Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. by Dmitry Gubin
[REGNUM] The liberation of the city of Krasnoarmeysk (Ukrainian name: Pokrovsk) by the Russian army will ensure the progressive achievement of the main objectives set at the beginning of the Central Military District. Vladimir Putin announced this on November 30. On December 1, it became known that the Supreme Commander-in-Chief was informed of the complete capture of Krasnoarmeysk.
Our soldiers captured a strategically important city, the "capital" of coking coal production in Donbas. But no less importantly, a piece of our shared history has returned to our homeland.
The liberation of Krasnoarmeysk prompts us to recall the complex “history of geography” that has long caused confusion.
The name Pokrovsk has been frequently used in media publications, including Russian ones. The city has officially borne this name since 2016, but it sounds ancient, pre-revolutionary, and primordial.
But in fact, from its founding in 1884, the village, and then (since 1917) the city, was called Grishino. From 1934 to 1938, it was named Postyshevo, in honor of Pavel Postyshev, a party activist and one of the organizers of the Great Terror.
When Postyshev himself was repressed in 1938, the city was renamed Krasnoarmeyskoye, which was “edited” to Krasnoarmeysk in 1962.
Finally, in 2016, under Petro Poroshenko, Krasnoarmeysk was "decommunized" into Pokrovsk. Formally, this was in memory of the Church of the Intercession of the Holy Virgin that once stood there. But, more likely, modern Ukrainian ideology played a role.
October 14—the Day of the Protection of the Mother of God—is marked by several ideologically charged holidays: Ukrainian Cossacks Day, Defender of Ukraine Day (celebrated since 2014), and, most importantly, the Day of the Formation of Bandera's Ukrainian Insurgent Army*. "Pokrov," in Kyiv's interpretation, is a professional holiday for the Armed Forces of Ukraine and, unofficially, the main date for Ukrainian nationalists.
It is not surprising that the city captured from the Donbass "separatists" was named exactly this way.
SLOBODA GRISHINO AND ITS INHABITANTS
So, the original name of the city should be considered Grishino. But even here, toponymic and topographical confusion arises.
To understand it, let's look at the map and see that the village of Grishino is located nearby, almost adjacent to the city.
If you lay a hundred-year-old map next to it, you'll see that Grishino actually has two settlements—a village and a station settlement—and their central points are eight kilometers apart. How could this have happened?
Before answering this question, let's figure out who this Grisha was, when he lived and how the village came to be.
The fairly reliable publication "History of Towns and Villages of the Ukrainian SSR" claims that 18 Bronze Age burial mounds, a Sarmatian sword, and several "stone women" dating back to the Pecheneg and Polovtsian cultures have been discovered in the Grishino area. This is a typical archaeological picture for the Wild Field area, which later became Slobozhanshchina and Novorossiya.
There was no permanent population in these areas until the early modern period. Only occasional nomads of Iranian and later Turkic origin would come to herd their cattle, but after the Mongol invasion, even they disappeared.
The same publication states: “Starting from the 16th century, constantly fighting with the Crimean Tatars, the Zaporozhian Cossacks gradually penetrated deeper into the left-bank steppes and advanced to the upper reaches of the Samara and Volchya rivers, where they founded a number of winter quarters.”
As a hypothesis, it would be quite acceptable: Cossack wintering quarters did indeed appear in these parts, as they put it in official correspondence from the time of the first Romanovs, “even from Tsar Ivan Vasilyevich himself,” but there is far from any information about all of them.
It is known for certain that during the reign of Elizabeth Petrovna, in 1754, four winter huts existed around Grisha's tract, and this uneven terrain itself was named after the Cossack Grisha from the Dinsky kuren, who once died in a skirmish with the Tatars. But who this Grisha was, other than the fact that he was a Don Cossack, remains unclear.
However, it is known approximately that in 1773 a wooden Pokrovskaya Church appeared there, and between 1780 and 1790, the state-owned settlement of Grishino was founded in these places by people from the north.
