Rare Drone Attack On Military Base In Breakaway Pro-Russian Republic Of Transnistria
An unprecedented or at least extremely rare attack has just targeted a military base in the pro-Russian breakaway Moldovan republic of Transnistria on Sunday.
A kamikaze drone hit a military base in Tiraspol, the capital of unrecognized Transnistria, local officials have told RIA Novosti. The attack reportedly resulted in fire and damage to military assets at the airfield, but there were no casualties.
Russian state media saida helicopter stationed at the airfield was destroyed in the UAV attack. Presumably the helicopter belonged to either Transnistria separatists or to the Russian military.
“Today a fire occurred on the territory of a military base in Tiraspol as a result of an explosion,” local authorities were cited in AFP as saying.
“It was preliminarily established that the explosion was caused by a kamikaze drone attack,” they added, and alleged the drone launched from the Odesa region. They are blaming Ukraine forces for the rare cross-border attack.
The incident was not immediately confirmed either by the Russian or Ukraine governments. “Grainy footage distributed by separatist authorities showed a projectile slamming into a military helicopter standing at an airbase surrounded by fields,” AFP noted.
Close-up footage of the Mi-8 helicopter in Transnistria being attacked by a drone pic.twitter.com/QMekkx47jO
Regardless of the AFP headline which says Breakaway Moldova Region Blames Military Site Blast On Drone From Ukraine… there remain conflicting reports on the origin point of the drone launch.
Russia’s RT writes, “Transnistria’s state security ministry alleged that the drone arrived from the so-called “Clover Bridge” area – a major multi-level highway junction located north of the city of Tiraspol and close to the Ukrainian border.” Further the report notes that “The unrecognized republic’s authorities have not named any suspects behind the incident so far.”
As we previously wrote in a backgrounder here, in 2006, a Transnistrian double referendum was held gauging popular support for the separatist state’s appetite to either renounce its independence and join the Republic Of Moldova or to maintain it and seek to join the Russian Federation. The referendum to become part of Moldova was rejected by 96% of voters while 98% approved of becoming part of Russia.
What’s the Record for Shortest Time from All-Time Highs to Bear Market?
That seems like such a strange question. If all you did was read the headlines, you would think that things were great (if not spectacular) in markets. If you say you are bearish, people will look at you with sympathy, wondering if you are going to be able to feed your family with such a disastrous call.
Yet, the reality of the situation is quite different from what the headlines seem to be trying to spoon feed us on a daily basis.
The Nasdaq 100, which was down on the week, is down 1% since February 9th. Yes, it had its closing high on March 1st, and its intraday high of 18,417 on March 8th. But 5 weeks, with a lot of hype and cheerleading, has amounted to a loss of 1%. Since the highs, we are down 3%, which is one of many things that have me wondering how quickly we’ve fallen from “all-time highs” to bear market? While 20% is a tad more bearish than I am, it sounded better than using a “correction” of 10% in the title.
The S&P 500 has performed more steadily than the Nasdaq 100, but at the other end of the spectrum, despite begging people to Stop Using the Magnificent 7 Moniker, we still hear that term quite frequently. Yes, some people have started talking about the Fab 4 or some other catchy phrase, but that makes sense when at least a couple of the so-called Mag 7 are back to levels from October, before the big bull market started (a time when we were quite bullish, possibly fighting consensus back then too).
Where We’ve Been Recently
We’ve been bearish, but with an emphasis that we felt the risk of a 5% to 10% rapid move to the downside was far more likely than a sharp rally. We’ve discussed aspects of this in:
Trillion Dollar Mistakes. Highlighting some big mistakes made in the overall market, while questioning if Wall Street, for all its foibles, was really likely to have been that wrong?
The Time to Retire report, referenced earlier, highlighted a series of market behaviors and charts that were making us increasingly nervous about the risk/reward of the market and forcing us to lean to the “cautious and need to hedge” side of things.
It’s Friday, I’m in Love examined the week ending March 1st, highlighting some of the things that helped propel stocks higher that Friday. As I re-read that, many of the positives have dissipated, been priced in, or in the case of AI “deputization,” are starting to be questioned. If it hadn’t been for the SOX Index (semiconductors) we wouldn’t have achieved these all-time highs, and that index has started to roll over. In a market with limited leadership, that could be problematic.
