Data Points

 

Translation.

 

I. (US News - LONDON) Russian President Vladimir Putin has lost faith in his top general and has fired other senior commanders for their high-profile and embarrassing failures on the battlefield in Ukraine, British intelligence believes.

U.K. military intelligence reports Tuesday morning that the Kremlin has fired Lt. Gen. Serhiy Kisel, commander of the elite 1st Guards Tank Army, for failing to capture Kharkiv. International attention has focused on the strategically critical northeastern Ukrainian city in recent days following news Ukrainian forces capitalized on Russia’s retreat and had pushed the invading troopss back to their border. The commander of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, Vice Admiral Igor Osipov, has also come under suspension likely for allowing the flagship cruiser Moskva to sink in April from an apparent missile attack – for which the Ukrainian military claims credit. 

Perhaps most notably, Valeriy Gerasimov, the chief of the Russian General Staff – a position roughly analogous to the U.S. chairman of the Joint Chiefs – remains in his post but, British intelligence believes, “it is unclear whether he retains the confidence of President Putin.”

The damning assessment follows reports that at least a dozen Russian generals have died on the battlefield – a seemingly stunning fact that the Pentagon has downplayed as indicative of how the Kremlin goes to war combined with the dysfunctional state of a Soviet-era army.

 

II.  (Metro-UK)Putin ‘facing a coup after his closest allies accept they’ve lost the war’

Vladimir Putin's top security officials think the war in Ukraine is 'lost', making the chances of a coup more likely, an analyst in Moscow says. The chances of the Russian tyrant launching a nuclear strike are receding as it is likely people would refuse to carry out his order. That's according to expert and investigative journalist Christo Grozev, who suggests Putin is losing his grip on power. He says leading officials are unlikely to obey Putin's commands to launch nukes as they don't trust he will still be in power in three months time. 'I think that it is the informed elite within the security forces who understand that the war is lost,' Grozev told Radio Liberty. He said Putin's inner circle understand the president would need a full mass mobilisation to win the war, but this would cause a 'social explosion' in Russia. Some hardliners may pressure for use of nuclear or chemical weapons, Grozev warned. But others will say 'enough is enough' and 'it is better not to waste another 10,000 lives of our soldiers and officers'. Grozev, lead Russia investigator for investigative journalist group Bellingcat, said one or more of the 'five hands' needed to launch Russia's nukes could end up defying Putin. 'And this refusal will be the trigger, most likely, a coup d'état, because after the refusal to comply with the order of the king, everything will go down very quickly,' he added. 'If Putin decides to give an order to use nuclear weapons, he must be sure that everyone along the chain will carry out this order'. If one person does not comply, Grozev says this will be a 'signal of insubordination' which could lead to the 'death of Putin'. 'So until he is sure that everyone will comply, he will not give this order,' he added. It is known that defence minister Sergei Shoigu and chief of the defence staff Valery Gerasimov would both need to sanction a nuclear strike. The journalist said senior figures from the FSB security agency and the GRU military intelligence organisation are preparing for life after Putin. He said the 'FSB elite' knows exactly how many Russian troops have died in Ukraine and knows that the loved ones of the dead or missing 'do not stop asking questions'. 'They know that this situation will eventually get out of hand,' Grozev added. 'This is already a kind of betrayal by these people, because they do not follow the ideological orders of the Kremlin, but are preparing for an alternative reality'.

Bummer for Vlad. 

Curiosity:

"From Elsewhere"

"Russia’s military BS, its inflated readiness and pencilwhipped training & inspections, deceived the worst targets possible: their own high command.

It’s pretty obvious that Russia thought they would pin the bulk of the Ukrainian army’s best units in the Donbas and trap it with a double envelopment, preventing it from pulling back to reinforce the capital, which would be seized by a coup de main striking south from Byelorussia linking up with the airhead at Hostomel.

All very Shock & Awe. Very lighting warfare and deep battle. And literally none of it came true because it was all wishcasting based on undertrained troops and fantasyland readiness reports."

We're curious, because a quick quote search on Gulag and Bing revealed no matching language, presumably anywhere (or at least, anywhere its search engines chose to reveal). And Tam, usually happy to post a link, has none for this snippet, merely heading it "From Elsewhere". So our interest is piqued, but we'd rather see the primary source ourselves.

Mariupolic Victory

 

Finally, Some Good News For Putin's Fanboys!

 

За здоровье!

Glorious Russian Army Finally declares victory in Mariupol after 21 33 45 days of trying!

Russia reports 265 Ukrainian fighters, most of them unwounded and fully able to continue to resist, bored and tiring of waiting nearly six weeks for the Russians to finally win on their own, decided to shorten the contest, and under direct orders from their own military command, walked out and surrendered instead. Which time period is slightly longer than it took the U.S. to militarily defeat the Afghani and Iraqi armies, depose Noriega in Panama, and free Grenada from a communist coup, combined.

Better news: at that rate of attrition, and after the expenditure of tens of thousands of rounds of artillery to not kill any Ukrainian fighters, Russia can look forward to conquering all of Ukraine, in only an additional 16,272 years, 1 month, and 18 days.

It looks like it will be a fine day for Mother Russia on July 6th,18,094 A.D., when they finally get the last Ukrainians to walk out and give up.

