307 thoughts on “The Rocks Of War”

1. Picked up one of your shirts and I’m wearing it with pride. (Not that kind of pride only found in June, the real kind) Anyway, the shirt is well made, and looks good. My only suggestion would be maybe to add a pithy saying on the back. Maybe something like “You are not alone” (because until I found your writings, I basically didn’t know others felt the same way I do. You routinely say the things I guess most of us feel or believe, but nobody else is saying). Or perhaps “Take the red pill, it only hurts a little” (Something like that if copyright isn’t an issue). Anyway, great shirt, keep up the good work!

2. A brilliant article that sums up exactly what is happening. How can the West and it’s “elites” have been so stupid? With the way things are going to be this winter, they will be lucky to escape with their lives.

   • Never underestimate the stupidity of western elites. 🙂

3. Things that have been exposed are:

   *The AK-47/74 not being suited to a professional military. The inability to hang optics, IR illuminators etc on the weapon means Russian forces cannot fight at night. A few special units have an updated design that are optics friendly but most units are iron sights only meaning they retreat at night. Not good when confronting (soon) US forces.

   *Signals discipline by Russian and foreign fighters has been poor. Leading to 12 dead Russian generals and foreign fighters being obliterated by missiles in Lyvov. All by targeting cell phone data. One need not listen in, just know the heat map of the data. US forces might well be vulnerable in this area outside Spec Ops.

   *Neither Russia (paratroop transport planes, Generals, two ships and counting) nor NATO (those foreign fighters barracks blown up) have an answer to high speed missiles. Russia’s navy in the Black Sea is doomed with the transfer of Danish missiles to Ukraine and US forces to operate them. Even the subs being diesel electric will have to surface and thus be found and destroyed.

   *Turkey is balking at being at war with Russia for … ?? Spats with Finland, Sweden and now Greece are only going to get worse and unless the US either removes Erdogan with a color revolution or massively bribes him it looks like Turkey is including itself out of War with Russia. The payoff (US help in crushing the Kurds, annexing part of Syria and Iraq, as well as the Balkans) is likely not a price DC will pay while Russia offers needed food, oil, etc.

   *A long war of attrition favors Russia and China, having superior interior lines of communication well outside ocean borne attacks, and having a mostly unified population demographically, as opposed to the Western model of minority Whites being treated as genetically evil and bearing hereditary blood guilt being commanded by Affirmative Action leaders. Newer weapons are more likely to be developed by Russia or China than Wakanda Forever!

   *Three Front Wars being unsustainable — DC is operating in a peacetime “limited Iraq/Libya mode” against what is aimed to be a decades long war against Russia, China, and the White male population at home. DC seems to believe that the magical powers of Wakanda and Captain Marvel will prove decisive and Russia’s 6K nuclear missiles can be wished away by the media just ignoring them.

   • “*Three Front Wars being unsustainable — DC is operating in a peacetime “limited Iraq/Libya mode” against what is aimed to be a decades long war against Russia, China, and the White male population at home.”

     You can be quite hyperbolic, but this was a profound point you made earlier into this thing and it seems to have proved true. Apparently the Regime was so delusional it thought it could make China fall into line and the Whites it had oppressed get war fever for Muh Ukraine. Apparently enlistments have plummeted, which of course is a good thing, and obviously China has become more aggressive. It was quite noticeable that the “or” after “you better punish Russia” always was left blank.

     “People who think Twitter is reality lose” is about to become war doctrine. Tragically, Russian and Ukrainian lives were sacrificed as part of the failed experiment. My prediction is either deals will be cut before it gets cold again or parts of Europe begin to officially exit the Empire–those weak enough not to matter, and those strong enough to be able to retaliate if the Empire meddles in their affairs. Think Hungary and France.

     Again, good call. Fortunately(?) delusional people cannot face reality. Just one more self-inflicted wound in the farcical wind down of the GAE.

4. Z from a few weeks ago. Well said.

   “Perhaps the psychosis of liberal democracy will finally be beaten out of the West in what is looking like another futile and pointless war of choice. Despite the disparity in wealth, the Russians merely have to continue to exist in order to win. For the West, liberal democracy requires the unconditional surrender of Eurasian identity to the homogenizing forces of Liberal democracy. History shows that this is every bit as futile as the crusades against Islam.”

5. Somewhat relevant, but submitted for your amusement. I posted a very late addition comment (#992) on this Unz article:

   https://www.unz.com/mwhitney/larry-c-johnson-the-ukrainian-army-has-been-defeated-whats-left-is-mop-up/?showcomments#new_comments

   Less than a day later “J2” posted a reply (#993), quoted in part: “Putin asked Kissinger and NYT journalists to tell Ukraine that it cannot win.” I just replied “LOL”. I browsed J2’s posting history. Among his other comments, he apparently is a noted researcher who has refuted Einstein’s Theories of Special AND General Relativity. No further need to check J2’s credentials. 😀

   https://www.unz.com/lromanoff/calling-all-cosmologists/#comment-5333639

   • Unz Review in 2022 is a weird combination of Stormfront circa 2008 and a psych ward. Plus the occasional pro-Russian lefty like Michael Hudson, who is actually worth reading. Some of the posters clearly have schizophrenia and post things in all caps about how the Illuminati are reading their minds.

6. Si Vis: “In Ukraine areas under their control the Russians are switching the local economy to rubles, they have started to pay pensions and salaries, they are switching phone lines and the internet to Russian operators, they are issuing Russian license plates, they are issuing Russian passports like it is raining, *they have even switched the time zone to the Moscow one*”

   The time zone thing killed me. The Russians I’ve known all love to laugh. You can picture them in a conference room coming up with all these changes. Then some Ivan jokingly suggests they change the time zone too. Laughter. Then they go ahead and add it to the list. Raucous laughter. Bunch of half-drunk Russians in suits actually on the floor laughing their asses off.

7. Best. Comment. Section. Ever.

8. All that needs to be said is this is White slavic brother on brother carnage made possible by an arrogant hostile tribe member who “makes funny” dressing in pop leather and playing a piano with his penis.

   Wherever the chips may fall, undeniably this atrocity is driven by peoples “of the pale”. The hoofbeats have cost countless good white slavic men their lives, especially on the ukie side. The WaPo article claims these brave men who volunteered are but common farmers, shopkeepers, mechanics… Real White men, all led by a “front group” to the front lines to be shelled, a group that is very tribal, a group who claims a mandate to possess the Holy Land, a tribal group that claims these brave men are nothing better than beasts, Goyim as they word it.

   Just a little bit more of a push and Normie will sacrifice his own sons to the altar of global homo, Yahweh, Judeo-Christian; brainwashed into wishing for a “Red Dawn” Scenario…high of the fumes of barbeque and smoking hickory and his own farts. What reality has waiting for him is the smoking ruins of “murica” and his torched stars & stipes, his melted down $80k F150, a melted grill, with charred burgers, ribs and brats; a wife that’s been ravaged and wanting more from “diversity” types, a ukie blue and gold smoldering on his front yard flag pole, and a nagging inclination that it couldn’t have gone wrong for him because he never saw “color”. He made sure he was not an “anti-semite”!

   It was for naught for old normie, voting harder only brought about the business end of Vlad’s 6,000 nuclear weapons.

   I’m sure I’m not the only one, but if Vlad is selling, than I’m buying!

   And here’s my black pilled metal for the day, only for those with ears, let them hear!
   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwZs45RRvPU

   • I hear you, but turn that anger into resolve. It’s not over. Get fit, get ready. When the fog arrives, you will need your wits and your strength. Use this time to train yourself to be a nobody that nobody notices. The Stasi will first roundup those with a target on their back, so don’t make it easy on them. Chopping wood is a great remedy for dissipating anger at the current crazy. Use your imagination when swinging that long handle axe. Break a sweat with every stroke.

   • Dude, you’ve got a “Mouth for War.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3JSbOt7CLo

     Take wise TomA’s advice and channel that huge anger of yours into making yourself fitter and smarter. Sprint as hard as you can for just 30 seconds. Don’t drive yourself crazy.

9. Gunner,
   This is what the police thought was happening, but the situation you describe is not what happened, the police actually admitted that they made a mistake. Kids were calling 911 from the school while police were waiting in the hall.

   • Thank you! I’d missed that development while traveling this weekend.

10. BTW This a good point to remember what happened to the Ukrainian gold reserves back in 2014. Flown into New York in the dead of night-

    https://www.commoditytrademantra.com/gold-trading-news/ukraines-gold-reserves-secretly-flown-out-by-new-york-federal-reserve/

    https://www.bullionstar.com/article/swiss-kid-explains-ukrainian-gold-transport-by-us

    https://www.reuters.com/article/us-gold-imf-holdings/ukraine-slashed-gold-holdings-in-october-russia-added-more-imf-idUSKCN0J501220141121

    • RoboFascist 1st: Those reserves were probably transferred to Kolomoisky’s personal accounts very soon thereafter. The French were smart (back when they were French) to get their gold out of the US. Anyone who believes what they claim is actually in Fort Knox is not terribly bright.

      • You are probably right about Kolomoisky and where part of the gold went.

        I will posit that even in 2022 fiat money world that future warfare is predictable based on previous large scale gold transfers and thefts. From Ukraine to Venezuela, Libya to Germany and even to Texas… gold is being stolen or demanded as to be return in physical form to Austin or Frankfurt.

        At the end of the day… bankers want gold.

11. Bottom line – when DaNYT, WaPo and Henry K all recommend to sue for peace – REALITY has been declared!
    Case closed.

    • What do you mean?

12. This new old way of Russian war: what role are NCO’s playing in it at the squad/platoon level?

    Received wisdom during the Cold War was that Russian non-comms lacked the authority/initiative of their counterparts in the US Army.

    • Vegetius-

      I have heard the same anecdotes regarding Russian NCOs during the Cold War.

      On the flip side, Patrick Lancaster was running around Mariupol with an old salt you could observe and know he was going to come through this mess just fine.

      In my years of working with a Third World army in a socialist North African country, I found that most NCOs were simply privates that had been in for five years.

13. The reporting on the Ukrainian war has always felt to me like the Trump-Hillary contest in 2016. Back then, every day the media carpet bombed us with stories about how doomed Trump was and how inevitable Hillary was. Yet, we all enjoyed the videos of election night.

    Similarly, every day we are bombarded with news about how doomed the Russians are and how amazing the plucky Ukrainians are.

    I look forward to the videos when Russia secures Donbas. And I don’t even have a dog in this fight. I just love it when our elites are reduced to hysterical weeping.

    • What is crazier about this is we have loads of on the ground reports from people in these areas. Granted, they are in Russian and Ukrainian, but there are lots of people translating this stuff. It is as if our gumshoe reporters are unaware these sources exist.

      • They are paid to be unaware such sources exist. Or if backed into a corner, they will call them disinformation, racist, and white supremacist. And this being a war, at least the first accusation would be likely true.

      • As Keynes said, it is difficult to get a man to understand something that his job depends on him not understanding….

      • could be they are setting up the normie to believe that the desperat putin nerve gassed the ukraine in a desperate attempt to forstall the eminent defeat that “everyone knew ” was coming . so america has to act!

    • “I look forward to the videos when Russia secures Donbas.”

      One significant difference: the media had to report the outcome of the 2016 election. With regard to Donbas, there’s no such compulsion. I expect either a media blackout or the story being relegated to the back pages. The whole Ukraine story will just die out as far as mass media is concerned.

      • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqEddipbpkw

        Videos like this

        • That day felt like 1,000 Christmas mornings. 🥰

    • Even in Poland the truth is lowly breaking out via independent reporters who go directly to battle-zones and speak with ordinary people. Bombing hours became “the new normal” and people are passively awaiting the conclusion. The only Ukrainians full of pep will be the ones far from the front-lines in western oblasts and in Poland.

14. Left unsaid is that our current elites can not recognize this and so will not. To meet these new challenges, our elites will have to be replaced. As they will not agree, being incapable of recognizing their obsolescence, they will have to be replaced through force. Because the bench coming up behind them have made their way by mimicking their elders (for campaign cash from the same owners), our bench, too, sucks. Because our media and our “education” (LOL) system are so bad, the people we need to progress are few and far between. The elite want it that way but, as they must be replaced, doing so likely will result in some duration of interregnum during which we will not be remain pre-eminent, as we have been in living memory. And THAT will be a problem for a world accustomed to the American economy and our military spending subsidizing all kinds of losers around the planet, from Europe to Africa, Asia, etc.

    • Exposed is not the word I would have chosen. We have been reminded once again of the incompetency of the foreign intelligence service.

15. I don’t know where you get your information on the War in Ukraine from, but your sources are ridiculously bad. Yes, Russians are using “snail’s pace” tactics and might take the whole of the Donbass before this is over (not much of a prize considering everyone expected them to blitz through Ukraine), but their losses are still unacceptably high. Even pro-Russian outlets like Southfront and Intel Slava are admiting as much. Your takes on this war had been so far appallingly bad, which is a rather poor fit for someone who constantly describes other as “dumb as a sack of bricks”.

    • So only total Russian victory over Ukraine in a week or two is success?

      You’re an idiot.

      The Russians are hammering the Ukrainians in the Donbass. It’s actually pretty horrific. And the reason that the Russians are moving so slow (at least according to you) is that they’re protecting their troops.

      The Russian army probes, finds Ukrainian units, pulls back and then lets the artillery or air strikes obliterate those units. It’s a slow process but brutally effective and minimizes Russian casualties.

