h/t NC Renegades
But on the chance it's possibly correct, we join those praying for Vlad, and applaud the sentiment.
And if this all pans out and he dies, we'll give thanks that our prayers were answered in the affirmative, and wish him a fond parting benediction as he begins Eternity rotting in Hell.
Just saying.
Randy Newman classic from 1972, sung by the incomparable Joe Cocker in 1986, when it peaked at #35. Video bits from 9½ Weeks. If you can get Kim Basinger, or some equivalent, to dance to this, I highly recommend it.
h/t Granite Grok
RTWT.
It never existed, and never will.
Money quote:
“Pfizer received initial FDA BLA license on 8/23/2021 for its COVID-19 vaccine for use in individuals 16 and older (COMIRNATY). At that time, the FDA published a BLA package insert that included the approved new COVID-19 vaccine tradename COMIRNATY and listed 2 new NDCs (0069-1000-03, 0069-1000-02) and images of labels with the new tradename. These NDCs will not be manufactured."
If TPTB are going to prop up this glistening turd and fraudulent pretender for another two and a half years, they're going to need to buy him an airplane that can land on its belly, and drop a handicapped ramp with foam rubber lining, so he can get into the plane without doing a faceplant every two minutes.
If it were up to me, I'd hire commercial tuna fisherman to snag and yank him from the ground with stout poles, and gaff hook him into the hatch, but I'm sentimental like that.
Someone suggested a body harness and a winch, but the WH staff were concerned about squeezing all the stored up pudding out of his Depends on national TV.
It's foolishly suggested that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has shifted the paradigm of war, demonstrating Russia's grasp of the new paradigm, and hopelessly outclassing NATO.
The trouble with that argument is it ignores facts from both history, and current events.
Battleships didn't become obsolete because of events at Taranto, nor Pearl Harbor, nor even because of the sinkings of two British battleships off the Malaysian coast. In point of fact, ignored wholly by Piggott, battleships continued to be deployed, successfully, for the rest of WWII (he might have noted the final Japanese surrender instrument was signed on the deck of USS Missouri, anchored in Tokyo Bay, had he the historical acumen to summon that factoid), and Korea, and Vietnam, and GW1, before the final retirement of ships then over 50 years old. Half a century of action after supposed obsolescence is quite a long time.
And they weren't retired because of obsolescence, but rather because they were simply aged ships, requiring more in staffing and maintenance than they delivered in capability, and their main-gun ammunition was becoming notably wonky. Naval gunfire is fantastic, and nigh irreplaceable, but running oil-fired bunkers on a 2000+-man ship whose capabilities can be parceled out more economically among other platforms was the end game for the battleships. It was that simple. (OTOH, the defense plan if one was rammed by a speedboat IED, or hit by an Exocet or Silkworm in the multiple belts of foot-thick side armor, was to come about 180°, lower a seaman over the side with a brush and a bucket of gray enamel, and paint over the scorch mark in the hull that would result from such an attack.)
Carriers didn't become obsolete after Midway, either.
Bad carrier tactics, yes.
Carriers, no.
Particularly against people with no defense against them. (Which is most of 185 nations out of 195 total.)
Piggott nonsensically waves the Russian hypersonic scramjet missiles as the death blow for anything in their path. They can cover 180 miles (their operational range) in a couple of minutes.
Okay, spiffy. Russia has new toys, based on technology around since the 1950s, some 70 years ago. So, had he more perspicacity, the obvious follow-up questions would be:
What are you going to do about targets 190 miles away?
How accurate are those missiles?
How easy are they to jam, spoof, or shoot down?
How are you targeting objects BVR?
How many have you got to shoot?
Where are they?
Those are questions a plebe at West Point or Annapolis would have thought of; Piggott, not so much. What he grasps about warfare in general, or in specifics, could be written longhand with a Sharpie on butcher paper and fit inside a thimble, with room to spare.
And the most obvious question is, if these missiles are so revolutionary, why is Russia in an endless meat-grinder conflict, rather than sitting atop the pyramid of victory in mere minutes, as they expected, and Piggott's suggestion predicts?
The obvious answer is, because all those questions show the utter dearth of ability of those "revolutionary" missiles to effect anything that looks like victory.
Might they have some utility? Perhaps. It remains to be seen.
Are they a "paradigm shift" in warfare? No. They are a fart in a windstorm in the grand scheme.
Grunt Law: When you declare victory, be sure to inform the enemy.
Offense/Defense Corollary: There ain't a horse that can't be rode, and there ain't a rider that can't be throwed.
IOW, fast missiles are anything but world-beating game-changers.
It would take pages to fisk the multiplicity of military errors, from strategy, to tactics, to logistics, that underpin this pile of gelatinous shit plopped out at the link, but suffice it to say that war has not transformed in 6000 years of recorded human history, and neither have the conditions for obtaining victory. (The plural of 27 fallacious conclusions is not "wisdom". When you ask the wrong questions, and draw the wrong conclusions, you get the equivalent of gibberish from a baboon. For but one example, the machinegun didn't make infantry obsolete. It made head-on infantry charges obsolete. Wee difference, but Piggott doesn't know what he doesn't know - or else ignores it because facts mess up the flow of effluvia in his narrative.)
