is thus how to get a war started with Iran without suffering those effects. The further question for Israel is then how to get rid of Hezbollah without suffering those effects.
There is only one answer to that: the United States (which has two things Israel does not – more troops and strategic bombers which can destroy underground bunkers and missile caches.) So the question for Israel is then how to get the United States to destroy Hezbollah, so that Israel can then start a war with Iran (or get the US to start it) and then get the United States to fight that war for it.
Does this mean another war in Lebanon is “inevitable” – in the same sense as above? I say yes. By this I mean that attempts will be made. The only question is how the opponents of that war will maneuver to prevent it (or what other events might occur to derail it, which is a separate question and almost completely unknowable unless you can see some other disruptive event clearly enough to predict it.)
Now when it comes to nuclear war, clearly no one in power wants to be vaporized. It’s not hard to predict that no one is going to launch a first strike against an opponent who is likely to be able to retaliate or preempt. Where things get murky is when two nuclear powers confront each other in a conventional war, and the “logic” – or happenstance – of escalation – or unintentional escalation – occurs. This is where predictions of human behavior – and predictions of events – break down and become sufficiently uncertain to warrant concern.
So, sure, we can say with some certainty that “no one wants to destroy the world” (which is not entirely true, but it’s fairly certain that most national leaders don’t if it would mean to them that they would lose the power they have). But beyond that, being assured that nuclear war will *not* occur is simply ridiculous.
So, no, I don’t feel any safer after reading this piece than before.
Strangely enough though, isnt Israel wanting the U.S. to start a war on Iran,(which seems to be widely accepted as occurring), “meddling in U.S. politics? Just as the Russians are doing “meddling” yet the latter is considered a crime while the former is simply ignored. Both are widely talked about just in different circles. Different sides of the fence? Or walking a different plank? yet the same action.
1. “Smartness” is completely subjective. What one person may consider to be “smart”, another may consider to be idiotic, and visa-versa.
2. The whole purpose of the use of supercomputers in IR today is because of speed!!! Improved tech = quicker communication = more processes happening at once. The human brain simply cannot cope with such mass processing of data.
3. How can an attempt be made without actually starting a war? You cannot un-drop a bomb or un-violate territorial integrity. A country is either committed to war or not.
4. Actually, the big stumbling block with starting a war with Iran is the fact that it would trash the US’ economy and demolish the Euro definitively. Hence why the trigger hasn’t been squeezed.
5. I never said that nuclear war would never happen; I affirm that it will not happen in the timeframe 95% of the “expert” articles on the Internet project.
6. The article wasn’t supposed to make anyone feel more or less safe. It is supposed to highlight why the cartoonish idea that the US president just presses the red button “because he felt like it” must be rejected.
7. Life itself is dangerous – we die from it.
“A country is either committed to war or not.”
How many bombs has the US dropped on Syria without starting a war – yet? How many missiles has Israel fired at Syria without starting a war – yet?
In any event, my point was that everything that leads up to an actual war is an “attempt” to start that war. Which means all the propaganda in the mainstream media that led up to the actual invasion of Iraq was an “attempt” to start the Iraq war – a war that was planned and intended *before* 911, just as Israel’s attack on Lebanon in 2006 was planned for at least a year before then, according to reports (the soldier’s kidnapping was just the excuse to start it.)
I also don’t think nuclear war will happen “soon” – while noting that “soon” is also subjective. I’ve seen some people with pretty good knowledge of the geopolitical situation suggest that a conventional war between the US and either Russia or China (or both) may be in the cards for sometime in the 2020’s. Is that “soon enough” for you? Is the 2030’s?
My point on supercomputers is that – absent “real” artificial intelligence (which doesn’t exist yet) – enhanced speed doesn’t help anyone understand the variables in human behavior any better. It may help with “interpreting data” but data is not intelligence. And also as I pointed out, you don’t need a supercomputer to estimate what Israel or the neocons or anyone else “wants” and what their actions to date indicate they intend to do.