      If you don’t believe Z, check out this channel, which has been critical of both the Russians and Ukrainians. The Russians are causing serious damage to the Ukrainians in the east, to the point that it’s possible the eastern Ukrainian army might not make it another month or so.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMtuqas55jo

      • There *is* an element of speed to be considered. Yes, a win is a win—but *if* the slow grind is attributed to “weakness”, then NATO becomes emboldened. Heck, it already is—if sources are to be believed wrt Poland’s shenanigans in training and arming resistance to Russia.

        The longer Ukraine presents a viable resistance to Russia, the more resources will be made available from NATO. Wild card of course is the EU and the suffering their people are willing to endure for a corrupt oligarchy and faux “democracy” called Ukraine.

        But what do I know.

        • The AFU’s command and control is pretty much gone. It will take a while to finish. The AFU has defensive lines all over the east put in over the last eight years.
          But remember the goal denazify and demilitarize. This means they have to kill or capture as many AFU soldiers as possible. Its a waste of life.

          • Someone put a list of urban sieges together: https://rwasamizdat.substack.com/p/the-siege-of-mariupol-and-modern?s=r

            What the Russians are doing in Ukraine is quite remarkable, when put into the proper context.

      • “The Russians are hammering the Ukrainians in the Donbass.”

        Yep. Unequivocally. No ifs, no buts, no maybes. The Russians are pulverizing the Ukrainians. It’s being done calmly and methodically.

      • >So only total Russian victory over Ukraine in a week or two is success?

        Hard to tell what Russian initial objectives actually were. Russian Military plans appear to have called for exactly your “idiot” scenario. Most Western analists went for taking over Eastern Ukraine in 2 months or so. Putin was suggestive about topling Zelensky and the current regime. None of those are achievable right now, which makes their initial military operation a failure.
        I guess that ending up with more territory than you started a war of aggression with is technically a victory. The same way as retrieving a pen from a working blender for the price of a couple of fingers…

        • Twist words much. That said, you’re not showing the usual Hasbara telltale signs, so that’s nice.

          Since you seem to have some reading comprehension skills issues, let me spell out what I said. I said that only an idiot would use total victory in a week or two as the benchmark for success. The Russians most certainly didn’t use that as a benchmark.

          That said, that’s a very reasonable chance that the Russians were hoping – again, “hoping” – for that scenario. Who knows, but it wouldn’t be surprising if the Russians were doing two things at once strategically when the war started.

          Attack across a large area, including a drive to Kiev, though concentrating most troops in the south and east, hoping the Ukrainians panic and fall apart. If so, great. If not, that’s fine, we still pin down a big part of the Ukrainian army in the north so they can’t fortify the south and east.

          I will also say that it appear that the Russian military leadership wasn’t doing a great job for a month or so after the initial invasion. However, they seem to have found their footing and, in particular, found a very effective strategy that the Ukrainians seem to have no answer for – yet.

          You also seem to forget that the Russians are operating with a relatively small force, yet they’re grinding forward. That is not a good sign for the Ukrainians, who should have been able to push them out of their country.

          As to long-term plans, hard to say, but I’d suspect that the Russians want all the land east of the Dnieper River as well as Odessa. That would provide a natural barrier and turn the remaining Ukraine into a very poor, landlocked country.

          We’ll see. A month or so ago, I would have said things were looking bad for the Russians. Now they have the upper hand. We’ll see if that lasts.

          • You seem to work under the assumption that leaders of state don’t make a cost beneffit analysys before deciding on something. In our case, it’s Putin weighing the potential gains of attacking Ukraine against projected losses in manpower and the economic costs encured by the inevitable reaction from the West.

            I know our camp is keen to kneejerk that “MuH sAncshen HUrt the WEst MOer” but that’s not the point. From the perspective of Russia, they lost trade with a huge economic block, and on the long term, losing trade partners is never good. The fact that the highly competent head of the Russian Central Bank offered her resignation upon knowing what sanctions the West will effectively incure should tell us quite a lot about the future prospects of the Russain economy.

            Now, what do you reckon Putin wanted to achieve for his *projected* cost. Well, according to those dumb-dmuns in western intelligence who were predicting a Russian attack back when most of our luminaries were smugly dismissing the prospect as western propaganda, he wanted the east of Ukraine and the coastline up to Transnistria. At the very least. My favourite pro-Russian experts also happen to agree (I can’t recommend Anatoly Karlyn’s substack enough), and I personally don’t see what lesser prospective gains would make such a wild move “worth it” for Putin and the Russian people.

            Now, on to the losses. Russia’s economic boffins seem to have staved off all blows pretty fine, for now. I hope this keeps up, but really, who can tell. On the other hand, Russia’s hitherto well-rated military managed to irredimably fail the larger objective outlined above, while showing itself as an incompetent and ill equiped force, unable to meet even the most basic requirements of modern warfare: keeping vehicles in good working order, troops suplied, coordinating assaults, applying basic unit tactics, etc. etc. On a personal note, what I saw from the VKS made me almost renounce my long held fanboism for Russian aerospace as a whole. I was one of those hoping they really got their act together after Georgia…

            Even disregarding the unacceptably high losses they recieved (admitedly at the hands of a force far larger and better equiped than the common perception of it in the West) the loss of Russian military prestige is immense. And Russia’s army is a big part of its identity, both internally and abroad.

            Now tell me, completing the takeover of two backwater regions of Ukraine (some here seem to be under the delusion that the Donbass is somehow rich — please do your googling), a land bridge to another backwater, and a couple of black sea ports, is really worth the loss? Do you think Putin would have still gone to war seeing how it turned out — with his army now slowly advancing towards a consolation prize while blowing up the already wretched piece of land they hope to get out of this? Some here are eager to point out that the Russian’s are clearly winning this slow, protracted type of warfare. Well, thanks a lot Matternich, every armchair genneral out there was expecting this doctrine to suite the Russians better, but what we’re dissapointed with is that Russia’s army ended up fighting like this in the first place!

            From a Russian perspective, I don’t think this looks like much of a victory.

            BUT, Globohomo also suffered a loss in prestige — it couldn’t stop Russia from attacking Ukraine (mUH neXT San Francisco if GH has its way!) and it now can’t stop it from winning its shabby consolation prize. As the saying goes, there are no winners in war.

            Well, except if you count Saker readers, UNZ, and Z commenters (not much difference between the two, it appears), or whoever else on the Internet gets excited upon seeing GH get a bloody nose. So excited in fact, that if you point out to them that *Russia itself* is probably worse off right now than at the beggining of this conflict they go around calling you a fed with the same gusto as the other side calls their own terfs. I reckon this is because some of you just can’t keep from identifying with the side you’re rooting for, or the side who’se actions are beneficial to the Dissident Right as a whole.

            This appears to be the reason why Z chooses to focus where he does. The biggest loser in this can’t be Russia [well, it’s Ukraine] — because they’re anti-GH — but those dumb-as-bricks-Western-intelligence-analysts-who-never-held-a-real-job-in-their-lives!! And the strawmening required to support that point leads him to make some bafflingly dumb assumptions.

            – Russia’s victory is a big one
            – the West didn’t expect this glorious Russian victory (he’s right on this one, the West initially expected an actual Russian victory)
            – the West actually hoped for an Ukranian victory (My take from what I saw on the msm is that the hopes are for Ukraine to hold on to as much teritorry as possible; not for them to regain all lost teritory or reach Moscow or smth; One could imagine decission makers were less optimistic than that, settling for the “bleed russia” thing, which was a complete success imho.)

            – Stupid liberals and their plucky Ukranians myth lol (never got why that was a “just a myth”, but I was rooting for a fast Russian victory.)

            – The Javeline proved uselsee because it’s not effective at something it was never intended to do.

            I’m sorry, but this is just more wonkish than what I was expecting from Z.

    • And there is a Sean Hannty take we have bene missing.

      • I think I’ll pair a screenshot of the 3-star general’s quote to that picture of Hannity partying with Jussie Smollett at a New York nightclub.

    • How is the Donbass not a prize, it the best part of the Ukraine, and leaving the Ukraine landlocked is a win

      The Russians may get less than they wanted at the start, but it will be a big loss for the (((evil empire)))

      • The Donbass is very important. Equally important, however, is separating Ukraine from the GAE and enforcing its neutrality as a buffer state between Russia and NATO. Russia will take the Donbass. Of that, there is little doubt. The second objective, however, seems less certain. I don’t think Ukraine’s present government will flee or capitulate unless they believe the conquest of Kiev is imminent. This outcome, too, may happen, but it appears to be on a very distant horizon.

        • I think the coastline all the way to Odessa is the achievable goal.kiev itself seems a more political prize,and quite negotiable. The political winds are shifting and I hear more and more voices arising around Europe seeking to quell their leaders madness.

        • I think the Damocles’ sword of further Russian incursion will remain over the heads of the surviving Ukrainian leadership. That will enforce neutrality. Yes, Russia definitely wants Ukraine as a buffer. It doesn’t want to conquer it. It doesn’t want to be responsible for it. It doesn’t care if it is a failed state. It just wants it as a buffer.

          • Russia will certainly be content with Ukraine as a buffer. However, if the Ukrainian government does something profoundly stupid like fighting Russia to the final soldier, Russia will happily swallow the whole of Ukraine. For historical and nationalistic reasons, Russia would not be averse to annexing the first Russian state.

      • The Donbas is a massive coal reserve. China will buy everything pulled out of it.

        • Fact Check: True. And the second largest natural gas reserve in Europe, the first being in Russia.

          • It’s coal reserve is significant but I wouldn’t call it “massive”. There’s little natural gas in Eastern Ukraine. The massive reserves are past the Don, and Russia is less likely to obtain them now than it was in March.

          • *Dnieper ffs. I was thinking of the Don Cossaks for some reason.

      • They aren’t taking just the Donbas, they are taking all of the East and the South, basically Ukraine’s best parts producing 75% of its GDP.
        In the areas under their control they are switching the local economy to rubles, they have started to pay pensions and salaries they are switching phone lines and the internet to Russian operators, they are issuing Russian license plates, they are issuing Russian passports like it is raining, they have even switched the time zone to the Moscow one.
        I could go on but basically, what Russia is “conquering” (really, liberatingl ain’t ever going back to Ukraine…
        And the locals for the most part LOVE it.
        I read Cyrillic and speak a passable Russian but my wife is an ethnically Russian “Ukrainian” citizen from the Donbas with family and friends in Russia, in the Russian parts of Ukraine and in the nationalist parts of Ukraine and we have first hand accounts of everything that is actually happening on the ground (i.e. the polar opposite of what the MSM and the politicians are saying in the West).
        The Russian Federation is winning, and winning big.

        • >The Russian Federation is winning, and winning big.

          Well, that would be some switch because it’s been losing, and losing shamefully until now.
          You seem to be deluding yourselves into thinking that just because its latest offensive has seen some *underwhelming* tactical success, the Russian war effort hasn’t hitherto been a failure in the light of its innitial objectives.
          The Zelensky government wasn’t toppled, Kharkov, and Kiev are under no threat of Russian control, and NATO is more popular than ever. The most backward regions of Ukraine, Kherson and a ruined Mariupol are lackluster consolation prizes against everything military analists projected Russians would get so far (i.e. the whole Eastern Ukraine and probably the South up to Odessa).
          Heck, I remember speaking to some Ukraininan nationalists and most of them were actually okay with “the shitholes” of Luhanks and Donetsk going to the Russians.
          Most likely, Putin will declare some sort of victory after the current offensive and get out of the war with only most of his face tarnished. His fanboys will convine themselves that the teritory occupied was good enough for the effort but anyone who remembers what the initial purpose of the campaign likely was will see their “win” as the phyric achievement it is. The status of the Russian Military and Russian pretige will return to what it was in the 90s.

          • You are a magnificent example of the GIGO concept: garbage in garbage out.
            A perfect example of the average brainwashed Westerner who, based solely on the BS he is fed daily by the MSM and the Western politicians thinks he knows it all and pretends to teach someone with actual first hand knowledge what’s really going on. Sad and pathetic…
            I am not going to waste too much of my time with you so this is not going to be an in-depth answer.

            “The Zelensky government wasn’t toppled”

            The conflict has not ended, it’s just been 3 months, and the Zelensky regime is on increasingly shaky ground (many signs of it, not going to elaborate further).

            “Kharkov, and Kiev are under no threat of Russian control”

            Kharkov city IS under threat, that’s why it’s heavily presided by lots of Ukrainian forces (some of the best ones they still have), and around 25/30% of the Kharkov region (Kharkov Oblast) is actually already “occupied” (liberated) by the Russians…
            Kiev was never a stated objective of the SMO (nor was Kharkov) and at most (= unlikely to happen) I personally believe that the Russians will take only the third of Kiev that lies west of the Dniepr river.

            “and NATO is more popular than ever”

            LMAO! That must be why we are seeing internal divisions over the proposed expansion (Turkey and Croatia) and anti-NATO protests in the two countries that want to join and that don’t dare to indict referendums about this choice and protests even in founding countries like my homecountry, Italy…

            “The most backward regions of Ukraine, Kherson and a ruined Mariupol are lackluster consolation prizes against everything military analists projected Russians would get so far (i.e. the whole Eastern Ukraine and probably the South up to Odessa).”

            Let me repeat it since you don’t seem to get it: the east and the south of Ukraine ARE THE PRIZE.
            And as for “ruined”, in Mariupol (like in the other liberated areas) the Russians are investing huge resources to get life back to normal as soon as possible, they are clearing the rubble and reconstructing at record pace, they are reopening business enterprises, in Mariupol SCHOOLS ARE OPEN (and the increasingly crazier Ukrainian curriculum of the last few years has been replaced by the standard Russian one) and so on!

