Not only no defensive capabilities, they have nothing close in offensive capabilities. Only prototypes.
Seems that Russian missiles are miles ahead despite having like 1/15 of the budget. They've got new ICBMs instead of 60 year old expired Minuteman, they've got hypersonic cruise missiles and regular cruise missiles by the thousands. They've used more missiles in a year in Ukraine than the US has used in Iraq in total. With no budget and under a billion sanctions!
Also, Russia is making like 800 tanks a year while the US is making 40. And hundreds of thousands of artillery shells per month instead of like 20,000. Hell, Slovenia is saying they'll be making 100,000 per month soon.
I understand that the Navy with their giant aircraft carriers is very expensive, but it makes you wonder what the hell the US is spending so much fucking money on. Besides free boob surgery for trans people, I mean.
A collapse is the only way the US can avoid paying its otherwise unpayable debt. The only thing unclear is how this will happen, by defaulting or by hyperinflation.
I think definitely the second one, because it offers the best out for the big players who get first shot at the cash trough.
The fed will pivot and lower rates to zero soon, everything will start to grow at crazy speeds, as everyone tries to get onto the last bug rush before the crash. This will cause hyperinflation and the death of the dollar, to be reborn as dollar 2.0 digital boogaloo
Wood is renewable.
That doesn't mean most of Europe wasn't deforested by the 19th century.
Or like the completely destroyed great virgin forests of the USA, like in Ohio or Illinois.
Or that unchecked logging is just fine and dandy.
Good thing that our demands on oil since the 60s are also suuper slowly growing.
Oh, wait, no, that growth is pretty much exponential. China will only need like 800 million tons per year of oil by 2030. That's only about as much as the entire world needed in 1960.
I'm sure it's not a problem. EROI of oil went from like 100 to 10, that's also fine, because in a few hundred/thousand years the oil fields will refill.
Yeah, the reason oil companies started using new and really expensive drilling techniques is BECAUSE THEY ARE FUCKING RETARDS, right?
You're the smart guy here, there was absolutely no reason for that, those retarded Texans should have just waited like a year or two and continued pumping like it was 1930.
Because the process to refill the oil fields is totally instantaneous, right? And also in line with exponential usage growth. Oil fields that took thousands of years to fill only take a week, tops, to refill.
Yep. You deserve a Nobel prize in all the science because of that one college report you did.
It doesn't benefit, it actively harms the Ukrainian people.
Their country is already destroyed, and it's going to get 10x worse. Millions displaced, hundreds of thousands dead. Cities destroyed. Economy in shreds. All for the "freedom" to join NATO, which Russia was never going to allow to happen, as they've been saying since the 90s.
We have a perfect example of what happens when a war like this is lost by the US puppet wanting to join NATO: Georgia in 2008. Georgia is a peaceful country with a growing GDP, pretty much free of Russian meddling, because Russia doesn't fucking care about what sort of corrupt idiots anyone wants to elect as long as they want trade and graft instead of NATO.
The only Ukrainians who would have lost had Ukraine surrendered are the functionaries of the Zelensky regime. And also the coked-up muppet with delusions of grandeur himself.
But having the regime lose is not the same thing as having your country destroyed
Relax, after the last Ukrainian is dead, there is all of Poland and the Baltics remaining to push through the meat grinder.
Also, Finland. Their new degenerate drug-addled slut of a prime minister will be more than happy to do her duty to the WEF
The larger point is that Russia simply cannot do what the USA did to Iraq or Libya in Ukraine because Ukraine will forever and always be next door.
Imagine the US taking out all of Mexico. What'll happen next? All of Mexico (even more than today) will be flooding into the US, but angrier than ever. And the US will have to spend trillions rebuilding Mexico if they don't want the world's worst shit hole as neighbor for the next thousand years.
Considering everything in Ukraine was built by the USSR, this is even more the case. Every powerplant destroyed in Ukraine is one that originally came out of Moscow's budget and will have to be rebuilt by the same budget.
So Russia is trying to win (not territory, but strategic security) by doing the least amount of damage possible. But the USA/NATO isn't allowing Russia an easy win and is forcing Russia to do what they never wanted to do -- destroy Ukraine.