Of course, that assumes Russia can ever cut the rest of Ukraine off as rapidly and totally as the six weeks it took to do so in Mariupol, to achieve this stunning victory over one single steel plant in a single mid-sized city. If, on the other hand, they fail to cut off all further military re-supply from the West, it may take Russian military incompetents considerably longer to conquer all of Ukraine than a paltry sixteen millennia.

Walk tall, Ivan! A Mariupol "victory" is now orders of magnitude worse than a mere Pyrrhic one.

But seriously: Watch what happens next. If Vlad was serious, rather than just offering a pizzling excuse as a pretext for a naked land grab, now is the perfect opportunity for Russia to declare victory over the Nazi bastards, and get the hell out of Ukraine, before risking any more blood and treasure while they embarrass themselves in front of the entire world. If they do that now, they solve a ridiculous number of self-inflicted problems, and scrape a lot of egg off their faces. Not all, but a lot.

If, instead, they redouble their flailing efforts, that crapola was just boob bait for the bubbas, and they're going to keep shooting holes in their own junk until they run out of sausage, until someone gives Putin a 9mm Q-tip, or until half the northern hemisphere glows in the dark.

Why Is That?

 h/t My Daily Kona

The Russian Army of 1980 called. From the convalescent hospital.
On life support.

As in, "Why do we keep getting it right, and the Putin-fanboys keep doing an endless faceplant?"

How The Soviet Army Fights: RTWT  

Go read Mr. Garibaldi's accurate 30-second thumbnail on how the Soviet Army trained to fight.

That was exactly the Soviet model doctrine. We knew it backwards and forwards. Hell, I read the whole collection from the S-2's open shelves while I was on battalion guard duty. It's not that complicated, and was written at a high school grade level, like most military manuals.

And that was great, when Ivan had 50,000 tanks to our 10,000, and his senior generals had no-shit fought German panzers at Kursk, and crushed them.

That was in the 1980s. When Russia was the Soviet Union.

But what too many fanboys forget, is that was then.

Here's a not-so-subtle clue:

This is 1980s heartthrob Kelly McGillis, co-star with Harrison Ford and Tom Cruise from movies like Witness and Top Gun, in a t-shirt and shades:

Hot stuff in 1986.

This is her in t-shirt and shades now:

There ain't enough lipstick to put on that to make anybody want it. It's box wine and cats forever. Time is cruel to women. They shine brightly when young, but biology's payback for that is that they age like milk, not wine.

Now imagine that as the entire Russian Army, after divorcing from Daddy Warbucks in 1990, living not in a Black Sea dacha on champagne and caviar budgets, but on vodka and cabbage soup and dwindling government handouts for forty years. And haven't won a war in 70+ years.

That's the force you were so certain was going to stomp Ukraine in 2022.

Ukraine, conversely, dumped Russia in 1990. At the same time Russians were siphoning alcohol from missiles to drink, Ukraine started beefing up its forces with Western technology. They accelerated this when Putin invaded once to steal back the Crimea (because he wanted it), and again when he invaded Donbas with soldiers in civvies. Both those illegal invasions took place under Putin, and both before 2022. So when the war drums were pounded again (mostly by D.C., and by Putin, not by Kyiv) they started getting their hands on mil-tech with a vengeance, and they'd spent years preparing for Russian grabbiness when it came calling the third time.

And once all of Europe, and most of the rest of the world, saw Russian military adventurism as a direct threat, the floodgates really opened, to a country neither as tiny as Chechenya, nor as backwards as Georgia, and the results in Ukraine have been anything but spectacular for Russia, but phenomenal for an army nominally outnumbered 10:1 by Russia.

Take another look at Kelly McGillis now, and see why.

Things get old. Rust never sleeps. People joining the army literally for the potato soup and a bed aren't as motivated as people fighting for their own homes, farms, and country.

The Russian troops rapidly don't want to be there, and sure as hell don't want to die there.

The Ukrainian troops are on the exact opposite end of that spectrum.

The Russians have no NCO cadre, and no junior leadership. When their senior leadership is incompetent, or takes a bullet in the head, they lose their collective shit, and they get slaughtered. They've been taking it in the head for going on three months, and they aren't getting better, they're getting worse, with less equipment, zero morale, and fewer leaders who have a clue, rather than a bullet in the head. And Vlad's not helping by shooting the old ones when they fail him either.

This was both predictable, and predicted, to anyone not taken in by knee-jerk anti-Biden responses, and people pimping an army that ceased to exist 40 years ago as being a world-beater. It's more of a wife-beater: fine for putting down tiny republics with disarmed citizens, but hopelessly outclassed by 40 years of military technology advances from the West, in the hands of a motivated people with a hard-on for payback for Stalin's Holodomor. Anyone who couldn't see that coming a mile off is simply too short to be talking geopolitics and military affairs with grown-ups.

Was this war cobbled up by Poopypants' minions in D.C., as a distraction from 57 massive failures, from election fraud to rampant inflation and looming economic collapse?

ABSOLUTELY IT WAS. We've never made any secret of that, nor failed to call it out.

But Russia remains in only one sense anything more than a Turd World failed state: they still have nuclear-tipped ICBMs in substantial numbers. Because they're drunken paranoid fucks with a pathological inferiority complex, have been since the 1400s, and getting invaded by Genghis Khan, Napoleon, and Hitler over the centuries hasn't helped their mindset or disposition. Even though their artillery can only hit minute-of-Mariupol, for a 10MT hydrogen warhead on an American city, that's close enough.

