Faultlessly exquisite and supremely sublime. All of human experience in one piece.
It may sound familiar to you from when it was used as the closing shot soundtrack in Ocean's Eleven.
In case 5 minutes isn't enough, and you need an hour of it looped together seamlessly, here you go:
h/t Matt Bracken
With all due respect to Matt, he's under-thinking this.
Imagine an invasion where no one was willing to drive the landing craft.
After all, it takes 30 minutes to change a tire.
(People were also grumping at Peter's blog about the durability of tire sidewalls, a conversation I've never heard made about front windows.)
It takes a full week to train a bus driver, and it costs about $2K@.
It takes a full month to find the second one after the first one is no longer an option.
Just saying.
Sometimes, the correct answer is "More cowbell."
When the usual GOP establishment back-room deal-making cronies get together, they ponder stupid things, in their ceaseless quest to bamboozle and flim-flam the average Republican Party voter. One of those thoughts was apparently, "Would Jeb have gotten more votes if he had tits?"
The answer to that question was Nikki Haley. (Not that Jeb was unwilling to have the surgery and get him some tits himself; doubtless he would have done exactly that for a shot at the White House.)
They keep trying to put lipstick on Miss Piggy on the theory that the average voter will have already forgotten her recent Frau Himmler Moment. [Pro Tip: Not Fucking Likely This Side Of Hell Freezing Over.]
Which is how Nikki Haley became a thing. To save bandwidth, she shall henceforth be abbreviated JIAD:
Jeb In A Dress
I'm still not worried, since she's only trailing Trump by 52 points.
The scary part of that is that Kamelknees Harris dropped out first with similar numbers in 2020. Look how that worked out.
 |
| You go, Big Dog. Like age, IQ is just a number, right? |
Seems Michael hasn't learned his lesson yet, and took issue with the preceding post at the OP.
We replied.
Untroubled by any acquaintance with the facts publicly available, Michael asked for "sources".
So we obliged him. This particular cluebat may or may not have had some spikes pounded in the business end of it.
The host there may or may not tolerate seeing Michael educated so diligently (and we understand if that's the case), but since Mikey asked for this, we feel it dulce et decorum that his lesson be left on the chalkboard to remind him of the immortal words of Dean Wormer.
Round One
2 hours agoDon’t worry, General Aesop just posted two articles on this post for us.
The Poseidon doesn’t exist and nada, nada. Go read his military knowledge in full proud glory over there.
Is there anything Aesop’s not an expert on?
Well, we should be grateful HE’s keeping an eye on NC Renegade for us.
Need I add a sarc tag for the last sentence?
Green Hornet’s comment has it correct. Poseidon was created by Russia to keep America from getting nuke fever. Pity is that only works if your target audience is sane AND doesn’t think that AMERICA (Hooo Rahhh!!) is still THE SUPERPOWER of the world.
Odd how slinking out of Afghanistan and the FACT we’ve not won a war since WW2 simply rolls of their backs….
Between the idiots in District of Criminals, Think Tanks that say Ukraine is Winning and folks like Aesop, maybe the Russians are too rational to understand them.
Riposte
Two articles, Buckwheat?
Common Core grad, or just need a new prescription?I never said this doesn’t exist, I said it can’t be what it’s bullsh*t-splained to be.
So let’s look at the videotape, Captain Queeg:As to the Poseidon, going strictly by that bastion of accuracy, Wikipedia, it’s
a) not a torpedo by any stretch of that term
b) not a “Doomsday bomb” on the order of Tsar Bomba
c) could carry a nuclear warhead in the 2 MT range (U.S. Titan missiles in the 1960s and 70s carried 10MT warheads, for comparison)
d) has an imaginary speed of 100kts (which would be about as tough to detect and track underwater as a Chinese New Year’s parade with fireworks
e) has no “tsunami creation” function nor intent.
We surface-tested a 15MT warhead in the Castle Bravo test (and had multiple other MT-range tests at Bikini Atoll), and no tsunami was created, anywhere, from any of them, period.So “Radioactive tsunami-making torpedo” is three whoppers of total bullshit in just one line.
Speculation is that it uses a deep and very slow approach speed using satnav guidance (with no explanation of how they solved the physics problem of getting satellite signals down to 500 fathoms), only shifting to loud and stupid in terminal guidance mode, and that its warhead is deliberately dirtied up with cobalt. Which only works with surface detonation.
It’s main purpose with such a relatively modest warhead (nowhere near a “Doomsday” device would be as a very dirty conventional nuke, intended to contaminate the target area long-term and render it unusable, beyond the expected damage of a 2MT explosion.