When you say an Iran war will “trash the economy”, my question is: whose economy? You think the military-industrial complex won’t make profits from a war with Iran that lasts the next decade or two – like Afghanistan has? You think the neocons and the Israeli elites are going to go broke and cuss about paying $20/gallon for gas like everyone else? You think the oil companies won’t make high profits when the oil doesn’t flow? Are you familiar with Greg Palast’s discovery that the Iraq war was about preventing Saddam from monkeying with the OPEC oil price – *not* getting “cheap oil” like the neocons promised?
In every war in history, someone’s economy gets trashed. Did that stop the war from happening?
I don’t recall reading anyone with any credibility suggesting that the President starts WWIII “for the hell of it.” If you’re writing articles intended to respond to ignorant trolls on this site, I’d say that’s a waste of time because by definition their opinion isn’t going to be changed by it. Mine certainly wasn’t.
The Israeli media openly boasted that the 2006 war was ‘the best planned in Israeli history’, and Israel Death Forces personnel even gave PowerPoint presentations of the plan to the Pentagon. But the best laid plans of Gods Upon the Earth, gang aft a-gley, as they say.
Sometimes I wonder whether the Americans and Israelis are just using Iran to keep scaring the Arabs into buying more weapons and to divide and conquer the area. An Iranian boggy man if you will. And if this would be the case, then I guess Russia would obviolously know about this.
There is for sure an element of divide and conquer, without any actual plans to directly invade land. I also perceive it as simply bullying the EU economically/throwing curveballs at Eurasia. America gains nothing from war with Iran, and Israel has no prospect of achieving anything either. The situation is in an equilibrium (for now).
So, why should Iran sit back and just allow the murderous, bullying, thugs of the USA and Israel, and the duplicitous stooges of the EU, strangle its society and murder its people?
No one is suggesting they should, and obviously they aren’t.
Since so much of this discussion relates to computers I would like to help outsiders understand an aspect of GIGO. This is the well known: “Garbage In, Garbage Out”. What many contributors have not considered is another phrase: “Garbage In, Gospel Out”. Somehow the magic of the blinking lights and the lines of printed data confer a certainty that cannot exist anywhere. When the first idea of GIGO is in use, we are at least somewhat standing on firm, if humble, ground. When the second is in ascendance, we are flying off the cliff and do not even know it.
Although this phrase seems to focus on the quality of data being used, it at least touches on a more difficult issue: the theory on which the program logic is based. This is severe and does not even have a theoretical solution.
Let us take a widely abused example: weather forecasting. Forecasting weather by computer is essentially running a simulation of the weather over a continent, according to a set of equations that are intended to predict how the variables that make up weather interact. The underlying science and technology have been under development for well over 100 years. The data is gathered daily: multiple weather factors at several altitudes over at least 1,000 geographical points — just taking the continental U.S.
Lots of experience with the overall phenomenon. Every simulation is a test of the theory and software, and can be checked against real data — every day, all day. A zillion patches, fixes, and upgrades. And, mirabile dictu!, there is not much in the line of political correctness or other interfering forces. (OK, OK, I realize that there are motives for fiddling the results. But there are inherent problems with too much fiddling, or we can say there are natural damping processes that attenuate the fraud. So we will roughly say that the process is fair.)
So, with all those provisos and caveats, what is the state of weather forecasting? We are pretty good at the next 24 hours most anywhere. (Professional trick: note the weather 600 miles to the west and “predict” it here for tomorrow.) But once we get out a few days into the future, there is obvious deterioration in accuracy. So the verdict on quality of predictions of one week into the future: they are terrible, essentially useless.
So contemplate this: with nothing like the long development of theory, and very little in the form of relevant data points, we are trying to forecast — well what? — for climate change: centuries, for economic processes: decades at least. The current discussion of using computers to analyze and predict threats of warfare are in another time universe. But we surely have even less developed theories and models.
I had to use weather forecasting because everyone is familiar with it with it and I feel that it blatantly shows the limitations of theory and practice. I can only say that international warfare poker must in all regards be worse.