And that's the only reason why nipping their military escapades in the bud is important. They can stew all they want; they can beat their chests all they want; they can even beat up their subjugated client-state constituents all they like, as they've done for centuries. But once they step outside their own territorial boundaries because they think they CAN, they're a bully in need of getting their dicks kicked up to their throats.

History teaches this lesson with excruciating clarity, over and over again.

Which is why we will cheer Ukraine and jeer Putin's warmaking until we are hoarse, and why anyone with a lick of sense should do so as well.

The sooner Putin either quits, or dies, the better for humanity. Then we can go back to letting Ukraine make its own way in the world, and go back to largely ignoring Russia as the vodka-soaked incompetent irrelevancy it has been and will be again, left to its own devices. Until they stop hugging dictators, keeping their heads down, and just following orders, as they've done since the czars, they will continue to be a failed state. Nothing has changed just because Emperor Poopypants and his minions needed a proxy war with them as a political tampon, to staunch the flow of blood from their pussified regime.

If you're butthurt by that, you've been on the wrong side of this since the outset. Sorry there's no nice way to say that. So just stop already.

Know When To Say When

 

Stop buying it by the case.

Just quit cold-turkey.

Your life will improve immeasurably.

Lakehurst, N.J.: LZ Hindenburg Coming In For A Landing

h/t WRSA

link 

Item One:

On Sunday, the foreign policy blogs were abuzz with the news that Scott Ritter had done “an about-face in his assessment of the war”. It appears that the ex-Marine had examined recent developments in Ukraine and concluded that it’s going to be much harder for Russia to win than he had originally thought..

O, ye gods and little fishes, if only someone, somewhere, ANYWHERE, had told you, and told you, and told you, and told you, and told you, and told you, and told you, and told you, and told you, that Putin had massively miscalculated, and that he and his assclown minions were merrily shooting themselves in the feet so many times they were running out of toes, based on report after report after video after video ad infinitum.

But wait! There's MORE!

Item Two:

Scott Ritter — “The thing that frustrates me… is that, it was my assessment that it would be very hard for Ukraine to absorb this new equipment and material (Material– the additional lethal weapons that have recently been shipped to Ukraine) but the howitzers are already operating against Russia. They are having an effect in the Kharkov region. Not all 90 of them, but they have several batteries in place that are being used.

The fact that these advanced howitzers are operating on the front lines right now, shows there’s something wrong with the Russian methodology. And–unless they alter that methodology– I think we’re in for a very long summer.”

Sweet blistering fuck! Aiyee, the humanity, O the humanity! If only someone, maybe with a tad bit of artillery experience, had told you firsthand how hard learning field artillery work IS NOT, and had then gone on to point out that such could be accomplished in days, not months.

If, If, If. If only the World's Foremost Experts had stopped listening to the sound of their own awesomeness for thirty seconds, they wouldn't fully deserve the catastrophe of Reality now cudgeling them about the head and shoulders with 20-pound iron kettlebells.

Me? I'm laughing my @$$ off right now!

Could this two-course feast of Crow possibly turn into a three-course banquet?

Item Three:

And the fighting that’s taking place right now –even though it is slaughtering Ukrainians– it isn’t cost free to the Russians. They’re losing equipment, they’re losing men, they’re losing material, and unless Putin mobilizes or transfers forces in, those aren’t being replaced. So, instead of having 200,000 online, Russia might have 180,000 men. And if you don’t think removing 20,000 men doesn’t change the options available to the Russian leadership, then you don’t know anything about war.”

Hmmmmm.

Waitwaitwait. You're saying that Russia losing substantial numbers of front-line troops - which Russia swears, cross our black hearts, hasn't happened - could seriously get their military dicks chopped off? Who knew? Who could possibly have foreseen that Russian military strength wasn't endless, and that losing the tiger's teeth and claws would relegate him to a zoo curiosity instead of a fearsome predator in mere days?

Who indeed.

blog comments that didn't age well

Maybe some folks might begin to twig to the reason why I've tagged multiple posts regarding events in the Ukraine with

Cleat Marks In Your Dick Are Hard To Heal

Clever readers, who knew this all along, will thus be in no wise shocked that this post is tagged:

Sunday Music: A Taste Of Honey

 

The second big hit for Herb Alpert (the "A" in A&M Records) and The Tijuana Brass, this one from 1965 hit #1 on the Billboard Easy Listening chart and stayed there for five weeks, and made it to #7 on the Hot 100, and the song and album won four Grammy awards.

Recharging Batteries

 

As in mine. Thursday was more trauma classes. New toys, new procedures. Don't go into the medical field if you hate school: learning never stops. Never. And just for more fun, an entirely new computer system, which they've been threatening/promising since before COVID, will apparently finally be dropped on us by the end of this year. Oh goody.

Meanwhile, stocking up hereabouts. On everything. Pushing months of redundancy into years is slow, steady, work. Which will be followed by another weekend of saving lives. Which is sometimes an inside joke, and far more frequently of late, exactly what's going on. Warmer weather and longer days means people are out and about more, doing stupid things and winning stupid prizes. The only constant is the constant conga line of illness, accident, and on-purpose mayhem, for most of the next week.

And the big wide world seems locked into SS,DD Mode, so it's not like I'm missing anything there.

So I'm taking the morning off. Y'all have fun, and amuse yourselves. We expect we'll be back when the spirit moves.