While more of a “longer-term” trade, everything about Made By China is likely to be negative for our markets and economy.
While those have helped articulate and explain our bearish view, they are all relatively recent (the oldest was published on February 27th). We should go back to one more article to express why the view has changed from a DEFCON 3 or 4 sort of bearishness, to a more dangerous and urgent DEFCON 2 level of bearishness.
Back on February 9th we published A Market Only a Mother or AI Could Love. That chart showed the “crazy” trading pattern of the week. So many wild swings. Gyrations, some of which could be attributed to news, but some of which seemed inexplicable.
This week seemed like that, on steroids! I think I actually physically poked my screen once to make sure it was working. I swear, the market was up almost 1%, I glanced away, it was down 1%, and then a few minutes later it was back to flat. I’m not sure what tapping my screen would do, but I could remember doing that when a thermometer didn’t seem to be working, so it seemed appropriate.
But no, my screen was working just fine – it was the markets that weren’t functioning “normally” in my opinion.
It seemed that every “big” order just caused the market to gap higher or lower while the order was being filled. It did work in both directions, but I’m increasingly convinced the risk is that the market will need to find some serious bidside liquidity, when it may be non-existent.
Where We’ve Been In the Past
All of this is forcing me to think about some things we’ve discussed in the past, which are rapidly rising to the forefront of my thoughts again.
While aging myself, yet again, I cannot help but think about the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. A fun “movie” many of us got to watch in school. This was back when someone had to bring in a projector and seeing a video in class was a “cool” thing (though not as cool as getting the whole school to watch the Canada Cup in the gym). But anyways, that video shows a bridge oscillating. That oscillation increases until, ultimately, it collapses! The movie was all about resonance frequency, but all I remember is seeing a structure, so seemingly sturdy, start to bend and twist before collapsing. The first time that hit me was back in 2007 and it is the main image I have in my mind right now.
It also made me think about pendulums. In Dredging Up Pendulums, we focused primarily on the complexity of a simple pendulum versus a double pendulum, and how important even tiny changes in starting conditions could be.
We also discussed Machine Learning Triple Pendulums. This YouTube video shows how a computer is able to manipulate a “cart” to get a triple pendulum to stand upright for a period of time. For about a decade, I’ve been using that when discussing market mechanics. It is difficult to tell what exactly happens day by day, or even minute by minute, when so much of the trading is driven by algorithms. The algorithms link not just “vehicles” (like stocks, ETFs, and futures), but also asset classes as correlations are traded rapidly. The reason thinking about market structure in terms of a machine learning triple pendulum cart is so important (if it is a correct interpretation) is that “functioning” or holding it upright is very unstable and takes more computing power and skill than a human possesses. Yet, it can be accomplished. The problem is that when it fails, it tends to result in an “epic” failure where the “natural” position of the pendulums (all pulled by gravity) is to be facing down rather than standing upright. Sure, maybe a bit alarmist, but we’ve seen it in the past. A VIX related ETF Went Poof.
What Changed This Week
One thing that changed is the “randomness” of trading seemed to accelerate, forcing me to think about bridges and pendulums. I also cannot stop thinking about some of the charts we included in A Retrospective of All-Time Highs. While many of the bears (and doomers) want to talk about “tech bubbles,” I’m more fixated on 2007. To me, the 2007 “all-time high” was one of the strangest ones.
All the problems were known. None had been fixed, but we hit an all-time high, based largely on the Fed. We bounced hard again after JPM bought Bear, only to sink to new lows a week or so after Lehman. Those “lows” seemed tame compared to where the market finally bottomed in 2009, but it was the almost “hubris” of all-time highs in the autumn of 2007 that I think about more than the tech bubble, as I don’t think that is the right metric. Though as a bear, who is increasingly worried about a 10% pullback, I shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth.
But here are things that have made me increasingly nervous:
Bond yields.