Hypersonic missiles haven't changed that calculus, and the failure of the Russians to sweep all opposition off the chessboard merely underlines the idiocy of the suggestion that they have.
If ICBMs with nuclear weapons didn't make armies and navies obsolete, there's little likelihood that a few missiles will do so now. The suggestion is risibly ludicrous, and only a rank amateur and total military loon would suggest otherwise. The first prerequisite of being the smartest guy in the room, is that one be smart.
Epic Fail.
Somebody wants to talk about actual new tech in this war, we can do that. But this article wasn't it.
Addendum: For the incorrigibly stupid who need this spelled out with wooden blocks, we lost our first aircraft carrier in 1942. Carriers were vulnerable 80 years ago: This is not news. We started WW II with a total of 7 carriers. We were so distraught and paradigm-shifted by the wholly unsurprising news that they could be sunk, that by war's end, we had 99 aircraft carriers afloat by VE day. And if anyone were to start lobbing missiles at any one of the 11 carriers we currently possess and had the misfortune to sink one, the life expectancy of their fleet, and capitol city, would be measured in minutes. Which is reason #27 why hypersonic AS missiles are largely irrelevant to any serious discussion of anything military-related beyond "What's a great way for a country to initiate national suicide by radiation poisoning?".
After all of the preceding, if anyone is still willing to carry water for Piggott's jackassical thesis, kindly turn up the brightness on your keyboard.
from WRSA :26/27, and one clinker
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| The difference between a rose, and rose fertilizer, in one quote. |
Said Julius Caesar. Genghis Khan. Napoleon. Bonnie and Clyde. Hitler. Mao. Castro. The Manson Family. Pol Pot. The Clintons. MS-13. BLM. Jeffrey Epstein. Some 19 y.o. @$$hole in Uvalde. Ad infinitum. All of whom acted "according to the dictates of" their own consciences. Which was exactly the entire problem there. Kindly show all work if you're going to espouse such claptrap.
This is simply "If it feels good, do it." It's total unadulterated bullshit since its utterance by Simone de Abbatoir. Not to put too fine a point on it, it's literally the exact lie of the Serpent in the Garden of Eden, from which proceedeth all subsequent human error and catastrophe to date.
Anyone you could think of, from Victor Davis Hanson, to Thomas Sowell, to Peter Hitchens, to Jordan Peterson, to Bill Burr, to Ricky Gervais, would make anyone espousing the same wish they'd never been born inside of 10 seconds' simple explanation.
Meme selection fail. Re-think.
Go, Vlad! Bleed yourself white. Adopt the conscription policies of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards mine clearing forces. Put the old guys and the kids in those rusty T-62s you've been pulling out of the scrap heaps. That'll show Ukraine who means business.
Platinum-selling main theme soundtrack and funk-soul masterpiece from Isaac Hayes, which skyrocketed to the #1 song in the U.S., then followed that by winning the Oscar for Best Original Song at the 1972 Oscars, giving Hayes the first win by any African American in any category but acting, and turned a middleweight blaxplotation flick into a cultural milestone and cult favorite. Hayes performed it at the Oscars, and rocked it again 30 years later for his induction to the Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame. Who's A-Number One?
(And to the Anon who queried me about "Why Shaft?"
Well, besides because it's a great track, you tell me: What have you been getting from TPTB for at least the last 2½ - if not 100 - years?. You're welcome. It's now a whole new theme song, i'n'it?)
Yesterday, Divemedic looked at why we keep seeing criminally insane mass shooters walking among us, and looks at the root of The Problem. RTWT. It's from research on his paper for a BSN, including the things he "can't say in a school paper".
My reply:
1) Keep working on the paper. Don't pull punches.
2) Latest numbers are that Califrutopia now has closer to 33% of the homeless people in the country, which is why I keep telling all the California-haters that they can have their toothless banjo-playing kinfolk back any time, because those crazy folks ain't from around here. I see their SSNs, and you can look up the state of origin [from the first three digits] in about 2 mouseclicks.
2a) 100:1 your state, for any of 49 values of that descriptor, hands the incorrigibly insane something between $5-10K for substance detox. In Califrutopia only. They fly them here, get into rehab, flunk out in a day or two because they're crazy addicts, end up on the streets, and drink or snort the balance of their funds. Then they become everyone's problem. I.E. mine. Ask me how I know, and how many times I've seen that exact scenario replayed again and again at local EDs.
3) They aren't releasing the homeless from prison to make room for the druggies. It's the same population. A Venn Diagram of the homeless, the alcoholics, and the lifelong drug addicts would be nearly one single circle, with all three groups overlapping. A fourth circle containing the convicts wouldn't stray too far from 1, 2, or 3 either.
4) People aren't homeless because they misplaced their homes, they're homeless because they drank it away, snorted it away, or perpetrated it away. No job, no skills, addiction, mental deficiency, and a criminal record is a crappy poker hand for life.
5) Psych meds make patients feel "weird". The rest of us call that weird feeling "sanity". So they stop taking those meds the minute they're released back into the community, with the result that ordinary citizens have to lock themselves inside plush secure home cells, while the crazy people walk around loose and free.