Which is not to say anything bad about the people engaged in developing and using this software. I am trying to expose inescapable problems with the undertaking. The second kind of GIGO: Garbage In, Gospel Out, spells extreme danger for decision makers to whom passing the issue through a computer process renders a totally reliable result.
You seem to not understand the difference between weather and climate. Climate forecasting offers ranges of probabilities, from small to considerable, or unlikely to highly likely. We know certain facts from laws of physics and thermodynamics eg that greenhouse gases like CO2 and methane trap heat in the Earth system, and lead to increases in global average temperatures, and periods of hot weather and drought, and increases in atmospheric water vapour levels, and consequent floods and deluges.
Not only is this established scientific FACT, but so too are the Milankovitch Cycles that control the succession of Ice Ages and inter-glacial periods. Other factors that affect climate, like solar radiance, ‘global dimming’ from volcanic eruptions and anthropogenic smogs etc, are all added to the greenhouse science to create climate models. As they say, ‘All models are wrong, but some are useful’, and climate models are growing ever more accurate, as one would expect. Moreover paleo-climate studies from ice-cores, tree rings, pollen deposits, coral cores etc, etc, have allowed models to ‘retro-predict’ to see if their parameters successfully match the climate conditions of the past, and they increasingly do, with growing precision. And climate science, observations and computer modeling tell us that we are stuffed.
To MM: Thanks for your comment. I often admire your contributions. I fear in this case that you have missed my point. I was comparing using computers on a problem about which we have developed decades of knowledge, with continuous checking of our results with “reality”, and yet still do not produce good long term predictions.
What’s crucial here is that we can all see how successfully these predictions come out.
Contrast this situation with problem spaces where we have nothing like the rich development of theory and practice, and in many cases have no true basis for confirming our predictions. This is even more the case when the predicted events are many years into the future (climate and econometric models) or exist in some universe where we may never see them (let me call it “great power poker”).
People may think that use of a computer produces some kind of magic that makes the results “gospel”. I tried to use as an example a problem space that most people would find familiar, and I hope can easily grasp the salient issues. Those lovely equations from the article above will deeply impress the yokels and totally shut down their intellects.
The cautionary point I am trying to make is really very simple. Those pretty blinking lights don’t turn a pumpkin into a lavish coach.
You know what scientists say, Ed,-‘All models are wrong, but some are useful’. The models of climate destabilisation have definitely been wrong, in underestimating the extent and rapidity of climate destabilisation. The latest example is the ‘sudden’ discovery that Alaskan permafrost is melting ‘seventy years’ ahead of what the IPCC models predicted. Somehow I, and anyone vaguely interested, has known that for at least a decade (so it was 80 years ahead)but the Guardian sewer sees this as a scoop. In any case, as computer power increases, as the volume of information from observations grows, and as scientists learn from their errors, the models must improve in accuracy, both forward in time, and in retrograde examination of paleoclimate observations.
Hi Ollie thanks for great article – worth slow reading top to bottom – what do you say about this news ?
A Russian Bolton?
An extreme zealous Zionist had been made an adviser to the Russian Minister of Defence. Eugene Satanovsky, a frequent commentator on Russian TV shows, the head of pro-Israeli think-tank, had been appointed by Kremlin to advise Mr Sergey Shoygu, the Russian Defence Minister. This sudden appointment meshes well with news of tripartite meeting of Israel-US-Russia security advisers. A possibility of pro-Israeli shift in Russian positions can’t be discarded. It could influence Syrian developments and Iran crisis.
Hi, could you perhaps write an article about this situation ? Thanks so much – Ann
Don’t worry, no shifts will happen. The plan in relation to Israel is going smoothly.
I am puzzled by your quote of the paper :
“A Model of Information Warfare in a Society Under a Periodic Destabilizing Effect” ,
and the solution exhibited by equations X0(t) and Y0(t).
