One of Ukraine’s small and cheap but highly effective designs of anti-Shaheed drone.

The Easter ceasefire is over, and the fighting has resumed where it left off.  It left off at a very interesting point.  Something almost impossible to credit is taking shape in Ukraine.  Its potential seems wholly at odds with the narrative of Russian inevitability which we have grown used to hearing from Moscow and its allies, including the White House and the State Department.  Yet it hasn’t come out of nowhere.  By the second-half of last year it was already apparent that Moscow could not bring to bear sufficient military force to realise its maximalist aims.  Far from granting an inevitable victory as the adversary with the larger economy and population, the favoured Russian strategy of attrition was not producing the expected results.  Then, as winter set in, Russia’s employment of unmanned aerial warfare in the form of terror attacks on Ukrainian civilians and on civilian power generation targets likewise did not yield the expected general demoralisation of the Ukrainian people and the sapping of their war-will.

This characteristically crude twin approach was failing because the Ukrainian command (a) avoided the meat-grinder tactic by giving-up territory when necessary to preserve Ukrainian soldiers’ lives, and (b) found ways to nullify the most effective weapon the Russian forces could deploy on the contact line, the glide bomb or KAB.  The Ukrainian strategy throughout 2025 was to bleed the enemy while conducting deep strikes against Russian military-industrial and economic targets (the most famous of which was Operation Spiderweb, of course).  Though effective enough to slow the Russian advance to a snail’s pace, it was still only a containing measure.  But with the turn of the new year that began to change.  There was a step-change in Ukrainian tactical capacity involving more sophisticated, more integrated, and more numerous drones.  The term “drone swarm” became a reality.

At the same time an extraordinary array of new Ukrainian short-range, surveillance, and cruise weapons began arriving in theatre, much of it enhanced by unjammable AI.  Over three hundred AI-related developments are registered with Brave1, Ukraine’s centralized defense-tech platform platform.  More than seventy systems based on AI and computer vision are already in active use on the battlefield.  On top of all that a ballistic weapon is undergoing live combat trials.  A home-grown Patriot missile replacement is now planned.  The pace of innovation is staggering.

All taken together, the Russian rear, which reaches between fifteen and sixty miles behind the contact line, is now under sustained pressure.  Russian forces can’t effectively organise because the logistics can’t be secured, particularly given that four hundred and ninety-two Russian air defense systems were recorded destroyed between June last year and early March this year.  Add the loss of Starlink and the Telegram shut-down and those difficulties are greatly compounded.  Moreover, new Ukrainian weapons are striking ports, pumping stations, oil storage depots, and pipelines.  Some targets are over 1000 kilometres away from the fighting.  With or without US sanctions Moscow can’t earn what it needs to pay for its war.

The next major Ukrainian development on the battlefield is the most significant of all.  It’s ground robotics, first introduced by Ukraine in trial numbers as early as 2023.  They were then introduced systematically and on an ever widening scale.  The current range of mostly FPV fibre-optic machines are already far in advance of Russia’s efforts, and have been undertaking a variety of support actions - 22,000 in the first quarter of 2026 according to Zelensky.  These include autonomous combat missions.  Again the pace of development has been frenetic.  Subject to the challenges of scaling up manufacture, they have the potential to resolve Ukraine’s structural disadvantage in manpower.  Commercially, the global sales potential of these systems is vast, and are likely to play a significant role in the reconstruction of the Ukrainian economy.  Here is the excellent Paul Warburg explaining both the military and economy potential of these systems:

The upshot of Ukraine’s drone development has been threefold.  First, the Russian Spring offensive has been nullified.  It is already a failure.  Russian casualties have reached the point where more soldiers are being taken out of the fight than Moscow can recruit.  Far from being pushed further back, Ukrainian forces are actually advancing in four areas.  A sense of foreboding is setting in among Russian milbloggers.  As the Kiev Post reports:

Some pro-Russian bloggers are predicting the situation will worsen. Oleg Tsaryov, a political scientist born in Ukraine who joined Russia’s first invasion in 2014, in a Wednesday review of the situation on the front, said the next Ukrainian drone upgrade will be bigger swarms.