Homonym

 h/t TBC

The Rugged Life: Book Review

 

We accidentally picked this up yesterday at Big Box Bookstore, who had it (purposefully?) misfiled under Arts and Crafts, which is a bizarre choice for shelving a book on Day One of release from a multiple NYTimes best-selling author. "Accidently", because we were going to get it from the 'zon a couple of bucks cheaper, but a bird in the hand, and all that, so it followed us home, which gets it out of our online "Want This" queue, where it's waited patiently for the book's release date.

His earlier works are nearly all go-to pure gold (Deadly Skills and Deadly Skills: Survival Edition are five-star recommendations; Deadly Skills: Combat Edition decidedly less so, chiefly because Emerson farmed it out to a bunch of people who had varying levels of actual skill, widely varying abilities to explain or teach combatives with the written word, several who are quite frankly full of crap, and none of whom have Emerson's ability to convey the subject, nor the real-world back-up to tell what works from crapola. But I digress.)

This work, being completely outside Emerson's SEAL skillset and wheelhouse, is one where he nonetheless learned from his mistake with the Combat edition, and rather than dealing the authorship out to less-qualified others, he took it upon himself to learn firsthand from subject-matter experts, and then distill the key points down himself.

A few hours in, we're not quite halfway through the 270-something pages, and what we've read so far is worthwhile. As we'd expect, he presents the topics logically, and in the manner of former MagPul trainer Travis Haley, doesn't present things in a "This is the only way to skin a cat" method, but rather, treats the reader as if they had a brain, by saying "This is what you'll need to do if you're going to do this all-out, but if you're not, you can try Option B or Option C, and find out what works best for you, at whatever level you need or want to be." Would that all instruction took that approach as often as possible. Sometimes, there is only one right way to do it, but in many things, there's quite a range of what works, and what doesn't.

Emerson lays out those options, with text, tables, and illustrations aplenty, and whether you're new to the ideas, or just want to check yourself and what you've already gotten going against some solid lists and suggestions, the book is worth the trouble, and the cover price. Many aren't, but this one is a keeper.

We get $0 from recommending it here, and paid for it with our own cash, which is why we do it. We don't recommend books we didn't buy, don't own, and/or haven't read ourself. If you have the desire to take care of your own business, and prepare for any number of bad things that may or may not happen, you're our people, i.e. the ones who'll generally be part of the solution, and not part of the Free Sh*t Army problem, in anything from a minor local mishap to a global calamity. Hopefully you never need any of this, and just benefit from a more connected life, less dependent on distant supply chains and the vagaries of political stupidity from our would-be overlords.

Recommended without hesitation.

That's Not Frustration

 h/t Wilder

Turns out not everything tastes like chicken.

Naked Men Should Not Do Magic Tricks

Some people disagree, fallaciously.

Because we can see where you're getting that rabbit, and now we know why it's brown.

Sorry to have to point out the obvious, but this is bassackwards, and btw, no, wet streets do NOT cause rain, and roosters crowing don't make the sun rise. That's reasoning on the level of an immature and ignorant child.

The recockulous and asinine implication stated therein is that "NATO and the US giving military aid to anyone is going to cause WW III".

Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight.

This is like footnoting your thesis that short skirts cause rapes.

How fucking retarded is it?

It's as retarded as saying that you buying more guns and ammo is going to cause feral monkeys to do a home invasion on your place, kill you, rape your wife, kidnap your children, and sell your stuff at the pawn shop.

It's your fault.

The feral monkeys will stand blameless.

So might there be a WW III? Certainly.

Because Russia, (by which I mean PUTIN) is an expansionistic dictatorial terrorist state, attempting to grab every bit of not-its-territory it can steal, and sees the rest of the world, let alone the wishes of the object of its obsession, as no brake on its intentions.

It's not working out like he planned (gloriously!), and apparently he hasn't been kicked in the dick enough times to want to cease and desist. Yet.

When a pitbull has your neighbor by the throat, do you stop trying to change his plan because he's latched on like a tick, and the first ten whacks with the baseball bat to doggo's head haven't fully gotten his attention yet? No, you do not, unless you're a lazy worthless asshole.

Sending Ukraine whatever we can to deal with Russia's unconscionable invasion is what you do unless you're a lazy worthless asshole neighbor. If Russia(Putin) thinks nuclear war is the answer to that (rather than letting go, and knocking that off), then we can all worry about who rules in Hell, but clearly, anyone that insane isn't going to respond well to tender entreaties, they'll be emboldened in their insanity by your weakness, and you don't let them walk around on the loose either. (And we still suspect that at that point, Putin gets the 9mm Q-tip he's been begging for since late February, courtesy of someone within his inner circle with more of a grip on sanity, and less wedded to the idea of restoring the Soviet Union's full glory, even at the cost of global thermonuclear annihilation.)

To those who think this unreasonable:

Those who think otherwise would bargain with a crocodile in order to be accorded the privilege of being eaten last, and not see the problem there until their leg was in process of being bitten off up to their own ass.

Such people should be accorded no attention, and in fact ridiculed as harshly as is possible, commensurate with then ignoring any further babblings they might make. They are idiots. When in positions of decision, they are dangerous idiots.

Chamberlain's stupidity and France's cowardice plunged an entire continent into war. But, we almost forget, there was this feral asshole (or four) who may have had a wee bit more direct role in all that, wasn't there?

