Gnews \\ Inflection Points

It’s been a while since I openly got on my soapbox about the various things going on around us these days, but there’s just so much of interest happening right now…well…I hope you’ll indulge this little diversion.

First, a few words about life here at Chaos Manor.  Mention has been made concerning Erica’s health and the amount of time I’ve not been writing as a result. That’s just a function of age, I think, but she’s ten years younger than myself and I had hoped that this differential would work out for both of us. Such has not been the case. She’s had a handful of surgeries this year, but a new heart condition now means that more surgery is problematic – so we are walking on eggshells here.

Last August, I palpated a small tumor on my beloved Heidi’s neck. Springers typically live ten to twelve years and she was ten at the time, so these things aren’t completely unexpected or out of the blue, yet even so this development hit me hard. Perhaps the anxiety I’d felt concerning Erica contributed to all my angst, but regardless, we took Heidi to see various doctors and surgeons and soon we had to come to terms with her cancer.

Heidi and I met in Oregon when my oldest sister was dying; in a sense she became my therapy dog. As my sister slipped away I held onto Heidi with a ferocity I’d never known, yet she absorbed my pain and gave me an endless supply of love in return. She was with me when I moved from Awaken, my boat, to Colorado, and still with me when we moved to Wisconsin. Not to make too much of it, but in ten years she never left my side. When I had to drive into Steamboat Springs on an errand she was by my side, and when I pulled out my trusty Honda snowblower to clear the driveway…well, yeah, she walked right along beside me. When our day was done she’d hop up on the bed and nestle into my neck and we’d fall asleep listening to each other breathe. In a word, we were close.

When the day finally came, we took Heidi to the vet and she knew what was coming. She hopped up on my lap and buried her face in my neck while the doctor did his thing and I held her as she passed. The last thing she heard was me telling her to check out the trail ahead, and that I’d be along in a little bit. I could not let go of her. I still haven’t been able to…not completely. And I doubt I ever will.

Heidi taught me about souls, and all about unconditional love. And though I miss her terribly I have two of her children, and one of her granddaughters, by my side. Suzy, her daughter, understands what has happened, and she is with me now, by my side.

[Andrew Weathers \\ High Tide on the Land Ocean]

So. Inflection points can be quite personal. Still, there is so much going on right now that is not, and yet so much appears to be unreconciled chaos, but then again…

Let’s look at a couple, okay?

Point 1: Kriegstüchtig

The Gnews from Ukraine depresses, unless your day job takes you inside the Kremlin, or to an office deep inside No. 2 Dzerzhinsky Square. If such is the case, well…good for you. Funneling all that money into operations buying off Republican Party operatives on The Hill is finally paying off (just ask Lev Parnas). Felix would be so proud. Really, he would. You pulled it off. Political polarization is now endemic in Washington, thanks to you – and your efforts via the clan Murdoch.

The current iteration of the ongoing Russo-Ukraine War (which commenced when Russian commandos infiltrated Kiev on 2/22/22, for those into numerology) had for a time appeared to be headed for a stalemate, but thanks to said operatives in Washington and its poisoned environs, as well as the concerted efforts of El Caudillo de Mar-a-Lago, Prince Vlad appears to be having his Neville Chamberlain moment – leaving Ronald Reagan to spin ever so slightly in his grave. 

Echoing recent comments by leaders of the three eastern Baltic states in NATO (those would be Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, for those not keeping up with the score), the German defense minister Boris Pistorius said last weekend that Herr Putin would not stop when he is finished with Ukraine. He stated (and quite plainly – for a politician, anyway) that the people of Germany would need to become kriegstüchtig, which translates in the current context as “fit for war,” adding that Germans needed to decide – and rather quickly, too – “whether we want to prepare ourselves for the real threat from Putin or whether we want to make it easy for him”. Pistorius invoked Churchill, and if you can’t find the irony in that…well…heaven help us.

And now, into this caldron of uncertainty, enter, stage right: El Caudillo de Mar-a-Lago. Despite his absence from Washington, The Orange One has decided that American foreign policy would best be dictated from south Florida. Ukraine’s lifeline, vis-a-vis the Congress of the United States, has been dutifully severed by Herr Putin’s rightfully purchased politicians. With aid to Ukraine, as well as Israel and Taiwan, all now tied up indefinitely by El Caudillo, all Herr Putin needs to do is sit and wait for the next shoe to drop. 

So shoe…you ready to drop yet?

[Hayden Pedigo \\ The Happiest Times I ever Ignored]

Point 2: Die Täuschung

Putin’s problem has been simple, at least so far. After festivities commenced on 2/22, neither China nor Iran were ready to commit to the next phase of Vlad’s operation, so he had to entice them a bit…reel them in slowly. First, he had to let Xi help him build up his military industrial complex (ahem, he had to sell his oil somewhere, didn’t he?), letting China become a little more dependent on Russia. And a desperate Iran needed an export market for its military drones (to raise needed capital), though their drones were clearly inferior to models made by Turkey and South Korea, and they were cheaper, too, so the Ayatollahs got onboard with Putin, made their deal with the devil they knew and started shipping their products north across the Black Sea. In exchange, the Ayatollahs agreed to stir up the hornet’s nests in Syria and Yemen. 