I’ll start with longer dated bond yields as they are more fun. The 10-year Treasury yield got back to 4.31% on Friday. Treasuries rallied, much to my chagrin, last time we got here, but they seem susceptible to moving higher again. China will NOT be buying Treasuries as they are raising their own debt to figure out how to spend their way out of their economic problems. FXI, a China ETF, did finish higher on the week, in a story that remains poorly covered, and is why I continue to like – for a trade – long FXI, short QQQ. I’ve been expecting to see another march to higher yields like we saw last fall. The 10-year yield moved higher each and every day last week – a sign of things to come?
The Fed is getting pushed out of the picture. The first cut is expected in June, with a chance of it getting pushed to July. The market is still pricing in cuts at the September and November meetings (which I think is insane given how every issue, including monetary policy, is fodder for campaigns that seem as much about generating anger as hope). We are still at 3 cuts for the year, but I think there is a chance that the Fed changes the dots just a smidge (given all the inflation data) to show fewer than 3 cuts. That, or a change in next year’s expected end rate, could be punishing.
The move in yields, at the longer end, has not reflected increased term premium. Minimal (if any) concerns about the never-ending growth of federal debt, as the spread between 2s and 10s closed at -42 bps. I see no reason why this doesn’t get back to recent “best” levels of -20 or so, with my target for the summer being flat yield curves as risk premium returns and we see an end to the era of inversion everywhere you look.
Inflation and oil. It is clear that inflation, by a variety of measures, is “sticky.” A couple of things, actually a few things, bother me most.
Lots of “apologizing” about Owners Equivalent Rent. If you’ve read the T-Report for long, you know how much I hate how we calculated shelter. So yes, right now, it is overstating the current rise in shelter – BUT IT IS DOING THAT BECAUSE THE RISE WAS NEVER FULLY PRICED IN! Sorry for the “all caps” but yes, today’s inflation is likely overstated, but only because officially we under-reported it. Yes, this is a rant, but it probably goes beyond those dismissing rent.
Beyond dismissing rent. Most consumers think in terms of dollars. We live in a “nominal world.” So something that rose 10% a few years ago went from say $100 to $110. Now it “only” rose 3%, but it is 3% on a much larger starting point, creating a much higher dollar increase than it would have a few years ago. Add to that all the people who have been arguing that the prices they see in stores don’t seem to get used in official calculations and all the “substitutions” incorporated into the calculations artificially kept inflation lower. Basically, the real-world level of current inflation may never have been captured by the official data, leaving more room to catch up.
Oil. Energy prices contributed to recent rises in inflation. Apparently, many seem confident they will go back down. With no end in sight to the war in Ukraine and the Middle East edging closer and closer to direct involvement with Iran, that does not seem like a bet I’d be comfortable with. I do like the energy sector, so I’m biased, but I think it is too early to dismiss the geopolitical risks associated with oil.
The U.S. consumer has been like a zombie for anyone betting against the U.S. economy. They just keep coming back to life. No matter what you think you’ve done, they seem to come back! Well, I think the consumer is rolling over. Debt is mounting. The job market is far from robust and has lost all of the momentum it had. It is at best “normal” like the years before COVID, and that might be a stretch.
While I don’t see “stagflation as a risk,” I think we are entering a period where we could see:
Higher yields coupled with a weakening economy and a Fed that is handcuffed by persistent inflation. Not a good mix.
In addition to a market positioned too aggressively that cannot expect much help from short covering.
While I don’t want to get into detail today, I think people staring at the VIX are looking in the wrong direction. This is a world of daily and weekly option flows that don’t show up in the VIX calculation. Unlike other strategies that have been difficult to understand (meme stocks for example), the 0DTE options market seems perfectly capable of trading from the call side of the market to the put side of the market. Many other strategies, like blindly selling vol, have tended to work in one direction and could really only be traded consistently from that direction. The 0DTE can work both ways and that could be the “shock” we need that disrupts this market.
For credit, look for CDX IG to go back above 60, maybe to 65. Not because of any serious problems in credit, but because spreads will be forced wider if I’m right on stocks.
So, instead of thinking about a 5% to 10% pullback in stocks, I’m much more concerned about a 10% or higher pullback along with 10-year yields breaking through 4.5%.
We didn’t answer the question posed at the start of the title, but I’m increasingly worried that we might be forced to find out what the competition is if markets start rolling over and lose the support of bonds, the Fed, and the few sectors that have done the heavy lifting.