            “Heck, I remember speaking to some Ukraininan nationalists and most of them were actually okay with “the shitholes” of Luhanks and Donetsk going to the Russians.”

            LMAO again! Then why have they been bombing them for the last 8 years and amassed their best military assets at the border of the LDNR to reconquer it?!
            Donbas (along with rest of the ethnically Russian Eastern and Southern parts of Ukraine) *IS THE PRIZE*.
            It’s the rest of Ukraine that’s a shithole with no economic future and no prospects.

            Ukraine will end up a much smaller, much poorer (which is to say something…), much weaker, landlocked state and from the looks of recent (easily prognosticated) developments, a state in a long guerilla war with Poland over its westernmost parts…

            P.S. oh and to be able to call them, my wife has had to change on her smartphone the phone numbers of her relatives and friends living in the liberated parts of Ukraine, she had to change the Ukrainian international prefix +380 to the Russian one, +7 …

    • yes threestars , I’m sure that is what the western media has told you , and they never ever lie. this whole debacle is the GAE using the puppet former star of movies for sensitive men to feed ukrainian men into hopeless sure death situations. nato provoked this war, and escalated hostilities untill the rus had no choice but to act. Now the GAE keeps it going to maximize casualties on both sides.

    • I have noted the “Russia-is-redneck-bushwhacker” reply guy species is slowly replacing the earlier “Ukrainians-are-Conan-cyber-ninjas” breed. The fact that Russia controls a bunch of places on a map that it didn’t 90 days ago doesn’t seem to faze these people — Slav East team is always, always risking imminent total humiliation by Slav West team (latter is of course renowned for its economic and technologic competence during the pandemic — really the pluckiest batch of Spartans you can find anywhere, like the new Churchill when ya think about it)

      • Ukraine is a stripper pole in a wheat field, with a brothel down the road and a bank in town with Hunter Biden accounts on the books,

    • Because Zman is confident and says stiff like, “what this means…” automaticity means he’s right, dummy!

    • I have wondered lately what the reaction to the inevitable Russian victory will be from people like you. You might listen to NPR or PBS or watch the news networks and those people have done nothing but spread silly pro Ukraine propaganda from day 1. You have been fed a steady diet of this stuff. I understand your anger but that anger should be directed at the same people that fed you all of the recent fake news including the Russian collusion hoax bs and now Ukraine , and not at our host.

      • It’s like a combination of the Ethiopian famine of ’83 combined with the jingoism of the first Gulf War.

    • I just glanced at Southfront and Intel Slava, but could not find anything about Russian losses. Do you have a link to anything that substantiates your claim of unacceptably high Russian losses?

    • Greetings!

      How is the weather in Langley today?

      Or is it Quantico?

16. The Ukrainian army in the east is getting slaughtered. And they have no hope of winning. These men are being sacrificed. The only reason to keep these guys fighting is to buy time.

    If the Ukrainian leadership isn’t using this time to build a new army in west, then they’re literally murdering these guys. But I’m not hearing any news about the creation of an army, just about the fighting in the east.

    If that’s the case, Zelensky should never be allowed to live.

    • According to the Alex’s on the Duran, the Ukes are now enlisting men in their forties and fifties.

    • Build a new army in the west . with who!?!?!?. how? that talk is like hitlers secret plan to win wwII in feb of 1945

17. This Ukraine business still perplexes me. I figured there must be some truth to the notion that the going was harder than Russia expected, given the slow pace. (Not that I’ve thought Ukraine ever had a chance.) But it sounds like Russia is dominant in spite of its lingering. It’s the strangest war. Theatrical, even.

    • I think the notion of “slow pace” is one that is a result of our modern conditioning. Though I do believe that Russia has received heavier casualties than expected (seems they were right – NATO was pumping Ukraine full of weapons), the area they have occupied is, roughly looking at a map, 5000 square miles or so. This isn’t uninhabited terrain like some sand people desert. I also think it is safe to say that there is not much of an insurgent force left after occupying a territory. The Second Chechen war was several months in a much smaller territory.
      Again, I’m not on the ground, and I’m not an analyst. All I know is what I see on telegram and MSM. The MSM shows video game footage of invented fighters (yeah – that pilot shooting down 70 russian planes was a complete lie) and Telegram shows Ukrainian soldiers getting the @#% kicked out of them – with real video. It actually looks like Russia pretty brilliantly split the country with the initial feint toward Kyiv (pronounce Kee-Yev) and prompt withdraw that focused on the south and east. I mean, if that 40 mile long convoy was destroyed, they would have shown photos, not the occasional tank carcass.

    • Russia has just switched a slower paced tactic. It’s using air power and overwhelming artillery to grind down the Ukrainians in the east. The strategy protects Russian troops while utterly destroying the Ukrainian army.

      It’s like boxing. The Russians are hitting the Ukrainians with body blow after body blow. It’s not as cool looking at punches to the face, but it’s crushing them all the same.

      • “Kill the body and the head will die”. -Joe Frazier. Not the most exciting boxer to watch, but he was relentless.

        • Frazier was just fine as a boxer. Ali’s comments about him were pretty tacky.

          Tyson was Frazier turned up to 13, unfortunately he fought in the 80s, which were meh for the heavyweight division.

      • I haven’t been following the fighting in great detail, but what I have read reminds me of the last stages of the First World War in the west. Heavy artillery bombardments, infantry moving forward, sometimes with the assistance of tanks, to occupy the bombarded ground. Consolidate those gains, then start the bombardment for the next conquest. Do it in sector after sector across the front and forget about major breakthroughs to be exploited by cavalry. Positional warfare can turn on the ability to take objectives that may not appear all that important on a map. Eventually even the well-disciplined German army started broke down and started surrendering en masse. As Marshall Foch put it: “The artillery conquers, the infantry occupies.

        • The US took that to heart in WWII, perfecting “time on target” artillery strikes—where multiple batteries of different calibers would drop all rounds on target at the same time. Terrified the Germans. And gave them no time to get to cover, so,casualties were horrendous.

    • Contrary to western propaganda , the Russians are outnumbered , and have tried to minimize civilian casualties and their own losses .

    • What is “slow?” We were in Afghanistan for 20 years, how did that turn out?

      Bottom line is we are in no real position to judge slow or fast because we are not privy to Russia’ prewar planning.

      • Right. That’s kind of what rankles. It’s counterinsurgency pace. If the point is to decapitate (‘denazify’) and you’re dominant, why not get it over with?

        Idk, I’m not expert on military strategy, and I don’t trust the info that the public gets. Add to that the West’s response to loot the treasuries and wreak economic havoc. Maybe this is a new kind of war, but it’s strange. I have the feeling much more is going on than us dirt people are seeing. Either that or tptb have truly lost their minds.

        • Re: decapitate/denazify. Maybe I’m getting that mixed up. Denazifying would be something like counterinsurgency, then again, the Ukrainian military is being destroyed. Mission creep, by necessity or otherwise? Maybe by gambit? Idk, I should probably go back to not paying much attention.

    • Its not slow going. It took the US 6 months to take out Saddam during GW1 with much better circumstances, terrain, weapons, morale, training.

      For a war in which they are facing equivalent tech, well trained troops and urban combat the Russians are doing incredibly well.

      If we were to actually think about it the Russian armed forces are terrifying to anyone not of the caliber of the US

      The Chechen threat to invade Poland is bluster but the truth is Poland no longer has armor, its all in Kiev or somewhere and if the US was distracted by say China, they could do it and win.

      They lack the warm bodies to occupy of course or the will but NATO sans the US would be destroyed.

      That is why we are delusional, our “its basically a gas station” has morphed into a formidable regional power with abetter odds of recovery than we have

      • Iraq took a little over a month to topple. Same with Germany vs Poland. Idk, this just feels different to me for whatever reason, and like I say I’m not an expert on these things, nor have I been paying close attention. But if you take the Russians at their word that Ukraine isn’t a real country and depends on Russia for its sovereignty… something about it isn’t adding up for me. The whole thing, from all sides, looks bizarre. Not that my opinion matters.

        • The Ukraine historically was not a real country. Kiev was essentially part of Russia , the home of the Kievan Rus

          This war is complex but the Russian POV is pretty simple , there are pogroms against breakaway Russian speaking republics, a CIA backed color revolution when our guy was in charge and NATO right on our border.

          We are next therefore an invasion makes sense

          As for the war, Iraq War 2, yes.We had destroyed the military by than anyway. It was a mop up operation with another 10 years of weapons development

          If Wikipedia is correct Iraq War 1 took six months.

          Germany v Poland is about how long modern Poland by itself would last against the Chechen forces alone much less the Russian ones since they gave all their armor to the Ukraine.

          Even so the Blitzgreig was a historical anomaly .

          Our last wars, Korea took two years for a push Vietnam ten years for a lost and Afghanistan twenty!

          • Right. I’m not questioning the Russian rationale. What I’m saying is that big countries can mop up small countries if they want to. The pace of the war tells me either Russia is being hindered or there’s something else going on.

            I’m willing to accept stronger-than-expected resistance because slavs, but this isn’t the mujahideen in the mountains of Afghanistan, so I’m leaning towards the latter. What that means I have no idea.

          • Paintersforms, I respect your opinion there. I really don’t know either.

            My understanding is that Russia is casualty phobic do to the low fertility which plagues basically all developed nations .

            The Ukraine is worse than Russia in that matter but maybe the leadership sees this as existential or maybe they just don’t care about loses .

            The Russians OTOH don’t want to lose many men or kill that many. either

            Apparently Russians also aren’t good at US style blitzkrieg warfare and can’t pull off the stuff we do with no fly zones than lighting fast strikes.

            The tried a coup de main and got a butt kicking so went back to what they were good at. As the US army would put it Traddoc (Tradition and Doctrine)

            Worse for Russia the Ukies are more than willing to fight in cities, set up in civilian occupied areas and fight a media fight to the last Ukrainian .

            This is bad optics and high casualty on both ends so the Russians are mostly avoiding urban warfare.

            Instead they are using a technique they call a Cauldron which we know as encirclement and destruction in detail . It tend to be slow going at the best of times but very thorough .

            It mostly uses artillery as well , which is what the Russian excel at what the Russian’s amusingly call a clobber list.

            So keep on shelling and grinding them down.

            Its working pretty well. No matter what arms we food that nation with, dead or shells hoicked Ukrainians aren’t going to be able to fight . Being on the receiving end of artillery bombardment over any length of time is a quick ticket to PTSD or as they called in the day Shell Shock

            I don’t have any more knowledge than anyone else so what happens after the Special Military Operation is the Ukraine is done I don’t know.

          • That makes sense and would explain a lot. Thanks!

      • …The Gulf War began with an extensive aerial bombing campaign on 16 January 1991. For 42 consecutive days and nights…Ground war invasion then began…Cease fire declared end of February…

        In round numbers, that 6 weeks, not 6 months.

18. Where are you getting your information from Z? Because it basically feels like you are just making shit up!

    I know that Western media isn’t reliable, but even unreliable sources will tell the truth when the truth happens to cut their way, and what the MSM has been saying about the surprising underperformance of the Russian military rings true to me. It’s clear that the Russians wanted very badly to take Kiev (which is central to the Russian nationalist narrative), made a major effort to do so, and it was a fiasco. That is not what you expect from a well run military that understands its own capabilities and those of the enemy! It’s clear that the Russians are not where they and everybody else expected them to be at this point. So why shouldn’t I believe the MSM when they talk about the effectiveness of Javelins, or the inadequacy of Russian logistics, or how the Ukrainians have been knocking off Russian generals due to the rigidity of the the Russian command structure. These are all things that could be true in a war, and if they were in fact true would the MSM not report them? So why shouldn’t I believe them? Because you say so?

    Honestly, you haven’t given me the slightest reason to take seriously anything you have been saying about the war. Or about Western assumptions and strategy. Or the Russian economy. Or anything. I’m not saying I have any deep knowledge myself. My best guess is that by next February things will have settled down to a stalemate, the Russians will have their land bridge to Crimea (at the expense of the tightest economic sanctions the West can manage), and Putin will be pretending that’s all he wanted anyway, and that the whole thing was something other than a disastrous miscalculation on his part. But who knows. Maybe both sides will be using African mercenary armies by then. Thanks Putin!

    • Who knows what’s really going on, but I’ve found this guy to be pretty on point throughout the conflict. He’s obviously ex-military and has been critical at times of both the Russian and Ukrainian military.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMtuqas55jo

      For what it’s worth, his take is that the Russian’s initial plan was to overwhelm the Ukrainians across a large front in hopes that the Ukrainians would crumble. That didn’t happen.

      After that the Russians took a bit to figure out a new plan of attack, but starting around a month ago or so, settled into using their air power and massive artillery to grind down the Ukrainians and degrade their supply lines.

      In his opinion, it’s working. It’s a slow process, but it absolutely hammers the Ukrainians.

      In essence, the Russians started with a bad plan, stumbled a bit, but have now righted the ship and are using their army very effectively. So, the Russians might end up being what people thought that they were in the first place.

      You can see this on the maps each day. The Russians are moving forward relentlessly and seem to be picking up steam. There’s a decent chance that the Ukrainian army in the east will collapse in a month or so if reinforcements or a counter-attack from the west don’t show up.

      Basically, relax, and look at a map.

      • Russia invaded with less than 200K troops vs 600K Ukrainians . they never planned to take keiv, i is 3-4 million and they don’t have enough soldiers to occupy a city that large , but the Ukrainians bought the head fake and sent a big chunk of their military there. The russians then destroyed their fuel and supply lines and left a portion of their troops to hold them there . and that’s where they are still trapped . the ukrainian army is collapsing as we speak .

