Heavy Metal

 

Oberst Reisner of the OB just uploaded another briefing, this time in English.

Not much up-to-the-minute info, but two takeaway factoids worthy of note:

1) Original briefings by US DoD people stated we would be sending a whole 18 M777 howitzers to Ukraine. That's three batteries, which is one bare battalion. Which ain't a helluva lot in a 100,000-man 600-mi. long frontline. Color me unimpressed at the time.

Obst. Reisner's briefing reveals that, from all NATO sources, Ukraine has actually received 114  M777 howitzers.

For reference, that's 19 complete artillery batteries, and more artillery tubes than you would find in a USMC division. That's comparatively yuuuuge. It is, however, not enough to support anything like the entire front line.

2) Also notably absent from Reisner's latest briefing:

Any wild headless-chicken nonsense about the Ukrainians in headlong retreat, collapsing, or in any serious difficulty. Unlike, say, multiple online Putin junk-garglers who have declared Ukraine lost, and the war already over. Pretty much like that 90-day long victory in Mariupol (where after three months of waiting hopelessly for Russia to actually win, the Ukrainian military command ordered the regiment+ of troops still fighting there to go ahead and surrender).

So, you can believe the non-NATO disinterested third-party expert analysis of a certified military genius with full access to real-time military intelligence about that, or you can go with the uninformed bloviations from the least thoughtful gasbags on the internet.

That's a pretty easy call for me to make; you're on your own.

Comedy Relief: Russia never invaded Ukraine, there is no war there, and a free and independent country like Ukraine cannot be allowed to decide its own destiny or alliances.

Yeah, About The Big Bad Chinese Navy...

h/t John Wilder

That's gonna leave a mark. Turns out pulling a first-tier navy out of your butt is harder than it looked on paper.

Pic courtesy of J.W.
If he's not a regular read, go read his latest.

But he didn't include a metric workbook exercise for you.
I did.

FWIW

FWIW (For What It's Worth): Over the last three days, the U.S. Kung Flu death totals have been, roughly, 2100, 1900, and 1600. This could be a hiccup from the weekend and Easter. Or we may have crested the hill, and begun trending downward. It's too early to tell for sure, but it's something to hope for.

It also could also simply mean that the virus has finally killed off the stupidest fraction of New York Gilligans. Because another factoid is that this has gone from being "the Chinese disease" to being "the New York Disease".

Because with a population less than half of all of Califrutopia (18M vs. 40M), and occupying a space of only 302.6 square miles (1/4 the size of Rhode Island), NYFC has 1/3 of the total U.S deaths (6,898 deaths out of 22,861 total U.S. deaths), and the entire state of NY has over 1/3 of all U.S. cases (190K out of 561K) cases.

This is somewhat due to population density (and I mean that both ways), not least of which because Governor Fredo and Hizzoner Mayor DeBozo ignored the potential of this disease to spread and kill in the Empire State and the Big Horse Apple. They decided to hold the open-air Chinese New Year festival, with thousands of people thronging to NYFC's Chinatown, with a large number of New Yorkers rubbing shoulders with relatives of visitors and returnees from ChiComia. (Genius-level move, right there.) And because mass transit - to this day - including the NYFC Subways, remain open and operating, and NYFC natives continue to throng Central Park, thus insuring two major infection loci remain productive, and passing the virus on to such a degree that there are more dead in NYFC than there are infected in the entire state of Ohio.

And Gov. Fredo is the crisis genius the Dumbocrats want to pinch hit for Dopey Joe in the nation's upcoming presidential election ritual shellacking and mole-whacking???
Apparently they couldn't find anyone else willing to strap on the political suicide vest the contest promises to become, even with promises of 72 virgins.
Things in Dumbocrat politics just aren't the same since the departure of Epstein.

So remember to wash you hands. Like Epstein, Coronavirus doesn't kill itself. h/t Peter

  

But for the earnest bozos (the sort of people who want underpants on dogs, and seatbelts on motorcycles) who think "a quarantine is only for infected people" and "we should let all the healthy people out immediately and restart this economy", the host of this party has a couple of rather pressing and pertinent points:

 

Asking for 330M friends...

