Miscellaneous And Off Topic Subjects

[Dr. Strangelove]

That Khater guy that crash posted an article about earlier this week just got 80 months minus the nearly two years he’s already served. He’s the one who confessed to using bear spray on Officer Sicknick

[Dr. Strangelove]

All Joey had to do was spend 5 seconds to check the DJIA. But he’s lazy. Christ, are MAGA Republicans ever lazy. They’ll do anything to just spend their lives on social media rather than find a real job.

[THE_WIZARD_]

Well I'm still down 38% since "Joey" took office...

[Jeff Buchanan]

Ukraine: It's Saturday and I'm on a cruise ship sailing to Aruba, Dutch West Indies. Good internet connection which is unusual aboard cruise ships. So, I continue to keep track and report. MSM continues to report a "lull in fighting." They assign winter weather as the underlying cause. However, the internet is full of milbloggers who are reporting a great deal of fighting is, indeed, underway. The Russian Army is concentrating its efforts to reclaim lost territory and expand their front lines westward from the Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts. They bring numbers to the fight for these objectives and are having some success, although only incremental and at the cost of heavy personnel losses - these don;t seem to matter to Putin or the Russian MOD. ISW, a military think tank I follow, reports in detail on the politics of the war inside Russia. In that vein there's a conflict between mercenaries of the Wagner group and the Russian MOD with the assessment that Putin wants to favor the MOD by downplaying the claims of the Wagner group leadership that they are responsible for making recent territorial gains, grossly inflated, and trying to expand their power base inside Russia, a potential political threat to Putin's power. I think ISW is overplaying this, maybe to suck readers in given the dearth of good intel about what's happening on the ground.

A lot of useless reporting on the west providing tanks to Ukraine is present in the MSM. There's no serious analysis of the impact this will have on outcomes, tactical and strategic. IMO, as long as the Russians can continue to deliver numbers in terms of artillery tubes and bodies, they will ultimately force Ukraine to submit and negotiations will be painful for them. The wild card is the answer to a classic question of military strategy. Can an undermanned but well equipped armed force through well coordinated combined arms and maneuver warfare defeat numbers of an opposing force in isolation? History is replete with examples and modeling that it can. The end of stalemates that featured exhausting artillery duels in WW's trench warfare was achieved by the introduction of maneuver warfare consisting of soldiers behind highly mobile tanks that broke though German defenses sending the Germans in retreat. Maybe the best example is Operation Desert Storm that was characterized by Allied rapid territorial advances, facilitated by combined arms maneuver tactics, penetrating static Iraqi defenses manned by incompetent, poorly trained and led defenders.

There are indicators that the Ukrainian armed forces, though outnumbered, could out maneuver and out fight the Russian armed forces forcing the Russians into retreat, given adequate armaments to do that. There are also differences. The main one is that despite getting some tanks - probably not enough and won't come fast enough - the Ukrainians don't have the air power to sufficiently support the successful pursuit of a combined arms operation. That's a 10k foot evaluation based on not a lot of relevant intelligence. I would like to think western military officials are convinced, having better information available to them than the public has, that the equipment they are providing, even small in numbers, can facilitate a successful Ukrainian operation that will put the Russians at a battlefield/tactical disadvantage. This would logically produce a more favorable negotiating position for Ukraine over the long term. It could also be largely wishful thinking driven by political exigency.

[lineygoblue]

Well I'm still down 38% since "Joey" took office...

Have you tried buying a dozen eggs yet?

Get ready to mortgage your house.

[THE_WIZARD_]

I don't have that kind of mula buster!

[AlabamAlum]

JFC

[lineygoblue]

She forgot the tinfoil that goes on top

[Mike]

Need to seal up the arm holes, then it will have optimal effect.

[Hannibal]

[THE_WIZARD_]

JFC

Ten bucks says that is DSL's Mom...

[lineygoblue]

Here we go again. This time an entire hockey team did not wear the "pride" jerseys to express their support of other people's sexual choices.

https://www.foxnews.com/sports/rangers-walk-back-wearing-lgbtq-themed-warmup-jerseys-pride-night

Why can't they just play hockey?

[Dr. Strangelove]

Something going on in Iran tonight. Seeing reports of explosions or drone strikes in a half dozen cities including Tehran.

[Jeff Buchanan]

Something going on in Iran tonight. Seeing reports of explosions or drone strikes in a half dozen cities including Tehran.

Surprisingly, there is little coverage of this in the MSM. A twitter thread I follow posted a bunch of video this morning that depicted huge fires and explosions around military bases throughout Iran. There wasn't a lot of commentary. The extent of attacks suggest Israel launched a wave of drones probably accompanied by air-launched stand-off missiles. Israel has long accused Iran of arming Palestinian militants so, they may have decided to simply take out arms storage and production facilities. Biden probably green-lighted the attacks because it lessens Iran's ability to provide drones to Russia. In any event, this is a significant escalation of tensions and increases the likelihood of a hot war in the ME. I think there's the potential for linkage with Putin's war in Ukraine and an increased likelihood that a NATO on Russia conflict could erupt.

[Jeff Buchanan]

In somewhat related thinking, an article appeared in the Guardian last week. I got around to reading it today. The article tries to deal with this question: Was the Biden Administration Right to Send Tanks to Ukraine? 4 panelists responded to that question. They were all equivocal about the rightness or wrongness of the decision. However, they were uniformly of the opinion that the two sides need to be moved towards negotiations. The most thoughtful views offer that the world has become absorbed with violence and that pathway has to be abandoned and replaced with diplomacy or the human race risks it's own destruction. To me, it's like elevating the discussion about Ukraine v. Russia up to the big picture of the risks this conflict presents outside of the immediate battlefield and the players involved.

I believe that a more rational view holds that western governments that have been supporting Ukraine with money and weapons are seeking not so much to defeat Russia in this war but rather to push Putin to abandon some of his most extreme and unrealistic objectives seeing that his war is unwinnable and too costly on many levels. The way to do that is demonstrate western solidarity in the face of Russia's imperial designs. The Ukrainian government may want to drive the Russian occupiers out of their country. This may be as unrealistic a goal as those that Putin has articulated. Both sides need to be shown that realizing their separate goals and objectives risks the destruction of the human race in a conventional to nuclear war pitting NATO forces against those of Russia. I don't know how you get the two sides, convinced they are each on the right side of history, to understand that things can easily spin out of control given the current trends. Those trends are dangerous and counter to the tenets of political discourse and diplomacy.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jan/26/is-biden-right-to-send-tanks-to-ukraine-our-panel-reacts?campaign_id=9&emc=edit_nn_20230129&instance_id=83979&nl=the-morning&regi_id=66290138&segment_id=123846&te=1&user_id=eb3770cd26926d6908b2da6e075b25bf