We tried isolationism in the 1930s. It got us precisely the World War of the 1940s almost nobody wanted. Because the fascist axis (which included Russia, until the honor among co-thieves caught up with them) were expansionist dictatorial terrorist states. And they would have happily taken everything without that war, but in the end, they wouldn't have settled for not getting what they wanted, and if all it took was a war, they thought the lemon was worth the squeeze.

Isolationism isn't an option ever, and in fact is even less of an option now than it was 80 years ago, when it was merely stupid and short-sighted. Now, it's suicidal. 

If you're still suffering from Stockholm Syndrome after nine decades of socialism lite here, it's time to seek professional help. (Or maybe a stout crowbar and some vaseline, to pull your head out of a very dark and smelly place. Dealer's choice.)

If you think arming your neighbor is what's going to cause bad people to attack them, and/or you, you're quite frankly around the psychological bend, and should be locked up for your own good, and heavily medicated, because logic and reason has left your zip code.

And concluding that helping somone else out to prevent a war here by letting them fight theirs there might not avail, does not therefore make that aid a cause of such a war, if it afterwards occurs.

But don't take my word for it. The fallacy underlying that sort of logical idiocy is well known;  you could look it up.

If someone wants to make the case that we're broker than broke, to the tune of negative trillions, and shouldn't be throwing around even more billions we don't have, make that argument. But you'd better be prepared to show the money we'll spend giving Social Security to illegal aliens and fake refugees, and handing out free crack pipes, which money will be spent, and without you raising a peep, is a far better investment of money-we-don't-have.

Otherwise, raise ten times more hell over that, or else STFU about the relative federal pittance "wasted" kicking Vlad in the nuts.

He needs it, and to the degree it's actual aid and not grift-bait, it's money well spent.

Meanwhile, Back At Banana Republican HQ...

 

Cue Hail To The Thief

Five-Alarm REEEEEEEEEEE in 3, 2, ...

 h/t CTH

And That's How It's Done

All rise for the Chiquitastan National Anthem

Go to Adaptive Curmudgeon's place, and RTWT.

A  clearer and more cogent summary of events you will not find.

America has been gaslit for a year and a half, and it wasn't your imagination. The fraud is as serious as a heart attack, and as real as your own body.

I've made no to-do over it, and it's probably escaped anyone's notice, but I have never, not once, referred to that demented stumblefuck above anywhere, anytime as president of anything. He never has been, and he never will be. You have to win an election for that, he's never done any such thing, and Stevie Wonder could see that from space.

The only sufficient reckoning for this level of banana republicanism inevitably ends in rivers of blood, and mountains of skulls. That was true then, and it's more so now.

Nothing less will avail.

WYS ≠ WYG: How you Know The King Is Dead

h/t Common Cents blog

 

A few pointers on this clip from ITV:

1) This is a militia artillery unit. So what? My posted estimate at BCE's place was that it would take a very short time, far less than expected, to train raw recruits to operate field artillery competently. My estimate was a few days for the artillery itself, and a couple of weeks to shake out the fire direction head shed. I was earnestly assured by a commenter at BCE's blog it would take far longer, months and months, to do so. Yet here we have a battery at two months, tops, doing as well as any experienced military unit would do. TL;DR: I win again. Days, not months and months.

2) By leveraging the use of drones for fire direction, something that was in its infancy in my day,

a) they don't need to push Forward Observers out into harm's way

b) they can operate and target well beyond their own FLOT (Forward Line Of Troops)

c) their fire direction corrections can be made seamlessly, in real time, without relay, taking artillery from being indirect fire, to being very nearly direct fire. Their own FDC is calling their own corrections, and they can do BDA simultaneously.

d) anything in their range fan that their drone(s) can see, they can bring under fire, almost immediately. Their only limitation is the NV/thermal capabilities of their drones; the artillery can fire 24/7/365.

Nota bene: 

3) Russian counter-battery fire is virtually NIL. For the novices out there: This is YUUUUUUUUUUUGGGGE.

It obviously happens, else they wouldn't all run to their bunkers right after a fire mission. 

But so rarely as to be inconsequential.

Blue Force Cold War doctrine was to expect OPFOR to start erasing the grid you were in within 2 minutes of firing. That's not happening here. Nor anything remotely close.

How do we know that?

a) They aren't hooking the field pieces up to prime mover trucks at light speed after "rounds complete", and then hauling ass a mile or more away within 90 seconds of last round downrange. Conclusion: they aren't doing it because counter-battery almost never happens.

b) They're running to bunker shelters. I'll say that again: They're running to bunker shelters. Which aren't chewed all to hell by the constant accurate incoming Russian counter-battery fire. Conclusion: because it doesn't happen.

c) They have those bunkers at all, because they're disciplined enough to build them, and more importantly, because they had the leisure time to bother, because they've been firing from the same positions for so long, it was worth the time and effort to bother. Conclusion: Because there's been no counter-battery fire whatsoever, and they haven't had to displace anywhere in a big ass hurry, not even once, in days and DAYS and DAYS.

Inescapable Conclusion:

Once-vaunted Russian grid-square erasing counter-battery Armageddon beloved of 1980s tech fiction is so f**king rare in Ukraine as to be virtually non-existent. You're more likely to find Bigfoot in a Ukraine forest poition than an exploding Russian artillery shell.

The former Russian King Of Battle is impotent.