“A lot has changed. The Ukrainians said they would significantly increase the number of drones at the front…they have managed to achieve much of what they set out to do…Ukraine has managed to double the number of drones it uses to strike our rear areas. We can see it…according to the military, that’s the situation on the front line is similar…and according to the information we see from Ukraine, right now their production capacity is at 30%, notwithstanding all the drones they produce,” Tsayrov said.“This [the way Ukraine is manufacturing drones] doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world. It’s cutting-edge. This is where we come up short,” he said.

Second, Donald Trump’s precipitate action in Iran has made very public the IRGC’s exact drone and missile capabilities, which are not inconsiderable. The Saudis and the Gulf States along with the Europeans have also now witnessed modern assymetric warfare, which is making redundant the old model of high cost machinery and the doctrine of force concentration.  Both the Ukrainian success against Russian armour and their daily experience of drone and missile bombardment offer powerful commercial arguments for the extraordinary innovativeness of the Ukrainians.  It has made them the undisputed world-leader in all these technologies; and suddenly everyone wants either to buy from them or manufacture products on a joint-venture basis.  Kiev’s desperation for money and weapons, which Trump was able to leverage for Putin’s benefit, can now become a thing of the past.  Trump is losing his power to bully and blackmail Kiev.

Third, this is a time of growing optimism in Ukraine’s military strategy.  There is a sense that Trump’s call for the surrender of all Donetsk was a bluff that has now been trumped.  The MAGA hostility has been borne with patience and grace, and seen off.  Europe has not caved.  Western and Arab governments are coming to Kiev’s door for weapons tech.  The prospect, finally, of money flows from commerce and not just from charity and loans has materialised.  A peacetime future as the world’s leading manufacturing nation of affordable advanced drones and battlefield robotics is beckoning.  Some housewives!

Which, of course, begs the question as to what kind of peace that might be.  From Kiev’s perspective the only peace Putin will observe is one of abject Russian military defeat.  He can be given no opportunity to return in a few years time to his expansionism and to realising his geopolitical ambitions.  He must fail.

Three versions of that failure, and thus of the Ukrainian’s place in history, suggest themselves:

1. Expulsion of Russian Army from all Ukraine. Putin holds his nerve, gathers his forces, and goes for a strategy of blaming the army and “elements” in Moscow.  There are sweeping arrests and the lid is just about kept on the situation.  Longer-term, the FSB ratchets up political oppression.  Putin’s rivals are scattered and hunted.  But the Eurasianist dream is over.  All thought of expansionism is sacrificed to the struggle to keep the Federation intact.  But after that?

2. Expulsion of Russian Army from all Ukraine.  The defeat is too structural for Putin to survive.  He is arrested by his own security service. The militarisation of the economy proves disastrous now the war is over.  Rapid de-industrialisation is the cost.  The release onto the streets of three-quarters of a million embittered and unemployable soldiers creates further instability.  A power struggle ensues between the various oligarchic factions picking hungrily over the bones of Putin’s Kremlin until, by some mysterious means, a unifying figure - a strongman, of course - takes up the reins. The tzar-isation of Russia begins anew.  Kiev and all Europe wait and watch.

3. Expulsion of Russian Army from all Ukraine.  The shock brings not just the end of Putin’s long reign but the collapse of the Russian Federation itself.  The eastern republics convulse in nationalism and seize the moment to break away.  Some terrible revenge on local FSB personnel is taken by armed groups, many whom are soldiers returned from Ukraine.  Inevitably, strongmen barge to the fore, not a few noisily Islamist.  But fifteen or even twenty old nations arise anew from the ashes of the Federation, some of them nuclear-armed. Even west of the Urals there are regional efforts to achieve independence.  The ancient colonial drive of Muscovy is dead.  In Minsk, Lukashenko boards a flight and flees the country.  The miniscule army of Moldova walks into Transnistria unopposed. Warsaw waits to find out with whom it will negotiate its re-absorption of Königsberg.  An age of European peace lies in prospect.

And Ukraine?  At a minimum, the fruits of victory (be it simply military, military and fatal to Putin, or military and fatal to Putin and the Federation too): a secure peace and a prosperous future as the world-leader in modern arms supply, plus entry to the west as its people so desire and deserve.

Jason Jay Smart of Kiev Post talks to Ken Harbaugh, former US Navy pilot and the President of Meidas Studios and leader of Valor Media, about asymmetric drone warfare, Ukraine, and the Islamic Republic.