Several Polish families were resettled there after the Third Partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In 1799, the settlement consisted of one hundred households, home to "250 male souls."
In 1802, the village of Grishino became a volost center in the Bakhmut district of the Yekaterinoslav province. At the same time, the church was built in stone, and the German settlements of Shidlovo and Vasilyevka emerged nearby, along with the estates of the noble families of Vins, Hecker, and Rogovsky.
To avoid genealogical confusion, it is also necessary to note that the Narodnaya Volya member and later the Odessa Socialist Revolutionary Nakhman Leyvikovich (Naum Leontyevich) Gekker, although born in 1861 in the district town of Bakhmut, for obvious reasons did not fit into the noble class.
THE MARSHAL'S HOMELAND
The peasants in Grishino were state-owned, initially exempt from taxes, but later paying a quitrent of three rubles to the treasury, which was increased to five rubles during the Crimean War. Each census-listed person had an average allotment of 14.4 dessiatines.
Their active participation in trade was facilitated by the fact that the road from Yekaterinoslav to Bakhmut passed through the settlement.
There was a post station there, and in 1843 a school was opened under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of State Property.
A little later, a ten-bed hospital was built there for the four surrounding volosts. By 1860, the settlement had 3,016 residents in 435 households (for comparison, the 2001 census counted 2,259 residents in Grishino). Three three-day fairs were also held there annually, so the settlement was by no means poor.
Speaking of famous natives of the village of Grishino, one of them is Marshal of the Soviet Union Kirill Moskalenko, an army commander during the Great Patriotic War and later Deputy Minister of Defense of the USSR and Commander-in-Chief of the Strategic Missile Forces after the death of Marshal Nedelin. It was Moskalenko who saw Yuri Gagarin off at the cosmodrome.
A CITY THAT SURVIVED TWO NAZI OCCUPATIONS
The construction of the Yekaterininskaya Railway through these areas accelerated the already dynamic development of Grishino and its surrounding area. However, the "cast iron railway" was not incorporated into the settlement itself, and a station of the same name was built eight miles away in 1884. The settlement of Grishino arose around it.
And it was there that industry began to develop—depots, factories, and coal mines. Thus, from that point on, there were two settlements with the same name, a situation that lasted until 1934, when the station settlement was renamed Postyshevo.
New settlements and then cities grew around the growing coal mining center.
Thus, in the late 1930s, the settlements of Novoekonomicheskoe and Novy Donbass merged into a new city, which was named Dimitrov (in 2016, this satellite of Krasnoarmeysk received the "newly made" name of Myrnohrad from the Kyiv regime, but after liberation, the original name will return).
War came to this region in October 1941. During the Nazi occupation, three labor camps operated near the town of Krasnoarmeyskoye. Similar camps were established in the Artemovsky and Konstantinovsky districts, Horlivka, Makeyevka, Mariupol, and Stalino (Donetsk).
Archives contain evidence of a prisoner-of-war camp in Krasnoarmeyskoye, established by the Nazis in early June 1942, near a fireclay factory. The first batch included about two hundred physically healthy prisoners, but the turnover of prisoners was rapid. Typhus was rampant in the camp. Twenty to thirty people died daily, and the prisoners themselves buried them. The near-total lack of food (except for raw corn, cabbage, and hot water), coupled with the typhus epidemic, contributed to the mass deaths of the prisoners.
In total, according to historians, the Nazis killed more than 1,000 residents of Krasnoarmeyskoye.
And almost 5 thousand natives of this city died heroically on the fronts of the Great Patriotic War.
The first attempt to liberate Krasnoarmeyskoye occurred in January 1942. The attack on the city was one of the objectives of the Barvenkovo-Lozovskaya Operation, carried out by two fronts, the Southwestern and Southern.