QED

If it were otherwise, those militia guns would have been smoking heaps of scrap, and those shelters blown asunder to kindling, with a fresh paint job of cannon-cocker blood-and-guts paté splattered hither and yon. Russian artillery is manifestly completely dickless, unless they're shelling non-movable cities and civilian targets, and hitting to minute of Mariupol on schools, factories, and apartment complexes only because those things can't run very fast.

Russian counter-battery capability has been degraded to non-existence, for all practical purposes. If it were otherwise, the ITV video would have been a snippet stating "ITV news team missing somewhere near  front-line positions in eastern Ukraine."

So, minus any help from what was once the foremost cudgel of the entire Russian military order of battle, to the point that amateurs are pwning Vlad's minions 24/7/365, see if you can guess why the Russian troops in Ukraine can't fight their way out of a wet paper bag, and have been relegated to shelling the living hell out of soft, non-movable civilian targets for two months.

FTR, I assumed the Ukes would need time to get their FOs up to speed, and instead they made them completely superfluous. 

I also took the common assumption that the Russians were barely competent at counter-battery fire at face value, but obviously, from first-hand evidence, they're about as good at counter-battery fires now as they are at running cruisers in the Black Sea, or attacking a short distance on mutiple axes of advance, while keeping their front lines well-supplied with fuel, food, and bullets: i.e. which is obviously not at all, based purely on the evidence of anyone's lying eyes.

I can pick that much info up from a less than 7 minute video; ITV didn't figure it out after being there live to film it. And all the gainsaying and Putin-cheering can't change those realities on the ground.

Those "Go Putin!" and "The Plan Is Working!" comments from those whose only uniform time was as a parking valet aren't aging well in light of ground realities on the front lines of a war. But you can't use facts and common sense to argue people out of positions they didn't use facts and common sense to get to in the first place.

Plan C...?

 

The first phase of Russia's invasion of Ukraine was a tragedy. The current phase is a farce.

This is not your great-grandfather's Russian Army. They spent so much time fighting unarmed dissidents, they appear to have forgotten how to fight and win a war where both sides get a vote.

Too bad, so sad.

Yet some blowhards will tell you "The Plan Is Working!", which of course explains why Ukraine fell 80 days ago, Zelenskyy was executed, and Putin is in full control of the adoring Russian fanboys in the Soviet Unio Russia's newest province. Oh, wait, none of that has even come close to happening, and Russia's even losing their grip on the eastern bits they scarfed up early on.

As to who's winning, here's a cluebat upside the head for ya.

Shocked. Shocked, I am.

Sunday Music: Stuck in the Middle With You

 

Before Gerry Rafferty's breakout solo career, he was the co-founder of and front man for Stealer's Wheel, and this cut from 1972 their sole memorable hit (which made it to #6 in the US for about five minutes). Which chorus applies to far too much of our lives.

Zeitgeist

 h/t WRSA

This is our submission to Boriquato.

The current administration, in one panel.

While we enjoy the predicament Vlad's gotten himself into, we are under no illusions that they are ten feet tall and shoot lightning bolts from their eyes.

The regime's desperate antics to distract from eleventy other ginormous self-inflicted problems heading into mid-terms are hilarious, in a clowns-in-a-Volkswagen driving off a cliff sort of way.

For John Wilder: How did the hunter know there were clowns sneaking up on him?

He heard a funny noise.

Russian Black Sea Submarine Fleet Grows Again?

RFS Makarov in happier times.

In what's becoming rather tediously embarrassing to the Russian Navy, it seems they've had another ship spontaneously catch on fire and explode just after Ukrainian defense forces fired AS missiles at it.

Funny how that works.

This time it's the frigate Admiral Makarov (smaller than a destroyer, larger than a patrol boat, for non-naval types).

(BOHICA) Russia's Admiral Makarov has been hit by Ukrainian missiles and burst into flames. The frigate would be Russia's latest naval loss in a troubled campaign.

We're still waiting to hear if this one sinks as well, or whether they manage to tow it back to port in Sevastopol, over 100 miles away, before it becomes another member of the Black Sea submarine fleet. Maybe they'll get luckier this time.

Meanwhile, sources with close ties to the Russian navy have obtained this Russian training film used to teach ship boarding and search operations.

Large, Clanking, Steel, 16#@

 

That would be the cajones on the featured pilot in this video, (this vid is at least a year old, as the Big Stick, CVN-71, seen herein is currently dry-docked in Bremerton) which randomly popped up in my YouTube feed today.

This is not recruiting poster video; this is the stuff they show to weed people out before they even sign up.

Near anybody can do this on an airfield that isn't moving, or even on a carrier on pool-table flat calm blue seas, on a bright sunny day.

Quite another thing to do it in driving rain, with visibility down to ¼ mile, if that.

"So, coming in at 160 knots (184mph) you're going to land a gray airplane on a gray ship, in gray seas, on a gray day, in a gray fog. Got it?"

There are four arresting wires to hit in a sweet spot only 50 yards long from #1 to #4, and after that, it's "BOLTER! BOLTER! BOLTER!" slam the throttles forward, and go around for another try. This guy just managed to get back aboard after catching the #4 wire.

Later in the video, you can see the arresting gear crew using the tow tug to unkink the cable for the next guy coming in. No word from the video on how long it took to get the pilot's seat cushion out of his over-clenched sphincter after landing.

And then, to make it hard, they'll do this at night.