6) But not taking those meds means the voices come back. And the voices always say "You suck. Kill yourself." or "Everyone's trying to kill you. Kill them first!" So they do drugs, alcohol, and/or both. Why?
a) Actual quote from extremely insightful 17-year-old schizophrenic addict: "I take dope and get drunk, because it gets the voices drunk too, and then I can't understand what they're saying!" F**king brilliant, right there.
b) And they get to feel the euphoria of drunkenness and/or "high", which is way better than what sanity and responsibility feels like.
7) When I started in the medical biz decades and decades ago, we got a drunk a week, maybe an OD a month or two, and pot cases never. Now we get 5-15 of all of the above per night, or worse. Don't get me started about banning Narcan when a new batch of anything loaded with homebrew carfentanil (which dealers put in literally everything) hits the streets. The only good thing about it is when it occasionally takes a few regulars out of circulation permanently. But the 20 addicts who hear about that, and want to get the new "hot" batch, more than takes up the slack.
8) At current course and speed, it's only a matter of time before we start seeing open Commitees Of Vigilance, or else onesy-twosey incidents of The Three esSes (Shoot-Shovel-Shut Up) to become commonplace among the homeless/mentally ill/alcoholic/druggie/convicts on the loose. And we're talking when, not if. After a month or two, they'll start skipping the "shovel" part too. Mark my words.
9) TPTB will talk a good game, but the push to track down the culprits will be about as enthusiastic as going after the johns serviced by Epstein and Maxwell on Lolita Island. They'll toss the wretches into paupers' graves, throw the cold case files into some file cabinet in some endless warehouse next to the Ark of the Covenant, and that will be that. It's how California, and a good bit of the rest of the country, cleaned house 100+ years ago. Some ideas never go out of style.
10) The alternative will be a "Three Strikes And Yer Out!" rule for getting placed on a psych hold.
After the third time you're caught running naked down the freeway and throwing rocks off the overpass because you're off your meds, you will be deposited on Shutter Island, and never allowed to return. You can run around naked, chase butterflies, jump off cliffs, eat dirt, pound your head with a rock, whatever. But your civilization privileges will be permanently revoked.
Nothing less than #9 or #10 will avail, and no one's willing to pay for reinstating Bedlam in 50 states, and warehousing the insane for life at public expense. It won't matter what's right, or good, only what works, at that point. And half the population trying to ensure that nothing works is only hastening those two unpalatable conclusions. By design and malign intent.
If we could mandate that the first two times, the insaniacs were set at liberty, it had to be as the permanent houseguest of anyone in favor of the current scheme, starting with do-gooders, judges, and lawyers, it would go a long way toward solving things short of more draconian measures. But that will never happen.
Homeless people turning up all inexplicably dead all over the place? That could happen as early as tomorrow, and I'm frankly surprised it hasn't already started. What a Brave New World mental health do-gooderism has inflicted on us all.
I'm not saying I approve of what's coming. But what cannot continue, will not. Molly-coddling the criminally insane is about to become a luxury the people will not tolerate in perpetuity, and Nature abhors a vacuum, particularly one the state created, and now refuses to backfill.
And loving metrics in a hazy conflict, the media and Putin fanboys are all agog with the news that Russian control now encompasses 20% of Ukraine territory. (They forget that most of that 20% was Crimea and the Soviet puppet "breakaways" in the east they already held before the war began on 2/24 this year, but we'll spot them the difference anyways, just to be sporting.)
So, at that rate, this war will last another 400 days beyond the first 100.
That's also overlooking Russian losses and retreats, but acknowledging the obvious facts there upsets the fanboys to the point of flinging feces from their monkey cages, so we'll spot them that too.
Meanwhile, Russian losses amount to about 10,000 troops/month, by reliable accounts. To take the territory they were certain was already ON their side. More each month than we lost in Iraq and A-stan combined, in 20 years of trying. Three times more men than we lost in all of Vietnam in a decade. And out of missiles, running out of artillery shells, and burning through hard military assets Vlad couldn't replace in another ten years of trying, with a Navy and Air Force largely MIA for weeks, in a land war against an opponent with pretty much neither one.
So in 12 more months, Russia will perhaps achieve a Pyrrhic (Mariupolic) "victory" over the whole of Ukraine, at a cost of nearly the entire initial invasion force, 150,000 men out of an initial estimate of 180,000, against an army it outnumbered on paper 10:1, but which it only attacked initially at 0.8:1, with a Russian Potemkin army composed of incompetent and unwilling conscripts led by drunken officers and fueled by gun-decked capability and maintenance reports, running now on mothballed tech left over from the 1960s, because it's all they have left to throw at the problem.
Yeah, that's going to do so much better against a Ukrainian ad hoc army that gets better equipment and more experience by the day, over the next 400 days, i'n'it?
Go, Vlad. Bleed yourself dry, only to achieve the capture of scorched earth, at a cost of a quarter of your entire national army, including probably 50-75% of all available actual combat forces, most of your war-making equipment, and beginning the next ten years of a partisan guerrilla insurgency in Ukraine that will make the last Russian foray to A-stan, or the British rule in Northen Ireland, seem like church picnics in comparison, while Russia is forced to genocide most of the surviving populace within Ukraine, and the 7M expats live on, with a seething hatred of Vlad and all things Russian that will outlive his own great-grandchildren.