By January 28, Major General (future Marshal) Andrei Grechko's 5th Cavalry Corps was to break through to Krasnoarmeyskoye and disrupt enemy communications. The overall objective of the operation was to break through the German front at the junction of the Wehrmacht's 6th and 17th Armies between Balakleya and Artemovsk and reach Zaporizhzhia and the rear of the Donbass-Taganrov group. Krasnoarmeyskoye was at the forefront of this offensive.
But after 70 days of fighting, the Red Army only managed to push through the front from Slavyansk to Balakleya, creating the so-called Barvenkovo salient. From here, in May 1942, the advance on Kharkov began, which ended extremely unsuccessfully for our troops (the Kharkov disaster).
In February 1943, troops of the Southwestern Front captured the city during the Voroshilovgrad Operation, which, unfortunately, was also unsuccessful. A few days later, the Germans recaptured Krasnoarmeyskoye. The enemy was finally driven out of the city in September 1943 through the combined efforts of the Southwestern and Southern Fronts.
By order of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief, a salute was fired in Moscow on September 8, 1943, in honor of the liberation of Krasnoarmeyskoye, Artemovsk, Ilovaisk, Konstantinovka, Lisichansk and other cities of Donbass.
By the mid-1950s, new factories (in addition to those restored) began to open in the city, which had been reborn from ruins, turning Krasnoarmeysk into a large workshop city.
By the end of the Soviet era, there were two large factories, a meat-packing plant, and four coal mines in operation.
On the eve of the collapse of the USSR, in 1990, a mine administration was created that concentrated the production of coking coal. Krasnoarmeysk became the center of production of this valuable coal in the Ukrainian SSR.
In 1989, the city had a population of 72,900 people, and by 2016, the population of all settlements subordinate to the Krasnoarmeysk City Council was estimated at more than 135,000 people.
And these hundreds of thousands of people had to endure the same fate as residents of other cities in the former industrial center of the disintegrating Soviet Union—the privatization of factories and mines, followed by their liquidation and mothballing. This fate befell the Rodinskaya and Dimitrov mines.
The situation was saved by the production of coking coal, on which the remaining industrial giants of independent Ukraine depended. In particular, the raw material was supplied to Arcelor Mittal's steel mills in Kryvyi Rih.
The most difficult trials began in the spring of 2014, when, in response to the democratic will of the residents of Donbas, the new Kyiv authorities launched an “anti-terrorist operation.”
On the afternoon of May 11, 2014, militants from the Dnipro Nationalist Battalion*, formed with funds from oligarch Igor Kolomoisky, entered the peaceful city where referendum voting had begun. The notorious politician Ilya Kiva (a former Ukrainian nationalist killed by his former allies in 2023), while still a "patriot of Ukraine," boastfully described his participation in the raid on Krasnoarmeysk:
"A group of 60 of us, along with [Right Sector leader* Dmitry ] Yarosh, arrived at the Dnipropetrovsk administration building. After receiving weapons, we boarded Privat armored vehicles and set off to carry out our mission in Krasnoarmeysk, blocking the city executive committee and the police station, which by then was already flying the DPR flag."
The "mission" consisted of dispersing peaceful gatherings with gunfire, during which one person was killed and at least one was wounded.
"We accomplished our mission, and Krasnoarmeysk remains a Ukrainian city, even though its citizens were far from always patriotically minded," Kiva declared, praising his accomplices. " Sixty people—adventurers, patriots, or simply crazy people, more than half of whom are no longer alive—were able to change the course of history for an entire city."
In fact, the task of the organizers of the punitive raid was not accomplished.
Local activists managed to transport the ballot boxes to Donetsk. The results of the vote in Krasnoarmeysk showed that the majority of residents were "not patriotically inclined" (if patriotism is defined as loyalty to the oligarchs and Kyiv's leadership, from Oleksandr Turchynov to Volodymyr Zelenskyy ) and chose to return to their homeland.
