Well it looks like World War III is on the front burner now...

Well I thought peak oil would have caused an economic collapse; then I came to the concusuin of belief that climate change will beat peak oil to it; recently, I thought the now-emerging and next financial crisis would give climate change a good run for its money. Now, apparently, because Obama reportedly refused to speak with Russia about its Aegis missile defense plans in Eastern Europe, the threat of World War III a.k.a. The Apocalypse, Armageddon, the final Holocaust has now passed climate change and financial problems as the biggest and first threat to civilisation and even the existence of humanity itself.  Dimitri Orlov, among others, posted the following about Washington's constant bear-baiting of Mother Russia:

Originally posted as A Russian Warning -- Club Orlov, 31 May 2016:

We, the undersigned, are Russians living and working in the USA. We have been watching with increasing anxiety as the current US and NATO policies have set us on an extremely dangerous collision course with the Russian Federation, as well as with China. Many respected, patriotic Americans, such as Paul Craig Roberts, Stephen Cohen, Philip Giraldi, Ray McGovern and many others have been issuing warnings of a looming a Third World War. But their voices have been all but lost among the din of a mass media that is full of deceptive and inaccurate stories that characterize the Russian economy as being in shambles and the Russian military as weak—all based on no evidence. But we—knowing both Russian history and the current state of Russian society and the Russian military, cannot swallow these lies. We now feel that it is our duty, as Russians living in the US, to warn the American people that they are being lied to, and to tell them the truth. And the truth is simply this:

If there is going to be a war with Russia, then the United States

will most certainly be destroyed, and most of us will end up dead.

Let us take a step back and put what is happening in a historical context. Russia has suffered a great deal at the hands of foreign invaders, losing 22 million people in World War II. Most of the dead were civilians, because the country was invaded, and the Russians have vowed to never let such a disaster happen again. Each time Russia had been invaded, she emerged victorious. In 1812 Nepoleon invaded Russia; in 1814 Russian cavalry rode into Paris. On June 22, 1941, Hitler’s Luftwaffe bombed Kiev; On May 8, 1945, Soviet troops rolled into Berlin. 

But times have changed since then. If Hitler were to attack Russia today, he would be dead 20 to 30 minutes later, his bunker reduced to glowing rubble by a strike from a Kalibr supersonic cruise missile launched from a small Russian navy ship somewhere in the Baltic Sea. The operational abilities of the new Russian military have been most persuasively demonstrated during the recent action against ISIS, Al Nusra and other foreign-funded terrorist groups operating in Syria. A long time ago Russia had to respond to provocations by fighting land battles on her own territory, then launching a counter-invasion; but this is no longer necessary. Russia’s new weapons make retaliation instant, undetectable, unstoppable and perfectly lethal. 

Thus, if tomorrow a war were to break out between the US and Russia, it is guaranteed that the US would be obliterated. At a minimum, there would no longer be an electric grid, no internet, no oil and gas pipelines, no interstate highway system, no air transportation or GPS-based navigation. Financial centers would lie in ruins. Government at every level would cease to function. US armed forces, stationed all around the globe, would no longer be resupplied. At a maximum, the entire landmass of the US would be covered by a layer of radioactive ash. We tell you this not to be alarmist, but because, based on everything we know, we are ourselves alarmed. If attacked, Russia will not back down; she will retaliate, and she will utterly annihilate the United States.

Well I'm going to ask Dimitri to add my name to the list of persons as the undersigned of the warning. For more information, click here.

Not only do we have the utterly insane neo-cons running the foreign policy apparat in Washington, but we have utterly insane End-Times Christians running about the command of the US Armed forces catapulting Christian propaganda. And they know they can get away with it, because they have congressmen and senators to run interference for them.

From The Huffington Post: General ‘Jerry’ Boykin Says Gun-Toting Jesus Will Lead ‘Mighty Army’ During Second Coming, 02/20/2014:

Jesus is coming— and he’ll be carrying a really big gun when he does.
That’s what former U.S. Lieutenant General William G. “Jerry” Boykin thinks,according to a speech he gave on behalf of the conservative Family Research Council at the WallBuilders’ Pro-Family Legislators Conference, in which he describes his vision of the Second Coming of Christ, that he believes will be led by a blood-stained, gun-toting Jesus armed to the teeth with an AR-15 assault rifle.

To see what Boykin said, click here.

And from the same site, The Taliban in Our Midst, 5/22/2015:

ChristPsychotic USAF Major General Craig Olson
Photo Credit: U.S. Air Force photo by Jerry Saslav

Military officers who wear their religion on their sleeve are a danger to our country at any time, but especially after the terrorists attacks of September 11, 2001. 

Whether it’s US Army Lieutenant General William G. Boykin telling his audience that “My God is bigger than his” in the close aftermath of that tragedy, or the more recent example of US Air Force Major General Craig Olson saying in uniform and in public — and speaking in tones far more like a preacher than a military officer — “I am a redeemed believer in Christ,” these are dangerous men, making dangerous displays of religion. 

Moreover, such displays occur in an environment where they are strictly prohibited by secular rules. These rules — and in the case of the US Air Force, written regulations — are in place for a reason.

But these rules are routinely flouted because...

The USAF is understandably afraid of certain members of the US Congress, as are all the Services when it comes to presenting an overt challenge to what these members of Congress believe is “every Christian’s right to profess his or her religion, no matter the circumstances.” 

Congress’ constant dalliance with such pseudo-Christian organizations as James Dobson’s Focus on the Family — whose members most remind me of the people at the famous Scopes trial in Tennessee, who for the most part were hopelessly ignorant — exacerbates this fear.

For more information, click here.

And is the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter ready to do combat with Russia and China's best and most capable?

From Air Power Australia, the abstract of the RAAF's assessment of the F-35:

The Joint Strike Fighter is not designed to perform air superiority roles, unlike the larger F-22A, and is not well adapted to performing the penetrating long range strike role filled by the F-111 until 2010.

There has been considerable adverse press associated with JSF cost overruns, project delays, and other difficulties observed in this program. 

The JSF Program and resulting aircraft designs have, since the very first days of the program, been burdened by fatal optimism, a total indifference to what is real, placement of form over substance, the acquisition malpractice of concurrency and the fact that the STOVL F-35B is the baseline for all three variants, having dictated and constrained most if not all key aircraft parameters in the definition and resulting design of the other two JSF variants. 

The F-35 JSF aircraft designs will not meet specification nor the operational requirements laid down in the JSF JORD (Joint Operational Requirements Document) by significant degrees, noting that these operational requirements and resulting specifications, themselves, were predicated on the capabilities of reference threats from an era past and subsequently subjected to the illogical and deeply flawed process known as CAIV (Cost As an Independent Variable).

The designs of all three JSF variants are presenting with critical single points of failure while even the most basic elements of aircraft design (e.g. weight, volume, aerodynamics, structures, thermal management, electrical power, etc.) will almost certainly end up in what Engineers call "Coffin Corner". 

In essence, the unethical Thana Marketing strategy used to sell the JSF, along with the acquisition malpractice of concurrency in not only development, production and testing but the actual designs of the JSF variants, themselves, have resulted in the JSF marketeers writing cheques that the aircraft designs and JSF Program cannot honour.

 For more information in the form of charts and graphs comparing the F-35 with other USA-built aircraft, click here.

We are so not ready for World War III.

And what will happen if World War III goes off? Nuclear exchanges between the United States and Russia. It will be a Near-Term-Extinction Level Event that sets off a Nuclear Winter that will be really a mini-ice age.  After that, global warming.