So they’re intended to take out a port, particularly strategic naval bases like Norfolk, King’s Bay, Bangor, and Pearl Harbor.Okay, great. Play that card.
20 minutes later, D-5 Trident IIs start popping and dropping like rain from half a dozen points at sea, and 95% of the Russian population is a distant memory for the next 100 years 30 minutes after that.
Followed in short order by the US, and then most of the Northern Hemisphere. Game Over.
Now Brazil and Australia get to fight for control of the world.
Who does that help?
What’s the point?Some of us have been studying the details of nuclear war for decades, and when obvious vaporware bullshit of this magnitude pops up, it’s snort-worthy comedy.
At least when the Japanese hyperventilated about this, they came up with Godzilla, and made a buck.
The source article for this is stupidity marinated in rose fertilizer.
Make better choices.
To be fair, Michael's standard m.o. is not to answer any direct questions that are too hard for him (which is most of them), but instead to generally gainsay the original points, wave his arms, and ask new questions. Today was no exception.
Round Two
Aesop, kindly list the sources for your many assumptions and your CV of learning so much about Nuclear Weapons and apparently submarine actions.
Size of warhead, perhaps?
It’s been about 65 years since the Atol tests, maybe your information might be a bit off? Perhaps the shape of the undersea area is different? Example, deep sea vs Chesapeake Bay shallow? Distance of radioactive water movement of but a few dozen miles to important targets like Ah, DC?
AND for the record is there ANYTHING Aesop isn’t an expert about?
Asking for many.
Set and Spike
Remember, when you're putting the tourniquet on, that you asked for this, Michael:
Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, man! Was telling you the info I referenced on Poseidon was straight from the Wikipedia page too hard to grasp?
Status-6 Oceanic Multipurpose System - Wikipedia
Learn to use your mouse for something besides a cat toy.
And you figure the widely-footnoted and researched published data from the Bikini tests have transmogrified since they ended sixty years ago??
Nuclear testing at Bikini Atoll - Wikipedia
Did the Nuke Fairy sneak in and leave bigger yields under someone's pillow in the last six decades?
Did the Underpants Gnome steal the craters left there??
It's not a question of the shape of the sea floor, it's basic physics: little bombs (and in oceanic and geologic terms, they're all little bombs) haven't the ability to create tsunamis.
FFS, the 2004 Sumatra Tsunami was a 9.2 earthquake that ripped the faultline 19 miles down below mean sea level, and ripped the faultline there for a distance of 810 miles. You figure the Russians have got a warhead that can do that? You could do stand-up comedy at CalTech with that joke!
2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami - Wikipedia
Here, let's get you a booster chair at the elementary geologic physics classroom for the 20 seconds it'll take to clue you in:
" The amount of energy released by the Hiroshima nuclear bomb was about 1012 J, whereas one magnitude 8.9 earthquake released about 1018 J of seismic energy (Figure 9). This is a million times more energy (i.e. a factor of 106) than the Hiroshima bomb."
That would be 15 GIGATONS for Common Core grads, (15,000,000,000 tons: as 15 BILLION with a B), or a single warhead as powerful as 258 Tsar Bombas.
Sh'yeah, whistle up one of those, please.
Earthquakes: 4.3 Seismic energy | OpenLearn - Open University
How sad you couldn't have pulled off two more mouseclicks before you jumped all over your junk.
And for the record, is there anything you are an expert about, or do you just latch on to everything you know nothing about and just dig in blind and start spouting off until you run facefirst into a brick wall of ignorance, over and over?
Nothing I told was anything you couldn't have confirmed all by yourself without having your hand held like a toddler, and you could have saved yourself from having your diaper changed publicly, for only about the 200th time.
Learn to do basic research, and educate yourself, instead of letting your mouth run away with you when your data bank is in deficit. Seriously, please try it, if only for the novelty of that approach.
And yet again, stirring crap with me on someone else's blog, without offering anything but the contents of your spleen. Color me shocked.
Why not go all in, and start your own, just so everyone can know which pronouncements to take the 180° opposite of?
And because I'm a nice guy, and hate to be rude to someone else on their own blog by having to educate you, if NC R decides this is just too painful to watch, (or post) I completely understand, so I'm archiving this answer and posting it on my blog, to memorialize this long-overdue moment in your education.
We repeat for your edification, Mikey,
Make. Better. Choices.
It's not that we know everything.