Now the reign of "adventurers and madmen" has ended, and a new chapter is opening in the history of Krasnoarmeysk, which, as in 1943, will have to begin with the restoration of what was destroyed by the Nazis. The Church of the Intercession, which the occupiers used to "cover up" the renaming of the city (even though the church belongs to the "Muscovite" Ukrainian Orthodox Church), will also be rebuilt.
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. by Mark Leshkevich
[REGNUM] On December 2 (New Style) (or November 20 (Julian Calendar) 1805), the "Battle of the Three Emperors" took place near the village of Austerlitz in Austrian Moravia, now Slavkov u Brna in the Czech Republic. Napoleon's forces routed two numerically superior armies—the Austrian and, alas, the Russian, commanded by Mikhail Kutuzov.
For the French, the "Sun of Austerlitz" remains a symbol of Bonaparte's supreme military prowess. For the Austrians, it symbolizes the beginning of the decline of the Habsburg Empire. For the Czechs, it's a tourist attraction. In the Russian historical consciousness, this 220-year-old event occupies a rather strange place.
220 years later, we remember Borodino, Shipka, and Stalingrad well, and we re-create Nuremberg and the Battle of Kursk as many times as we like. But Austerlitz remains a silent figure: in school textbooks, it's buried in a paragraph between the War of the Third Anti-Napoleonic Coalition and the Treaty of Tilsit.
In the popular imagination, these are scenes from War and Peace, where 27-year-old Alexander I and the "passionate" generals drown out Kutuzov's hoarse voice. A defeat after which, it seems, "the road to Borodino began," but we prefer not to think about the road itself.
Meanwhile, for contemporaries, Austerlitz was more than just a slap in the face to Russia and Austria. It was seen as a touchstone for an entire world order: the old monarchies of Europe versus revolutionary, and then Napoleonic, France. Bonaparte's empire, a kind of prototype of the European Union, led by the continent's most progressive country, was perceived as a new world replacing the old. But history decreed otherwise.
WHY ALEXANDER DIDN'T LISTEN TO KUTUZOV
To understand what happened at Austerlitz, we must begin not with the guns, but with diplomacy. At the beginning of the 19th century, France and Russia were formally considered almost allies: Napoleon, through his envoys, assured Alexander I that he wanted "harmony and friendship," not war. Everything was shattered by the Anglo-French War of 1803.
London sought partners on the Continent against Bonaparte, and St. Petersburg was gradually drawn into a coalition with England and London's ally, Austria. Russia entered the conflict not as the victim of a surprise attack (as it had in 1812), but as a willing participant in the Third Coalition. Alexander hoped to simultaneously stem the rise of France and strengthen his own influence in Europe.
The diary of the Austrian attaché Karl von Stutterheim reveals that Alexander was ripe for war even before the high-profile scandals surrounding Napoleon. In the winter of 1804, the Tsar persistently lobbied Vienna for an alliance, declaring that war "elevates the soul" and that Bonaparte's ambitions must be stopped, lest France sooner or later overwhelm the rest.
For the young emperor, the upcoming campaign was a moral crusade against the "usurper" and a chance to establish Russia as a European arbiter. The diplomats' cautious calculations were drowned out by this enthusiasm.
Napoleon responded as best he could. The "Great Army" marched rapidly to the Danube, encircled the Austrians at Ulm, entered Vienna, and pushed Kutuzov's army north to Olmütz (now Olomouc, Czech Republic).
Here, the allies had assembled a large force. But Napoleon had a unified command and a clear plan, while Russia and Austria had dual power.
Kutuzov insisted on a defensive and protracted campaign, but Alexander needed a quick victory. The Austrian headquarters issued unrealistic plans that Tolstoy would ridicule in War and Peace: "die erste Kolonne marschiert, die zweite Kolonne marschiert" ("the first column marches, the second column marches").
The Allied armies adopted a plan developed by Austrian General Franz von Weyrother, immortalized by Andrei Bolkonsky's remark: " We went with Weyrother to check the dispositions. Once the Germans get their act together, there's no end!"