Any red-blooded mathematician who had an introductory course in ordinary differential equations
will tell you that these equations are solutions of a simple 2×2 system of linear differential equations
with constant coefficients and the constant forcing function (perhaps only over a single period). Negative exponents, e.g. exp(-gt) , indicate that such a system is stable, i.e. the transient solutions are
guaranteed to decay and the system will tend to a steady state, given enough time.
I just don’t get it that this is, or ought to be, a serious model/algorithm for an information warfare (IW). Much less that either Pentagon or Russian Ministry of Defense are relying on it for conducting IW. It is too elementary, or simple minded, and I dare say wrong.
The whole point of IW is in its unpredictability, stochasticity (randomness), time delays, discontinuities, nonlinearity etc, etc, and these can not be modeled by a linear system of ordinary differential equations with constant coefficients. Something is seriously missing, or am I mistaken?
Best regards, Spiral
I didn’t intend for the equations to be taken literally. I used them to simply demonstrate the complexity of IR today and that it’s not just a case of “bomb/don’t bomb”. The real algorithm(s) inside the supercomputer, we will never know.
Ollie, using that is really pointless when you consider that it does not – and cannot – factor in evilness. You are describing rational actors, when the world is involved in something infinitely deeper and worse, and which cannot be computed.
Spiral,
I agree the model mathematically looks simple, but it depends on how you approach the modeling. Maybe this is just one of the many other models.
With predictions, we obviously want all possible scenarios with each given a probability of occurrence. More complex models using randomness, stochastic modeling, Monte Carlo simulations, machine learning algorithms like neural networks, AI etc. etc. are also used. However, the more complex the models, the more variables you introduce, the more uncertainties are needed to be defined. Therefore most of the time we start out with simple models (like linear ones), and then compare them with more complex ones.
The more variables you introduce, the more complex the model gets, the more uncertainties you have. Each variable has an uncertainty or a range, etc. Then you have the issue of variables being dependent on one another (dependency problem).
Maybe a stupid example: (1) the probability of a rogue nuclear armed submarine commander launching his nukes depends on (2) the probability of his subordinates to carry out the order. These two can be seen as independent, but if this nutcase commander is some kind of cult figure within his submarine crew, the second probability is not independent…one effects the other, etc. This is just one of the tiny aspects of modeling.
To throw a monkey wrench in the statement, the cost of uncertainty is rising, this can only lead to rising costs of just about everything, including confidence. Ignoring it and taking the wrong path, is a potential catastrophe right under your own nose.
Everyday, when I read the fakestream media, or watch fakestream TV or listen to fakestream radio, I am bombarded with disinformation warfare. They lie, disinform, misrepresent and distort just about everything to do with politics, geo-politics, the economy, social relations etc, and do it with near total uniformity of Groupthink. To call the information system in the West totalitarian does not do it due credit.
” It is supposed to highlight why the cartoonish idea that the US president just presses the red button “because he felt like it” must be rejected.”
What if someone replaces the words ” US president ” with ” Supercomputer ” and “because he felt like it” with ” because it super smart calculated the nuclear threat ” ?!
I have also a feeling about what russian defence supercomputer is been calculating, getting all the inputs about,US,UK, EU,Israel and Nato actions throughout the world ( endless wars and literally begging everybody for more ) :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GepiirKyUY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MIBg-jSvqs
I wonder if some people ( crazy or not ),having unlimited financial resources could think to build for every russian nuclear missile, 300 interceptors or more ( on land,sea and space ) ,meanwhile crippling their defence industry through all kind of sanctions,market restrictions,etc. Retreating from the international treaties and overwhelming the Foes in time.
Very insightful article! However, in today’s world, I’d focus on the dangers of 5G ( specifically the Western implementation of it) because this is, as stated by numerous military analysts, is straight up -microwave weapon. Also, next war will not be among states – it will be states against its own people. The globalists are absolutely adamant about population reduction and a total mind control of its servants. The 5G infrastructure is already in place and can be activated at any moments.
Exactly! The next great war will be the Final Solution for the Useless Eaters Problem. I predict bio-warfare.