Why? To annoy the Big Bad Wolf, as Biden is known around Dzerzhinsky Square.

So Iran got Hamas involved, and the Israelis got their October Surprise. Then Putin and the Ayatollahs sprinkled in a dash of Hezbollah to go along with some spicy disinformation aimed at gullible students in New York, Massachusetts and California, and all of a sudden the Big Bad Wolf was all wrapped up in “domestic political considerations” – because, after all, there’s an election looming. But then, to Putin’s surprise and utter joy, the Israelis went after civilians in Gaza with completely unexpected savagery, so much so that further disinformation in the United States was proving unnecessary. Now all Vlad had to do was get Iran to stir up some new trouble in Yemen and just like that, two aircraft carrier battle groups that had been lending their air wings to operations around Ukraine disappeared, heading south to the eastern Med. Then Netanyahu & Co bombed the Iranian consulate in Damascus and quicker than you can say casus belli the Israelis handed Putin the gift he had hoped for – and suddenly the Iranians were ready to commit to their part of the grand bargain.

[Ulrich Schnauss \\ A Forgotten Birthday]

Point 3: Das große Schnäppchen

The operational tempo on an aircraft carrier under such conditions is, to say the least, exhausting on both personnel and equipment. Six month deployments under these conditions are debilitating. Steam catapults, like those found on all US carriers except the Ford (CVN-78), are especially needy (and, FYI, the next Ford class ship, the JFK [CVN-79], won’t be commissioned until 2025, with the Enterprise [CVN-80] due in 2029); ships on patrol need to return to Norfolk after extended periods of intense activity – or things start to break.

Which brings us to WESTPAC, or the Western Pacific TOE (theatre of operations).

Where all of a sudden it looks like Xi is ready to put some real pressure on the Philippines. The Fat Boy in North Korea is up to real mischief, too, with intel weenies in Ft Meade aghast at the revelation that Iran has been inquiring about the possibility of getting their hands on a nuclear warhead, and you have to wonder what Xi thinks of this. “Is Putin moving too fast?” he might wonder.

The second world war in the Pacific was a carrier war, and Japan knew this better than everyone else (aside from FDR, anyway), which explains why the Japanese are busily building a new carrier, their first since the debacle at Midway in 1942, and wouldn’t you know it…the Fat Boy is getting ready to resume nuclear testing…

This is where the frog in warming water starts to squirm.

So China is making noise in the Southwest Pacific (requiring the attention of at least one US carrier) while the Fat Boy is freaking out everyone in Japan and South Korea (requiring another US carrier to remain in the Northeast Pacific).

See a pattern here?

America’s carrier forces are being pulled away from…both the North Atlantic and the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, and this is now A Very Bad Thing.

That Putin, Xi, the Ayatollahs and the Fat Boy are all coordinating these efforts is well known. What is not currently known is the timing of their planned festivities. Their known objective, to replace the American world order established in 1945 with one of their own design, ain’t exactly news, but most everyone in Ft Meade thinks the party will begin in 2030 or thereabouts.

But what if they’re wrong.

[PM \\ Junk]

Point 4

These inflection points converge somewhere in the future, but while that time is locked away somewhere inside Putin’s mind, there are more than a few things going on right now that lead to troubling conclusions.

The first of these will be upon us on the first Tuesday of November 2024. Putin’s last best chance of avoiding a large land war in Europe comes with the possible election of his bought and paid for agent, El Caudillo de Mar-a-Lago. Putin must assume that if El Caudillo emerges victorious and resumes his employment in the oval office, the US will simply hand over the keys to the empire…and who knows…he may be correct in that assumption. The isolationist wing of the Republican Party fought FDR right up to Pearl Harbor, so this group has long history of short-sighted obstructionist behavior in congress to fall back on, but what if the isolationists have the White House? That would be the perfect storm Putin could be counting on.

But what if El Caudillo de Mar-a-Lago loses in November?

Well, El Caudillo has stated that any election he loses is rigged, and he’s convinced about thirty percent of the people in this country that the system is rigged against them, which brings us to an even more interesting scenario. He wants a bloodbath this time.

And a movie was released last week, Alex Garland’s Civil War, an amusing bit of fiction that speaks quite openly about a subject most people in this country would, at this point, rather ignore, to wit: the idea that United We Stand (and divided we fall). If you’ve not seen the film, you should do so. It is loud and viscerally shocking, but the film asks a question we should all be willing to answer: Is this Union more important than one man’s ambition.

But back to the main point.

If the US were to fall into some kind of post-election chaos, and if the civilian chain of command was to be called into question, would that not be the perfect time for Putin and his axis of evil to make their move?

So, think about inflection points in those terms.