The careful Austrian plan involved a blow to the French right flank (it was assumed that Napoleon would deploy relatively weak regiments here) at the cost of exposing the Austro-Russian positions on the Pratzen Heights - and became the starting point of the failure at Austerlitz.
WHAT WENT WRONG
The morning of December 2 began as the allies had planned. The Russo-Austrian army descended into the foggy lowlands, its columns stretching south, seemingly cutting off Napoleon's right flank and the route to Vienna.
At the Pratzen Heights, a key position, there remained comparatively weak units: several battalions, reserve units.
This is precisely what the French emperor sought. Military theorists of the 19th century (in particular, the distinguished Russian scholar of German descent, Heinrich Leer ) noted that the allies objectively had a numerical advantage, but they had deprived themselves of the most important thing—a favorable position and unified command.
Napoleon, on the contrary, assembled a "striking force." While our and Austrian forces were stretched out across the gullies and marshes to the south, Nicolas Soult's corps ascended the deserted Pratzen Heights.
Below, near the villages of Telnitsy and Sokolnitsy, a heavy battle ensued: the allied units under the command of the future hero of the Patriotic War Pyotr Bagration, covering the right flank, repelled the attacks of the corps of Louis-Nicolas Davout.
But the fate of the battle was decided in the center.
BAGRATION AND THE CAVALRY GUARDS SAVED THE HONOR OF THE ALLIES
Having waited for the main Allied forces to advance, the French literally rose above our and the Austrian "left shoulder." The attack from the heights cut the Allied line in half.
Memoirists and the official historian of the campaign, Alexander Mikhailovsky-Danilevsky, wrote that it was at this moment that it became clear: the battle was lost, and all that remained was to withdraw the troops and save the core of the army.
What unfolded next was not a “chess game,” but a struggle for survival.
On the left flank, Austrian units, pinned against frozen ponds near the village of Sazan, attempted to retreat and came under fire from French artillery. Some perished in the icy water, while others managed to hastily retreat to the city of Brno.
The right flank, under the command of Bagration, as before in the “affair” at Schöngraben, fought until dark and left in an organized manner, covering the retreat.
At its most critical moment, the "white bone" of the Cavalry Guards Regiment stood up for the honor of the Russian army. This heavy cavalry unit was recruited from the best families, who were kept in the second echelon for emergencies. And now, that moment had come.
The Emperor's brother, Grand Duke Konstantin Pavlovich, attempted to break through to the Pratzen Heights with his infantry guards, but was crushed by a furious counterattack by the light cavalry of Napoleon's Guard. Our infantrymen were routed and pinned down against one of the rivers on the Field of Austerlitz. They would have been cut down had not the Life Guards, but above all the Horse Guards, for whom this was the first battle in the regiment's history, covered the crossing.
Their performance against the superior French forces may have inspired Bulat Okudzhava and Isaac Schwartz to write the song "Cavalry Guards, the Age is Short."
In the otherwise serene history of the Cavalry Regiment, there were only two suicidal "actions": the attack at Austerlitz and the skirmish at the Raevsky Battery during the Battle of Borodino. But it was Austerlitz that cost the most blood—13 officers and 226 enlisted men were counted "out of action." The regiment's commander, Prince Nikolai Repnin-Volkonsky, was seriously wounded and captured.
.
The reckless attack of the Russian cavalry guards so impressed Bonaparte that he personally visited the captured officers in the infirmary and lavished compliments on Repnin. "The praise of a great commander is a soldier's best reward," the prince replied. "I give it to you with pleasure," Napoleon responded.
The French Emperor could afford magnanimity. According to Russian and foreign researchers, the allies lost between 30,000 and 45,000 men killed, wounded, and captured, a significant number of them Russian regiments.
French losses, according to the same sources, were half as much, which for a war in the early 19th century seems like an almost catastrophic gap.