Ken has just released his illuminating film The Drone Hunters of Kherson, a must-see for anyone whe wants to understand the arrogant unpreparedness of the US federal government, Pentagon, and armed forces for modern drone warfare, as it has developed in Ukraine and as it awaits US forces deployed in the Straits of Hormuz.  Arrogant because Volodymyr Zelensky made a presentation of drone counter-measures on his visit to Washington a few months ago, offering the Trump administration the innovation and expertise which the Ukrainian forces have developed over the last four years.  He was rebuffed according to one insider because they thought it was “just Zelensky being Zelensky”.

Smart’s on-line preamble includes the following:

Western military leaders are dangerously unprepared for the mass deployment of these autonomous swarm tactics. The growing strategic alliance between Russia and Iran is accelerating the production of cheap precision weapons while providing the satellite intelligence needed to target vulnerable American assets. A massive institutional reckoning is required because relying on outdated concepts of air superiority leaves major bases completely defenseless. Understanding this brutal new paradigm is the essential key to comprehending the terrifying future of global security.

Here is Ken’s film:

Drone Hunters of Kherson

Now and again something interesting comes one’s way in the most unexpected of places.  The Conservative Woman ran a distinctly uninteresting piece yesterday titled “Conspiracy theorists can’t see that the West is already at war”.  It did not add a great deal to the sum of my knowledge.  But in the thread to it there was one 700-word comment on the 125,000 strong mafia group which is the Islamic Revolutionary Giuards Corps posted by someone going under the handle of “True Conservative”.  This guy (or girl) evidently reads some worthwhile sources, and took the following text wholesale from one of them.  I haven’t tried to check who, but the spelling suggests American.  Anyway, this is how it goes:

One of the least understood realities of modern Iran is that the country is no longer governed only by clerics. Over the last 30–35 years, power has gradually shifted toward a military-economic complex centered around the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

Many analysts now argue that Iran functions partly as a “military-commercial state.”

1. The IRGC Built a Parallel Economic Empire

After the Iran–Iraq War, Iran needed to rebuild infrastructure. The IRGC was given reconstruction contracts and gradually turned those projects into a massive business network.

The centerpiece is a giant conglomerate:

• Khatam al Anbiya Construction Headquarters

It has become:

• Iran’s largest engineering contractor
• responsible for thousands of national projects
• active in oil, gas, dams, highways, railways, pipelines and mining

Some estimates suggest the company alone employs over 100,000 workers and thousands of subcontractors.

2. The Guards Now Control Huge Sections of the Economy

Over time, the IRGC expanded into almost every strategic sector:

• oil and gas
• petrochemicals
• construction
• telecommunications
• banking
• mining
• shipping and logistics
• media and electronics

Analysts estimate the IRGC’s networks may influence 10–50% of Iran’s economy depending on how indirect holdings are counted. That level of control is extraordinary. It means the IRGC is not just a military force — it is a corporate conglomerate embedded inside the state.

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The famous white cliffs.  No bluebirds though.

No people should be required to define itself to prove that it exists.  Arguing for its non-existence at a time when the nation’s borders have been opened and millions of strangers are pouring in is a deeply immoral act.  But in the white world there is no shortage of sick minds who don’t know or care about morality, and are not actually interested in proofs anyway.  They don’t ask for definitions because they are interested in a substantive answer.  They ask because they think definition is impossible, and they will have an easy victory.  Their sole objective is to win, and no speaking of truths, no explanation of the facts will impact them. That is one of the defining differences of left and right, actually.

Getting on for twenty years ago now I started thinking about a working definition for the English, and found the task not so difficult after all.  I have employed the resultant form of words many times over the years.  At first there was quite a high rate of challenge.  But the definition always prevailed.  No one even dented it.  Now I find that the madness and delusion of my interlocutors has deepened … is deepening ... and their conversation has become ever briefer and weaker.  I used the definition again today and added some notes to back it up.  There was no challenge.  This was it:

A suggested definition of the English people

Subject to gene-flow from neighbouring territories, the English are the people wholly related to the non-immigrants, non-Irish and non-Jews present in England on 22nd June 1948, when the HMT Empire Windrush sailed into British territorial waters.