 

 

 

 

Local notes: While visits, including to the ERs hereabouts, continue to run at record lows, our ICU is completely full, 100%, with intubated patients, all with fever and pneumonia. That means until some of them die, any new ones will be managed in the ER and on regular floors, which increases the risks to patients and staff for infection, and limits our availability to absorb and handle any critical patients from any cause.

 

There may not be one peak to this outbreak. There may instead be 50 peaks.

 

NYFC, by contrast, is a shell-shocked war zone. Reports from friends of my coworkers there in the middle of the outbreak's hardest hit sections are:

"Everyone is on ventilators, patients are on gurneys in all spaces and hallways, and we can't even tell who's coding, because everyone's alarms are going off all the time." 

Once this is over, those people are going to have PTSD for reals, and a lot of them are inevitably going to leave healthcare permanently.

Local Anecdotal

So, it having been a solid week since the Califrutopia lockdown order, and other than my work commutes, upon my first venture out and about, the following report:

Bank: Open. Reduced hours. No withdrawal limits. 6' tape marks on floor, lobby stripped to bare tile to make space. Traffic: light.

Gas station: Prices amazingly low. Under $3/gal., which hasn't been seen here since probably before 9/11. States with less confiscatory taxes added are at under $1/gal. in some places.

Sub shop: empty. Tables stacked up to make a 6' barricade between sandwich maker and customer line. I was the only one there, so I did my part to keep them open.

Supermarket: Welcome to the Soviet Union.
Chain store (not WalMart, Sam's, Costco, etc. - going there would be cray-cray.) and the staff is doing a herculean effort to maintain normalcy. BZ, shelf stockers and such.
Details:
Paper goods: stripped.
Milk: no problems.
Butter: raped.
Eggs: There, but raped, and limited to 1 carton/customer.
 (A man with some laying chickens now is a future millionaire.)
Bread: No disruption.
Canned meat, tuna, soup: What canned meat, tuna, or soup??
Canned fruit: sparse. Big holes on every shelf.
Produce: thinned, but fresh, clean, and still plentiful.
Pasta: What?
Fresh meat: Abundant.
Packaged lunch meats: Gooooone.
Paper goods: We have no idea what you're talking about.
Frozen foods: Moderate amounts, with some notable bare spots.
Cleaning products: raped.
Crackers: gang raped. Got the last box of saltines.
Bottled water: available. Limited to one flat@.
Couldn't get the carbonated colored caffeine-free diet soda I drink (mainly from habit), but had no problems finding any of 300 other varieties. Grabbed a couple of cans of lemonade powder instead, and some straight 100% fruit juice jugs, both in plentiful supply.
Also grabbed two whole bags of potato chips, which I haven't had in months, and was my sole activity that might pass for "hoarding". Otherwise, just did my normal week's shopping. Which means another week I won't have to dip into the emergency reserve of canned goods.

In short, in the last week, people lost their minds, and tried to make up in one trip what they should have been doing every week, ever.
If/when they settle down, and realize this is going to be okay, the stores will fill up again.
And we'll finally have half or more of the population at least half-ass prepared for the next Big Earthquake.

The mall parking lot was a ghost town after the zombie apocalypse. Except for in front of the supermarket. It was like Charlton Heston driving his convertible Mustang through L.A. in Omega Man.

But there are still one helluva lot of swinging Richards out there at midday who seem to think whatever they're doing is essential. It was like Charlton Heston trying to get around town in L.A. in Soylent Green.

If otherwise-idiot L.A. Mayor Garcetti turns trash scoops loose to scoop up some of the idiots out and about during the misnamed "lockdown", I might move back to the town just long enough to vote for his re-election. And then scamper back to safety behind the Orange Curtain.

If things go sideways up there, that whole city is beyond f****d.