        • That’s entirely possible. Or it’s possible that the Russians were hoping that a big show of force would cause the Ukrainians who, the Russians believed never wanted this fight in the first place, to lay down their arms and let the Russians roll in.

          Or maybe it was a bit of both. See if the Ukrainians capitulate, if not, well, we still pinned down a huge part of their army while our main force hits the east.

          • There’s any number of possibilities, but not the one JEB seems to think—“the Russians wanted very badly to take Kiev”. If the reported force approaching Kiev was ~40k, that was never going to happen. I’m thinking Ritter was right on this one—the approach was purely diversionary to keep Ukrainian troops there in place and not reinforcing other engaged units. Secondarily, the approach might have goaded Ukraine to take peace talks more seriously.

          • It was a “free option”. Best case the “thunder run” worked. Worst case you fix the bulk of Ukrainian forces there, degrading ability to mount any counterattacks elsewhere. A variant of the Grant/Sherman strategy.

        • Thank you for pointing out that the Russian forces were never adequate for and never intended to capture large chunks of Ukrainian territory. But all the media could harp on was the 40 km convoy that was out of fuel or some other silliness. It’s been indicative of just how stupid a lot of our media are but thats no surprise since many are young women who have certainly no military interest, much less service under their belt.

          • Capturing territory has never been a Russian war concept. Russian military strategy is about destroying armies in the field as an extension of diplomatic efforts. In this regard, the Russian never left the 18th century.

    • “It’s clear that the Russians wanted very badly to take Kiev ”

      Thanks for the laugh.

      Clear to whom?

      It is clear to many that the purpose of the northern tank column was to prevent the Zelinsky forces being moved from the Capital to reinforce the Donbass.

      • Many things are “clear” to JEB, ref his sage Covid predictions of prior postings.

        • Compsci — Can you link to some of these “sage Covid predictions” that you keep bringing up every time I post something here? I don’t remember making much in the way of predictions, but maybe you can refresh my memory.

          • JEB. Why yes, you continually touted the 2M Covid deaths that was predicted by false modeling and never occurred. You were emotional and panic driven. You still are. You, to date, have never acknowledged your error.

            One need only look at your initial posting wrt the current Ukraine/Russia fiasco.

            Really, a bad look for anyone desiring credibility—of which you have none. And you have the audacity to challenge Z-man’s take/credibility?

            Insight you don’t have, but keep posting, if for nothing else comic relief.

          • “The audacity to challenge”? Really??? I have to say I do not share your reverence for Z. He has some interesting ideas, which is why I read him, but much of the time he comes across as a pontificating crank. I do admire his ability to grind out 1,200 word blog posts on a daily basis, but really, he is just one of many, many, many anonymous internet pundits, and far from the most impressive.

            The way you consistently interpret disagreement as “panic” is not very impressive either. Also, I didn’t really expect you to do the work required to dig up links to support your claims, but don’t worry, I did the work for you! In fact, this is the second time I’ve addressed this issue, and rather than cut and paste my words from last time I’ll just…, you know…, link to them:

            https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=26969#comment-295163

    • I commend your skepticism, but you are being skeptical of the wrong thing. I would (and frequently do) argue that we should be leery of ALL purported information. There is a war on. I assume* the West is being fed a very one-sided version of events, a large portion of which I would suspect as being untrue propaganda. In such a conflict, both sides have plenty of motivation to lie and damned little incentive to be truthful.

      *”Assume” because I follow only the barest outlines of the news, operating always under the assumption that what I’m being served is fiction, not fact. Why, then, do I participate here? Because I gain more from hearing different points of view argued, something one will rarely find on the mainstream media.

    • Jeez are you still upset at not getting the republican ticket.

19. Peter zeihan is saying the exact opposite, that the ukranians have done exceptionally well, the russians have embarassed themselves, javelins worked great, and russians only win in the long run because of their larger population.

    • “Well they were going to win anyway” might be some workable ass-covering from them, but it’s not going to sound so great to people when they go to pay their energy bills.

    • Zeihan is the Malcom Gladwell of our time. He’s a mile-wide, inch-deep thinker.

      He knows a little bit about a lot of things. The only area where he brings anything to the table is incorporating demographics into political thought, but even here, he’s a shallow thinker – and, naturally, a believer in the blank slate.

      • Agreed. I’ve never been impressed by Zeihan. He strikes me as a classic GAE-regime-bot. He has a slick presentation made with a veneer of unbending confidence. Those presentations raise a lot of questions that the forums he presents in never permit being asked.

        May the days of the punditry be numbered. We need doers and builders in far greater numbers than presenters and pontificators. We’ll know the regime has changed when we are all too busy to give the Zeihans of the world a moment of time.

        • Zeihan writes books and gives speeches that make the reader and audience members feel like they’re really smart without having to think much.

          It’s a gift, really. Gladwell had the same gift.

          • I forgot about “10,000” hours Gladwell.

            If you want to master something you need to work really hard at it. No f’in s*&*! 10000 Hours? What about 9000? Everyone? Really? What about the talentless? What about prodigies and geniuses? What about 10000 half-assed, unengaged, unfocused hours? It is just another sign that this culture and the people who forge it is not serious. When the most banal and obvious thoughts and ideas can be proffered, packaged and sold as some incredible, sublime insight to the top 10% who repeat 10K hours like the great formula for accomplishment has been finger snapped into existence, the engine beneath its the culture’s hood can’t be that far away from seizing up if it hasn’t already.

            —- —- —- —-

            In Ted Talk nation the final acts play.
            Enthralled with shamans with nothing to say.
            Mere signs of the zenith, the fabric’s decay
            The famines that feast on tomorrow today

            10000 hours of the Burning Man’s gaze
            The husks of a hollow beyond the haze
            10000 hours of pleasure borrowed from pain
            The Degenerate’s Theater circles the drain

            – Perihelius Lux

        • “GAE regime-bot.”

          Damn son, you nailed it.

          Remind me not to waste anymore of my precious time on Zeihan interviews.

      • “… a believer in the blank slate.”

        Intelligence is pattern recognition capability. Stupidity is lack of pattern recognition capability. Type 1 stupidity is from an excess of mutational loading: too many suboptimal alleles results in poorly functioning hardware. Type 2 stupidity is from an excess of emotion (greed, hatred, envy, fear, arrogance, etc) that shackles the reasoning mind.

        Anyone who believes in the blank slate theory (the most easily personally falsifiable notion) is stupid. Any other patterns they think they see are automatically suspect.

        • Well we should put him in charge of the Treasury then!

      • Obviously he is one of the D.C.beltway crowd, at least on this issue. Whether he believes what he’s saying or is just a shill matters not; he’s still dead wrong.

20. That is a very comprehensive, and, if accurate, devastating broadside against the West. I hope it is dead-on balls accurate, but would settle for it being 75% accurate.

    • New elite sounds good to me. These people suck. If anyone halfway competent would replace them, I’d bet the turnaround would be shocking.

21. Pingback: DYSPEPSIA GENERATION » Blog Archive » The Rocks of War

22. “Lee Greenwood, Larry Gatlin, and Larry Stewart have all pulled out of performing at the National Rifle Association (NRA) convention in response to the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, that left 19 children and two teachers dead.”

    In addition, China Mitch of the GOP told his fellow Republican Senators and Congressmen to “work with the Democrats” on a new “Gun Control Bill.”

    A nation of White men with no balls at all. We are finished as a country and likely as a race.

    • It looks like the Feds played a role in encouraging the Buffalo race killer:

      https://buffalonews.com/news/local/authorities-investigating-if-retired-federal-agent-knew-of-buffalo-mass-shooting-plans-in-advance/article_bd408f18-dd39-11ec-be53-df8fdd095d6f.html#tracking-source=home-top-story

    • Speak for yourself ,Carl, not our race. You don’t exemplify our finer traits.

    • Ain’t that a shame.

      Uvalde has to have another 200+ killed to reach Chimpcongo numbers.

      Yet nary a word about it.

      I guess when it’s pet on pet violence it doesn’t count.

23. The Germans have proved to be particularly thick headed in all of this. This may be due to the Greens winning so many seats in their last election. In the words of Obama, “elections have consequences.” In Amerika, we don’t have real elections, just the consequences.

    The German people themselves are as suicidal as any western country and more. They really do believe in the ESG fairy tale. The average German may indeed throw himself into Gaia’s volcano as a sacrifice to the Mother Earth God. To this day they haven’t flipped on decommissioning their nuclear reactors. Even California did that. The reason which is because half the power at Diablo Canyon is used to pump water to LA. Now that’s a stumbling block for the Greens.

    We talk a great deal about the natural, genetic inferiority of blacks, except for playing in any sport involving a ball, or field work in oppressive heat. But the German, and possibly Polish gene pools (given Poland’s disastrous recent foreign policy decisions) may have a fragility in a propensity for group think that’s far beyond any Mediterranean gene pools. In the nature/nurture argument, I think the autism of that particular region of Europe can be a detriment.

    • JR –

      The Allies have been wrecking the German character & people ever since 1945; jealous of their military prowess – crushing France in 6wks, throwing England out of Europe 4x, & inflicting 3.5 million casualties on the Soviets in as many months – they set about to destroy them & their national identity by crushing the Prussian spirit as “militaristic” & throwing the Holocaust in their face every 5 minutes. Throw in a healthy dose of Western self-loathing & you get what we have now, a kind of lunk-headed recalcitrance in just about everything.

      That said, the Germans have always been awful @ PR.

      • It might just be due to a surplus of women vs men influencing politics and institutions.

        • David –

          Yes. Former Gefechtsministerin (Defense Minister) Ursula von der Leyen oversaw the large reduction of the Bundeswehr to little more than a color guard useful for greeting foreign “dignitaries”.

          The West is not serious about anything except destroying the West.

          • A large standing military is expensive and serves no use when everyone around you has low fertility and an aging population/

            They just need a small one and a stronger border patrol.

            And yes the West is not serious, again caveat immigration and maybe sustainable energy there are no problems we can solve that we need to.

            We have all we need and adapting to that is proving challenging for us.

      • West Germany was a still formally occupied Country until WWII was finally settled by reunification after the collapse of the DDR. I think the treaty is dated 1991 but indolence prevents me checking. Forty five years is two generations of krauts raised under the boot of the yankee.

      • True, that all played a part, BUT…those of us on this side of the great divide know that genetics matter a lot. Dr. Dutton and others have noted that there’s evidence to suggest that one’s political leanings, left or right, is influenced by genetics. It’s entirely possible that right wing/nationalistic/alpha male genetics were simply decimated by two world wars, and many remaining ones fled to South America.

24. Speaking of military rocks, the latest empowered female flying an F35 off a carrier destroyed a 100 million dollar airplane. Of course, the military is going after the guys who leaked the crash to the media and not the quota hire and everyone who promoted her. The rot is deep. The collapse of standards in the Navy is striking.

    • But, but I keep seeing commercials in which a black Air Force general claims that he doesn’t care who he commands — black, Hispanic, woman, man, white — they’re going to kick your ass!

      How much more are we expected to take?

    • Good. The more pozzed AINO’s military, the less effective and more dysfunctional it will be if/when we confront it.

25. Our “elites” are incapable of understanding what motivates other people – and thus get Russia wrong.

    Some people are motivated based on duty, national pride, and unchanging moral principles (ie. religion).

    Our “elites” (and most Western people) are motivated based on celebrity status, sexual pleasure, feeling morally superior, the latest MSM outrage, and sassy one line Twitter comebacks.

    A sassy one-line burn against a devoted religious person (or scholar or military man) means nothing. Starbucks shutting down in Moscow means very little to most Russians.

    Russians have been poor compared to the West since forever. They aren’t going to revolt because they can’t afford a new BMW (assuming the sanctions even worked as intended). Afghans aren’t going to revolt because girls can’t play soccer.

    The Western leadership and media classes have excluded any kind of non-woke person (seen as a threat to them) for so long that they are unable to deal with people with different motivations. There are no voices in their leadership circles that understand why a Qu’ran fanatic doesn’t care about promises of Western wealth and opulence. Combine this with evident declines in general population competence and morality. So they keep losing.

    With India and China inching closer to Russia the West could be in a very rough spot.

    • Does help explain the “bad intelligence” maybe. GAE probably honestly figured that with no charge card and no Star*ucks that Russia would fold in a day, because that’s what they’d do.

      • Well over ten years past now, I was in my “professional student” phase towards eventual Spanish Lit degree. I knew at least one young woman (Millennial) who went into military intelligence. She was intelligent enough, but your typical idealistic young kid. I’ve known a few others (older by a few decades) in my life. These people often know only what they were taught in the University. God knows what the Feds teach them on the job, but it’s probably worse. They haven’t the slightest conception of how the real world works. I’m speaking of the 100% civilians, not someone who had actual military experience or similar (e.g. Peace Corps, et al.) As someone already observed, these few with actual real-world knowledge would get weeded out by the Woke, since it goes against the new dogma.

        My current project is working on a good friend’s grandson, who just graduated high school with reportedly good marks. He wants to be a surgeon. I’m hoping to be able to talk him out of it. 🙂

    • The first thing to shut down was McDonalds. The McDonalds’ closing was plastered in every media outlet as if the water supply to Russia was being cut off. They simply could not fathom a scenario that the Russians could live happily without fast food.

      • McHutu’s shutting down will increase average Russian life expectancy by four years.

        • “McHutu” literally made me LOL. Great stuff.

      • Without our fast food really. Anyone can cook a burger after all.