On that note, I do promise to write “Up in Smoke” as a title of a T-Report (I couldn’t end this report without at least trying to get you to smile!)
Finally, Happy St. Patrick’s Day to those who celebrate!
Ukrainian Porn Star Poses With Mangled War Veterans For Charity Photo Shoot
First there was the bizarre contingent of pro-Gaza porn stars that twerked their way into the media limelight in support of Palestinians. Now Ukraine appears to be hosting a charity calendar featuring porn actress Yulia Senyuk, also known as Josephine Jackson, posing with armless and legless war veterans wearing tuxedos. Who could have guessed that porn stars would become a staple of public war relations?
Ukrainian porn actress Josephine Jackson takes part in a charity photo shoot with the military.
The photos will be included in a calendar, the proceeds from which will be used for rehabilitation and prosthetics for Ukrainian defenders. pic.twitter.com/rfDhkxzT4b
The scene looks like something straight out of Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers, complete with mechanical prosthetic limbs and plenty of cleavage. Sadly, the intent is not satirical. The actress notes on her Instagram:
“You may ask why we chose theater and suits. It is because we have all seen our guys in military uniforms or in rehabilitation centers, which is, unfortunately, a very hackneyed topic, so most of you just ignore it. But this transformation reveals them from a completely different side, showing what refined, elegant and handsome gentlemen they are. It gives them more self-confidence and a sense of self-sufficiency. These are the emotions we should give them, not pity and tears… Believe me, this is more than enough for them. The stage of pity has long since passed, and now we need to give them a thirst for life by involving them in this kind of activities. And I know that they enjoyed it, and that’s the most important thing…”
You might be wondering why the calendar will not feature popular Ukrainian actresses, fashion models or perhaps the Ukrainian winner of the Miss Universe pageant, Angelina Usanova. It’s hard to say, but the optics are not great. Since the beginning of the war the country has seen an unprecedented spike in prostitution as well as female refugees being recruited abroad for sex work. The number of Ukrainian women working in prostitution has quintupled in Red-Light districts in European cities like Berlin, Germany. It is estimated that around ten times as many Ukrainian women have entered prostitution globally in the past two years.
The goal of raising funds for the rehabilitation of injured veterans is certainly a noble one. However, since nothing travels outside of Ukraine without some level of propaganda gloss, one wonders what the intended message of this photo shoot really is? Take an artillery round for Zelensky and maybe you too can spend an evening with a porn queen?
Ukraine has become one of the the biggest proxy wars since Vietnam in 1965, or the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, but it is also possibly the first war to ever be fought in the battlefields of social media. Disinformation, spin and hype have buried the news feeds with the public left to sift through the debris for individual seeds of truth.
In the midst of this chaotic struggle for online supremacy and popular sentiment it’s not surprising that some promotional stunts get a little weird. In desperation, Ukraine is willing to try anything to appeal to western populations and get that next injection of sweet NATO cheddar. And to be fair, westerners do love their pornography.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says that calls from US Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer for new elections in Israel are “inappropriate”. Schumer on Thursday had called for Netanyahu’s government to be unseated, saying new leadership was needed in the country.
“As a lifelong supporter of Israel, it has become clear to me [that] the Netanyahu coalition no longer fits the needs of Israel after October 7,” he said, referring to the Hamas attack in southern Israel that resulted in the deaths of almost 1,200 people. “The world has changed radically since then, and the Israeli people are being stifled right now by a governing vision that is stuck in the past.”
On Sunday, Netanyahu hit back at Schumer, saying his comments were “totally inappropriate” and amounted to an interference in Israeli democracy.
“I think what he said is totally inappropriate. It’s inappropriate to go to a sister democracy and try to replace the elected leadership there,” Netanyahu said in an interview on CNN.
Political leaders in the US have reportedly been increasingly frustrated with Netanyahu’s leadership in Israel, particularly his insistence on pushing ahead with a planned assault on Rafah in Gaza, which currently hosts 1.5 million mostly displaced Palestinians sheltering near the Egyptian border.