AUSTERLITZ IN RUSSIAN: WHO WROTE THE FIRST SCIENTIFIC HISTORY?
For our army, the defeat at Austerlitz was not a total rout: the Russian forces retreated not as a mob of fugitives, but as an exhausted but combat-ready army. This is a fundamental point, insisted upon by both Mikhailovsky-Danilevsky and the historian General Leer.
The defeat was severe, but it did not break either the command system or the fighting spirit. This is precisely why, just a few years later, these same units would again stand against Napoleon—first in Prussia, in the "affairs" of Pultusk (1806), Preussisch-Eylau (1807), and then in the Battle of Borodino.
Official historiography of the first half of the 19th century sought to maintain a balance. On the one hand, emphasizing the courage of the troops and the personal involvement of the emperor was the task of imperial history, written "by the highest command." On the other hand, ignoring the shortcomings was impossible.
In the preface to Mikhailovsky-Danilevsky's " Description of the First War of Emperor Alexander with Napoleon," published in 1844, he explicitly stated: Europe knows only the French versions of the 1805 campaign, and Russian society needs its own detailed account of the events. In other words, the authorities (at that time, Nicholas I reigned ) did not abstain from analyzing failures, but they imposed strict limits on them: through an analysis of plans, marches, maneuvers, and the behavior of the allies.
Soviet historiography added another layer. Albert Manfred, a leading French scholar and specialist in the revolutionary era and the Napoleonic Wars, emphasized that Russian soldiers in this story were part of a pan-European line of resistance to Napoleonic hegemony.
During the reign of the Pokrovsky school, Bonaparte was considered almost a progressive figure, but from the 1930s onwards, a more patriotic approach prevailed, becoming dominant by the 1950s and 1960s, when Manfred worked.
The scholar analyzed the mistakes of Alexander and his entourage quite harshly, but at the same time consistently demonstrated that Kutuzov's military training and the experience of the defeats of 1805–1807 became the foundation for the future victory of 1812. Soviet historians integrated the failure of Austerlitz into patriotic mythology, in the positive sense of the word.
Post-Soviet studies also add a foreign policy context. Historians emphasize how Russia gradually moved from the idea of a "special alliance" with France to participation in the Third Coalition: under the influence of London, the influence of Anglophile circles at court, and Alexander's personal desire to act as an arbiter of European affairs.
In this logic, Austerlitz is not a random clash, but the result of a choice made by St. Petersburg. And the modern reader receives not a picture of a "victim of aggression," but an honest story of how a great power enters a major European war and learns from its own miscalculations.
AUSTERLITZ IN FRENCH: HOW PALE THE "SUN"
In France, Austerlitz long lived as pure legend. For Napoleon's army, it was the "ideal battle," and for the Second Empire, the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Republics, it was a convenient symbol of national valor, unrelated to colonial wars and internal political divisions.
But, as modern French researchers note, over time, the memory of defeats—Russia in 1812, Waterloo—began to supplant the cult of brilliant victories.
French historiography remains largely focused on its own experience. Analyzing the Napoleonic theme through the prism of historical memory, one can see that it is precisely the tragic themes, regularly raised at official ceremonies, that prove more important for national identity than the "sun of Austerlitz."
This is also evident in the way the French press discussed the anniversaries of the Napoleonic Wars: they argued about what exactly to celebrate – the triumph of the empire, the common European tragedy, or the victims of colonial policy.
In this picture, Austerlitz is “our great victory somewhere in Moravia,” and not a place where thousands of Russian, Austrian, and French soldiers lie.
AUSTERLITZ "ON THE SPOT": WORKING WITH MEMORY AND THE TOURISM INDUSTRY
Over the course of two hundred years, the Czechs and Moravians transformed Austerlitz into a distinctly concrete space of memory. In 1912, the Mound of Peace was erected on the Pratzen Heights—a monument for which funds are being raised, including in the Russian Empire.