Foreign Policy Via Twitter

And the unspoken Other Shoe in that Tweet:
"Dear Mexico: You're next on my sh*t list!"

The standard responses I've seen are best summed up by Kenny's post titled
"F**k that, bomb 'em"".

Au contraire, that would be the worst thing to do, for a host of reasons.
And that's the wrong hammer, for a problem that's not a nail. Yet.

Let's don't get recockulous.

You don't fly 1000 miles away to bomb a refugee column, even if it's 98% military-aged male invaders. If we ever do that, it gets done when they're 20 miles away, not 1000 (and after the mid-term elections, if ever). This nonsense is just a sideshow to bigger things.

But if we decided to seize a one-mile-wide buffer 2000 miles long on their side, and invest it with troops while we build the wall, that would be reasonable.

Seizing all remittances to those countries automatically, as the fruit of illegal activity, and contributing to terrorism, would also stop this nonsense in about a heartbeat, fund the military action, and hit those countries where they live. In Mexico alone, it's some good fraction of their yearly GDP, and if it were gone, they'd be in open revolution in about a week.

It would also cost $0 to implement Monday morning.
Demanding Congress permanently outlaw the practice to those countries would similarly be reasonable.

Telling Mexico if they want that brand new trade treaty to stand they'd better end this nonsense is also correct.
If they want to see their food prices quadruple, all they need to do is ignore us.
Once again, that'd be the cue for open revolution in Mexico.

Which would make a military buffer both prudent and necessary.
It means we could then start rounding up illegals as enemy aliens, and deport them permanently over that wall, once and for all.

27 problems solved, by Friday next, at that point, and without bombing anyone or mostly without firing a single shot.

You play ball with the U.S., or you get the bat shoved up your tailpipe.

Mexico is about to learn that lesson, yet again.
Bigly.

But if they want a permanent DMZ-style border, forever, pushing them permanently into Central America, or else taking this as the last warning to fix Shitholia once and for all, and join North America, this idiocy is the right way to go about either outcome.

Which also ought to give ex-pat whiners like Fred Reed reason enough to go deep on tanning spray and tequila and get fluent in Spanish, or slink back to the country he currently lampoons from the safety of Rancho Gringo in Baja Turdistan.

Win-win.

¡Viva!

Brassy Fraud: Sociopath

From American Thinker: The Three Lies Of Christine Blasey Ford:

"While these claims might appear minor in isolation, together they form a pattern recognizable and undeniable. There will no doubt be others coming, but three is all we need, according to the wisdom of Auric Goldfinger: “Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.” 

A lot of print and commentary, both online and otherwise, has argued that Blasey Ford is credible, convincing, and sympathetic. Even her opponents hold that “something must have happened” to explain her behavior.  But to believe this, we have to toss all standards of truth out the window. We have to postulate that a lie is not a lie, a liar is not a liar. We have to slip into a pure postmodern, nothing-is-certain, all-truth-is-relative mode. Without that, Blasey Ford is approximately as convincing as Julie Swetnick. 

She is not a sympathetic figure. She is not a confused, traumatized victim attempting to grapple with the fragmented memories of a past incident. The record clearly reveals that this to be nonsense. She is a malicious liar who has put herself at the service of malignant political clique for the purpose of undercutting the stated will and intentions of the people of this country. 

It is a simple fact that Kavanaugh’s accusers on the committee are proven liars – Feinstein in withholding the letter in the first place (not to mention denying how it became public), Booker concerning his good friend T-Bone, along with his “Spartacus moment”, Blumenthal concerning his heroism in Vietnam. The stunning irony here is that Judge Kavanaugh is demonstrably more honest than any of his accusers. 

This is the central truth of the Kavanaugh case. It must be hammered relentlessly, to the point where it can no longer be evaded. It must be repeated every time we’re told that “women don’t lie”. Every time someone flaunts a t-shirt reading “I Believe Her”. Every time we hear another obtuse blurt from Pelosi or Hirono. I must be repeated until it becomes the default, the meme that crowds everything else out: that the truth is not in Christine Blasey Ford, and that she is condemned by her own words. 