Netanyahu reiterated his plans to attack the city on Sunday, vowing to uproot what he says are Hamas operatives. Israel’s assault on Gaza has reportedly killed at least 31,645 people in Gaza, most of them women and children, according to the enclave’s health ministry.
Netanyahu dismissed growing international pressure on Sunday, accusing them of forgetting the deaths on 7 October.
“To our friends in the international community I say: is your memory so short? So quickly you forgot about 7 October, the worst massacre committed against Jews since the Holocaust?” he said at the start of Sunday’s cabinet meeting.
“So quickly you are ready to deny Israel the right to defend itself against the monsters of Hamas?”
Prior to 7 October, Netanyahu’s government had been rocked by mass demonstrations by Israelis angry about his planned reforms to the judiciary in the country.
Though the war on Gaza has led to a decrease in the anti-Netanyahu protests, disapproval of his government over the reforms and his handling of the war has persisted.
Musk Defends Former President After Leftist Corporate Media Unleashes Trump “Bloodbath Hoax”
Corporate media and their woke allies on the Biden/Harris social media campaign team launched a disinformation and misinformation propaganda campaign against former President Trump, purposely misconstruing his speech at an event on Saturday.
The blatant disinformation and misinformation by leftist newspapers, radicals in the Biden administration, and even Democrat lawmakers have been on full display over the last 15 hours. There has also been an awakening on X of just how bad Democrats are at propaganda – and they can’t even make it believable anymore.
Let’s begin with the actual speech. On Saturday evening, X account EndWokeness posted a video of Trump at a campaign rally in Vandalia, Ohio. In it, Trump tells the audience that the American automobile industry will be a bloodbath if he’s not re-elected because the Biden administration will allow Chinese cars to flood the market.
Media narrative: Trump just called for a bloodbath if he loses the election
The disinformation and misinformation campaign by the Democrats this weekend is right out in the open. And they’re not even good at it!
And you wonder why trust in corporate media is imploding to record lows as Americans are tired of being lied to for years. The result of breaking out of the corporate/government propaganda matrix has been the flood of Americans finding their news on X.
It will be the country’s eighth presidential election and more than 112 million voters will be called to the polls.
While four candidates are in the running, Statista’s Katharina Buchholz reports that there is almost no doubt among observers that Vladimir Putin will be re-elected for a fifth term in the first round.
The only real unknown is the share of votes he will receive.
During the last presidential election in 2018, this number stood at around 77 percent.
In power for around a quarter of a century – spanning four presidential terms and two terms as prime minister between 1999 and 2000 and between 2008 and 2012 – Putin has spent a total of almost 9,000 days at the helm of the country. If he is re-elected this weekend, the ensuing six-year term of approximately 2,190 days will likely make him Russia’s longest serving leader since the start of the twentieth century. This record is currently held by Joseph Stalin, who led the country between 1924 and 1953 for a total of 10,636 days. Putin became Russia’s second longest-serving leader overtaking Brezhnev in 2017 late into his third term as president.
During Dmitry Medvedev’s presidency from 2008 to 2012, Russian law was amended to extend presidential terms from two terms of four years to two terms of six years.
This change was also designed to reset terms served and therefore enabled Putin to win another two terms.
A decade later, in 2021, Putin signed another law setting the limit at two presidential mandates per person in a lifetime, again paradoxically resetting terms already served and thereby exempting him for a second time.
A statue of a fat black woman which “pays homage to a young, metropolitan woman of colour” will feature on Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth in London from 2026 onwards, an announcement that was met with widespread derision.
The Fourth Plinth has become infamous for displaying vulgar modern art, although it is also now reliably used to push different variations of “the message”.
The statue is called Lady in Blue and according to the artist, Tschabalala Self, “pays homage to a young, metropolitan woman of colour who could be just one of many Londoners today.”
Self previously described the nature of her ‘art’ in precisely the kind of pretentious, obscurantist babble you would expecting, saying it serves to “embrace and confound collective fantasies and assumptions surrounding the Black female body,” whatever that means.
Excited to reveal the winning #FourthPlinth artworks for 2026 & 2028 in Trafalgar Sq 🏛️ Lady in Blue by Tschabalala Self & Untitled by Andra Ursuţa!