While uniting NATO like it hasn't been in 50 years, increasing it in size and scope, and putting the entirety of it right back on Russia's borders from the Black Sea to the Arctic Ocean, exactly as Vlad didn't want.
Sanctions work both ways, but Russia spends the next century or two as the Iran of Europe. They couldn't feed themselves once from 1900-2022, but now that they're burning Ukraine to the ground, they're looking at not being able to feed themselves next year, or the five years after that, until the famines have done their job, and their entire population decreases appreciably. Along with that in the West, and the rest of the world. Famine hits the Turd World even harder, because when food gets scarce, the poorest are the ones who do without, not the well-off.
But watching millions starve and threatening global thermonuclear war is a small price to pay for being a worldwide pariah state, right?
Well-played, Vlad. Well-played indeed. Keep banging your head against that wall.
h/t Daily Timewaster
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| And I suppose they recruit pilots from the deserts of BFE who used to bullseye womp rats in their T-16s, right? |
CW posted this (he was kidding) as the "artists conception of the SR-81".
But srsly:
Look, we retired the SR-71s in 1999.
Some anonymous soopergenius opined that "satellites replaced the SR-71" and "high flyers aren't coming back".
Bitch, please.
Catch up on anything-but-current-events, from 30 years ago in fact:
(REALITY) The mysterious rumble and bounce has occurred five times since last June, always about 7 a.m. on Thursdays. These were no earthquakes, but a passing aircraft, Caltech seismologists say.
"All I can say is that it's something that's traveling through the atmosphere at several times the speed of sound in a generally northeasterly direction," said Jim Mori, a seismologist with the United States Geological Survey at Caltech.
Analysts from Jane's Defense Weekly, the widely respected London-based military periodical, say that the Thursday morning phenomenon could be a top secret new spy plane, dubbed the Aurora, that can fly up to six times the speed of sound, or about 4000 MPH.
The Air Force denies that any such plane exists.
Jim Mori, Ph.D., anything but dumb, is a SME on earthquakes and seismology. And California is paved with GPS-precise-to-millimeters seismographs wall-to-wall, which made collecting the data easy and meticulously precise. So when a string of "earthquakes" hit SoCal in 1991-1992, always before 7am, always on a Thursday, he plotted the rumbles on the SoCal seismograph network, and did some napkin math.
The minute-by-minute timelines formed an arrow-straight chevron moving at about 70 miles a minute south to north from the Pacific Ocean towards Area 51, and Tonopah AFB beyond that, and based on speed-over-ground, they were moving at 4000+ MPH. Mach 6.
Pre-7am, because this was a project in progress, and on Thursday, unlike Fridays, traffic was lighter, so less people up and about. Project engineers and such tend to be M-F guys. And earthquakes don't punch time clocks.
Ergo, something moving in the air, not in the ground, at Mach 6, and coming in for a landing at one of the two most secured and remote AFBs we have.
Since then, other evidence has piled up:
Black delta-wing unidentified aircraft, frequently seen in high-altitude formation with USAF birds like KC-17s and F-15s, etc., over the USA and Europe. Frequently with contrails suggestive of a pulse-jet, and making an unfamiliar and distinctive sound.
I remind all and sundry that it was years between the SR-71s first operational flights for recon after the U-2s vulnerability was exposed to the world in 1960, and the time the USAF actually admitted to owning and flying the -71.
To date, AFAIK, they've still never copped to the existence of the Aurora, let alone revealed nomenclature, official photos, performance specs, or anything like, in 30 years.
But you think they gave up a world-beating recon and intel asset like the SR-71 (it was still setting speed records the day they retired it), in exchange for nothing? Or satellites? Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight. Sure they did. NOT.
Now, see if you can figure out why China and Russia have spent the last 30 years busting their scientific asses to develop hypersonic missile tech, at a huge cost in effort and treasure.
Hint: It ain't to shoot down recon satellites, kids.
(Sidenote: If the Air Farce had someone really bright somewhere, their most top secret:codeword-level unit would be a couple of science fantasists, and a small crew of welders and carpenters, and their sole job 24/7/365 would be to create whimsical plywood and sheet metal fake aircraft, especially designs that failed spectacularly, and plant them at a few testing airbases, and leave them out for satellite recon and GoogleEarth to find. I'd also have them take a couple of cutting edge planes and paint false black silhouettes on the undersides, and change the shape using light blue over wingtips and such, maybe a couple of smoke generators on underwing mounts to fake additional engines, just to give amateur airplaneologists something misleading to photograph. For that matter, they'd create fake ICBM silos scattered on military bombing ranges, and leave a few SSBNs fake hulls moored at several Navy docksides too, with full guards and foot traffic. Just saying.)