Vlad’s invasion of Ukraine has had the exact opposite effect of the thing he wanted most, disunity and chaos in NATO. And now European leaders are united in the common knowledge that there is b-b-big m-m-money to be m-m-made undertaking a crash rearmament program, and these European efforts could begin to bear fruit – in a few years. 

A few years? Europe united AND rearmed? 

“Dare I wait?” Putin asks the aging face in the mirror.

And why is it that Russia’s most advanced new weaponry, including the Armada tank, the Sukhoi-57, and all those new submarines have all been conspicuously absent from the present conflict. And why have the most well trained units of his army remained well away from the front lines of the battlefield? The war has provided some of his NCOs and low level commissioned officers a venue to gain valuable combat experience, but their value now is to return to the Urals and pass on that experience. 

Will they have had enough time by November?

But then an interesting thing happened late last week, and not in Israel or the Western Pacific.

No, it happened off the Swedish coast.

When a Russian Air Force Ilyushin Il-20M violated Swedish airspace. The aircraft is an ELINT variant of the old Il-18, redesigned to snoop out all kinds of electronic signals intelligence and, more importantly, to perform radar imaging and mapping of coastlines. The aircraft spent most of its time flying around Gotland, the Swedish island at a chokepoint in the Baltic that was once referred to as the largest aircraft carrier in the world. Also, those Russian submarines have been snooping around the area recently – which is curious, given that until recently they have been lurking around the undersea cables that connect the US to Europe.

So you need to ask yourself…Why now?

If you take Gotland in your opening move, then take the Suwałki Gap, you cut off the three Baltic states – and then you force NATO’s hand. Is Article 5 invoked? Does the third world war commence? Or is everyone too afraid to take that chance. If so…Putin wins.

So here we are, with more and more inflection points plotting all kinds of new curves. Connecting the dots, points on a graph that seem to be leading to – what exactly? These points can lead in several directions all at the same time, but in the end we’re watching an orchestrated performance, the last act of the Soviet Union, because nothing much has changed since Reagan called the Russian culture out as The Evil Empire (and George Kennan told us so, too). But here’s the real question. If El Caudillo is indeed a true Putin ally, is he not evil? But how could this man take the throne again without Putin’s and Murdoch’s machinations. What the hell is going on?

And here’s some more irony: if Russia and China still feel like they need to run the world, why do they still blame the United States for all the flaws in their economic systems. Are those faults really of our design? And if Iran hates the US because of our support for Israel, surely they understand that we still hate them for 1979 (and yes, I know, they still hate us for 1953). And let us not forget…the poor Fat Boy hates the US because, presumably, we never franchised Weight Watchers over there.

I doubt Karl Marx would like anyone in this rogue’s gallery, but there you have it – they are what we have and there are no deals to be made with our fate. Personally, I still sort of like Joe Biden. He’s a decent man, and he looks you in the eye when he shakes your hand, but there is a very real possibility that he really could be too old to handle what’s coming his way, and let’s not forget: he’s an Old School Democrat like Dukakis and Mondale, which means he may be in way over his head. Still, I doubt he’d hand over the keys to the kingdom, which is exactly what El Caudillo de Mar-a-Lago has been told to do. Bought and paid for, you might say.

Me? Frankly, I’d rather James Stavridis was somewhere in the White House, but that’s just me. I think Mr Putin would think twice if Stavridis was standing watch, but that is not to be.

But, be that as it may…as you go about your day think about these inflection points, and where they might be taking us, the few I’ve pointed out here, and the ones sure to come between now and November. There’s so much going on and it all really is quite interesting…in a way like watching moves on a giant chessboard. I doubt there’s much anyone can do to affect the outcome at this point in the game, so you might as well just sit back and enjoy the next move. 

In Conclusion

I still hope to keep on writing. It keeps me busy, keeps my mind working and there are too many loose ends in these stories that need to be tied up.

But I’m reading more. Check out Punk’s War by Ward Carrol, and Nuclear War by Annie Jacobsen. I waded through Rural White Rage by Schaller and Waldman so you wouldn’t have to, and you probably shouldn’t either, unless your blood pressure is under good control. Admiral Stavridis published 2034 a few years ago (imagine a naval war between the US and China, then India gets the last word) and it’s worth a read, and he recently put out 2054 (not read yet) which deals with AI and warfare.

If you’ve not watched The Three Body Problem on Netflix I think you might find it worthwhile (I’m starting the books now). Also on Netflix, Leave the World Behind ought to provoke a little existential dread (especially considering the Obamas produced it), or try Don’t Look Up for a laugh. The Adam Project is great to watch with any teens in your life, and gain, I think the new Civil War film is worth taking in.

That’s about all I’ve got for now. It’s funny, but little Suzy gets up on the bed at night and she lays with me for a while, but every now and then her head pops up and she looks around and I think she’s a little confused. I know she’s looking for her mother, for my Heidi, and I know she’s still waiting for her to come back to us. I keep Heidi’s ball handy, so the next time I see her I’ll be ready.

[Dominic Miller \\ Urban Waltz]