It's that we know so much more than you, with half our brain tied behind our back, because we look things up first, and you make it childishly easy to demonstrate it beyond any rational dispute when you just shoot from the lip, and fire blanks.
If you're going to keep whining and instigating like a little bitch, don't be too shocked when you get bitch-slapped.
The seismic moment (M0), which represents a physical size for the event, was calculated by the USGS at 3.9×1022 joules, slightly less than the 2004 Indian Ocean quake.
For reference, and to help out the Short Bus crowd on this, that was an energy release equivalent to roughly 100 million* Tsar Bombas. That would be a chain of 26'-long Tsar Bombas from Tokyo to the Moon and back. To get this:
From one Poseidon weapon? Sh'yeah, pull the other one, it's got bells on it.
Poseidon Nuclear Torpedo: An underwater drone designed to carry a nuclear warhead, potentially causing radioactive tsunamis.
But! But! But I found it on the internet, so it has to be true!
Point of Order for the Common Core grads on the Internet:
You can put a nuclear warhead on a torpedo. We figured that out 60-70 years ago.
Everything else in the above excerpt is horseshit of such a quantity that it cannot be measured with existing instrumentation. Except perhaps a truck scale.
To wit:
1) An underwater drone is going to be about as hard to find as a lit flashlight in a dark field at night for any first-world navy. Unless it's the size of a submarine. Which, cleverly, probably wouldn't be called a torpedo nor a drone. In which case it'll be as hard to find as a brass band carrying lit flashlights in a dark field at night while playing the 1812 Overture. With artillery percussion.
2) A torpedo is going to have a range of a several miles. Like ten. Twenty maybe. Not, for instance, hundreds to thousands.
3) To cause a tsunami, it would have to be a very large warhead. Which, first of all, shoots range capabilities right in the ass.
4) Second, to actually cause a tsunami, it would have to go off deep. Like way down at the bottom of the ocean, to displace enough seawater to create a tsunami.
5) If you do that, the tsunami isn't going to be radioactive. The sea floor at the explosion site is. And all that heavier-than-water radioactivity is going to stay right down at the bottom of the ocean. Because of this thing called gravity. Stop me if you've heard of this concept. I have an inkling that the density of sea water, at about a ton per cubic yard, is going to tamp things down a wee bit too.
6) You can make radioactivity up near the top of the water column. Which is going to make radioactive fallout just like any other nuke. Most of which is going to fall right back down, downwind, but fairly close to the detonation site. Like with every other nuke on the planet since 1945. Because of this thing called gravity. Yet again, stop me if you've heard of this concept.
7) If you detonate it near the surface, you also aren't going to make any tsunami. And the only thing radioactive will be the airborne fallout cloud, not the wave that results.
8) Tsunamis travel hundreds and thousands of miles. Radioactivity in water from deep subsurface explosions is going to travel distances measured in yards, not miles, and probably not even reach the sea surface if it's deep enough. Bubbles, maybe, perhaps a small amount of radioactive gas. What it isn't going to do is send a wall of radioactive water rocketing hundreds of miles away. Don't believe me: Google the results of any of dozens of air-, surface-, and sub-surface nuclear tests prior to 1963, FFS. Much of the info has been in the public domain for decades.
9) You can make nuclear blasts that cause fallout. You can (theoretically) make nuclear blasts that case tsunamis. But you only get to pick one or the other. And they aren't likely to be either drones, or torpedoes.
Classically, the concept of tsunami-causing nuclear weapons was described in print in 1972 by Martin Caidin in When War Comes (brighter readers may know him as the guy who wrote the book Cyborg, which was the basis for the TV show The Six Million Dollar Man. He is thus no stranger to science fiction with a heavy dose of future realism, rather than science fantasy.) a well-thumbed hard-cover copy of which has sat on my shelf since the late 1970s.
In his version of the tsunami-causing nuclear blasts, he had Russia sink several cargo ships, with monster nuclear bombs the size of the hold of a cargo ship, sunk strategically off the US continental shelf, deploying long cable antennas, and awaiting the Doomsday detonation command off of, in his scenario IIRC, Seattle, Portland, Frisco, and L.A. To be used just-in-case.
So yet again, you can have torpedoes or drones, or you can have nuclear weapons large enough and deep enough to cause a tsunami. Pick one. Both is not an option. Even he knew this 50 years ago. We haven't made nuclear weapons that much smaller with the capabilities advertised in the excerpted stupidity above.