” Also, next war will not be among states – it will be states against its own people. The globalists are absolutely adamant about population reduction and a total mind control of its servants. The 5G infrastructure is already in place and can be activated at any moments. ”
It is easy to see now ( no need for computers ) that the next war will be between states. It is easy to see who will fight whom.
You ( generic ) can’t start killing your own people if you don’t control the world first. It would be a kamikaze stupid ( not even noble ) action. After you kill your people, the enemy would start marching in and take over the remnants.
But after the war,the global dictatorship will do what you say. The states ( acting as one ) against its own people.
And they will insert computers inside people bodies communicating with the 5G network. Controlling their minds and biological functions. Humans acting like robots. No more dissidents,whistle-blowers, independent journalists, wise people thinking, no more wars,no more political parties….just a button push and the undesirable is gone. The inner or ultimate dictatorship. No escape from inside humanity anymore because there is no more humanity to find.
This time left is only a delay for the wise people to believe and repent . When we clearly see the ” tsunami ” coming,maybe some good words would come up,maybe some good deeds,helping others.
Not so long ago, even any mentioning of MKII Ultra programs were labeled as a conspiratorial lunacy. Since then a tone of document were declassified, and the truth happened to be much more bizarre than what was previously thought. The same goes for many, many other branches of “conspiratorial lunacies”. One has to simply look up into the sky and note that it does not look the same any longer – it is so heavily sprayed with nanoparticles and a bunch of toxic chemicals that it is no longer recognizable.
This is yet another weaponized subject people try to avoid. Yet, there plenty of official statements describing numerous plans to block the sun. What can possibly go wrong by blocking the source of life on our planet!?…All of that to say, is that the real warfare has been waged against people’s minds and their health; weakening and subjugating humanity through slave foods, slave education systems and a steady distraction of anything that is natural. It is not a secret – The controllers want to replace us with the machines. This is where the war is raging, the rest is a TV to keep the slaves preoccupied with things that don’t matter that much.
@ Ollie Richardson
I normally appreciate your articles and you have even impressed with some but with time you will probably find this one to be below your normal (removed). Why?
1. Governmentality, the concept of Michel Foucault that in French is called regementalité and refers to the mentality that governs a certain actor/s. Your article does not deal with the governmentality of neither USA, NATO, GB and the Commonwealth, S.A. and GCC, Wahabis and Salafis or Talmudists and Kabbalists and the connection between them, plus that of all their PFP hang-arounds. Nor does it deal with Hindu genealogy or that of other ethnicities or rather those of our thousand year old elites (because most of us are serf descendants and history is not ours but theirs).
2. Hegemony means a power that is so great that its governmentality is veiled. Comparatively a normative power wins most ‘games’ but also loses some to the weaker non-normative powers but a hegemon wins 98-100% of its ‘games’. The existence of a hegemony dictates that all our combined mainstream scientists (with their conventional analytical toolboxes, and I’m not impressed by those of International Relations) that study the hegemon and its effects are deceived to a hegemonic proportion.
3. Sun Tzu said in The Art of War (paraphrasing):
Know yourself but not your enemy and you will win one and lose one.
Know your enemy but not yourself and you will win one and lose one.
Know both yourself and your enemy and you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles.
The existance of a hegemon dictates its polar opposites are clueless about their adversaries governmentality.
4. Sun Tzu also said (paraphrasing):
To win a hundred battles out of one hundred is not the acme of skill. The acme of skill is to win without the enemy even knowing.
How does one do that? From within, from the beginning of history, from the construction of languages to cosmologies and the exclusion of what is, etc. and the result is hegemony.
5. What is semiotics and why did the controllers of the nine (9) media conglomerates that own 99,x% of all world’s media think it was of global concern that Erdogan’s Chief Advisor went public about “Ankara switching from Google to Yandex” search engine?
6. A supercomputer is reactive. Mastering your enemy’s governmentality is to be proactive to 100%. Does Moscow proactive much? How many great mistakes has Moscow committed after Medvedev’s Libyan fiasco and humanitarian catastrophy?