On a tip from a reader - Morons will be morons: The Great Canadian Dronemaster Windbag gets it wrong again. Space starts at the Kármán Line, where the atmosphere ceases to exist, which is 100km (330,000') up, some 230,000' feet higher than reconnaissance aircraft reportedly fly, i.e. nearly 2½ times higher than anything with wings goes since the X-15 stopped going there. This boundary was established in the 1960s, and recon planes don't fly there, because by definition, no one flies where there's no atmosphere within which aircraft (which cleverly has "air" in the description) control surfaces would work. People who fly to space get astronaut wings. People who fly recon flights have ordinary pilots' wings. And they carry their balls in their helmet bags, because they need something that big to hold them. Stick with being massively ignorant about drones, Gasbag. Being ignorant about everything you touch only takes you from sad to utterly pathetic. But thanks for playing, and enjoy the extra looks.
And save one backward glance when you are leaving
For the places they can no longer go.
Be not ashamed to say you loved them,
Though you may, or may not have always.
Take what they have left, or what they have taught you
With their dying, and keep it as your own.
And in that time when men decide, or feel safe,
To call the war insane, take one moment
To embrace those gentle heroes you left behind.
- Maj. Michael Davis O'Donnell
KIA, Cambodia, March 1970
We'll remind those who need it that this day is not to wish any veteran a "thank you" for their service.
Unless you're doing it while laying a wreath at their gravesite.
But it's okay to enjoy a ball game, a picnic, a long holiday. They'd not begrudge you that. Just take a moment to recall that they bought it for you, and gave up all their tomorrows, to pay for your today.
And take a moment, if only in your heart, "to embrace those gentle heroes left behind".
Monster 1986 soundtrack hit (peaked at #2), back in play this weekend as the sequel soars to record opening numbers worldwide, even without Russia and China box office. And because there hasn't been a Navy pilot in 35 years who doesn't hear this in their head every time they do a carrier cat shot. You had to know this was coming today, right?
Given his unfortunate recent travails, Mike at Cold Fury kicks the hell out of some asses long overdue for it. RTWT.
The question of the day isn't whether we vote for full-bore communism, or the kinder, gentler, light beer slow-roll of the same thing, just with more subtlety.
The question is how long until you fire all the sons of bitches outright, and vote in a party that aligns with your values, and will actually DO something about supporting them, come Hell or high water?
If you can't figure out the answer to that, you're the walking definition of Insanity:
Doing the same thing over and over, and expecting different results.
If that's your cunning plan, TINVOWOOT.
And "doing something" isn't going to be a slightly more strident form of the republic.
It's going to mean trials and gibbets in job lots. Or far, far worse. Once you break the rice bowls and invalidate those EBT bribe cards, and start rounding up the Usual Suspects just for the crimes committed against the Republic in only this century, things will get sporty rather rapidly.
The Pipe-Hitting Years are approaching. And not the ones Hunter Biden means. Best get ready for that.
(No spoilers. Okay, almost.)
Most sequels suck. Even more so, sequels based on 36-year-old original material.
Hollywood usually - in fact reliably - screws the pooch on nearly all of them, because they can, and because most producers aren't even 36 years old. Now you know why they screw the pooch so often.
This is the exception that proves that rule. Cruise wouldn't let them screw this one up, not least because he was one of the producers (and let's face it, without him, as producer or not, there is no Top Gun sequel.)
This was in the can 2½ years ago, but COVID kept getting in the way of its release, and it was pushed from a year ago to last Thanksgiving to, finally, this Memorial Day weekend. It was worth the wait.
If you didn't like the original, don't bother. If you really liked the original, and saw it in the theaters, get yourself back to one now, and see this film. Ideally, in an IMAX theater. This movie is was what IMAX was made for, and this movie was shot for IMAX. You've never seen flying sequences like this, and as Jerry Bruckheimer said in lead-in interviews, you probably never will again either.
It tells a new story, but wraps itself in enough of the original to be satisfying. They couldn't get Meg Ryan, Tim Robbins, Clarence Gilyard, or Rick Rossovich back for this one, let alone older-than-dirt dinosaurs like James Tolkan (90), Tom Skerrit (88), or Michael Ironside (72) but the use of Val Kilmer was priceless.
And if Jennifer Connelly had been cast as the original Penny Benjamin and seen in the original film, we'd get why Maverick broke rules for her, but she'd have been jailbait at the tender age of 16 when the original premiered (she did Labyrinth that year). And we've been in hardcore lust with her since at least 1991, when she did both Career Opportunities and The Rocketeer (both of which you should catch some time, even if just for her). It also helps that at 51 now, and 48 when this was filmed, time has been far kinder to her than it has to currently best-left-in-your-80s-memories Kelly McGillis, now 64, and looking like somebody's cat-lady box wine granny. >shivers<. (Don't look. You were warned.)
You want to know spoilers, beyond the eleventeen trailers released over the last two years? Okay: you haven't seen your last Tomcat dogfight. Want more? Go. See. The. Movie.
You won't be disappointed.
Our Rating: Fleet Admiral - 5 stars.
The first two Godfather movies should be required viewing for Political Science 101. It's Plato, Machiavelli, von Clauswitz, and Sun Tzu, in Technicolor.
Bonasera comes to America and finds freedom, peace, law and order, circa 1990.
Then young punks (Putin) rape his daughter, twice, once by taking Crimea back, and again by putting paratroops in street clothes into Donetsk and Luhansk, and claiming they wanted "independence".
