Since You Asked...

 h/t Commander Zero

Yeah, I’m almost over deliberate endlessly f**king off. (But seriously, I highly recommend it.)

A poster sent a fairly involved question – three back-to-back posts, that I have every intention of answering in depth. Which plan spoken aloud apparently pissed the Almighty off, and then some douchebag passed their flu along at one of my few occasional forays into public dining, and I spent the last week moping around with a URI, feeling like a baby Harp seal during clubbing season. Best laid plans, and all. I’m over that, finally. (Mucus: the most worthless bodily fluid when produced excess to demand.)

Upside of a mostly blog-free year:
There’s now a beta site IRL. And I’m dangerously close to a hunker down bunker as well, which has been a work-in-progress since before the blog began. And that’s all I’m going to say about Vietnam.

So in short, yeah, I’ll dust off the keyboard in the very near future.
Which will amuse some people, and piss off all the right ones.

Also, FWIW: A year of going dark evidently drops me off Gulag’s “Let’s F**k With His Visit Stats” list. I.e. ten times the listed visits, posting nothing, as I was getting posting daily or more in prior days. (Peanut Gallery, stifle yourself. I hear you warming up with the snappy aside.) I literally recorded more site hits the last year, posting nothing, than the two years before, combined, when I was posting regularly. Including one single day peak of 150,000+ hits, which has happened on the blog maybe 5 times in 15 years or so. (I see you, Gulag, and your ham-fisted fingerprints are all over that.)

So my intention is to pick up where I left off.
Lemme see IIRC…everyone hates everything Trump does. Check.
Russia is reaching new casualty milestones, and is as close to “winning” their futile war as they were in March of 2022, like we said twenty times. Check.
The Dumbocrats were bloodthirsty communists. Check.
The Republicrats have accomplished nothing of note. Check.
Nobody among TPTB has been arrested for any of a laundry list of crimes that would have seen guillotine beheadings and torchlight neck-stretching in an earlier age. Check.
The financial system is a huge bubble glistening towards an earth-shaking pop, and gold is a wise holding. Check.
AI continues to be the tulipomania of the 21st century. Check.
So nothing substantive has changed a whit, other than being a year closer to becoming truly craptastic, and a lot of minor cultural icons have died in the interim, due to the actuarial millstone grinding them out of their oxygen addiction.
And the alternate retirement plan of winning a nine-figure Powerball draw, buying a megayacht, and stocking it with the Swedish Bikini Team for hospitality crew still hasn’t panned out. Well,…sh*t.
It’s like I never left.

So, yeah, back at it, momentarily.
Like I could ever shut up to begin with.

Just A Reminder

Cheers.

 Definitely never expected this when we started this thing in 2008. Wonders never cease.

Coincidentally, this is post #5000. Huzzah.

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.