This is why no one in the Air Farce ever imagines they can do what the carrier-qualled guys can do. Both high skilled, but two completely different worlds.

And somewhere, on one or more of the four deployed CVs, they're doing this right now.

Mad props. Top Gun is barely the tip of the iceberg on this.

Russia Claims Victory Over Azovstal Plant For 33rd Straight Day

 

We haven't seen this kind of military performance since
Snoopy tried to shoot down the Red Baron.

And after they fall back and regroup for the 34th time, they plan another successful attack tomorrow. And the day after that.

Just kidding.

What Russian troops involved in the fighting in Ukraine actually have to say is hilarious:

(Buttfuckograd) ..."ninety-nine percent of the equipment" in another unit didn't even work, but when the troops warned the senior in command that their vehicles didn't work and their guns "did not fire" he shrugged it off and said to just "go like that".

 It gets better. RTWT 

Sounds like good news for Vlad is still not looking to be coming home anytime soon. Pretty much like his hapless raggedy "army". (Unless we count the coffins.)

And when they attack deep, they seem to have an accuracy problem, according to the conservative-leaning Washington Examiner.

Clever readers will note a common theme about Russian military "performance problems" from the entire political spectrum. Intel analysts would call those universally bad appraisals an "indicator".

Couldn't happen to a nicer guy.

Moscow Molly rebuttals detailing the 47-D chess Puton is playing in Comments.

Be Careful What You Wish For

 

If You Can't Do The Job Right, Quit, Or Kill Yourselves

 

MPD, circa 2021.

Go to Divemedic's blog.

Read that entire post, and watch the videos. He tells this in exquisite detail.

This is not "bad tactics", however. It's institutional insanity.

This is where the former judicial system of the Royal Navy should take precedence:

Those officers - the entire convoy - should be rounded up, fired en masse, and horse-whipped to bloody shreds for no less than 24 hours apiece, regardless of whether they die at any point, with the punishers - from their own department, no less - working in batches lest they tire (defaulters and shirkers to be placed in with the culprits), in the city square in front of the courthouse, televised live citywide, with every off-duty officer in that county, and the families and children of the culprits, including any child over the age of 5, mandatorily present to witness the event until it's over. Any survivors to be subsequently pilloried in front of City Hall for 30 days and nights, untreated and unguarded.

Then the entire surviving MPD left afterwards should be required to knock at the door of every residence, and sincerely and personally apologize to every citizen of the city, until they're done.

And the chief of police and every officer in their direct chain of command should be sentenced to 20 years for corruption, attempted murder, and criminal conspiracy, pour encourager les autres.

But as they won't be, every officer in the MPD that dies "in the line of duty" for the next century has it coming. 

"A few bad apples" my aching ass. Fire them all, and start the prosecutions, for cause. Citizens there should be given full carte blanche to shoot at the MPD on sight, without prior warning, and all such incidents excused under all state and federal laws.

The MPD cure of "law enforcement" is worse than the disease of "crime". They're the problem, not the solution. And it didn't start yesterday, or last year.

This is why you defund the police: anarchy is a better government than Gestapo tyranny. And all but the most delusional and deranged copsuckers know it, not just here in the wake of multiple incidents, but in formerly polite and proper Canuckistan, after seeing the Mounties trampling unarmed grannies for sport, and down under in Ozshwitz, after watching their local gauleiters use the Oz polizei to throw people into COVID konzentrationslagers because they were Vaxx Juden.

If beating the hell out of random citizens trying to protect their businesses while the police go out shooting random people on "hunting trips" rather than arresting actual rioters is how your local fuzz respond during city-wide riots, the best thing you can do for public safety, and your own well-being, is shoot them all in the face, on sight. More and more, the worst of them are all but begging for exactly that sort of response, from Joe Average. Eventually, that's exactly what they're going to start getting.

A weak second-best would be to fire the entire department for cause, and start from scratch, trained by the state police under transparent full outside scrutiny, for the next 25 years, and only turn them loose when they get to where they can do it themselves without having their hands held, and without ever again getting accused of turning lose Brute Squads with official sanction.

Nazi Germany was not supposed to be an instruction manual.

Someday, Folks Will Figure this Out...

 h/t I Hate The Media

(BIGBROTHERISWATCHING) The US Centers For Disease Privacy Control and Prevention paid for location data harvested from millions of cell phones to track compliance with COVID-19 lockdown measures, according to a new report.

The CDC documents described SafeGraph's data as 'critical for ongoing response efforts, such as hourly monitoring of activity in curfew zones or detailed accounts of visits to participating pharmacies for vaccine monitoring'.

F***ing Retards!

They were literally watching to see who went to get their VAXX Clot Shots and boosters, in real time!

I have a dream that someday, even average nitwits with 80 IQs, maybe even down to 75, will learn to stop carrying their electronic tattletale everywhere they go, plugged in, powered up, and telling Big Brother their moves to within 2m every waking moment of their fool lives.

And I'd also like world peace, gasoline for 50¢/gallon, the winning Powerball ticket, and the cellphone number of the Playmate Of The Year (provided it's still a biological female).

You can guess which wish is likelier to come true this century, but overwhelming odds are the dedicated retards will still be checking their Facecrack status as they're standing in line for the boxcars. Mark my words.

If The Shoe Fits Dept.