Finlly, Putin comes back to rape and pillage a third time, and Bonasera goes to the Godfather (the West) for justice.
The Godfather sends a couple of Clemenza's people, Javelin, NLAW, etc., over to break the punks' legs, and now Bonasera finds himself forever indebted to the Godfather.
QED
Putin hasn't been able to take Ukraine in three months and tens of thousands of casualties of trying, and he's bleeding himself white for the effort. And the Godfather is upset with him for disrespecting his protection.
All Putin can do is scorch the earth, endlessly, and win a mouthful of ashes. He's a proud fool, and a slow learner. When broken knees don't get the point across, the arms will be next.
But the West could snuff out Ukraine's candle with the snap of a finger, merely by withdrawing any further aid.
That's power.
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| The chickensh*t douchebadges in Uvalde who stood around "just following orders" deserve so many white feathers over this, they could make a whole chicken. What a waste of skin and oxygen that Fate lets them live who stood by as little kids were slaughtered. |
Color Me Shocked:
The. SPECIAL. Hell.
Because if spectating while children are being gunned down, just to save your pension, isn't child molestation, strike the phrase from the lexicons. Uvalde badged chickenshits, consider yourselves served with the Official White Feather of Cowardice. Please, we besech you, do the right thing: go home and eat your guns, if you have a shred of dignity left.
Those gutless m*****f*****s, from chief to lowest beat cop, should be fired for cause, and en masse, and all policing duties turned over to the county sheriff and Texas Rangers, until they can find some non-chickenshits and train them to do the job correctly, from scratch.
All their names and likenesses should be memorialized on a plaque in perpetutity at Cowards' Park, erected on the school front lawn, publicly identifying every single one of them as the cowards they are, for all time, with a giant white chicken atop the marble marker.
They were more afraid of a tranny shooter than they were the endless lifetime of shame of being cowards when it mattered.
And they should be rewarded by the city and its citizens for that behavior for all time.
Teaching that lesson to generations of school kids would be worth gold.
Angus has undertaken to give historical background to the Ukrainian artillery tactics we described last week.
I am sure his artillery history per se is excruciatingly correct, and beyond dispute, and you are unhesitatingly recommended to read the exposition given.
The problem, however, is that his explanation of how this current thing is not new, basically did a face plant.
Firstly, what he describes, a Time On Target (TOT):
Multiple guns in multiple batteries fire all their tubes at different times (based on flight time) such that all the rounds land on that single target nearly simultaneously, or at least, close enough as makes no difference. Infantry mortars and even air-to-ground munitions can be added, just for grins. Any way you do it, at any size, it's Hell, in a very small space.
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| TIME ON TARGET: Each battery of 6-8 guns fires their rounds the indicated number of seconds prior to the planned TOT. Think "Whump...Whump......Whump.....Whump...Whump....." Then all 30-40 of those shells impact within 1-2 seconds. "FOOM!FOOM!FOOM!FOOM!FOOMFOOMFOOM!!!" The only thing more awe-inspiring would be God's own thunder from a lightning strike (or 40 of them in a second or two, at one spot), but the devastation is near identical for anything at that address. |
Having participated in everything up to a regimental TOT, where every tube in the 10th or 11th Marines (90+ tubes, from 16 batteries with 6-8 towed and SP pieces each, at the time) dropped their shells from 105s, 155s, and 203s all on one specific given point within 1-2 seconds of each other, I will allow that they are properly glorious for everyone involved, other than anyone inhabiting said target. Which is rather the point.
They do that because artillery per each is inherently inaccurate, and thus an area weapon, fired like a shotgun. A TOT is like firing all the rounds in a single shotgun at once, at whatever poor SOBs are in that impact area.
That is NOT what Herr Oberst Reisner was describing in the linked video.
The Ukrainians spread those 6-8 gun batteries down to 1 or 2 tube sub-units, all linked on StarLink, and all using the GIS ARTA targeting program, (neither of which anyone had before) and each one picks an identified target, and shoots at it as soon as they're ready. Then they look at the update, and see what hasn't been waxed, and shoot at that, until there's nothing left to shoot at. Each sub-unit shoots when it wants, and then the guys (as we covered in an earlier ITC video) scamper in the rare case of counter-battery return fire, while other sub-units pick up the fight from a different position until there are no more Russians to shoot up, either from their destruction in smoking heaps, or their hasty retreat. Usually a couple of minutes either way.
Counter-battery fire is somewhere between pointless to impossible, both because Vlad's artillery counter-battery assets work as well as the rest of his Potemkin military to date, and because hitting 10, 20, 50 or more different single-tube targets would take hours, and require more artillery than there is in the entire Russian Army, and metric fucktons of ammo to splatter-fire an entire grid square just to take out one single tube, and 3-6 guys, plus a couple of dozen unfired rounds. If Vlad wants to try and use 500 rounds to kill one gun, even the Ukes (hell, even Ewok log and rock catapults) can play that game all week long, and twice on Sundays, from here to the next millenium, and come out ahead.