Congratulations to all the shortlisted artists & big thanks to the Commissioning Group & our incredible partners ✨️ pic.twitter.com/e4XYAtxVpd
Meanwhile, the ‘art’ that will adorn the Fourth Plinth from 2028 onwards is almost equally as bad.
Created by Romanian ‘artist’ Andra Ursuta, “The work points towards an uncertain future. It is made in a hyper-fragmented, paranoid time when public space, consensus and community continue to dissolve.”
It’s basically a green blob.
Romanian-born Andra Ursuța wins the Trafalgar Sq Fourth Plinth competition! Out of 7 artists shortlisted, 2 are declared winners. Andra Ursuța & Tschabalala Self, their works to take centre stage in 2026 & 2028. Fabulous end of a great week! pic.twitter.com/hzTROmhCRr
YES! Exactly what Horatio Nelson would want displayed in Trafalgar Square.
The monument to our finest ever naval victory, arguably our greatest victory in any theatre of war next to Nelson’s column, honouring the man who masterminded it dying in the process.
As we previously highlighted, London Mayor Sadiq Khan effectively blocked the placing of a statue of the late Queen Elizabeth in Trafalgar Square by green lighting an installation comprising of ‘transgender faces’ instead.
The ‘woke art’ consists of 850 faces of trans people who were mostly prostitutes. It will occupy the fourth plinth at Trafalgar Square for 6 months, and then be replaced by the fat black woman and the green blob.
The transgender faces installation, which will feature “marginalised sex workers,” got the go ahead despite just 23 per cent of Londoners approving it and 43 per cent saying they disliked it in a YouGov poll.
The ‘art work’ cost a total of £170,000 – all of it covered by the taxpayer.
Meanwhile, as we discuss below, actual works of art, namely paintings of the English countryside from 200 years ago by people like John Constable, are now being given trigger warnings by museums because they may evoke a “darker side” and stir “nationalist feelings”.
When will it ever end?
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St. Patrick’s Day Spending To Cross Seven-Billion Mark
Saint Patrick was not only a fifth-century bishop and missionary instrumental in converting the Irish to Christianity, but he is also the namesake of one of the most important cultural celebrations on the island. St. Patrick’s Day, or Lá Fhéile Pádraig as it’s called in Irish, occurs on the alleged death date of the island’s patron saint on March 17.
Originally a religious holiday, the Irish diaspora in the United States turned the occasion into a celebration largely divested from the liturgy and rather connected to wearing green and drinking Guinness.
As Statista’s Florian Zandt details below, the commercialization of the holiday is also apparent in total and household spending in the U.S. connected to St. Patrick’s Day.
According to estimates by the National Retail Foundation (NRF), overall spending for St. Patrick’s Day in the United States is bound to cross the seven-billion mark for the first time in 2024, increasing by 57 percent compared to the 2015 spending numbers. Per-household spending is also up significantly compared to ten years prior, although this figure hasn’t increased much since 2020.
Data from the NRF survey also shows that 62 percent of respondents plan to celebrate the holiday in one way or another. 82 percent of those celebrating plan on wearing green, 29 percent want to cook a special dinner and 27 percent aim to spend St. Patrick’s Day at a party in a bar or restaurant.
Make fun of the Germans all you want, and I’ve certainly done that a bit during these past few years, but, if there’s one thing they’re exceptionally good at, it’s taking responsibility for their mistakes. Seriously, when it comes to acknowledging one’s mistakes, and not rationalizing, or minimizing, or attempting to deny them, and any discomfort they may have allegedly caused, no one does it quite like the Germans.
Take this Covid mess, for example. Just last week, the German authorities confessed that they made a few minor mistakes during their management of the “Covid pandemic.” According to Karl Lauterbach, the Minister of Health, “we were sometimes too strict with the children and probably started easing the restrictions a little too late.” Horst Seehofer, the former Interior Minister, admitted that he would no longer agree to some of the Covid restrictions today, for example, nationwide nighttime curfews. “One must be very careful with calls for compulsory vaccination,” he added. Helge Braun, Head of the Chancellery and Minister for Special Affairs under Merkel, agreed that there had been “misjudgments,” for example, “overestimating the effectiveness of the vaccines.”