26. Wasn’t it Thomas Friedman or John McCain who first called Russia “a gas station masquerading as a country”? Could have easily been either. Anyway, I’d say one of the big things revealed quite plainly under the rock of war is that the US has become a Gender Studies Department masquerading as a country. At least in Russia they have gas.

    • I’m guessing that anyone that derisively calls Russia a gas station never has to use a gas station.

    • It turns out that another way to put that is: “Russia’s economy is based on selling critical commodities that people cannot do without to the world, rather than being based on selling them iPhone apps, superhero movies, and incomprehensible Jewish financial instruments out of Wall Street.”

      Turns out that economies based on something real are way more stable than our elites thought.

    • Russia is a gas station run by a mafia masquerading as a country. John McCain

      This reveals the degree to which ‘conservative’ crony corporatists have internalized leftist thought patterns. It is pure projection.

      There have been Rus for more than a millennium. They have scientific and cultural traditions (art, literature and music) that long predate our founding. The ugly truth is that current-year America is an corrupt imperial open-borders crony-corporate trade zone masquerading as a country. The natural process of our melding into a real country was short circuited by the the 1965 Hart-Cellars Act and the capture and subversion of the institutions of cultural product manufacture by deeply hostile foreigners.

      • We’re an israeliprison plantation, pretending to be a country.

    • Typical American arrogance and ignorance. Russia has a history and a culture almost 1,200 years old. America lasted 244 years before devolving into the obscene Empire of Perversion in which we now dwell.

      • 244 is generous. Many, with some justification, pin its death around 95 years old. The rest has just been the corpse twitching by having diversity’s axe embedded in its nervous system.

    • If we look at GDP in terms of PPP (purchasing power parity), Russia is essentially a Top 5 economy, within spitting distance of German and Japan, which are both pipsqueaks in terms of available natural resources.

      India is buying so much Russian oil they’ve delayed maintenance on at least one major refinery to process the increased input.

27. I think that what has been exposed over the last few years in particular is how toothless (well not totally), incompetent and pathetic our paper tiger leadership has become. Not only internationally but domestically. The AINO cabal has been running the show and bossing the world (mostly the third) around for so long, they have just been assuming it’ll last forever, and whatever they say, goes.

    They can’t see what a laughingstock they and US, by extension have become. Sure, we can bomb the piss out of places, but who can actually take this place seriously anymore?

    To wit: the Trump years and all the non-stop lying, an obviously stolen election, Afghan debacle, covid debacle, dementia patient “elected” president, the Ukraine debacle, joggers running wild, the Uvalde debacle and on and on. The last kind of puts a stamp on everything. Kids being slaughtered while brave cops stand around outside and forcibly prevent parents from attempting to save their own children. If that doesn’t highlight to everyone just how AINO doesn’t have their backs, I don’t know what will.

    • There is a weird progressive (read; hyperliberal) compulsion to dissolve all social roles into one mushy melange. They conduct this crusade with government jobs because that’s the easiest place to start. Being a cop is obviously different from a garbageman is different from a postal worker — but the great grinding down of useful vocational distinctions doesn’t leave you a society that is easy to manage, except maybe by the financialized/Wall St definition of “manage”

28. So many lies exposed. All we can do is hope that more people will finally come to the realization that it’s been crumbling for a while. It’s increasingly becoming impossible not to notice.
    There are more rocks to be overturned and many snakes hiding underneath.

    • The snake is too high of a lifeform. Think slugs instead.

29. I have found the war to present a vivid contrast between the communication styles and thinking ability of the Russians (and Chinese) and the US government, its vassal state leaders and the cabal that runs the EU. Putin, Lavrov, and Medvedev come across as thoughtful, articulate leaders who can see the big picture and clearly communicate how the parts fit into it. They also are very patriarchal.

    Then there is the sad lot representing the US, EU and our vassal states. Yow. There is no one among them capable of going one on one in a debate with the Russians (or Chinese) without demonstrating that they are incompetent fools.

    I have never dealt with the Russian government managerial class but, given the quality of the leaders I can’t imagine they are the useful idiots I find among the US managerial class. That isn’t saying much. . For them to be better is a very low bar.

    • The moment I find that best captures the difference is Blinken channeling Taylor Swift and her song We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together in regards to the relationship with the other great nuclear power.

      I just can’t see Putin, Lavrov or medvedev taking that approach.

      Russia has to win in its geopolitical challenges. The US side’s leaders have no skin in the game. No matter how they mess things up they will be OK

      • Likely inspired by John Kerry bringing James Taylor to Paris in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attack, so that America could tell France “You’ve Got A Friend”.

        It reminds me of a few years ago, when my company rolled out a new product that would be made at our facility. They brought in a handful of social media drones from corporate to give the guys on the floor a rah-rah talk. They gave a presentation featuring the TV commercial that would be airing, then moved on to the hashtags they tried to make trend, and how many “impressions” their cutesy social media posts were getting. All of which was incontrovertible evidence that success was surely right around the corner.
        Sitting in front of them were a few hundred white men, many of whom would rather have been out working on a car, 4 wheeling, hunting, or even mowing their lawn. I was astounded at how this escaped the millennials trying to impress us with their allegedly tech-savvy credentials. They may have even gone back to their hotel that night congratulating themselves for the work they did on our behalf. At any rate, they were blissfully ignorant of how actual people made purchasing decisions.

        BTW, the product never made money and was discontinued less than a year later. There’s hope.

      • Like Pat B says (about the US) – an unserious people in a serious time.

    • Medvedev’s current Pro-Russia hawkishness has been an enormous surprise. I had thought he was a pretty dyed in the wool Atlanticist based on his trial run as Russian president a decade ago.

      • A decade of the West pissing on their faces at every diplomatic juncture will do that.

    • https://voxday.net/2022/05/27/unrestricted-war-on-russia/

      Russia is quite aware that this fight is for all the marbles:

      One of their foreign ministers:
      
      “The challenge Russia is facing has no equivalents in our history. It’s not just that we have neither allies nor even potential partners left in the West. Frequent comparisons with the Cold War of the mid and late 20th century are inaccurate and rather disorienting. In terms of globalization and new technology, the modern form of confrontation is not only of a larger scale than the previous one, it is also much more intense. Ultimately, the main field of the ongoing battle is located inside the country.
      The asymmetry between the opponents is huge, particularly the imbalance between the forces and capabilities available to them. Based on this, the US and its allies have set much more radical goals than the relatively conservative containment and deterrence strategies used toward the Soviet Union. They are in fact striving to exclude Russia from world politics as an independent factor, and to completely destroy the Russian economy.
      The success of this strategy would allow the US-led West to finally resolve the “Russia question” and create favorable prospects for victory in the confrontation with China.
      Such an attitude on the part of the adversary does not imply room for any serious dialogue, since there is practically no prospect of a compromise, primarily between the United States and Russia, based on a balance of interests. The new dynamic of Russian-Western relations involves a dramatic severance of all ties, and increased Western pressure on Russia (the state, society, economy, science and technology, culture, and so on) on all fronts. This is no longer a source of discord between the opponents of the Cold War period, who then became (unequal) partners. It looks more like the drawing of a clearer dividing line between them, with the West refusing to accept even the perfunctory neutrality of individual countries.

      • No more talk of “our partners”. That shit is entirely over; the Russians are launching off into their own trajectory, and so far as I have been able to see, with the nearly total acquiesence of their populace. The Big Brains in the US, and to perhaps a slightly lesser degree in Their poodles, are driving other nations to choose sides, and not to Their advantage. That this course of action is not to the benefit of us, the Dirts, goes without saying, because our benefit matters not a whit to the Big Brains, and for decades has not. Brace for impact.

30. “Three months into the conflict and the Russians are on the cusp of victory.”

    The Russians have been on the cusp of victory for almost 3 months. It doesn’t matter how long it takes AINO or the EU to admit they won. It only matters how long before the Ukranians do.

    “Their (neocons) seething hatred for the Russian people has blinded them to many things.”

    I wonder if they hate the Russian people any more than they hate the people that live in their own country. Probably not.

    • They hate everyone who isn’t them.

    • Texas equals Russia now. Washington DC is at war with both of them.

      They are just different fronts in the same global war.

      • Steveaz: I wish the mythos of Texas as full of strong and independent White people would finally die – because it is blatantly untrue. Half of Texas is non-White. Most of the southern part of the state might as well be Mexico – and that most definitely includes Uvalde. Almost every last person there is a magic-dirt ‘murrican. And leaving aside the incompetence of police in general, what Uvalde demonstrated is that where there are Mexicans, there is Mexico. The corruption, the disorganization, the lack of personal resolve, the lack of consequences.

        The Border Patrol is majority Mexican. The schools – school boards, teachers, and students – are entirely Mexican. Abbott is a typical weasel politician who says and does what he thinks will go over well with the old White repubicons who continually vote for people like Abbott and John Cornyn.

        And one of those ‘devastated’ uniformed Mexicans in Uvalde wants AR15s banned – because only ‘professionals’ like himself should have guns.

        The over-emoting and finger pointing about Uvalde needs to stop. Rules and procedures weren’t followed, stupid decisions were made, and there’s plenty of blame to go around. But at the base of it all: None of those people ought to have been on American soil. Neither the parents nor the children nor the mentally-unstable killer.

        The Texas that actually exists is at war with the Texas of people’s media-enhanced memories. Demographics wins, every time. If DC is ‘at war with Texas,’ then I hope both lose.

        • ” If DC is ‘at war with Texas,’ then I hope both lose.”

          Brilliant.

          There are a handful of freaking Northeastern states with more balls than Texas.* Basically every Appalachian state is more based than the Lone Star state, admittedly a low bar.

          *There are diminishing pockets of West Texas and the bayou north of Houston that kind of retain traces of the false stereotype.

          • Jack Dobson: There are pockets of decent people almost everywhere, but they are shrinking and – unfortunately and importantly – isolated from one another. There are also slimy politicians in every state. But everywhere in the media I encounter this fantasy of Texas the way it was portrayed in a movie I saw in school in the 70s about Texas quirky millionaires like Nelson Hunt, and that’s just not reality now if it ever really was.

            Considering not just income taxes and property taxes, but building costs, various vehicle and other licenses and fees, etc., Texas is not nearly as high on the list as so many seem to believe. Add in the horrific climate, clay soil, lack of potable water, and ever worsening demographics, and it’s just not where genuine DR people ought to be looking to as an inspiration, let alone a place to move to.

        • well, we tried voting for someone other than Abbott in the primaries. Huffines at least talked the talk. And he wasn’t Abbott.

          The only thing going for Abbott, Cornyn and Cruz is they run against Betas. I wonder how much the contributed to Beta’s campaign?

          • c matt: Why I am so vocally opposed to the “vote local” crowd. I repeat, demographics always win. Voting in a rigged system always loses.

        • Excellent post. You raise some insightful aspects. Now, with the understanding that I have some familiarity with Mexico, it’s limited to a total of six trips done in the 2000s. I’ve seen the real Mexico, quite a selection of it. That said, I’ve had very limited contact with any Latinos in the USA, whether they were immigrant or native-born. That’s doubly true for the Southwest, which I’ve only passed through on my trips.

          That said, you implicitly raise a curious point: To a large degree your claim “Where there are Mexicans, there is Mexico” rings true. However, what is abnormal in Texas and similar regions? Ah, there’s a key point: It’s the United States, or more precisely, the legal, social and economic systems of the US. And it’s very different from Mexico’s. For all its faults, Mexico is an enchanting country, with much for its citizens to be rightly proud of. But it also has Mexican traditions, law, society.

          America was set up by and for White men of European ancestry. For that reason alone, it may be unsuited to other races. That doesn’t mean that non-Whites haven’t sometimes adapted, but much evidence would suggest the vast majority haven’t. Perhaps they can’t, even if they wanted to. Our laws will change to be more non-white, but that change alone dooms much of the American experiment. 🙁

          • Ben: Whether or not some Mestizos might adapt better to the traditional US system than others (which might well be true) is, to be honest, irrelevant to me. But your observation is accurate. The entire keystone cop episode (teacher who propped the school door open – to take a smoke break? – the resource officer who wasn’t wanted there because so many of the kids were illegals – the macho posturing yet lack of action by the cops – it all reeks of actors in structure and system utterly alien and unnatural for them.

        • Then there is the issue of Texas as a police state.

          Conservatives built Texas as a huge prison-enforcement institution.

          It is only a matter of time before that monster gets turned against white people as the demographics decay further

        • @3g:

          This has been true since the Seventies. When I would visit relatives there as a kid, I was struck at how pozzed it was (pozzed wasn’t a word but fit). The pop/cult magic has kept the false image alive for at least fifty and more like sixty years.

          As an aside, and this isn’t good from a dissident perspective, but it is very funny, what has turned the Mexicans off of the Left has been the Haitians streaming across the border. Even among Third Worlders, they are considered a cancer. So contra the Karl Rovian “we need to open the borders to win Hispanics,” the Republicans actually have won an, as usual, undeserved victory because the Mexicans got pissed at the sight of blacks streaming into “their” towns. It is why the Biden Bunch jumped to stop the flow of Haitians.

          • Jack Dobson: Yet there are Haitians in almost every country on Earth. One always reads about hunger and poverty in Haiti and Ethiopia etc., but their populations continue to increase in exponential fashion due to local proclivities and White food and money. If there truly is a world-wide ‘famine,’ it will be long overdue.

        • As I’ve posted before, I live in an Hispanic County and metropolitan area. Nothing terrible to say about the neighbors, but 3g4me is right on the money. The political situation when Hispanics vote their race is headed for the toilet. That’s what is so surprising to me in that Texas has lasted this long. The political class here is abysmally incompetent. If it wasn’t for worse areas (like CA) sending refugee Whites, this State would be a definite Blue and in fiscal deficit.

