Drunk on Story

Posted on by accordingtohoyt

So, with the Junta in power acting like freaking lunatics and trying to bring on WWIII, my friends keep asking “Why are we antoganizing a nuclear-armed* power?” and “Why do both sides of the spectrum seem to be pushing us towards WWIII?”

And there’s only one answer: drinking their own ink. Both sides are drinking their own ink.

I’ll dispose of the right first: the “right” which in this case is mostly the military-industrial complex, the real one, the one that is composed of swamp creatures in our secret services**, in the military, and in the fossilized GOPe, the remnants of what used to be called “right wing progressives” in the beginning of the 20th century when “progressive” spanned both parties. It’s all about, gah, what in Rome amounted to old men talking about their upright ancestors, who ate acorns and lived in caves and were real men. (There are still Portuguese men talking about this, I swear.)
It’s all about this thing that since WWII defines strong American manhood as having fought in a war and proved themselves. And this will somehow make the country more conservative, if you understand “FDR” or at least Eisenhower as conservative (which he was, just not AMERICAN conservative.

Also, the right, in a more benign view of this whole insanity, at least those like me who grew up in the cold war “waiting for the hammer to fall” is weary of letting another country, much less Russia (which WILL swallow every country nearby one by one because Russian paranoia, and also because their economics are still highly flawed and can’t survive without parasitizing other countries. And once the swallow a tier, another tier is now near them, and them…. there’s no limit to this) have the upper hand over the US.

The answer to that is: Do you guys trust this lot to run a war? Do you trust their motives? Do you really want to give more power to the government? Do you think you’ll be in power forever?

Then there is the left side. And what you have to understand is that if the right side is drunk on story, the left side is drunk on story on steroids. They’ve been butt-chugging it, as well as drinking it.

Worse, they’re drunk on several, mutually contradictory stories at once.

Part of their motivation was a form of “thinking” the left indulges in which consists of “let’s do this because it worked in the past.” (To be fair the right tends to believe the left’s plans will work as they did in the past, so everyone is crazy.) Which is true, except what they know of the past omits how things have changed. And boy, have they changed.

So, you know, they often try to run the “rise of the USSR” scenario without realizing it does not/can not work with an armed populace. Then they realize it, try to confiscate/outlaw guns, fail, run in circles, try again.

In the same way, they’re trying to run the WWII module, (or WWI, for that matter) because it led to massive growth in government power, a compliant population and got them out of a depression before, right?????

Except none of that works that way. It’s so wrong it’s like an alien language.

The only reason Wilson or FDR got the powers they did and could run around like the whole beast and the triple six besides, trampling everything in their path was that they had FULL CONTROL of mass media and public opinion.

They don’t have that now. They already don’t have that. And they ain’t getting it back. They keep forgetting that they poured it on full force under Obama, and what they got was…. Trump. And then they did everything — everything, including the “pandemic” script and locking the population down…. and they still had to fraud at the last minute, in front of G-d and everyone, because people aren’t BUYING it.

Wishing this away is like wishing away guns.

Yes, they’re trying. That’s what mintrue is all about. But the woman is so stupid (Seriously, she’s friends with the dumber of our older adversaries in SF/F) that she’s become an instant joke. Also what she’s screaming “Saying Commie Lawhorish slept her way to the top is disinformation” is what the left has been screaming at us for YEARS. And it doesn’t work. In fact, I predict in a couple of months, we’ll know what’s true by what this chick denies.

The other way they drink their own ink is hilarious. They continuously do this thing where they make up something stupid and then BELIEVE IT THEMSELVES. No, seriously, this is a pattern of every socialist/communist going back to yep the USSR.

It would be like if I wrote something about the moon being made of cheese and then tried to start an expedition to harvest it.

They made up the story about Russia putting Trump in power, partly because they thought the RIGHT would fall for it. (“Because they’re so stupid, they hate Russians, ur ur”) …. and then they FORGOT they made it up and fell for it. So, they have a big mad on at Russians and want to beat them.

BUT they also still think the right (ur ur) being “stupid” fell for the story themselves, so it means we must love Russia, right? (No, just go with it. I know your brain just twisted. What can I say. Commies.)

So they fully expected us, the minute Ukraine was invaded to come out in full vocal support of Russia. (No. I know there’s half a dozen of you. Stop it. Just stop it. KGB trained dictator is not defender of anything, except himself.) And then they COULD STOMP US. Because war act, repress bad speech.

Only we didn’t act as they expected. As with guns, they don’t know what to do when people don’t follow their script. It always works in stories. (Mostly because the stories they write are predictable and stupid, and have no real humans.)

So now they’re trying to stampede us into war, because THEN IT MUST WORK. Somehow, Automagically. If they keep digging the shit, there will be a pony at the end.

What they’re actually doing is pissing off most of the country. I’ve never seen people so upset as at sending massive money to Ukraine while our border is essentially undefended. People wish Ukraine the best. And I understand how important this fight is to Europe. But we have our own sh*t to deal with.***

In the population at large, there seems to be almost no support for war against Russia. Which is good. Because we’re not in a state to fight this war, let alone win it. The only thing that can be said about us is that our potential enemies are worse off. And that’s not saying much.