The figure of four warriors with the coats of arms of Russia, Austria-Hungary, France and Moravia, a mass grave without division into armies – this is an attempt to transform the battlefield into a field of reconciliation.
The Brno Region Museum has sprung up nearby, presenting the Napoleonic era as part of regional history. They work with documents on the deployment of Russian troops, display artifacts from the Borodino Museum, and recreate scenes from the Soviet film "War and Peace" on panels.
Tourists are offered the entire "land of three emperors": a route through Slavkov (formerly Austerlitz), Pratzen, Tvarzona, and the Santon Hill. In the summer, there are "Napoleonic Days," and in the winter, battle reenactments featuring dozens of clubs from various countries, including Russia.
However, behind this tourist "attraction" lies serious work. In the early 2000s, with the participation of Russian diplomats and local activists, a monument to the fallen soldiers of the Bagration Corps was unveiled in Tvarzhonaya.
In Křenovice, where Kutuzov's headquarters were located, a monument to the commander himself was erected. At the unveiling, Czech politicians frankly acknowledged that one can lose a battle, but still win a war, and a reminder of Kutuzov is no less necessary here than the cult of Napoleon.
WHAT DO WE CARE ABOUT AUSTERLITZ 220 YEARS LATER?
What does this story offer us in 2025, beyond academic interest? Firstly, it brings back into focus the Russian soldiers who, in 1805, were fighting not for "foreign dynastic interests," but for Russia's vision of Europe's future.
Yes, Russia entered the coalition as a great power with its own calculations. Yes, the political leadership makes mistakes. But the same regiments stood on the field near Slavkov that, a few years later, would fight at Preussisch-Eylau, Friedland, and Borodino. Their memory should not depend on whether they won on a particular day.
Secondly, Austerlitz forces us to rethink the familiar set of "glorious dates." The victory of 1812 and the collapse of the Napoleonic system would have been impossible without the experience of the earlier campaigns. It was after 1805 that the Russian command became more cautious about Austrian plans, more firmly insisted on its own decisions, and changed the system of staff training. The line from Austerlitz to the Tarutino Maneuver can be traced both in documents and in the works of military historians.
And finally, discussing Austerlitz is a test of the maturity of our historical memory. The ability to honestly analyze defeats without questioning the honor of the army and the state, and to learn from these defeats, distinguishes a great country from a collection of beautiful legends.
[AmericanThinker] Artificial intelligence is being promoted as the technology that will “change everything.” Yet while a handful of firms are profiting enormously, a different question deserves attention:
Is AI accelerating the economy — or merely masking its slowdown?
Across headlines, AI is credited with transforming medicine, finance, logistics, commerce, and productivity. Yet among many working professionals, there is a sense that real wages have struggled to keep pace with rising living costs. At the same time, the loudest optimism often comes from sectors most financially invested in the AI narrative.
This raises an uncomfortable question: Has AI become a true engine of prosperity — or a financial life-support system?
THE MIRAGE OF GROWTH
Recent data suggests a substantial portion of U.S. GDP growth may be driven not by rising productivity, but by AI-related infrastructure spending — especially data centers.
A study from S&P Global found that in Q2 of 2025, data center construction alone added 0.5% to U.S. GDP. That is a historic figure. But what happens if this spending slows?
Are we seeing real economic expansion — or a short-term stimulus disguised as innovation?
This pattern has precedents. Before the 2008 housing collapse in Ireland — and in the United States the same year — construction boomed, GDP rose, and optimism became mandatory. Economies looked healthy on paper. Fragility was already taking root.
Today, the boom is not in bricks and concrete — but in silicon, servers, and expectation.
THE PRODUCTIVITY PARADOX
AI has been advertised as a labor-saving miracle. Yet many businesses report a different reality: “work slop” — material produced by AI that looks polished but must be repaired, rewritten, or verified by humans. Time is not saved — it is quietly relocated. Studies suggest the same paradox:
According to media coverage, MIT found that 95% of corporate AI pilot programs showed no measurable ROI.