31. Thanks for bringing up the Europeans. No matter how this plays out, the Europeans will definitely come out as big losers, possibly the biggest loser.

    And thank goodness. They’ve been a pampered wife for at least the last 30 years. The Americans provided their security, security that they didn’t even need but were more than happy to allow the Americans to pay for. They got cheap energy from Russia to prop up their manufacturing and living standards. They even got to sell to their supposed dangerous neighbor.

    Basically, they were a wife who didn’t work and had a boyfriend on the side who buys her nice stuff. Now, the husband is telling her to get a part-time job and the boyfriend is breaking up with her.

    Europe’s life is about to get a lot worse. If they had any brains, they’d tell the Americans that Russia is no threat to them and that they’re going to continue doing business with it. But they won’t.

    • This is outstanding insight and writing. It makes a seminal point about the current dilemma using an analogy that everyone can relate to. It is the essence of useful wisdom that propagates readily into mainstream awareness and may therefore can have an impact on group behavior. Most of what passes for erudite commentary in the national media is obtuse, convoluted nonsense that is a waste of time to read. We need more concise and easy absorbed wisdom nuggets.

    • They’ve been a battered wife for at least the last 30 years

      tftfy

32. From what I heard online, the reason the rockets like the NLAW and the Javelin are failing is because they sat around in warehouses for years and years and the the battery packs are no good anymore. Something rings false in that to me – I have seen them fail to kill the target several times now in the vids coming from the conflict – even when they make seemingly good hits. Something more is at work here. According to the hype, not a tank should be rolling in the area because they should all have been reduced to smoking ruins by these superweapons.

    It’s odd after seeing the old Gulf War clips where Patriot missiles and smart weapons could take out their targets with surgical precision…

    • I think there is a combination of factors with the javelin. One is the stuff was not sent there ready to use. Another is there is training required to master the weapon. Another is the Russians have counter measures. I also suspect the weapon is built for a certain type of soldier that is not present in the Ukrainian army. In fact, I think we may be seeing a real world HBD test. The Slavs have a way to fight and their tools need to match it.

      • The one analysis on the Javelin I saw from an ex-military, was the greatly reduced hit performance if the tanks were in motion. As to the Stinger and its follow on, Russian pilots are flying close to the ground, which make deployment, aim, and firing highly difficult.

    • Glen-

      The battery angle is real. Battery maintenance is a critical duty when storing these weapons. It is also one of the most boring, onerous duties.

      Thus, it is difficult to find anyone that wants to do battery maintenance, much less anyone that does it well.

      There are PDFs floating around that show the epic scale of US military battery maintenance operations.

      Here is just one of many websites that describes the Goldilocks approach that should be taken when storing rechargeable batteries:

      https://www.call2recycle.org/consumer-safety-tips/

      • do ICBMs have batteries? 😛

        • No, but they used to use liquid fuels, and that made batteries seem easy. I believe we had a huge blowout way back when in a Arkansas Titian silo due to a dropped wrench, Now everything is solid propellant.

          • Those aren’t without risk either. Thiokol lost an entire factory many years ago. Also I seem to recall at least one incident where technician(s) were turned to beef jerky when a solid fueled rocket lit off unexpectedly in its silo. (Those are just from reading media over the years — no industry knowledge at all.)

            All the same, I too would rather be around a solid fuel rocket than volatile fuels mixed with liquid oxygen…

            BTW, a fun “redneck science” video to watch (e.g. Youtube) is when someone uses LOX to get a charcoal grill started 😀

      • Wild Geese: Are the batteries in US mil equipment essentially the same as those sold in the consumer market, albeit a more robust/hardened version? I don’t know how much more robust a rechargeable battery can truly be made. Some YT videos claim solar panels can handle a lot of weather before degrading, but batteries/generators need to be kept from cold, heat, and moisture. Merely building a basic wooden battery house doesn’t cut it – there needs to be a great deal of insulation and ventilation.

        I’m sure today’s diverse army is just as diligent in storage and maintenance as the diverse elsewhere around the globe have proven.

        • But… with respect… the Javelin is basically a “point and shoot, fire and forget” weapon. That is one of its selling points – it’s so simple to use, even black thugs like George Floyd or Cornelius Rye could use it. You aim it, arm it, the device acquires the target and acknowledges the lock, you press the trigger…and your job is done. (I don’t know about the NLAWs).

          I think I’ve seen about half a dozen instances where they did all that… but for whatever reason they failed to make the kill. I wonder if the explosive compounds deteriorate over time too…?

          • Russia builds countermeasures into their tanks. and they test them extensively against similar warheads . They understand what they are liable to be facing which apparently we don’t .

            Now subject to supply lines, parts and of course canned sunshine, the US can beat Russia in a fight but from what I can tell the Russians are actually very good and the Ukrainian op was fast, low casualty and appears to be accomplishing the goals of the SMO

            That is impressive.

            Trith is the US is not up for a war as we lack the ability to replenish stores and if China were to cut us off , we’d be screwed.

            We are basically a glass hammer now. Hits hard. Once.

        • 3g4me-

          Excellent question!

          In my corner of the world, I feel I’ve seen a clear dichotomy in military batteries.

          1) Batteries that are quite close to standard, off-the-shelf, consumer products for vehicles and devices.

          You can see this in this US Army vehicle battery maintenance PDF I found: https://pdf4pro.com/view/the-u-s-army-battery-maintenance-management-45c688.html

          2) More customization than you can shake a stick at, which is what tends to happen in compact, complex products like the Javelin and Stinger.

          The cell chemistry and physical layout will be custom. Multiple cells packaged into a battery will have a custom form factor. The package will include custom electronics for the custom software in the unit to manage the battery. Lest I forget, the battery terminals will also be a custom design.

          You can get a sense of the situation where they talk about the Stinger battery in the third paragraph under the Description heading here:

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIM-92_Stinger#Description

          Just spitballing from that info, I’d bet a bunch of the batteries that were sent had the argon leak out long ago. If they are as sensitive to abuse as described, more were probably lost in shipping, and yet more dropped out as they’ve been banged around in the field.

          Alas, the hysterical Western media and pols simply don’t understand that many of the high-tech weapons are simply not as rugged as they imagine.

          • I qualified on the TOW and TOW 2 and while those aren’t high tech by today’s standards, they were still a fairly complicated weapon. And fragile. And sometimes a total POS. They also required extensive training and I am sure the Javelin is the same.

          • I looked up the training schedule for the Javelin. It is a two week course, eighty hours. That gets you to the point where you can operate the system safely. From what I have gathered from field reports, many of the trainers sent with the weapons have just come from that initial course. They are given a week to prep conscripts on the system.

          • This is precisely the calibre of commentary i expect in the average Atlantic or NYT comment thread.

            Do I even need to put the /s?

        • I’ve never serviced weapons, but I do know a thing or two about consumer electronics. I would speculate that the very last pace you would ever see a rechargeable cell would be a disposable military weapon. No, it would likely be a dry cell, probably lithium, (mercury in old days), or perhaps something else with a very long shelf life. No rechargeable I’ve ever read of had anything close to lithium or alkaline in terms of charge held or shelf life holding that charge.

          I do know from first hand experience in the military four decades ago, in a much less diverse time, that “pencil whipping” (forged test reports, in so many words) happens. In my field it was for non-mission-critical numbers. But I’ve seen the results of an inspector general inspection and lots of maintenance gets forgotten even when it was mostly whites in a relatively technical specialty.

          Even though the batteries would have multi-year shelf life, it is quite likely that maintenance was ignored and/or that old or expired stock was sent to the front. The old stuff would be the first thing they’d send to such a conflict.

      • And we’re going to be running our entire superpower economy on these in 8 years, right?

    • Forgot to mention that the Patriot is no great shakes either:

      https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/03/28/patriot-missiles-are-made-in-america-and-fail-everywhere/

      Earlier this year Houthi air attacks damaged enough oil facilities near Jeddah that the Saudis and F1 were seriously considering cancelling the Grand Prix there:

      https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2022/mar/25/saudi-arabian-grand-prix-at-risk-of-cancellation-after-houthi-missile-attack

    • i have read that the russian tanks have a kind of armor that is resistant to the javelin.

      • Yeah but the new Gen 4 stuff is going on the new T14s and they are having problems with the product roll out…so I’ve heard, anyways…

33. May I turn over a rock right here in our own backyard?

    During the shooting rampage in Uvalde where a deranged “trans” “immigrant” ruthlessly gunned down innocents in an elementary school, and in an almost exact repeat of the Columbine disaster and elsewhere, LEOs stood down for nearly an hour and hid outside while the murdering continued inside the school. What does this say about the quality of people in law enforcement? How much lower can you go as a declining society when supposedly honorable men cower behind brick walls while children are being slaughtered? Worse yet, these same “brave” men prevented parents from entering the school to save their children? And the perp was arrested 4 years ago for threatening to do exactly what he did, and then released with no consequence. Yeah, we can wait until November to vote harder. That’ll fix everything.

    • On the plus side this means that the police aren’t really much of a threat to any non-voting means of enacting political reform.

    • evidently, the cops ran in and got their own kids out, before keeping the other parents at bay.

      • Reference for this accusation? There is none. A report is that a mother ran in and got *her* kids out. No police to my knowledge had family there, much less took them out in leu of other children.

        • the local tv channel 5 reported it. snopes has an item about it. might be true, might not be.

        • i saw an interview right after the incdent and a LEO confirmed both of these my gell manner friend

    • “LEOs stood down for nearly an hour and hid outside while the murdering continued inside the school. What does this say about the quality of people in law enforcement?”

      Pretty good, actually. From what I’ve pieced together, Tranny shooter killed a classroom’s worth of kids then barricaded himself in it. He wasn’t being a threat to any additional children so police formed a perimeter and held for specialist units to arrive.

      If I’m correct then they acted with considerable restraint, given the hysteria of those soccer moms. A critical part of emergency response is overcoming the “don’t just stand there, do something!” impulse.

      Think about it. If Tranny had been killing schoolkids unopposed for a full hour then the body count would have been triple digits. That Border Patrol guy? Turns out, he had a daughter in the school and was as panicked as the other parents. Rushing in worked out for him… easily might not have. His daughter would have been safe either way.

      • not true , 5 of the kids hid under a table with a long tablecloth and survived . on child hidden elsewhere in the room answered a shout out by police and was killed. there liver were greatly endangered by the unspeakably slow response

    • I’ve seen credible (to me) reports that the local police force reflects the local community: Mexican. I’ve seen a picture with 7 recognizable hispanics out of a total of 7 officers shown.

34. I’ve been saying for 5 years that California needs a bailout. The Ukraine war is that bailout.

    Every Raytheon product purchased with taxpayer momey for this war puts a couple thousand dollars into Newsom’s slush fund. Before Biden launched his Ukraine campaign California was broke. Now it is projecting a ‘surplus.’

    I stand by my prediction: this war was ginned up for a host of unspeakable reasons. One was to bailout Newsom’s treasury, and ensure that CA stays blue.

    • I’d think money to Lockheed would be of more benefit to California since they have a lot of facilities there.

      Raytheon HQ is in Massachusetts and the facility that builds the Javelin is in Arizona.

    • Get ready for “Marshal Plan V 2.0” to “rebuild” Ukraine.

      It’s going to be a trillion dollar decade plus slush fund. The grift and the theft will be EPIC.

      This time, there won’t be a George C Marshall managing it. I don’t think men of that caliber are around anymore. At least not in the US.

      • nah brah, ukraine is yesterday’s papers. finland is the new/next ukraine.

35. Watching the snarky, passive-aggressive Zelensky government reminds me of a hysterical woman on her monthly. The U.S and NATO need to start acting like the adults in the room but they can’t because they’re pretty much on the same level. A small group of people who vehemently hate Russia are not just determined to fight to the last Ukrainian, but foolishly will drag the whole world down with them.

36. I think Herodotus said that war is the father of all things. In particular it exposes weaknesses and failings that had hitherto remained camouflaged. This Ukraine conflict is highlighting how weak and hollowed-out the Collective West has become. Economically. Militarily. Intellectually. And by implication socially and culturally. The rest of the world is scrutinizing this carefully and adjusting its posture towards the West accordingly.

    • One reason I studied military history in college. You learn more through the lens of a nations “war machine” than any other. One of the best “starter books” is Weigley’s “American Way of War”. Some the analysis is flawed and there are subsequent historians like Brian Linn that have filled those gaps. But you can clearly see the drift from course over my lifetime that got us into fiascos like Afghanistan.

    • You mean there might be the smallest candle-flicker of hope…

      That Bollywood will give up its appalling Indian gangsta rap videos?

    • > The rest of the world is scrutinizing this carefully and adjusting its posture towards the West accordingly.

      This! Exactly. It is why I was so adamant that the west would never let the Ukraine situation escalate to the point of Russia invading. They CANNOT risk allowing the facade of military and economic invincibility drop one bit.

      I thought peace, prosperity, and global domination was worth too much to risk over some dirt-world money laundering outfit off the Black Sea coast, but I underestimated just how deranged our rulers truly are.

      • “They CANNOT risk allowing the facade of military and economic invincibility drop one bit.”

        Rule #1: Don’t get high on your own supply (taken from the film “Scarface”). That’s exactly what Western “leaders” did — they fell for their own propaganda.

        But then again, history tells us this kind of hubris is not unique. Happens again and again. The 30-years war (1914-1945) revealed how hollow the British and French colonial empires were. Pax Britannica was effectively over by 1919.