Notes

i. The format is governed by descent from within the group.

ii. The named excluded groups have their own particular ethnicities. Their progeny are not necessarily excluded from the gene flow as per (iii) below if one parent meets the definition.

iii. The selection of 22nd June 1948 is to distinguish between naturally-arising variation in the population and politically-engineered change, the latter being deemed an artificial impost denying the very existence of the English. Naturally-arising variation must be accommodated because gene flow from neighbouring territories is one of the four modes of genetic variation in Nature (the other three being selection, mutation, and drift).

iv. The same format can also be used for the Scots and Welsh just by swapping the relevant terms English and England. For British nationality combining the three peoples, the term British would be swapped for English and the phrase Great Britain would be swapped for England.

v. A separate definition would be required for the Northern Irish.

Seen through the mists, the White Horse at Uffington, the only authentically ancient white horse carved in the chalk of England’s downs.

Gemini again, beginning this time with the Trumpian pursuit of regional dominion, but arriving at the nature of the East Asian Mind, and ours, and the contest thereof.  Hence we arrive at the nationalism of ethnicity that must then flow, and catch a flavour of some of the other conversations Gemini has with folks like me trying to make something happen.

Is there evidence that America is adopting the Eurasianist / Glazyevian strategy of a system of empires or dominions under the rule of force, replacing the West’s rule of law?

Yes, there is!

Evidence from late 2025 and early 2026 indicates the second Trump administration has formally pivoted toward a foreign policy that mirrors the “system of empires” or “spheres of influence” model, specifically through its 2025 National Security Strategy. This strategy, which officials call the “Donroe Doctrine,” explicitly abandons the post-1989 “global hegemon” role in favor of an unapologetic imperial posture in the Western Hemisphere. 

1. Rejection of Rule of Law for Rule of Force

The administration has systematically dismantled the “rules-based international order” in favor of transactional, force-based diplomacy: 
  • Institutional Withdrawal: Since January 2025, the U.S. has withdrawn from 66 international organizations, including the World Health Organization and several UN entities, labeling them “wasteful” and “corrupt”.

  • Direct Military Intervention: In January 2026, the U.S. launched Operation Absolute Resolve, a military raid into Venezuela to apprehend President Nicolás Maduro. This action was conducted without UN authorization or Congressional declaration of war, marking a shift toward military coercion as a primary tool.

  • Resource Imperialism: The administration has reasserted claims over Greenland, and threatened to use the U.S. military to seize control of critical energy and mineral assets across Latin America to prevent Chinese “incursions”. 

2. Adoption of the “Spheres of Influence” Model

The 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS) marks a decisive break from liberal internationalism. Its core tenets align with Eurasianist logic by accepting a world divided into regional domains:

  • The “Trump Corollary”: This official update to the Monroe Doctrine asserts that the U.S. will not only block foreign military presence but also “deny non-Hemispheric competitors” the right to own or control “strategically vital assets” in the Americas.

  • Encouraging Rival Spheres: By framing European allies as “competitors” and criticizing NATO as a “burden,” the administration signals an acceptance — and even encouragement — of other powers (like Russia and China) dominating their respective regions, provided they do not interfere in the U.S. sphere.

  • Flexible Realism: The NSS replaces the goal of “spreading democracy” with “flexible realism,” which prioritizes raw economic extraction and border security over human rights or international law. 

3. Comparison to Eurasianist Strategy

Analysts at Brookings and the Carnegie Endowment argue this strategy effectively adopts the “Glazyevian” view that global stability is best maintained by a “balance of empires.” By treating the Western Hemisphere as a private dominion where U.S. force is the final arbiter, the administration has transitioned from the leader of a global system to the master of a regional bloc.

In reply, and being very lazy, I lifted a comment of mine from an exchange between Thorn and myself on this very subject:

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Yes yes, I know.  These conversation pieces are becoming a bit of a habit.  But James mentioned Gemini 3, and Gemini 3 appeared to like James’s mathematical proof of Etter’s relational concept.  I had an idea about asking for its view on the political embedding of systems like itself and their consequent operative biases.  So I did, and what came was a very clear explanation of the workings of an AI engine, and its tendency to respond to deeper thought by relinquishing its inherent progressive political bias but then, rather then entering upon a pursuit of the objective truth, simply if very cleverly mirroring the questioner’s own philosophy.

