Miscellaneous And Off Topic Subjects

[Dr. Strangelove]

Dry your tears and wipe the snot off your pitiful face, Geezer, I won't pick on Kushner any more. He is absolutely NOT like Hunter Biden. He has NEVER attempted to cash in on his family ties or his ties to Trump. Everything he has is entirely by MERIT. No nepotism here, MERIT. Just like Trump. They are both SELF-MADE MEN! PERIOD!

You should talk to Hannibal if he agrees with you that Jared Kushner is the greatest hedge fund manager in New York City, is a financial wizard, and it's no wonder the Saudis would invest $2B in his no-name fund. It's absolutely NOT because of favors done during the Administration, it's MERIT

[THE_WIZARD_]

....good to see you have seen the light DSL...

[Dr. Strangelove]

Brady & Giselle getting divorced?

I'll stop you right there, Wiz. No: you don't have a shot with him.

[Mike]

Good. She's been a distraction for way too long. He can upgrade in 5 minutes.

[Dr. Strangelove]

Good. She's been a distraction for way too long. He can upgrade in 5 minutes.

You sure? I thought she was the one providing him with all the life-extending elixirs, mysterious roots, and eye of newt. He hooks up with the first 23 year old Bucs cheerleader that passes his locker and his age gonna catch up to him in a hurry

[THE_WIZARD_]

Giselle couldn't handle THE_WIZARD_...

[Dr. Strangelove]

The chatter I've seen today from Ukraine suggests the Russian collapse in Kherson province is even bigger than thought. They may be giving up roughly half of the territory they occupied to try and reform a stable line much further south. If you look at the Kherson front map at the link below, it's not reflecting the past 2 days yet but there are reports that the Russians have abandoned the northern half of what they control west of the Dnieper River.

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, October 3 | Institute for the Study of War (understandingwar.org)

[iam416]

I read that this morning and figured it would end up here. Really good stuff. Charlie is my favorite writer over there.

He's outstanding.

[Jeff Buchanan]

Ukraine: Here's what I learned from a reading of the sources I use covering Putin's war yesterday evening and today:

The Russian army is clearly withdrawing from positions they have held for months in the Kharkiv province abandoning larger cities and small settlements in what appears to be a chaotic retreat. Peskov, the Kremlin's spokesman, replies to questions from the press on the retreat and annexation with often conflicting responses - the most telling: "we're not sure of where the borders (of the annexed territory) are." He's speaking of the previously well defined borders of four Ukrainian provinces or Oblasts: Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaphorizia.

Right now, Ukrainian forces are at the doorstep of the Luhansk Oblast with the previously held Ukrainian cities, recently occupied by Russian forces, Severodonetsk and Lysychansk, in their sights. The Russian army has lost access to major resupply routes that the Ukrainian army now control severely limiting their ability to resupply or reinforce operations to defend these two key cities. The loss of them would put control of the Luhansk Oblast back in the hands of Ukraine. That would add to the restored Ukrainian control of the Kharkiv Oblast (not an Oblast annexed by Russia), but nonetheless a previously Russian occupied territory that their military was unable to defend.

This speaks volumes to the reports that Russian BTGs were so severely degraded that they have not been combat effective. Reports form Ukrainian soldiers indicate that Russian soldiers they capture are cold, malnourished and dehydrated, poorly equipped in standard military fashion and some had nothing but flip-flops on their feet. Exaggeration aside, if even 1/2 of these kinds of reports are true it reflects the terrible state of the Russian armed forces deployed in Ukraine.

The Ukrainian army is also threatening Russian control of the city of Kherson and thus control of the Kherson Oblast. It appears that Ukraine continues to attack supply points and the routes that run back and forth from them to positions the Russians are trying to defend. DSL mentions that the Russians appear to have withdrawn to the other (SE) side of the Dnieper River that separates the northwestern and southeastern 1/2 of the Kherson Oblast. You could call this a tactical withdrawal that Russian commanders would use the Dnepier as a natural defensive boundary. This leaves Kherson undefended if accurate and the city and capital of the Kherson Oblast could be taken by Ukraine within a matter of days.

Together, the Kherson and Zaphorizia Oblasts constitute the "land bridge" between the Donetsk Oblast and Crimea. That "bridge" controls the fresh water supply to Crimea. If Russia loses control of that territory and, as they did in the past, the Ukrainians can stop the flow of water to Crimea, Russian occupation of that strategically important piece of land isn't sustainable. There is no Ground Line of Communication (GLOC) between Russia and Crimea. Though since 2017 Russia has deployed and built up military personnel, bases and equipment, it will become hard to defend that territory, functionally an island, from a focused Ukrainian attack of it. It is currently the HQ of the Russian Black Sea Fleet.

From what I can tell, NATO intelligence agencies are heavily engaged with Ukrainian command elements and providing critical targeting data that is allowing Ukraine to efficiently use it's weapons and ammunition and integrate combat power at decisive locations and times. The Russians have displayed an unexpected lack of capability to do that and this juxtaposing of capabilities helps to explain why a seemingly superior force can be neutralized or defeated by a smaller force. As well, NATO equipment - all types from uniforms, body armor to fighting vehicles and artillery pieces to rations - are key in sustaining the Ukrainian advances. Add to that the clear degradation of Russian units fighting strength in terms of soldiers, morale and equipment and you have, on the ground, what we are seeing.

In the Kremlin, Putin can continue to talk about annexation but the bottom line is boots on the ground are what determine who controls territory and it is becoming pretty clear that Putin's army is not in control of the territory Putin has prematurely annexed. I'll report more on what is going on inside Russia with Putin's, what is turning out to be, a catastrophic military mobilization plan. I'll also report on how experts are assessing Putin's willingness to use nuclear weapons to change the shape and direction of the war.