Because it's not the war that will bankrupt Russia, but the rebuilding everything that comes after if all of Ukraine is destroyed
Unless Russia builds a wall 100 feet high and tells the EU that the radioactive shit hole formerly known as Ukraine is now their problem
Ukrainian history is very short. The country has never existed as such before the 1920s and then for a few short years before becoming part of the Soviet Union and then again as a new country after 1991.
All their symbols are a crazy and fucked up mish-mash of Russian, Polish, Austro-Hungarian and "local shithole farm" created from an attempt to back-port "Ukrainian" as something that existed since the dawn of time. It never did and it never was, always being a territory hotly contested between East vs West and a conflict that created it's own sort of culture and people that is more like a spectrum than anything.
Anyway, the actual trident symbol was originally used by the Rurikids: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbols_of_the_Rurikids
Sweden has more claim to being the origin of the Rurik dynasty than the local swine-herders that populated the fields and forests of current-day Ukraine during those times.
Joe Biden called Putin and asked for permission before going. And then he went because he trusts that Putin keeps his word.
So brave.
Anyway, Putin is probably only too happy to have that incompetent, corrupt dementia patient as president of the USA.
The "rules based world order" is that the USA makes the rules.
Russia is the first semi-powerful country to say "fuck your rules, we're going to take our ball and go play somewhere else"
And the reason so much effort is being spent -- not to mention Ukrainians -- to stop this, is because there is a very real risk other countries are going to do the same thing if Russia gets away with it. For the simple reason that the rules made by the USA mostly totally suck donkey balls, including for the people of America itself.
Meanwhile, the productive patriots won't even riot once they start implementing 15 minute cities and replace your cereal with dried cricket paste.
It's like "I do everything the authorities tell me to do, why aren't things getting better!"
Every single source of capital, except gold and silver, are currently based of off debt.
Debt works as long as people have faith that the debt they hold is as good as actual money
As soon as this faith is gone, the whole thing crashes completely. What good is a promise to pay back 10x or even 100000x of what someone is borrowing from you if you know that they cannot pay it back?
Well, the government cannot pay it back. No one can. Outside of just the direct government debt, you have all the household debt (like 16+ trillion) and all the different unfunded liabilities and assorted IOUs like pensions and Medicaid, the total amount of "promise to pay it back" is more than $100 trillion.
Moving your dollar money into a CU or even under your mattress isn't going to change any of that. When the system collapses, 99/100 of the value of your money is gone, poof, even if you kept it in fat stacks in a safe.
The only thing that will hold value is gold and silver, if you've got someplace to store it physically. But what you really need for when the faith-based credit system looses faith is food and basic supplies for a few months.
250,000 Union soldiers died to create an American empire out of a voluntary union.
Before the war, a state could join or leave the union at will.
After the war, it was a single centralized federal government and the states couldn't do shit.
Look, the USA doesn't give two shits about Ukraine or Ukrainians. No one does, except Russia. If you understand this basic fact, everything about the conflict makes sense.
What people call (eastern) Ukraine has been part of Russia for longer than the USA has existed. The only reason it is no longer is due to petty soviet tyrants and shithead bureaucrats.
All those cities and critical infrastructure being bombed today were built by Russian money, using Russian labor and defended by countless rivers of Russian blood from different enemies vying for the same tasty land parcels. And they wanted it in their sphere of influence whole, not in a pile of rubble.
The US doesn't want Russia to have it back whole.
That is the whole point of the war. Russia will reassert their dominance in the region regardless of all else simply because of the way geography and logistics work.
The US is making sure that Russia gets a destroyed hellscape instead of the things they spent centuries building. The Russians don't want this, which is why they've been trying to fight a war without fighting an actual war for a year now.
And the Ukrainians are all largely brainwashed retards who are willing to turn their country into a hellscape so that their oligarch masters get to live out a very comfortable life somewhere in the West when all this is over.
The point-blank murder of prisoners happens to make Russians angry enough so that they get over their reticence about destroying Ukraine. The Russian's job is to destroy and kill everyone as thoroughly as possible so that they have to spend decades and untold billions rebuilding everything.
Or she had a stroke or something and no longer functions very well.