This display of the German authorities’ unwavering commitment to transparency and honesty, and the principle of personal honor that guides the German authorities in all their affairs, and that is deeply ingrained in the German character, was published in a piece called “The Divisive Virus” in Der Spiegel, and immediately widely disseminated by the rest of the German state and corporate media in a totally organic manner which did not in any way resemble one enormous Goebbelsian keyboard instrument pumping out official propaganda in perfect synchronization, or anything creepy and fascistic like that.
OK, sure, in a non-democratic totalitarian system, such public “admissions of mistakes” — and the synchronized dissemination thereof by the media — would just be a part of the process of whitewashing the authorities’ fascistic behavior during some particularly totalitarian phase of transforming society into whatever totalitarian dystopia they were trying to transform it into (for example, a three-year-long “state of emergency,” which they declared to keep the masses terrorized and cooperative while they stripped them of their democratic rights, i.e., the ones they hadn’t already stripped them of, and conditioned them to mindlessly follow orders, and robotically repeat nonsensical official slogans, and vent their impotent hatred and fear at the new “Untermenschen” or “counter-revolutionaries”), but that is obviously not the case here.
No, this is definitely not the German authorities staging a public “accountability” spectacle in order to memory-hole what happened during 2020-2023 and enshrine the official narrative in history. There’s going to be a formal “Inquiry Commission” — conducted by the same German authorities that managed the “crisis” — which will get to the bottom of all the regrettable but completely understandable “mistakes” that were made in the heat of the heroic battle against The Divisive Virus!
OK, calm down, all you “conspiracy theorists,” “Covid deniers,” and “anti-vaxxers.” This isn’t going to be like the Nuremberg Trials. No one is going to get taken out and hanged. It’s about identifying and acknowledging mistakes, and learning from them, so that the authorities can manage everything better during the next “pandemic,” or “climate emergency,” or “terrorist attack,” or “insurrection,” or whatever.
Thousands gathered outside the Reichstag building in Berlin to protest the “New Normal” totalitarianism this morning, so the police declared the demonstration illegal and turned the water cannons on them … are you satisfied yet, totalitarians? pic.twitter.com/j70CHsEWWM
Once they do, I’m sure they’ll find that that “mistake” bears absolutely no resemblance to the Enabling Act of 1933, which suspended the German constitution and granted the government the power to rule by decree, after the Nazis declared a nationwide “state of emergency.”
Another thing the Commission will probably want to look into is how the German authorities accidentally banned any further demonstrations against their arbitrary decrees, and ordered the police to brutalize anyone participating in such “illegal demonstrations.”
Memories fade, and history is rewritten, so here’s a 2.5 minute montage of goon squads in Germany (which, of course, bear no resemblance whatsoever to the SA, or the SS, or any other Nazi goons) enforcing compliance with official “New Normal” ideology during 2020-2022. https://t.co/GIrb4NCJcCpic.twitter.com/6BIOgLVLKx
And, while the Commission is inquiring into the possibly slightly inappropriate behavior of their law enforcement officials, they might want to also take a look at the behavior of their unofficial goon squads, like Antifa, which they accidentally encouraged to attack the “anti-vaxxers,” the “Covid deniers,” and anyone brandishing a copy of the German constitution.
Don’t worry, Covidian Cultists … German Antifa is mobilizing to unleash total war on “extremist neo-Nazi Corona Deniers” like the lady holding the copy of the German constitution in the lower right! pic.twitter.com/HkdXBxyaEJ
Come to think of it, the Inquiry Commission might also want to look into how the German authorities, and the overwhelming majority of the state and corporate media, accidentally systematically fomented mass hatred of anyone who dared to question the government’s arbitrary and nonsensical decrees or who refused to submit to “vaccination,” and publicly demonized us as “Corona deniers,” “conspiracy theorists,” “anti-vaxxers,” “far-right anti-Semites,” etc., to the point where mainstream German celebrities like Sarah Bosetti were literally describing us as the inessential “appendix” in the body of the nation, quoting an infamous Nazi almost verbatim.