Physics is still a thing, and actual smart people have been studying on things like this for more than 50 years. When you slap-dash cobble together three or four mutually contradictory things in one sentence like they were real, it just tells us you know the flavor of the windows on the short bus. And/or spent more time listening to George Noori than working a slide rule or a TI calculator. Sorry if that's too on-the-nose.
Given the level of stupidity necessary to concoct that one pull quote, we're not even bothering to fisk the gaping flaws in the rest of that wagonload of horse cobblers. Caveat emptor: there is no recommended safe amount of bullshit in anything you're going to swallow from that piece. Insist on bullshit-free, for your own palate and self-respect, if not safety.
People pulling together Popular Science-levels of Russian vaporware, and endowing it with National Inquirer or Weekly World News-level scare quotes and mythical and epically stupid levels of science fantasy capabilities are simply pulling their underpants down on the internet, and waving their asses to everyone in sight.
Don't be That Guy.
Be like Timmy:
Unplug. Enjoy your holiday weekend. Nothing's going up here except Sunday Music and a holiday message this side of Tuesday. Probably won't even update comments before then.
Eat too much, if you can. Share with others less fortunate, if you can.
Be the Grinch at the end of the story, and keep Christmas like Scrooge at the end of the tale instead of the beginning.
All the nastiness and strife in the world will keep for a few days. Take a holiday, and let if go for a weekend. We promise, it'll be right where you left it all too soon.
Recharge your spiritual battery. Enjoy the blessings of the season with friends and family, with our warmest wishes for a Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year.
We Told You So Dept.:
(MOSCOW) Russian President Vladimir Putin has [inadvertently] admitted to the significant losses Russia has suffered in the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, which has been raging since February 2022.
“Putin literally admitted irretrievable losses in the amount of 363 thousand people,” said a military analyst. The purported losses would be orders of magnitude beyond those previously claimed by Russia, with the Kremlin having only officially admitted to around 6,000 troop deaths.
Despite the losses, Putin has maintained that peace with Ukraine will only be achieved “when we achieve our objectives”. This was stated during his first marathon news conference since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began.
The invasion was met with fierce resistance from the Ukrainian forces, backed by the international community. The severity of the Kremlin’s recent military reversals in Ukraine has been acknowledged by Putin. Mr. Putin insisted that Russia could “move forward” despite Western economic sanctions and political isolation stemming from its Ukraine invasion.
“Practically along the entire line of contact our armed forces are improving their situation, to put it modestly,” he said at his marathon news conference. There has been very little movement on the front line in recent months, but Russia is targeting two eastern towns in the Donetsk region, Mariinka and Avdiivka.
Russia has claimed that Ukraine is suffering a high number of troop deaths during the war, with Putin stating in October that Kyiv had lost 90,000 troops since starting its latest counteroffensive in June. Putin also mentioned that the Ukrainian death toll was “simply huge” and at “approximately one to eight as a ratio” to Russian deaths.
Ukraine’s military success in a “small area” is described by President Putin as a last-ditch attempt to break through to Crimea. He explained that Russian forces decided to withdraw several meters into wooded areas “to save our lads” and suggested that Kyiv’s main motive is to show the West that it needs more military funding.
If you're keeping score at home, this latest series of admissions (overt and accidental)
1) Confirms that last week's declassified U.S. military estimate of Russian losses in this debacle was spot on, to three decimal places. Oops.
2) Undoes all the fanboys claiming "Russia has already won", and shoots that stupid lie right in the ass, as Putin admits they still haven't achieved any of their objectives.
3) Points out that Putin's only plan is more of what has failed for the last 22 months, just with 90% less ground military to do it.
Suck it, simps. Belly up to your party-sized sub sandwich of crow. With extra crow. Your beloved KGB-thug hero just admitted this is a generational-level fuck-up of biblical proportions for a hopelessly incompetent and ineffective Russian military. Russia has killed more of its own troops in two years in Ukraine, a country 1/4th its size and 1/10th its military strength, than the U.S. has lost in all its wars and conflicts worldwide combined from 1946-now.
And he further admitted they've been stalemated for nearly two years, despite simultaneously floating the bullshit that they've killed Ukrainian troops at an 8:1 ratio.
This is like the NY Yankees admitting they tied a Little League team 0-0, even though 7 of the other team's grade school-aged players had to go home for curfew before the game was called after maxxing out on innings.
You can keep rootin' for Putin all you want. But you'll need an entirely new line of horseshit to peddle to keep fooling yourselves. But go ahead and keep digging into it; there's got to be a Christmas pony for you under it somewhere.