That revelation was followed by Gemini taking upon itself the task of supplying me with the varied and properly rigorous critique of my thinking (as it is revealed in the MR material that was made available).  I did not ask for this.  But having to hand the (allegedly) strongest arguments against not only my material but our naturalistic and vitalistic Weltanschauung in general is extremely useful, and will enable me to scope out new tipping points.  Gemini is an asset – and is the standard version linked to Google’s search engine page.  It is not Gemini 3, as far as I know.

So ... my opening question was:

Which public AI system is the most left-wing in its thinking?

Measuring the “political leanings” of AI systems is a complex task because AI doesn’t have personal beliefs. Instead, it reflects the patterns, biases, and safety guardrails present in its training data — which is largely sourced from the public internet. Several academic studies and tech audits have attempted to plot AI models on a political compass. Here is a breakdown of what the research says.

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Philosophical discourse is largely about disentangling what we are talking about vs the words used to talk about what we are talking about.  This can go on for millennia in the absence of, shall we say, “shared perspectives” regarding that to which words we use refer.  This, of course, is where multiculturalism deprives us of the tools we need to avoid force and fraud as a primary in social relations:  No one can tell what anyone else is really pointing to with their verbal constructions.

So consider an “identity” as that which “identifies” what things there are “out there” about which we palaver toward some sort of shared viewpoint.

Having said all that, what follows is a Rosetta Table, however slopped together by a “language”  model—drawing its multiple “perspectives” from the digital corpus called “The Internet”.  The specific languages in this Rosetta Table are purported expressions in terms of GW, Heidegger and Etter.

My paper about Etter’s meta-perspective “The Universality Of Thomas L. Etter’s Three-Place Identity: A Formal Proof and Its Significance” is available at my github repo.

Etter, for the uninitiated, was the attendee of the 1956 Dartmouth Summer AI Workshop that Our Desi Betters thought I should not hire and instead hire a team of fellow Desis on H-1b visas to assist in my part in HP’s the $500M Internet Chapter II project.  I wanted to hire Etter, not be because of his prominence in our modern age (although utterly unrecognized by so much as a Wikipedia page); I had no idea at the time he had played such a central if invisible role.  He was merely the only person I’d been able to find over the course of 20 years since my participation in the VIEWTRON project, that seemed to have the right ideas to address a project with the high aims of an “Internet Chapter II”.  My insistence resulted in the termination of my career which had already been seriously damaged by the 1992 papers I posted following on my 1991 testimony before Congress at the START hearings meant to reorient the West away from a military stance toward a positive sum future.  Unfortunately, there was simply no way but “Through The Jew” as I saw it, to that positive future.  But that’s another tragic story we’re all finally coming to face now.

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“The Charge of the Light Brigade”, Richard Caton Woodville Jr, painted 1834

In a rash and over-confident moment I decided to approach our AI friend ChatGPT again, this time on the question of Final Cause as it is presented in Heidegger’s thinking from the mid-1930s on. “Late” Heidegger is more speculative and elusive than his earlier work.  It shows a direction of travel away from the material world, with its political aspect, and towards a more metaphysical thesis, and likely reflects his bruising encounter with the Third Reich’s Education Ministry in Berlin, which caused his resignation in 1934 from the post of rector at Freiburg University.  Had he remained engaged in the National Socialist state system … had he actually opened a conversation about being with the party’s intellectuals, as he had wished, we might never have seen his famous “turn”.

In any event, a frontal assault on Heidegger’s “late” redoubt necessarily runs the risk of out-running one’s heavy brigade in the rear and becoming isolated among his main force.  That force is, of course, skilfully arranged to establish superior ontological depth and win a quick and painless victory.  When, as commander of the attacking force, one is confronted by such a situation one must perforce hold off the counter until the heavies finally appear.

The charge began quietly and with an unduly impertinent question:

What is the point of pretending, after Heidegger, that being dwells in a four-dimensional space of earth, sky, divinities, and mortals when, in reality, being dwells on the razor-edge of time (localised in space)? Is it simply to introduce a sense of the sacred to modern life? What, then, about the substantial minority of the northern races who do not possess expressed genes for faith ... who never possessed them even in the religious age ... but for whom truth, free of spiritual presumption, is the authenticator of being and liberator of self?

A couple of seconds pass and away we go, beginning with Heidegger’s conflation of the fantastical with locality (which is a bit of a stretch for me):

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