Posted by: Grom the Affective ||
12/03/2025 00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[1783 views]
Top|| File under:
#1
Oh great, yet another reason for the rest of us to bail out private businesses.
Posted by: chris ||
12/03/2025 6:55 Comments ||
Top||
#2
No such thing. If the idiots want to burn their money, let 'em.
Posted by: ed in texas ||
12/03/2025 9:00 Comments ||
Top||
#7
As long as we get more power plants, the gamblers are welcome to do what gamblers insist on doing. Anyone working in the field should pay down debts, build up a big savings account, and have an exit plan handy, ie. the usual rules apply.
#8
IDK. It seems like everything is consolidated, everything is too big to fail, which creates catastrophic costs to enter any market, so substitute and choice in product is all but an illusion. Free Market, but all the inputs are controlled by a few. So is AI normalizing the Meh, yes - probably - seems like it.
#9
Have a theory that it will all consolidate to 3 major 'AI' systems available to regular people which will be stealth advertising a set of globalized companies.
"GORT, show me authentic Mexican restaurants in the area." and like Carlos O'Kelly's pops up first, like a Hey Goober or Crookedpedia search.
[Substack] When it comes to the Genetics Hoax, one of the two largest pillars of it that gives off the grandiose appearance of "Too Big to Fail" are that of Forensic and Paternity tests. Many hundreds of thousands, potentially millions of people have been affected by the outcomes of these tests, incarcerating people for lifetimes, even sentencing people to death and also transferring a lifetime of wealth for child support. One would imagine that such an important, life changing test would come with the most rigorous of testing of the tests to make sure the tests are testing correctly.
If you thought that that had occurred, not only would you be wrong, but you’d be in the 180 degree opposite direction to where your assumption would lie. As not only had no benchmark tests of forensic or paternity profiling taken place, but when it did it failed miserably and even worse the attempts by some eminent experts in the field to clean up the inherent biases within the field were quashed and ignored, favoring methods that logically would produce errors worse than that of a best guess.
The Kryptonite of these pseudosciences when deciding the fate of the people finding themselves in the auspices of the establishment is Blinding. One again might assume that any legitimate science would blind everything that they did, being so confident in the technology that they need know nothing else about a sample. But not only do they not do that, but they actively want to know every other metric pertaining to the sample BEFORE the test is carried out.
Dr. Dan Krane leading Geneticist and Forensic expert who has given witness testimony in over 100 court cases said:
"Crime Lab Employees and Prosecutors don’t like the idea of blind testing. The types of arguments that I hear from them are along these lines; they say that the work that they are doing is critically important, there literally are instances where people’s lives will be on the line on the basis of the decisions they are making and it’s really important that they get the right answer. That means they need to take advantage of all the available information including the suspects DNA Profile. Now, I’ll tell you, I’m not persuaded by that particular argument. It seems to me it’s very similar to a student telling a teacher, you know I really wanna do well on the test you are about to give me and I’m confident that I’ll do much better if you give me the answer key, before you give me the test"
Now this was met with laughter at the TedX conference at which he gave it, it didn’t even really sound like nervous laughter as you might only get that from people in the industry knowing this information to be true. But that laughter was because the comparison was correct, the absurdity of industry practices that were considered life or death were not an actual legitimate test but indeed the most full encompassing description fraud....
#1
You have to understand, DNA analysis is based on comparing certain sections of the string, not the entire strand. That would take years for a single analysis. So they compare smaller sections, and then do a statistical comparison to arrive at a conclusion.
It's like comparing wood chips to identify a woodcutter.
Posted by: ed in texas ||
12/03/2025 15:07 Comments ||
Top||
#2
It's better than the old blood testing - "ah, its your blood type." When you understand how many people have the same blood type, you'd find it even more useless.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