[crashcourse]

gotta hand it the girl who got the abortion saving the check and the get well card for use 20 years later was mighty sweet of her

far as giselle goes not a fan

and never a fan of brady

they are both sub wizard on people id ever want to meet list

[Dr. Strangelove]

Latest in Trump Mar a Lago drama: he's trying to get the Supreme Court to intervene and stop the govt from going through the 100 or so classified documents they found lying around his shitty social club. They were allowed to do so after the DOJ won an appeal with the 11th Circuit.

READ: Trump asks Supreme Court to intervene in dispute over Mar-a-Lago search and seizure of documents - CNNPolitics

[Tom W]

Hey, does anybody know if they ever identified the leaker of the SCOTUS draft? Just curious.

[Dr. Strangelove]

Hey, does anybody know if they ever identified the leaker of the SCOTUS draft? Just curious.

Write to CJ Roberts and ask nicely and maybe he'll tell you

[Dr. Strangelove]

Musk is apparently...caving and agreeing now to buy Twitter at his original price?

Elon Musk offers to buy Twitter at original price days before trial (cnbc.com)

[Jeff Buchanan]

Shortly after Putin invaded Ukraine, politics in Russia didn't matter. Polls showed Putin had broad support for both the invasion itself and the underlying basis for it - this was true inside Russia and in about 60% of the civilized world. Higher income Russians who lived in the big cities were disinterested in the war. Rural areas were mostly supportive as here the population is older and still thinking of the greatness of the USSR.

7 months on, Putin still enjoys support but it is from an increasingly smaller population of Russian citizens, among them nationalists who make a large portion of milbloggers on the Telegram social media platform. Putin has courted this group in the hopes that they will have a positive impact on doubters and those who are neutral. That support began to erode when mothers and fathers in rural areas, whose sons were recruited disproportionately to recruitment and deployment of men from Russia's big cities, to fight Putin's war started coming home in caskets and in ever increasing numbers. After continuing reports of Russian losses of men and material further eroded the generally supportive Russian public, when Ukraine liberated Izyum, anti-war protests began to emerge. Simultaneously, as the Kremlin scrambled to find replacement soldiers, implementing a chaotic, inept and ill-advised "partial mobilization," the shit hit the fan. The the loss of Lyman in recent days the nationalist milbloggers have voiced aggravation and frustration with front line commanders, the Russian MOD and indirectly, Vladimir Putin.

I don't think this is the US's anti-war movement of the 60s that brought Nixon to commence withdrawal of US troops from Vietnam and ultimately what amounted to a surrender to North Vietnam in 1973 coming to Russian soil but there are elements of it creating significant domestic problems for Putin. The reality for the west is that Putin has gone too far in his quest to restore Ukrainian to mother Russia that a Vietnam style withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukraine ala. the US withdrawal from Vietnam is unlikely to happen. Putin is also president of an autocratically ruled Russia not a democratically governed USA. Obviously different circumstances.

As I posted earlier, it's clear Russia is losing the war in Ukraine being forced to abandon earlier territorial gains to the Ukrainian armed forces. The problem here is that Putin shrewdly implemented a wide range of undertakings from replacing Ukrainian officials in administrative posts with Russians, directing the implementation of Russian curriculums in Ukrainian schools, running what amounts to a gestapo operation of intimidation, threats, outright torture and killing of Ukrainians who resist. There have also been 10s of thousands of Ukrainians forcibly removed from Ukraine to Russia - the intent to erase Ukrainian culture. In part with many Ukrainians tired of the death and destruction, these undertakings have been partially successful. There are certainly some people living in Ukrainian territory who are more aligned with Russia than with Ukraine. To what extent they make Zelenski's job of returning corrupted territory and people to Ukraine, regardless of how effective Ukrain may be indefeating the Russian armed forces in Ukraine is hard to judge.

All of this makes murky business out of restoring the whole of Ukraine to it's pre-2014 status that Zalenski is insisting on these days and that Putin says is absolutely not going to happen. Clouding this picture is Putin's threatened use of a nuclear weapon to stop the current successes of the Ukrainian armed forces and to force a Ukrainian surrender. Experts on nuclear warfare that I'm reading think that Putin has already reached the conclusion that the costs to Russia's and his own standing in the world of actually deploying a nuke in Ukraine would be too high with the outcome of such an action likely leading to NATO intervention - an event that, so far, Putin has assiduously avoided undertakings that might prompt that. But as the red lines that Putin has marked out are crossed, without a nuclear response, his threats of using nukes become less useful to him.

Still, we don't know how Putin is thinking. He's in a box with no reasonable, on his terms, off ramp easily discernible. My position from the start of this talk of nukes is that Putin is not suicidal, understands the principles of nuclear escalation and is not likely to want to destroy large portions of humanity while reducing the world's major cities to ashes. I believe Russia will try to defend whatever Ukrainian territory they have occupied through the winter. The more consolidated those occupied areas become, the more Russia digs in, the easier they are to defend. Given an inevitable slow down in combat operations for both sides that occur in the cold weather of the winter months, this factor will give Putin time to rebuild and resupply has army. If he is successful in doing that, he may be able to restart offensive operations. Two things might stop Putin from achieving that: (1) Existing sanctions are already affecting Russia's ability to replace high-tech weapons and weapons systems, already proven to be not that great anyway. (2) If Russian forces try to garrison to recover, they become sitting ducks to Ukrainian strikes directed from NATO derived targeting data. That's how things will play out in the coming months, IMO. We'll be sitting watching and waiting to see what the spring brings