37. “Like trust fund babies raised in insular opulence, Western leaders are unprepared for a world where they have to perform their role as elites. The war is exposing them as a toxic blend of self-indulgence, stupidity and ignorance.”

    I think Ken Wark has said more than once that the US elite is the most under-performing elite in world history. In the words of Gordon Gekko, if these bozos opened a funeral parlor, no-one would die.

38. Its hard to find solid information on the war, I read the Sakers site but he’s clearly too pro Russian to admit any failure or mistake by Moscow. but the Western media is far worse, the war was about 2 weeks old when they started saying the Russian army was low on food and weapons, 3 months later the Russians are still fighting and the BS in the MSM continues. a while back Zalenskyy admitted he was losing 50 to 100 men a day (I wonder what the real number is) at that rate at some point the Ukrainian army will just collapse, I assume, but who knows. I think Putin wants to take Odessa, that battle could be worse than Mariupol, the Russians just keep grinding on

    Watched a video on youtube the other day, if the info is correct the Russian BMP troop carriers are pretty useless, close to zero protection, they have a more modern solution but have not produced it in large numbers yet

    The lunatics in DC are now planning on sending long range missiles to the Ukraine, the Russians will have no choice but to escalate

    Petrol is €2 a litre ($7.6 a gallon) where I live now, people are getting really pissed off, next winter will be even more interesting, even if its a mild winter, Natural gas prices will hurt everyone, except the Russians

    • I follow Ukrainian and Russian channels. The pattern is that something happens, one side wildly exaggerates it and the other denies it entirely. it goes back and forth for a week until both sides agree. The Ukrainians are much more plugged into Western media narratives, so they are far less reliable. The Russians are skeptical of everything, including Moscow, so they get closer to the truth usually. It is an interesting study in contrasts.

      A good gauge is Mariupol. The Ukrainians claimed they had 15,000 defenders. It was about 10,000. They claimed to have lost only a few hundred troops. The total captured was about 5,000, which means the rest were killed. Some surely fled before the fight, but the rest were killed.

      Reliable estimates say the Ukrainians have lost about a third of their army thus far. That was before the latest break through in the Donbas. The DPR says they have 8,000 Ukrainian prisoners. The Russians have about 10,000, so that means about 20,000 dead or wounded, which is 200 a day.

      • I speak to my classmate in Kharkov couple of times a week and she does not know what is really happening. She can only tell me how many explosions she heard that day. Of course all Russian stations were shut down even before the war and she knows better than to trust the Ukrainian official sources.
        Finding a reliable info is as hard as in the Soviet Union.

        • I came to rely on Russian language Free Press (svprees.ru). Today they reported that monkeypox originated in Nigeria which has several biolabs.
          FWIW.

    • Try telegram Intel zlava or use the search function. For updates on the front try youtube channel defense politics asia.

39. Why am I suddenly thinking of the scene with Dr. Evil revealing that he will demand One. Million. Dollars.

    • Even one billion sounds trite now.

40. Jared Taylor always takes a lot of stick from the “muh free market” types when he points out that communist and socialist countries didn’t succumb to the cultural and migrational decay that the supposedly free societies did. Lots of Westerners (and even those in the Eastern Bloc) sneered at the idea that the walls and checkpoints were there to protect the East from the decadent swine of the West, but there might be some truth to it. Coca-Cola is the ultimate Western product, sugary as apple pie but much easier to consume in compact measurable units, and even though they fought to get cokes in Czechoslovakia and East Germany, it really is just tooth-rotting, high-fructose corn syrup that reduces its victims to Rascal scooter-riding tubs of lard.

    Another, maybe more important assumption we all sort of had in the West was that the cordon sanitaire imposed by these countries kept most information out, except for what samizdat could be mimeographed or whatever songs could be picked up on the pirate ham. But think about how hard we have to struggle to get good info now, how dangerous it would be to read a Greg Johnson or Greg Hood book in public. Turns out the media blanket forcefield thrown up by our system is a hell of a lot taller and grayer than the Wall. And you can scale a wall. It’s much harder to beat a signal constantly beaming bounced against the side of your head.

    • In Oliver Stone’s “The Putin Interviews,” I noted several scenes in which a bottle of Coca-Cola is sitting on the side of the table occupied by Stone and his western crewmen, while all you ever see on Putin’s side of the table is… bottled water. I’ve watched hours and hours of video of that man, and with the one exception of buying an ice cream cone for a visiting foreign leader (what is it with politicians and ice cream cones?), I have never seen that man consume a single bite of junk food.

      People think Putin’s macho outdoor activities were all filmed as some kind of ego trip. No doubt that was a factor, but the real purpose was the re-masculinizing of Russia. In the Yeltsin years, Russia was weakened in every way, and male life expectancy decreased to 61 or 62, if I remember right. Russia felt emasculated. Putin came along and improved the economy, lifted tens of millions of Russians out of poverty, restored the social safety net, improved education, and increased male life expectancy by over ten years. He sees part of his job as being a role model of fitness, vigor, resilience, and healthy masculinity. Russian society needs those qualities. ANY country needs those qualities. Putin has often expressed genuine puzzlement as to why the West is committing suicide by deliberately stamping out those things.

      F*ck McDonald’s and Coca-Cola.

41. One of the strangest aspects of the Ukraine war is Ukraine’s complete and utter inability to produce any sort of effective counteroffensive. The only time Ukraine had regained control of large portions of land is when the Russians decided to withdraw their troops to focus elsewhere, not because of any pressure from Ukrainian forces.

    In any aspect of human competition, whether it is business, sports, or war, the agent sitting back on its heels reacting to his adversary’s moves is at a huge disadvantage. It gives credence to the thought that Western leaders really don’t know how to react when an opposing force is adapting and showing an effective attack. Their go-to domestically is usually scorched Earth (see Canadian truckers and French riots), but this time their enemy has the same capability.

    • Your definition of counter-offensive is so 2021. Zelensky has gone on how many United States award shows now? WINNING.

      (This is not even total sarcasm)

      • The cloud people are 100% sure the Russians are getting the asses kicked, every day for 3 months now. what happens in the end, will they just ignore the real world results ?

        I having beers with a good friend on Saturday, he’s a good lad, but a total normie, I can’t wait to get his opinion on the war in the Ukraine

        • Gellman-Amnesia is a real thing. At some point it won’t be, but I doubt the torrent of lies about this war will cause the United States government to be toppled.* There was a great deal of backlash about the $54 billion, to be fair, because it was obviously stolen by TPTB, but that was quickly forgotten.

          *This assumes the Great Depression Boogaloo doesn’t happen, which may be wrong.

          • The latest $40B was just a funding bill for the deep state.
            Far more of it will end up in Northern Virginia than east of the Danube.

        • Trump was (and is) literally Hitler for going on 6 years.
          Everyone has died from Covid.
          Black people would build Wakanda, but can’t because of racism.
          The Jab is safe and effective.
          $5.00 gasoline is because of Russia.

          Like the stock market staying irrational longer than you can stay liquid, it is pretty clear that a large portion of our neighbors are NOT waking up.

          • trump got promoted to Ultra-Hitler!

    • from what i have read, any time the ukes come out of a defensive crouch, and mass out in the open, they get slaughtered.

      • It appears that the Russian, “retreats,” were mostly tactical withdrawals intended to bait the Uke forces into revealing themselves and extending their figurative necks to get them chopped by the Russian executioners.

        • And even I, the news-free cynic, learned on this very blog a few days ago, that what you describe is classic Russian strategy going back centuries 😀 And damned effective, I surmise.

    • It shows what dominating the air space can accomplish.
      Russia, with it’s missiles and other air power needs to create just enough doubt in the minds of those who want to launch a counter offensive. [But really, the Russians largely have their back to the Kiev “front”, I would think that any sort of exerted effort could relive their trapped forces. But then again, maybe not.]

    • > One of the strangest aspects of the Ukraine war is Ukraine’s complete and utter inability to produce any sort of effective counteroffensive.

      Dude, you can’t launch ANY kind of a counteroffensive when your opponent has air supremacy. You would get SLAUGHTERED!

      Honestly, I think Ukraine’s “strategy” of “dig in and pray for NATO” is probably their best option.

      • When your best option is relying on the US, you are fubarred.

    • Not unexpected. Ukrainian are less capable than the people surrounding them and ruling over them. Thus a historic hatred of Poles, Russians and of course Jews.
      And to round up the picture: they are good at singing and dancing.

42. Indeed, the economic war turned out to be a huge self-inflicted wound, not unlike amputating your own leg by mistake.

    Turns out an economy based on building real things, with real labor and real capital beats an economy based on hot air after all…

    And no matter how much they try, they cannot put Humpty Dumpty together again.

    Seems likely to me that this SMO marks the high water mark of the hegemony of the west.

43. Western leadership issue: “…unprepared for a world where they have to perform their role as elites. The war is exposing them as a toxic blend of self-indulgence, stupidity and ignorance”…

    Western leadership response:
    Look over there! Covid, no wait…Monkey Pox.
    Behind that tree! White nationalist, nazi lovin’, gun toters.
    Under the bed! Gay haters
    Over there! It’s climate change. Give us more money.
    Only D.I.E. can save us now.

44. The great walkback has begun; Kissinger earlier this week said the Ukraine will have to give up territory and now the Washington Post is admitting the Ukrainian army east of the Dnieper is about to get destroyed.

    So what’s the next big freakout? Covid II: The Coviding flopped and its spinoff Monkeypox isn’t getting traction. My money’s on a meteor.

    • So far the West has not come up with a new narrative for after the fall of Donbas. Maybe that comes in June. They may be waiting for Russia to reveal Phase III of the operation. Still, it is curious that they are not prepping a new narrative yet.

      • Do you think once they take over the Donbass and landlock Ukraine whether they’ll fortify and declare victory with their newly acquired territory, or go for broke and keep pushing to get assurance of a fully neutral Ukraine?

        • That is the question right now. The Russians have been clear about their goals. One was eliminate the ultranationalists, which was accomplished when they surrendered in Mariupol. The next was the liberation of Donetsk and Luhansk. That will probably be done in the next month, maybe sooner. The last objective was the neutrality of Ukraine.

          It is clear that the Russians have no interest in returning Kherson and Zaporizhzhia in the south. Both are moving to the ruble and converting Ukrainian passports to Russian passports. They could easily take Odessa and Nikolaev, thus reducing Ukraine to a landlocked state. The trouble is if Washington tries to rebuild the Ukrainian army in the West to launch another round of shenanigans. The Russians may decide to preempt that possibility.

          • it really seems like russia has done a deal with poland, to hand over western ukraine to them. this would focus ukrainian nationalism towards poland, and away from russia. does this prevent nato from staging arms in what was western ukraine? no, but the threat of those sites where nato arms are located getting missled does.

          • I would laugh my ass off if the Russians recreated Catherine the Great’s province of New Russia in the Donbass region with a distant relation of Gregory Potemkin on the throne.

          • Neutral Ukraine is the big sticking point.

            Once the operations in the East get wrapped up, the Russians will push for this. If the West refuses, which they likely will, things will get serious.

            The Russians will need to decide whether they 1) use military force to invade the rest of Ukraine – a seriously large operation; 2) put the big squeeze on Europe by cutting off their gas – though this might be too late as the Europeans have been filling their storage facilities in preparation; or 3) hold off for now and push for a color revolution.

            It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.

          • @manc

            One of any new polities formed by the Russians, whether provisionally independent or incorporated into the RF, should be labeled the “Cossack Hetmanate” just to troll the specials who started this war.

          • There is a militia unit called the Cossacks of Catherine (I think) operating out of the south.

        • Odessa, etc. would be worth a trade to the west for peace. The west would get to show that they forced some capitulation on Russia, while Russia gives up territory that would have been hard to hold onto long-term anyway.

          • Maybe, I think a land locked Ukraine would be a win for the Russians, it makes control of the Black sea easier, even what they hold now is a win, its some of the best land in the world, and they have taken a big bite

            The longer the war goes on, I see Putin giving back less in any negotiation, the question is, when does that penny drop for the Ukrainian nationalists

          • No, Odessa’s fate is sealed.
            1) Whatever is left of “Ukraine” needs to be landlocked to make their position henceforth absolutely clear.
            2) A link up to Transnistria needs to happen. Moldova and Romania need to have The Bear glaring at them from across a border to reinforce who rules the roost going forward.
            3) Odessa needs to feel the knout for what happened in the massacre at the Union of Trades hall a few years back. President Putin has staked out a position that this atrocity is among those for which there will be retribution, and Odessa must pay.

      • i think their backs are against the wall, with all the myriad fukkups they’ve made, so they go all in and declare the GOP a threat to the nation, and start rounding them up and shooting them. this of course would be accompanied by martial law nationwide. sound extreme? wait a few more months. you can see the seeds of this plan already being planted, with attempts to get GOP candidates banned from running etc. instead of asking if this is likely, or possible, ask “who is going to stop them?”…

        • Yeah, they will make war on Americans, and no doubt with the same valor and confidence as the Ulvade cops and the troops running like little bitches out of Afghanistan. No doubt Uncle Lloyd is meeting now with Raytheon and Co. to discuss what weapons will be needed to put the boot to the insurrectionists, White nationalists, and independent book store owners. It may even pay more than $54 billion.

        • The Democrat Party working for the American people, at last!

      • I’d say that the West is sticky with the old narrative, just tweaking it a bit. To them, the plucky Ukrainians are still putting up a great fight but being overwhelmed by the huge Russian army, which while completely incompetent and running out of everything, still have a massive numerical advantage.

        (Yeah, yeah, I know that Russia is operating with a shockingly small force, but whoever let facts get in the way of a good narrative.)