That looks like this:
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| Ukrainian artillery bushwhack ca. 2022 AKA: How To Erase An Enemy Regimental Task Force, In 5 Minutes Or Less |
The Ukes DGAF when rounds land on the multiple targets, nor are they synchronizing any attacks (which is the entire point of doing a TOT), nor are they having all tubes/weapons impact the same rough patch of real estate. Their only concern is that all visible targets get serviced as rapidly as possible. The whole point is to get first- or second-round direct hits.(Word To Your Mother: Until very recently, artillery doesn't GET first-round direct hits. Period.) They're inviting, via that GIS ARTA app, every single weapon system that can be brought to bear to hit anything and everything within their own range fan, which targets are also dispersed, and which is something nobody did with arty before now, including us, because now arty can drop a shell with accuracy rivalling that of tank cannon in direct fire, so that instead of shooting up a vehicle from a couple thousand yards, they're dropping heavy arty on a target from a dozen or more grid squares away. (Our preference to date is to do that with LGBs from aircraft.)
It is exactly the company of long range snipers I described in the OP, rather than the historical artillery idea of a mob of musketeers doing a group mugging, which ain't nobody been able to do before now, and you can't "invent" that if you can't do it. This is why Edison gets credit for inventing the light bulb, and the Wright Brothers with inventing the airplane, because their versions worked, and which is why we don't give the credit to some nameless fantasizers who thought "Wouldn't it be great to light the room with electricity instead of fire?" or "Wouldn't it be cool to fly a heavier-than-air craft wherever you wanted?"
The Ukes are thus not doing anything like a TOT. So thanks for playing, but we know whereof we speak, from firsthand experience, and we know the difference between this, and a TOT. The two are worlds apart.
They didn't invent all the components, but they synthesized those other things together into a coherent whole like no one has ever done with artillery, and when they do it well, they're erasing Russian units up to regimental level (1000-2000 guys, and all their equipment larger than a Toyota) in a few minutes.
We don't even do this now. (Nor, AFAIK, does anyone else. YET.) We drop a round, adjust, drop another round, adjust, and so on, and then fire for effect (i.e. drop a shit-ton of rounds on the last spot) once we're on the bullseye. If we had this level of artillery accuracy (which two words, to this point in history, were generally understood to be an oxymoron on the level of jumbo shrimp, government help, or military intelligence) in Iraq/A-stan, we would have deployed all our available arty assets in firebases, along with Predator drones to spot, and simply erased the Taliban and Iraqi insurgencies one shell at a time, with virtually zero risk, unless they tried to mob attack a FSB, and walked into interlocking fields of fire from miniguns.
Traditionally, artillery is a shotgun, fired by a blind man, and coached by someone nearby; the Uke concept of operation is using it as a sniper rifle, and it's kicking the shit out of Vlad's minions, over and over again. The observable secondary explosions after arty impacts on video after video are the proof of the pudding. Welcome to the Big League, rookies.
Anybody who still thinks this current employment is a TOT, or has been done before as-is, is free to specify who made it work like this, and explain why it isn't therefore the universal artillery tactical rule, instead of the exception, being some mythical number of decades old, for all artillery since whatever mythical invention date so specified, and how come it's become so devastating to the Russians, who should have known better, being formerly thought of as the world Subject Matter Experts on artillery usage in combat up until 1945, or even 1985.This is like explaining that Moses and the Israelites really only escaped through a marsh a few inches deep, and then having to explain how that water level drowned all of Pharoah's pursuing army and charioteers.
Sorry, but that's how it works. It's theoretically possible that I got it all wrong, along with the Austrian Army's head of R and D, and that despite his PhD, and everything he used to illustrate the point, he's historically ignorant about his entire profession.
But that's not where I'd put my chips if the wheel was spinning.
UPDATE:
Something else Angus gets right is this news:
1) The Russians aren't "winning" for any value of that word other than either "Pyrhhic" or "Mariupolic", and
2) They're now being forced to rely on vehicles that the Israelis were bitch-slapping around the Middle East 50 years ago, because modern AT missiles ate their lunch. Which things were what made those T-62s obsolete in the first place.
They're more advanced than lawn tractors, but if you couldn't win with top-tier gear, you aren't going to get it done against the same Javelins and NLAWS that kicked your ass earlier by using machinery that was obsolete almost before Vlad was born.
This is annoying for the Ukrainian forces, but mainly only if they run out of Western-supplied AT missiles before Russia runs out of mothballed crap from the 1970s to throw at them.
If Russia gets down to pulling T-34s from WWII out of museum displays, dollars to donuts they'll be using them for advancing on the Kremlin, not the Donbas.
But if Russian troops keep attacking, and can sop up enough AT missiles faster than they can be replaced, they might start to outlast the Uke resistance, and start to get some traction. It's unlikely given their past performance, but the law of averages says they can't stay incompetent forever.
Their attack is going to become a scorched-earth offense, which is going to tear the hell out of all the formerly Russia-friendly areas they hold now, which is where the war is being fought to a slogging standstill.
h/t Miguel
h/t Wilder
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| Also razors, soap, deodorant, and the Lever. Including the one on a toilet tank. |
A picture may sometimes be worth a thousand words, but a bad one is never worth 1000 IQ points.
So if you're going to tell a story in pictures, select them carefully. And beware of memes you didn't make yourself.
And never ask rhetorical questions you haven't thought about, or to which you do not know the answer(s).