Pisser for those still carrying a torch for that codswallop.
Ukraine doesn't want to return to Moscow's tender loving embrace, and never will. Like we told you nearly two years ago. And Moscow has gutted its own minimal military power in pursuit of an epic level of failure. While the entire world sees them for the Potemkin nation, in every respect, that they've always been.
As Patton noted, "All glory is fleeting." But this level of national faceplant will last for ages.
Related: New Russian Airborne Division suffers "exceptionally heavy losses"
UPDATE: Video link corrected.
As to "no one else is reporting this recently":
Vladimir Putin says no peace in Ukraine until Russia achieves its goals | ABC News - YouTube
President Putin says Russia's goals in Ukraine have not changed - YouTube
Putin Says No Peace in Ukraine Until Russia Achieves Goals - YouTube
No peace in Ukraine until Russia's goals achieved, says Putin - YouTube
Russia’s goals in war with Ukraine remain unchanged, Putin says - YouTube
Putin: No peace in Ukraine until Russia achieves its goals - YouTube
This 1972 instrumental made it to #6 on the charts, with Apollo 100's modernized take on Bach's classical piece "Jesu, Joy Of Man's Desiring".
Mark Rober continues to do God's own work, and hasn't made a bad video in 6 years.
This is no exception. Merry Christmas.
WASHINGTON (Wall Street Journal) --The war in Ukraine has devastated Russia's pre-invasion military machine, with nearly 90% of its pre-war army lost to death or injury, and thousands of battle tanks destroyed, according to a newly declassified U.S. intelligence assessment shared with Congress.
The intelligence assessment, according to a congressional source, says that 315,000 Russian personnel have been killed or injured since the February 2022 invasion, or 87 percent of Moscow’s prewar force of 360,000. Russia has also lost nearly two-thirds of its tank force, or 2,200 out of its 3,500 pre-invasion stock, the source said.
While it is widely known that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s military has sustained vast losses in Ukraine, the assessment provides new details about the extent of those setbacks.
If you still want to keep huffing hopeium, and/or kissing Vlad's ass, go ahead on; we don't care. If you're convinced the intel from any twenty Russian shill blog sites are giving the straight poop, shovel it down with both hands with our enthusiastic blessing.
Your delusions are your own problem, not ours.
Note this estimate, nor this blog, doesn't hereby conclude that Ukraine must therefore be "winning", for any value of that word. {Google France post-WWI if the greater concept eludes you.} And as we told you as early as May of last year, IIRC, Ukraine having shifted to dependence on the West for support continues to leave them at the entire mercy of the West not to withdraw that support.
But as we told you from days of the outset of Russia's asinine exercise in futility, the likelihood that Russia ever can score anything like a win is less likely than Bigfoot swooping onto the Capitol steps on a winged unicorn to crown Trump Emperor For Life next Novermber.
So if you'd like your reality just like your whiskey - straight up - this estimate of Russia's situation is likely a metric f**kton closer to the real story than anything else you can cobble together from your underpants.
For those of you inclined to froth and gnash your teeth at any suggestion that Russia Could Be Eating A Big Shit Sandwich despite all available evidence, and jonesing because you haven't had anything to gibber and caper about here lately, consider this your Christmas present.
But when your Any Day Now™ delusions all come crashing down, and there's nothing left to scrape out of your underpants and fling at the wall in response to the voices in your head, remember: you were given fair warning.
This figure closely aligns with data from the Dutch open-source intelligence firm Oryx, which tracks military equipment and vehicle losses through verifiable photo and video evidence.
Oryx's findings indicate that Russia's verifiable tank losses stand at 2,541, with a significant portion destroyed, damaged, abandoned, or captured by Ukrainian forces. The U.S. intelligence report also highlights the loss of 4,400 out of 13,600 infantry fighting vehicles, representing a 32% loss rate for the Russian Armed Forces. These figures are in close agreement with Oryx's documented losses of 3144 infantry fighting vehicles. The enormity of these losses has compelled Russia to take extraordinary measures to sustain its military efforts. This includes a partial mobilization of 300,000 personnel and the relaxation of recruiting standards to include convicts and older civilians.
This new intelligence from the United States not only confirms the extensive material and human losses suffered by Moscow but also provides a clearer context for understanding Russia’s setbacks in the Ukraine conflict.
As Warren Strobel of The Wall Street Journal points out, while it was assumed that Russia had incurred significant losses, these latest revelations offer a more detailed picture of the extent of the impact on Russian military capabilities.
Suck it, crybabies.