Case closed."

 RTWT.

We've pounded most of that, but they drive those nails well home.

Bonus: another article there links to a new site where her scrubbed yearbooks live free again.
(And if that one goes away, I grabbed the pics myself. BFYTW)

Thoughts On Norkistan

h/t Silicon Graybeard

The first thing to remember is that Asians in Asia are not Westerners.
(If I have to belabor the point with countless examples from throughout history to the present, you're not tall enough for this ride.) I bring this up at all because those who've no idea, generally don't know that they don't know, and that error has been the root of every Western foreign policy failure in the region for 150 years and more.

The second is to remember that the Norks aren't even like the rest of Asia.

The third is to ponder that in order to discredit the communism under which entire generations of Norks have labored, we need for it to fall, hard, and even more disastrously than communism crashed in Russia, or emperor worship crumbled in Japan. (Why is it, do you think, that we're cheerfully watching Venezuela burn to the ground? "When your enemy is making a monumental strategic blunder, stay out of his way." Much like not standing under falling trees, and for the same reasons.)

Failure of this pre-condition means that a sizable percentage of Koreans would persist in the greater-than-half-a-century monumental error that has propped the Kim dynasty up in the first place.
Like an alcoholic, the Norks simply must crash hard and hit bottom, in order to find the need for a change.

Giving them what they want, while not giving the West what we want, just gets us a mini-PRC: an expansionist military state, fueled and paid for by capitalism, of a type controlled and contained like the fuel in a nuclear reactor. Ask Vietnam, Indonesia, Australia, Singapore, the Philippines, and even Japan how that's working out for them. (Hint: Japan didn't just suddenly decide to start building aircraft carriers for the first time since the 1930s for no reason.)

As long as both China and the Norks cling to communism and state-run economic and social life, they are mortal enemies of western democratic republics, whether they chose to exploit that position fully at any given moment or not.

Once they abandon central economies, and try living as free republics, they're just another new potential ally. It's the difference between living next door to a crazy drug addict/dealer with guns, versus a guy who's clean and sober, who just likes deer and hog huntin' and big pickup trucks.

The last thing I want is to ease the pain for the Norks.
I'm willing to see things turned down a tad, provided the noose is still just tight enough that they pass out unconscious, and if while they're in that state, lose their grip on the entire nation, well...

Any moves vis-à-vis the Norks have to accord with China's interests, (or more importantly they must appear to do so) or they'll continue to be used as a pawn, and the last thing they want is a thriving capitalist economy along the Yalu River border, which will simply shift the DMZ there from the 38th Parallel.

It would also likely provide nothing but an object for the PLA military, itching for a chance for a real-world trial of their new toys, to want to grab.

North Korea exists at all as a lesson in Communist expansion circa 1945, and if its survival didn't suit TPTB on the other side, it would have been allowed to die out decades ago.

We need to flip their allegiance, and then we have a client state on the border of one of the last, and the all-time biggest, communist powers on the planet. If you're looking for a place to put the lever of freedom, that's the bastion to go for. People in the PRC can't see Taiwan, and the Hong Kong and Macau experiments expired in 1999, but the Norks travel and trade in China, and have done so forever. If you want to thaw the iceberg, the warm water needs to be right up against it.

Coupling that move with explaining to Vietnam the joys of capitalism and freedom (without trying it with B-52s this time) would really put the PRC's chestnuts in a vise. An entire generation knew Vietnam was a beautiful country with some great people, if you could just get rid of war and communism. We need to keep working on that project.

We cannot burgle Asia, and steal China's most vital client state from their orbit overnight. It would be Prague Spring or Hungary 1956 all over again.

The Norks need to be demilitarized and unshackled, bit by bit, so that China doesn't have cause to intervene until it's a fait accompli.

Anything else is merely a disaster for the people of Norkistan, and a potential trigger to fan the Cold War into a hot one.

Telling me, therefore, that things are going slowly, is probably the best news there could be, for everyone concerned.