7. “Everyone wants to survive, remember”, you ask.
But who is the hegemon? And what does the actors of the hegemon have do do with everyone else you’re referring at?
As for Jean Baudrillard, I cannot prove it but my current evidence point to that he was an actor of the hegemon.
To overstand – because when you master something you’re on top of it – anything one has to be humanity/life-centric as well as enemy-centric. If I was to direct the eyes of Ollie and others only to one direction for 10h I would recommend the life-centric physicist Dan Winter (https://www.youtube.com/user/lophi618), for the sake of context and a new point of view to look at things instead of using the same toolboxes that only reproduce the hegemon.
That said, the research of Dan Winter will only give so much (as with anyone but at least a wholly new point of view to geopolitics that nonexistent on this site).
Clue? The governmentality of the hegemon lies exactly where the total sum of mainstream analytics are not looking.
Logical, isn’t it?
Don’t discard looking through your enemy’s ‘dirty underwear’ just because your nose and tongue thinks its yak – unimportant – for it might not be to Her.
These supercomputers have absolutely nothing to do with predicting that the West was preparing yet another false-flag in Syria. They are used for managing the logistics of the Russian army and working out that of its enemies.
The reality is that the Russians are incredibly slow learners. They watched the Israelis use false-flags for decades and they never bothered to learn from them. Any PR firm on Washington’s M Street could have helped them work out what was going on and helped them defuse it. No need for computing power – just a tiny bit of brain power.
Trying to impress us with “science” is really ridiculous. Like all that fake news about “Artificial Intelligence” – which does not exist. There are no-self learning machines in the real world. Telsa’s cars use electronic maps, motion-sensors and suchlike.
AI could just be information that is not understood by the elites, yet they still need a way to communicate this via the MSM. Its just a term with many interpretations, so that alone brings it alive.
And your brain power argument is loose also, mistakenly keeping the peace with in a family, that leads to a war on the streets with the law, could be just that. And the “learning” might simply be lawyers refusing to publicly help a cause(they supposedly believe in) for their own private self interest. Do not over think this.
I second that Moscow are incredibly slow learners.
They’re close to blind when it comes to learn from the enemy and naive, as if the enemy has the same mentality as oneself and there’s no need to get in to your enemy’s head because you have one yourself. All the ceasefires, treaties, agreements, strategic blunders, cluelessness about the governmentality of various entities and the actors behind them.
I’ve been crying for over a decade. I seriously thought that Moscow, Beijing and Tehran were controlled opposition by the NWO, only faking to be an antithesis, that’s how clueless they are.
But you’re wrong about AI. In less than 5 years they’re go and before 2030 we’re f’d, by design.
Interesting approach to a very old problem. Modern Israel was founded in 1826 when Jerusalem passed from Ottoman hands in to Jewish ownership. By the time Herzl, the originator of the Zionist concept, visited Israel 70 years later, kibbutzim were widespread.
The British established the Sauds in power in the mid 1920s with military support, as much to counter the embryonic Israeli state, as to divide Islam with Wahhabi heresy.
Persia (Iran to Americans) watched all this with disbelief over the hundred years from the founding of Israel through to the founding of Saudi Arabia. Of course it was oil…that was the propaganda officially. Reality though was City of London control of the international drug trade, (what the British Empire had been about in both India and China). The oil factor was, and still is, a charade loved by the main stream media and gullible politicians.
And so we arrive at nuclear weapons. The aircraft and missiles that might deliver them are a bit like cavalry. Generally they are not as effective as is claimed. And if the do connect with their targets, not as effective as the fear mongers hoped for.
While is seems certain that the US and the EU will be wiped from the face of the earth, it is more than likely large swathes of people will survive. You know, much of the US arsenal is thirty years old. Many may not make it out of the silos, and those that do may be totally eliminated by S400 and S500 along with the flying bedstead F35 and other aerial assets.