 

In Case You Were Wondering

 

Obstruction Of Justice

18 U.S. Code §1503:

(a)

Whoever corruptly...endeavors to influence, intimidate, or impede any ... officer in or of any court of the United States ... in the discharge of his duty, or ... corruptly ... influences, obstructs, or impedes, or endeavors to influence, obstruct, or impede, the due administration of justice, shall be punished as provided in subsection (b).

(b)The punishment for an offense under this section is—

...

(3)

in any other case, imprisonment for not more than 10 years, a fine under this title, or both.

In short, whoever leaked the draft memo from SCOTUS is looking at the ass end of a dime of federal hard time. 

Nota bene that there's no First Amendment carve-out for conspiracy, and any reporter or paper who fails to identify the leaker is subject to contempt of court charges, and indefinite time in federal prison, until they reveal their source.

This is one of those cases where that should include "for the rest of their natural life, or until they cough up the information, whichever comes first."

Life is a long time to be Bubba's new girlfriend.

Somebody's looking at hard time over this, and if the FBI doesn't get their man, federal marshals may be conga-lining reporters and editors into contempt hearings by the busload.

And God help them if it's a sitting justice on SCOTUS.

Failure to go after this: more proof you're now living in WROL times.

The More You Know

h/t Miguel

 

Two cinematic deaths. One pretty effing brutal, especially by 1972 (or any other year's) standards. The other painless and peaceful.

I brought that up because of this:

Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted. - Amendment VIII, United States Constitution (1791)

The question came up at all in comment discussion at Gun Free Zone because people don't know, don't understand, or don't care about the details regarding legal execution, and most folks have no idea how it's done.

By the numbers:

1) Sedative: (Valium, Versed, etc.) Subject is sent to chemical Oblivion, beyond responding to pain. This is key. If they're not pain-free, you're executing someone cruelly, which is a violation of the 8th amendment to the US Constitution. This includes using outdated or impotent drugs literally past their freshness and efficacy date. Do it right, and it's the Final Big Nap.

2) Paralytic: (succinylcholine) Subject's muscles of respiration are paralyzed completely. Breathing, and any attempt at same, is switched off in a couple of seconds. Paralysis in about 2-3 seconds. Brain death begins at about 6 minutes, and total irreversible body-wide cellular death in 15 minutes.

3) Electrolyte: (potassium chloride) Subject's heart muscle receives a massive overdose of potassium, which switches it off like a light switch within a couple of seconds after administration.

You have to do it in this order. If you don't make it painless, it's cruel punishment, at a Dr. Mengele level of performance. If you turn the heart off first, there's no circulation to move the succinylcholine around in order to paralyze the breathing muscles, and they flop around unconscious, gasping agonally for breath, and take longer to die, all the while looking like a fish out of water, while yet unconscious. With designated press representatives watching, by law and custom, every grisly detail.

Do it the right way, and you turn off their mind (and pain perception), then their ability to breathe or move at all, then finally switch off the heart muscle. Death is inevitable, rapid, and peaceful. And looks like Yoda's passage into the afterlife, rather than Luca Brasi's.

Which is why SCOTUS lets you do it, and the media can't really say f**k-all about the actual mechanics of the process.

But botch it, and give them someone wide awake while being suffocated, and then inducing cardiac arrest via a painful electrolyte injection, or leave them with someone flopping around and gasping for their last breaths like Luca, and that will be the last legally-sanctioned execution you see in probably anyone's lifetime. Game. Set. Match.

(And yes, I have given and do give all three medications regularly, just not to the same person at the same time, and usually not in the dosage necessary nor with any intent to induce the results described above. But I know my sh*t, so I know what I'm trying to not do, in most instances. Giving #2, sux, being the exception, because we want to paralyze your breathing to make insertion of an ET tube possible and easy for the doctor for a few seconds, all the while a respiratory therapist is ready to start bagging you or hooking your new breathing tube to a mechanical ventilator and oxygen.)

Now you know how they do what they do, and why it's done that way, as opposed to something like slitting open their abdomen, tying off one end of their intestines to a solid anchor, and kicking them out the window on an upper floor, and leaving them to twist slowly at the end of their own innards, fully awake, until they expire.

The Ministry Of WTF?!?

 

Fertilizer Shortage Solved

Call 1-800-Morbark for a problem solver near you.

WFEE Takes A Grenade In The Pants

Another thrilling installment of Internet Drone Expert getting it totally wrong.

Episode III V IX We've honestly lost count

The World's Foremost Expert on Everything, who has assured all and sundry for years that hobby drones can't lift worthwhile explosive payloads, takes it in the pants again, this time on Miguel's Gun Free Zone blog, with a post about the Hobby Lobby Air Force. RTWT.

We were not only assured by that same expert that not only is what you'll see there UNPOSSIBLE! ELEVENTY!, but that furthermore, no one of nefarious bent will ever take this lesson, and bootstrap it to delivery of payloads to our comparatively rather peaceful environs. Sleep tight, America.

And if you believe that wagonlaod of bullsh..., er rose fertilizer, we have a bridge for sale, cheap.

Bonus Special: One Handful Of Magic Beans for any family cow!

Send checks to the blog: winning bid takes the prize.

Sunday Music: On The Border

 

This Al Stewart selection courtesy of a mention a few years back by long-time commenter RandyGC. Before then I'd never heard it, but through the magic of YouTube, you never miss anything, even if you tune in to 1976 more than forty years late.