John knows better, but the genius who came up with the original meme clearly never took a chance on the second grade.
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| Not so funny when you turn up the brightness. |
Making a meme, like everything else, is harder than it looks to the Dunning-Kruger crowd.
The essence of comedy is Truth. Stupidity is just farce, where you're the punchline.
Always, always: Make Good Choices.
America's fourth Top Ten hit, from November of '74, when fittingly, it made it to #4.
Assuming there are folks out there still interested in information, rather than posturing, empty gainsaying, and reflexively giving Putin his daily tongue-bath:
Why Vlad Is getting his Ass Kicked, Day 82
Oberst (Col.) Reisner of the Austrian Army giving a thoroughly professional and easily understandable briefing on why Ukraine keeps kicking the shit out of inferior Russian forces with artillery tactics hitherto largely unknown, and capabilities that are even better than us at our best to date, especially so for a fourth-rate military cobbled together under constant attack and three months of invasion by a nominally far stronger power.
(Click on YouTube to turn on CC, then go to settings, and select English captions, and Bob's your uncle, you've got the briefing in real time. You can even turn off the sound.)
In short:
1. Ukraine developed a simple program (GIS ARTA) which anyone, even people who are essentially untrained national guardsmen conscripts, can use to upload target info to the network in seconds, to within a couple of meters of accuracy. This wiped out any requirement for highly trained FOs, and shortened required competency at that task from months to minutes. That's world-beating.
2. Elon Musk's 1760-satellite multi-redundant and unjammable Starlink system communicates that data to every weapon system user on the network, in real time.
3. Ukraine deploys its artillery, not in traditional "Come counter-battery the shit out of me" compact battery formations, but rather in highly dispersed packets over wide areas, making counter-battery massing of fires immensely more difficult. Used to be, an artillery gun or rocket battery fit inside an acre or two, and Ivan's counter-battery would wipe out that whole grid square within 3 minutes. Now, the Ukes have dispersed their weapons over entire square miles and miles, and anything over everywhere can get the target, and open fire, and the fires are massed on the impact area, without the tubes or systems being massed from the launch point. This isn't evolutionary, it's revolutionary. It's the difference between taking a Napoleonic company of riflemen blasting away with smoothbore muskets, and transitioning your force to 200 guys with Barrett .50BMG sniper weapons, and scattering them from hell to breakfast, and having them pick off people from a mile away. Good luck returning that kind of incoming fire. (It was last tried by the US 7th Cavalry at the Little Bighorn. Spoiler Alert: This did not go well for them.)
(UPDATE: Sorry, Angus, but natzsofast: this is not a Time-On-Target (TOT), which item is pretty glorious, and in which we participated multiple times; that is a wholly different thing from what is being discussed here by Herr Oberst. See follow-on post.)
4. The Ukrainians are using laser-targeted and GPS guided projectiles, and getting first-round hits with artillery. Russia is getting, in their laps, what happened to Saddam's army for the first time in 1990, where you had LGBs going into truck windows, and through ventilation shafts at HQ, and precisely targeting anything you can see. And Ukrainian drones are seeing everything.
5. Turning this level of targeting on Russian HQ, and any massed forces. In the video, Col. Reisner notes 13 Soviet generals, and 30 colonels are now good Russians, courtesy of the Ukrainians shellacking the hell out of any Russian HQ they find. (FTR, IIRC, the US hasn't lost 13 generals in battle in the last century.)
The Ukrainians also wiped out the best part of two entire Russian assault battalions in that famous disaster of a bridging operation in Donetsk. When your forces are knocking the enemy's attacks out in job lots of 1000 men at a time, it's become less a battle, and more a harvest of baby Harp seals.
Ukraine is now visiting on Russian troops the sort of artillery bitch-slapping smackdown Russia was formerly famous for, only by using targeted sledgehammer blows, instead of dropping a bus on the target. And it's kicking Ivan's ass all the way back to the Russian border, chewing up the best he's got, and spitting out nothing but scrap metal and bloody bits of corpses. No wonder the Russian troops don't want to play any more. This is like playing Army, and you draw Iraqi Republican Guards, against the other guy's choice of US 1st Armored Division. The Washington Generals have a better chance against the Harlem Globetrotters.
But hey, why worry? This isn't really the Austrian military college's analysis, this is all "Globohomo propaganda", those 13 dead Russian generals and 30 colonels are all secretly massing for the Big Russian Counterattack, any day now, and everything is going according to Vlad's brilliant 97-dimensional master plan. (That's what you get when you listen to people who put the "anal" in "analysis", because that's where their heads are.)
For those of you still believing your lying eyes, instead of the World's Foremost Internet Experts, this is why the number of people still talking about Pee Wee Putin's Big Adventure are getting quieter and quieter, and turning into the Chicago Cubs Fans of Russian Cheerleading and Current Affairs.
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| From Lenin to Putin, when your head guy is named Vladimir, it's not going to go well. |
And FWIW, mad props to the Austrian Army, which is putting out weekly Master's level commanding general briefings for free, on the internet, just because they can. And I don't know how large or ferocious the Austrian Army is, but if this guy is representative of their competence level, you do not want to f**k with them.