Would be funny if Russia is able to eliminate all of the US’s nuclear assault. Then what? US surrender of course! You can’t fight a war with eleven clapped out obsolete aircraft carriers with a few Kinsals about to fall on you. Those nations with oil and natural gas will be able to feed a few million of their people through any nuclear winter, just as Iceland today uses its thermal power to grow fresh vegetable throughout its winter today.
I like the scenarios played out in this article. Mind over matter or what used to be known as PMA, positive mental attitude, is the deciding factor. It was PMA that built the British Empire plus the belief the Empire’s enemies had that British troops were invincible.
Today it is noticeable that both the US and its vassals like the UK, France, and Scandinavia all share a high degree of negativity, whereas Russia and China are positive no matter what!
Again, I am impressed not only with your argument, but also with the careful, step-by-step process of building the case. I am even more impressed as I am one of those who has worried about suicidal-tendencies among whomever is running the West, which I take to be Bibi and Co.
Really, brilliant work.
I would add though that if “history knows no example of a civilisation that consciously slit its own throat,” then the CIA/Gorbachev/Yeltsin/Andropov clique came pretty darn close to slitting the throat of Russia.
Thanks. I too feel safer after having read this work
Russia Expert’s 2017 Prophecy About The Nuclear Threat Of Russiagate Is Coming True
https://www.greanvillepost.com/2019/06/16/russia-experts-2017-prophecy-about-the-nuclear-threat-of-russiagate-is-coming-true/
Thanks for the article.
So, lets get it straight, Pentagon has da fancy secretive supercomputer with da secretive formula, it is fed a mass of endless secret data, then in comparison RF has few pages of simple arithmetic formulas with handful of variables and if fetched into 30 year old TI scientific calculator giving results faster than da supercomputer.
To make boss happy supercomputer is loaded any data just to show productivity with no oversight as in contrast RF simple formula is fed systematic well weighted values from competent humans and results of the formula are given to competent humans. The latter happens within structured chain of command with assigned roles and responsibilities and no confusion about man’s toilets.
Complexity is prone to unforeseen failures, F35 anyone?
“Obsession with gadgets doesn’t win a war”
Not Sun Tzu, but may as well be.
Just saying
PS; does supercomputer have input for Vasili Arkhipov moment? (A soviet submarine officer who averted war escalation in 1962)
The author fails to notice human error and sabotage are very real. Death drive or Thanatos also is. It’s not true that “everyone wants to survive”, what is true is “everyone has its own imaginary” by which even death might mean survival. No matter what precautions you take, or how sophisticated they may look, nuclear weapons on human hands are like a monkey holding a scalpel and will remain as such for a long time until the human brain evolves enough. But the article is an enjoyable read and arguments well presented.
In my opinion the one true religion of Merkins is the worship of Death, seen in the extreme violence of the country from its foundation to today, and its mindless materialism and insatiable greed. And Bibi, King of (Israel, has Masada and Samson Dostrine written all over his ghastly mug.
Bullshit in = bullshit out. The real problem is the nut case programmers of the supercomputers.
On thing I would like to see this author, and others, address is covert weapons systems. The Fukushima earthquake appears to have been initiated with a nuclear device on or under the sea floor off Japan. How does this fit into the hybrid war situation in which nukes are just one of a range of attack vectors? I don’t for a minute think that the pig virus sweeping China is anything but spawned by the West. There are probably dozens of other such exotic weapons “systems” out there. Weather control? How do these play into the scenario?
Could very well have been that scenario, the big problem was the GE defectively designed back up generators and air intake system, either one would have failed if called upon in the situation, the air intakes happened to be the initial fault which didnt even give the backup generators a chance to fail, but by design, they would have also.
It’s healthy to be optimistic. However the author made a number of assumptions. One is that response would be equal in magnitude. That would not be the case if it nuclear assets are decimated in the first strike. Another is that they are not prepared to suffer nuclear retaliation of any magnitude. But they might calculate limited retaliation is acceptable if they still end up as winners. Moreover, retaliation actually might calculate in the whole plan.
There are some indicators they are actually moving towards this. We need serious analysis of that possibility, not ridicule.