Derka Derkistan: Still Crazy After All These Years

Anyone: See if you can figure out why they shoot rabid dogs.

Administrivia: Gulag's view-throttling censors have gone on vacation, and daily hits have inexplicably jumped from circa 10K/day to 30K/day. How to tell us Gulag fucks with our blog numbers, without telling us Gulag fucks with our blog numbers.

Just Saying

Stop Hyperventilating About What Isn't

Personally? Hoping they finally ditch the asinine Colon Powell "You broke it, you bought it" model, and replace it with the "You FA, You FO. And if you FA again, you FO Harder" Doctrine of Don't Mess With America.

The latter served us well until 1945.

Tehran Trail

Maduro. El Mencho. Khamenei.

In the Jeopardy! category "Dick-taters Hiding 200 Feet Underground", the $500 answer is "Who is Kim Jong Un?"

Apparently, Trump has issued himself a hunting license. About time.

Fuck yeah!

Any Day Now™: Day 1461

Great News for the Rootin' For Putin crowd: After four full years of Russia's three-day Special Military Operation, the number of Russian armor casualties has dropped off a cliff, compared to the relatively massive losses in the early days of the war.

Bad news: That's because the number of available Russian tanks still running has also dropped off a cliff. In the timeless words of Bob Dylan, in Like A Rollin' Stone: "When you got nothin', you got nothin' to lose". Bummer for Vladophiles.

To date, Russian army casualties are somewhere around 11,000 tanks, and 1,500,000 casualties, including half a million dead. They're gaining ground at a rate best measured with a pocket ruler each day, and at the current rate, they'll be in Kiev again by about the year 2576.

What they've succeeded in doing is showing the world their military is fourth rate on their best day, while taking Ukraine from a second-world nation to a third-world one over the last four years, and tanking the economies of both countries for probably the next 50 years, or until someone in Russia holds a Makarov retirement party for Putin, and Russia pries their fists and feet out of the Ukrainian tar baby.

Final answer: this is a geopolitical disaster for Russia, like we told you when they failed to conclude it in the first 96 hours. Russia has suffered more casualties than the U.S. did from VJ Day to yesterday, plus more casualties than Russia suffered in Afghanistan before concluding they'd lost that one too. This is why Hubris and Inertia are the two worst generals to lead in a war of attrition.

Charlie Brown, to date, has fallen on his ass trying to kick the football Lucy holds less times than the Russian military has in the last four years. 

That makes the continued conflict a clowncarnucopia of fail, providing endless wailing and gnashing of teeth for those who keep Rootin' For Putin. The only thing funnier, at this point, than Russia unassing Ukraine, would be them winning, and embarking on the next century of endless guerrilla warfare there. It's only a pity we never hear about the underground that must be doing a thing or two in Russia every day. But at least Vlad has gotten used to constant defeat, and has stopped pushing his generals out of unfortunately open twelfth floor windows in the middle of Russian winters.

At this point, Russia's best gamble is the Grand Fenwick strategy: Pick a direct fight with the U.S., surrender immediately, and then rake in endless fortunes in post-war restoration projects, and hope for a renaissance worthy of post-WW2 Germany and Japan.

The conflict continues to be funny, but in a vaudeville-circa-1960 way: the joke is old, and the audience who cares is shrinking due to actuarial inevitability.

If You Live South Of Canada, Best Pay Attention

Sunday, Mexican Army units cornered the head of the Jalisco Cartel. Electing to take his chances with shooting his way out of the trap, the cartel head received the full Bonnie & Clyde treatment. Within hours, the Jalisco Cartel responded by setting much of Mexico on fire: burning busses across roads, arson to houses, hotels, and anything else they could, and shooting anything moving on legs. Think Rodney King riots x Beirut.

That's all fun and games in the dumpster fire/failed state that is Cartelistan, or Shitholia/Mexico.

But now the cartel is vowing to go after tourists, and the U.S. State Dept. Has issued run/hide advice to all gringos in Cartelistan, and thousands of international flights have been diverted from Mexican airspace, because the drug armies are shooting at the airports, the planes, and anyone exiting them.

So, picture this. The cartel minions grab a handful of Americans, because it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Trump, being Trump, jumps on them and stomps the living sh*t out of them, courtesy of Delta Force, Navy Seals, the 82nd Airborne, and two thirds of the Marine Corps.

The cartels say "Fuck me? No, fuck you!" and order any fifty cartel members (out of the thousands that already reside in the U.S.), to travel to the local malls in Dallas, Houston, El Paso, Phoenix, San Diego, and Los Angeles, and just shoot up everyone they can. And then a couple of NBA games. Disneyland. A few schools full of kids. Take your pick, and there's fuck-all that can be done about that short of putting the factories that makes Mk 82 bombs and all the B-52 bomber wings on a three-shifts-a-day schedule, and just like that, Mexico's cluster-fuck meltdown is now America's war, on American soil, for the first time since Pancho Villa raided New Mexico in 1916. And we aren't going to fix this with Pershing and Patton galloping around northern Mexico, but sending the 1st Armored Division and the 1st MarDiv to occupy a twenty-mile wide buffer zone south of the international border would be the likely result by next Friday.

You want a war where your meat suit is your uniform, where being brown in America is the new n-word, and where 60 million Mexicans caught in the crossfire decide to move into California, Arizona, and Texas, and this is a swell way to get there.

Pay close attention, kids. This might simmer down. Or it could all go Shit Mardi Gras in hours to days, and demonstrate in an international way, the truth of the statement: Good fences make good neighbors.

And own this, in your bones: we got here because too fucking many people who should have known better thought doing drugs was no big deal, and going soft on them was a bright idea. You were down with a Slap Fight On Drugs, With Collateral Damage. If we'd ever had an actual War On Drugs, Mexico and Columbia would look like the surface of the moon.

As If Troy Was In Wakanda...or Minneapolis