        In essence, in their minds, the Russians are winning by sheer numbers. If you listen to the Americans, the Russians are running out of tanks and soldiers. The Russians are resorting to using old tanks and equipment because the newer stuff has been wiped out. This is a sign that the Russian military is near exhaustion.

        So, yes, the Russian will take the Donbas, but their military and economy will grind down after that. (Again, this is the Americans speaking, not me.)

        So, why how do the Americans reconcile this narrative with the calls for possible peace? I mean, if we’re going to win, why negotiate.

        That’s easy. They’ll simply say, “Sure, we could win this if we wanted, but the cost in Ukrainian (and Russian) lives is just too horrendous. Russia is falling apart as anyone can see, so it’s time to be magnanimous.”

        Personally, I think the Americans would love to see this go on for years, but the inflation and damage to the European economy won’t let them.

        • On Fox’s Jesse Watters show the other day with one of those other slick-haired guys who I mix up all the time subbing for Watters, they had some guy peddling a book about Patton. The subtext of the conversation was a comparison between Zelenskyyy and the legendary US General.

      • They are starting to craft the narrative of the heroic defeat, a defeat so heroic it is in in fact a victory.

        • Since when did they become American southerners?

      • So far the West has not come up with a new narrative for after the fall of Donbas.

        Look, a school shooting!

    • Anne Applebaum is quite upset about this and demands we fight to the last goy. Has there ever been a more incompetent, moronic and consistently wrong bunch of fools than America’s self-proclaimed elites? Hey, Anne, in case you have forgotten, it is a grift. Or are you wanting a cut before the next carnival starts?

      This one was and is serious due to the nuclear war angle. Maybe we can marginalize and possibly force these idiotic monsters out of the country this time if they don’t get us nuked?

      • IMO the risk of nuclear conflict has been greatly diminished by Russia’s unalloyed success with conventional arms – as well as weathering the economic sanctions nicely.

        • Yep. Russians also have been focused and shown great restraint and determination. The contrast with the West could not be greater. You are right about the economic brinkmanship, but when you look at the state of the Western economies it is no shock the people who came up with MMT would fuck up sanctions, too. Here in the USA, we have the spectacle of financial titans begging the Fed to stop increasing the interest rate because the hikes already have worked! These morons cannot thrive without a free money teat and we are all going to be much poorer as a result.

      • > Anne Applebaum is quite upset about this and demands we fight to the last goy.

        You first Anne.

        Anyone who insists a foreign country they could not point to on a map a couple months ago should sacrifice hundreds of thousands of people to a futile war meat-grinder is a complete psychopath.

        • It it weren’t for genocidal psychopaths The Atlantic would not have an editorial staff.

      • The most dangerous people are those who come to believe their grift is virtuous.

      • Jack –

        The globe has the worst “elites” since 1914.

    • https://i.ibb.co/wCq1ZXy/Monkeypox-Ukraine.jpg

      Get with the program.

      • Perhaps some day there will be a pogrom instead, that addresses the root cause of many problems 😎

        Ah, it’s nice to daydream…

45. “The first lesson of this war so far is that Western intelligence has been exposed as useless in understanding modern Russia. At every turn, the information provided to political leaders about what Russia is doing and planning to do has turned out to be more fantasy than reality.”

    What if the information “intelligence” has provided to “leadership” has been deliberately false? In other words, factions within the Security State wanted this conflict and lied to elected officials to get their glorious little war. Even that is generous in that it assumes “leadership” had to be deceived.

    What this war has exposed is the Empire of Lies literally is the Empire of Lies. Granted, some of the delusional NPC’s who thought they could meme Putin out of existence have filtered into key positions of power and that accounts for part of the cognivite dissonance, but only some. The liars and grifters wanted to divorce Europe from Russia, and have accomplished that goal although it probably will backfire come autumn and cold weather. Also take note that as soon as the $54 billion was approved and the envelops were passed out by the Congressional help, suddenly there were calls for a negotiated settlement. Maybe the Neocons can be permanently sidelined if all wars start with the MIC naming its price and the politicians getting their cuts up front. It is play money at this point, anyhow.

    Which leads to:

    “That has turned over another economic rock. The European economy has been revealed to be a house of cards. The sanctions regime is creating havoc for the Europeans, because their economy was based on the assumption that the Russians would always supply them with cheap necessities. The EU is a mommy economy where Mother Russia makes sure her babies are warm and fed. Shortages and spirally prices are bringing this reality home to Europeans.”

    Mommy Russia has provided the cheap goodies and Daddy USA has locked the doors, set the alarms and kept watch at night. The question is whether empty bellies can overcome the comfort of Daddy playing the Big Meanie. My guess is not and NATO falls to pieces as Europeans decide they rather like heat and food.

    • Funny how everything you read in the media about the Russian economy decried how small and inconsequential the Russian economy was before the war started. Now our “elites” are realizing food, energy, basic minerals, fertilizer and metals have something to do with how stuff gets to the grocery store, Amazon, into your gas tank and furnace. Guess cutting them off from our exports of social media influencers and McKinsey consultants wasn’t that effective.

      • Didn’t you know? Cancelling Russia on Twitter was supposed to work!

        • Something unfortunately believed within the halls of the DoD. Uncle Lloyd himself told us Russia would be weakened by mean Tweets, and Thoroughly Modern Milley has polished xhis nails for the occasion.

      • I believe that the size of the Russian economy has been under reported for years. Obviously the financial analysts and reporters in the collective West have massive incentive to do this.

        • They may just not have the skills to arrive at a realistic picture; after all, these are people who believe that our ridiculously-contrived mechanisms for justifying our own GDP figures are to be taken seriously. This failure of comprehension of the Russian economy is undoubtedly due to baked-in contempt not justified by facts, largely ideologically determined by (((ethnic hatred))).

    • when have our intelligence services ever been right?

      • Even given the level of utter incompetence throughout the system, it is hard to believe any one group could be so inconsistently wrong. It has to be deliberate. For example, everyone assumes the intelligence claims of the Soviet economy about to overtake the West were major screw-ups. I submit the more likely reason is that the intelligence services and the MIC wanted their grift to continue. This is what is happening in the Ukraine. Again, take note, that as soon as the envelopes stuffed with $54 billion got passed out the cries for peace broke out.

46. seems like these repeated military fiascos will drive the US leadership inwards, becoming more insular and isolationist. won’t be long before the money spigot to the armed forces is turned off, thankfully. what a colossal waste of men and money they turned out to be. now they can all be police officers standing around eating donuts while schools get shot up.

    • One of my kids has several engineering classmates that interned at the shipyard producing the “state of the art” Littoral Combat Ships. Even as 2nd and 3rd year NavArch students they could recognize these things were pieces of crap. Yet supposed to be the mainstay of littoral water power projection. He told me they’d likely never see service over three years ago. Now they finally announce that….the USN is scrapping 8 brand new ships. That’s “end of empire” stuff

      • plus that one littoral ship a malcontent started a fire on, that wrecked the ship to the point it had to be scrapped! probably just a pile of oily rags did the trick. imagine if the POS had been hit with ordnance?!

        • That ship the sailor set on fire was an old school Wasp class amphibious assault ship (LHA), which were good ships with long service, the littoral combat ship was something entirely different.

          • oops, my mistake.

      • Wait, what? Scrapping 8 new ships?

        Just one darn-tootin’ minute. After approving $40B, they heard our protests, and immediately approved a *second* $40B.

        That’s a total “in your face, dickhead” move, and how much they hate us.

        So, ya think any of that is going to buy some seaworthy vessels?

        • I believe it’s more like two in service, the others on paper or being started. But I’m too lazy to look it up.

      • With the sinking of the Moskva, will the Russians even bother building another ship that big, or will the expand their Submarine fleet

        • More submarines are probably in the offing, and whatever surface vessels are added will likely be the size of destroyers or smaller. With their new range of cruise missiles either supersonic or hypersonic whether they are for land attack, or for anti-shipping, they don’t need to be on the scale of big, muscular cruisers to accomplish those missions. Look at what their Caspian Sea and riverine missile-capable vessels did in support of their mission in Syria.

          I would imagine that the Russians are also working hard on their anti-submarine warfare capabilities.

      • The story of the LCS retirement is a fascinating portrait of failure:

        https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/44811/littoral-disaster-navy-wants-to-retire-10-littoral-combat-ships-according-to-report

        Heck, just looking at the photo at the beginning of this article you can see the fragile, poorly put together hulls. They look like they could be caved in with a swift kick. And the visible rust is simply embarrassing.

        • Here’s another LCS article with a great shot showing the trash quality of the hull material and construction:

          https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/41816/critical-fix-will-take-years-to-reach-all-navy-freedom-class-littoral-combat-ships

          Just look at all the uneven sizes of the tiny panels, their concave shape, and the poor quality welding.

          I mean, the 12′ Sea Nymph aluminum rowboat my dad owned in the 80s had better construction quality than this tub.

          • C’mon Wild, did you stop and consider all the DIE it took to make those boats? Sounds like you’re judging them on a curve of White Privilege!

        • Apparently the problems go deeper than propulsion. Composites were used extensively in the superstructure and the differences in expansion and response to torsional stress are playing hell on the framing. That vibration were not accounted for in the “general arrangements” so wear is excessive—may be part of the transfer gear problem—this is from my kid. So basically these things are sea going “Galloping Gerties”—if you recall the famous bridge that shook itself apart.

          • SIA-

            Thanks for the info.

            In my experience, mil-grade vibration test is always very difficult, even for small items.

            The LCS is a good sized ship, so they probably created a computer model, ran it through some simulations and called it good.

            I’ve never been completely sold on composites in harsh duty applications.

            Take carbon fiber bike frames, for example. It doesn’t take a very large nick in the fibers to totally compromise the structural integrity of the frame.

            The stresses applied to an LCS are orders of magnitude larger, so it makes sense to me composites would struggle in that application.

          • Well, you certainly can’t make ships from Pittsburgh steel anymore. Of course, you can’t man ships with white American men anymore either, so I suppose it fits the Clown World Navy.

    • Fiascos? You think actual combat proficiency is the goal? No, keeping the funding-political contribution-post officeholding directorship loop going is the goal. By that measure, these are bang up successes!

47. The great military strategist Scott Adams opined that Russia couldn’t hold out or secure positions because of the West’s modern drone warfare. This guy couldn’t secure his nubile young wife so there’s that.

    I imagine the any western military response to be something similar to the police response to the Texas school murders. Events constantly reveal our weak and broken souls trying to sustain a country that is no longer it’s former self. Men without chests.

    • On the other hand, scott’s nubile young ex-wife no doubt secured her hold on his assets.

      • For such a smart guy, he fell for one of the oldest ruses in the book.

        Is there anyone who didn’t see that coming?

        • “Is there anyone who didn’t see that coming?”

          Yes. Scott Adams.

          But let’s listen to him predict the future!

          • Jack

            One wonders if he had a prenup.

            If he did, I’d say that hitting that on a regular basis was worth it.

        • it’s like scott doesn’t know he looks like a human vulture!

        • Plot twist. Scott Adams is not a smart guy.

      • She wasn’t that nubile, she already had two kids and I think Scott’s now on the hook for raising them like the victim of a Cuckoo while she parties.

      • I regret that I feel schadenfreude over Adam’s troubles but he was always such a smug know-it-all. He tells you that he’s the master persuader, that he’s the most incisive thinker.

        He couldn’t persuade that gold digger to stay with him. A little bit of humbling may improve him.

    • In any major disaster event the lack of coordinated effort and information sharing is always magnified to the Nth degree because of the various department heads not all being on the same page, it was only because a lone alpha male rushed in to act independently that more school children were not shot. You see this over and over during disasters, it’s the people who organize themselves locally and act without waiting for permission that actually do help..

      • There is a lesson in that, I’d say.

    • At some point Scott will inform us that his predictions about the war were the most accurate, if he hasn’t already! 😂

48. Not sure we’ve ever gotten Russia right. Took a two term sequence in modern Russian history around 1981, at the height of the Science! of Kremlinology. Then watched as much of what was assumed about Soviet politics and put into textbooks was undone as the Soviet archives were opened. And recall about the same time there was a “rogue” intelligence analyst that somehow got Reagan’s ear at the point the approved Kremlin Science! had the Russian economy rapidly growing and on track to bury the west. He didn’t think so and proposed a humint based program that looked at conditions in the farther reaches of the Empire focused on things like food and goods deliveries. He got it approved and soon came back with assessment the Soviet Union was an economic wreck teetering on the edge.

    • The old canard about “Russia is never as strong, or as weak, as she seems” applies, and should be tattooed on every State Department flunky’s forehead.

      I wonder what an outside observer would say after looking through some US mega-chain shelves? Definitely not as it was 2 years ago.

    • The west has long been addicted to “phoned in” intelligence. Even during WWII it was all about breaking codes and not field assets (though their incompetence keeps getting field assets killed so there’s that).

      • They tend to give themselves away pretty early when they’re yelling at the waiter “Parle usted ingle-se? Hello? Yo wanto dos beeros por fae-vor!”

      • And as I observed directly during two weeks without power during Sandy, the capacity of the average Cloud Person to suffer is a slight fraction of a Russian’s.

        • There was a great moment of video I wish I could find again in which some Western journidiot confronted Putin about all the suffering the West was getting ready to impose on Russia. Putin (whose father was wounded fighting the Nazis and whose brother died in the siege of Leningrad) just laughed and replied, “You can’t scare Russians.”

      • Every once in a while the enemy cooperates. The neocons wouldn’t have known who to blame if the Iranians hadn’t written “Made in Iran” in English on the inside of the IED’s in Iraq.

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