And then there’s the whole “vaccination” business. The Commission will certainly want to inquire into that. They will probably want to start their inquiry with Karl Lauterbach, and determine exactly how he accidentally lied to the public, over and over, and over again …
And whipped people up into a mass hysteria over “KILLER VARIANTS” …
And “LONG COVID BRAIN ATTACKS” …
And how “THE UNVACCINATED ARE HOLDING THE WHOLE COUNTRY HOSTAGE, SO WE NEED TO FORCIBLY VACCINATE EVERYONE!”
And so on. I could go on with this all day, but it will be much easier to just refer you, and the Commission, to this documentary film by Aya Velázquez. Non-German readers may want to skip to the second half, unless they’re interested in the German “Corona Expert Council” …
Look, the point is, everybody makes “mistakes,” especially during a “state of emergency,” or a war, or some other type of global “crisis.” At least we can always count on the Germans to step up and take responsibility for theirs, and not claim that they didn’t know what was happening, or that they were “just following orders,” or that “the science changed.”
Plus, all this Covid stuff is ancient history, and, as Olaf, an editor at Der Spiegel, reminds us, it’s time to put the “The Divisive Pandemic” behind us …
… and click heels, and heil the New Normal Democracy!
Heavily armed and armored, the modern tank is a versatile and mobile weapons platform, and a critical piece of contemporary warfare.
This visualization, via Visual Capitalist’s Chris Dickert, shows the top 15 global tank fleets, using data from the 2024 Military Balance report from the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS).
Let’s take an in-depth look at the top three fleets:
1. United States
As the world’s pre-eminent military power, it’s perhaps no surprise that the United States also has the largest tank fleet, by a wide margin.
In total, they have just over 45,000 armored fighting vehicles in operation, along with 2,640 main battle tanks (MBTs), and 12,800 vehicles in storage, of which 2,000 are main battle tanks.
The U.S. is internalizing the lessons from the ongoing invasion of Ukraine, where Western-supplied anti-tank weapons and massed Ukrainian artillery have been cutting Russian tanks to pieces. As a result, the U.S. recently canceled an upgrade of the M1 Abrams in favor of a more ambitious upgrade.
Meanwhile, the U.S. is nervously eyeing a more confident China and a potential clash over Taiwan, where air and naval forces will be critical. However, a recent war game showed that Taiwanese mechanized ground forces, kitted out with American-made tanks and armored fighting vehicles, were critical in keeping the island autonomous.
2. Russia
According to Oryx, a Dutch open-source intelligence defense website, at time of writing, Russia has lost almost 2,800 main battle tanks since invading Ukraine. Considering that in the 2022 edition of the Military Balance, Russia was estimated to have 2,927 MBTs in operation, those are some hefty losses.
Russia has been able to maintain about 2,000 MBTs in the field, in part, by increasing domestic production. Many defense plants have been taken over by state-owned Rostec and now operate around the clock. Russia is also now spending a full third of their budget on defense, equivalent to about 7.5% of GDP.
At the same time, they’ve also been drawing down their Soviet-era stockpiles, which are modernized before being sent to the front. Just how long they can keep this up is an open question; their stockpiles are large, but not limitless. Here is what their storage levels look like:
3. China
China holds the third overall spot and top place globally for the number of main battle tanks in operation. Untypically, the People’s Liberation Army has no armored vehicles in storage, which perhaps isn’t surprising when you consider that China has been rapidly modernizing its military and that stockpiles usually contain older models.
China also has one of the world’s largest fleets of armored fighting vehicles, second only to the United States. Breaking down that headline number, we can also see that they have the largest number of light tanks, wheeled guns, and infantry fighting vehicles.
This is equipment that would be integral if China were to make an attempt to reunify Taiwan with the mainland by force, where lightly armored mechanized units need to move with speed to occupy the island before Western allies can enter the fray. It’s worth noting that China also has one of the world’s largest fleets of amphibious assault vehicles.
End of the Tank?
Many commentators at the outset of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, were quick to predict the end of the tank, however, to paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of the tank’s demise are greatly exaggerated.
With the U.S. and China both developing remote and autonomous armored vehicles, tanks could be quite different in the future, but there is nothing else that matches them for firepower, mobility, and survivability on the modern battlefield today.