My guess is the stampeding fails.

Now will the left still steal the election? Probably, but it will be REALLY obvious.

Will there be a violent uprising? I doubt it. Oh, some places, maybe. But the left would need to really eff it up to get a VIOLENT uprising.****

What we’ll have is what already dissolved the covidiocy bullsh*t in most of the country. Where I live now, I don’t even know if the signs are still up. I know for months we were walking past signs saying “Masks strictly required” and “Six foot distancing” into stores where everyone except a few mentally slow Karens (glaring at everyone) were ignoring the signs.

It is important not to attribute magical powers to the enemy. Their plans ALWAYS fall apart. As I tell people, if the USSR plan to take over the US worked, it would be the first of their plans to do so.

And their plans for us are already disintegrating. Remember the “new normal” and the “this is how life will be now?” No. Just no.

And if they steal the election again, this will just go into turbo mode, with bells on, until everyone is laughing in their faces.

I don’t mean to say it won’t be bad, or that Team Heads on Pikes Highway Beautification Program won’t happen, but that’s not what I see happening.

What I see happening is far more devastating to the left. We will not drink their ink. We will not buy their story.

The future is a human laughing in the collectivists’ faces.

Forever.

*Ah, but are they, in any significant sense? For that matter, are you sure we are?
Look, yeah, the Russians “got the bomb”. Theoretically. Almost for sure. but we know at the height of the standoff, Krushev basically had “nothing” and was trying to hide it. They were driving long tubes around in trucks, so we thought they had more missiles than they did, and of course our secret services bought it, because they’re made of utter stupid.
Frankly, when May 9 passed with nary a mushroom cloud…. well, are they? Does any of their arsenal actually work? The things take more work and investment than I’d guess they’ve given it, ever, but particularly the last few decades. And for that matter, what’s the state of ours? Do you trust it? I mean, since we’re talking of swallowing narratives, it behooves us to at least quirk an eyebrow, okay?

**The ineffective if not treasonous bunch of them.

***Most of it in DC

****Not fully putting it past these geniuses, but keep in mind it’s demographics. We simply don’t have ENOUGH young males, proportionately to have an uprising.

477 thoughts on “Drunk on Story”

  1. And for that matter, what’s the state of ours? Do you trust it? I mean, since we’re talking of swallowing narratives, it behooves us to at least quirk an eyebrow, okay?

    The screaming that resulted when the Great Orange One suggested they demonstrate they could still let the sunshine out of the can certainly doesn’t fill one with confidence.

    1. I certainly agree that is a big question for us and doubly so for the Russians. Weapons in silos for more than 50 years. Why would we trust them to work?

      1. 50 years is the wrong timeframe. The modernization project that negated the need for Minuteman-X was far more recent than that.

        The big problem is the warheads. You can design computers, launchers, missiles, etc to sit for decades without maintenance and still be ready to go at the end. You can’t do that with the warhead: you have to take it out and completely rebuild it about once a decade.

        Now I’m reasonably confident that that actually happened with US warheads. Not so much Russian ones.

        1. I suspect a carp-ton of the Ruskie missiles would not go pop correctly, but they’d still make a helleva mess somewhere. Their wing delivered version even more likely to not go boomba the right way, but the delivery device is one of the loudest and least stealthy planes in use. That said, I don’t want a dud spreading radioactives around any more than I want a well functioning fusion bomb to go pop, so please, let us not test the things.

          1. And folks don’t realize that a nuclear FIZZLE (not the same as a dud) is still ~50 Tons of boom. Not as bad as a full-on true initiation, but nobody’s idea of a Good Day, either.

              1. That’s assuming the Pu implosion trigger goes off correctly. If one connector is corroded beyond spec or one detonator is a squib you don’t get a kT boom, you a few tons of boom and a bunch on angry Geiger counters.

              2. Yep, and you don’t even need that much. That’s why some people argued the supposed fizzle in North Korea on their first test wasn’t a fizzle, but just a test of bare primary. After all, at this point, why bother with fission bombs now that the solution to fusion is well known enough designing one for your physics thesis is passe.

              3. “The Los Alamos Primer” (“Everything We Knew About Building Atom Bombs in 1943”) has that as the ‘fizzle’ yield for a not-quite-a-dud fission bomb. That’s why the container contracted (and sold at $1 as the maker wanted to avoid accusation of War Profiteering they endured in WWI…) was never actually used – A true dud wouldn’t need it, and even a fizzle would utterly destroy it.

          2. The other thing is that even if, say, only one in five Russian nukes worked as expected, that’s still a whole lot of dead people. Hugely embarrassing for the Russians, but still catastrophic results.

            2. Thing is, reliability of complex systems.

              Warheads are one element, delivery vehicles are another, and the navigation system as a third, depending on how you divide up your classification of the systems.

              My basic and fundamental concern is Biden. I think he would order the missile defense to stand down. I think he would order our offensive forces not to act. I think the senior officers might go along with this.

              I think that even at an expected rate of Russian launch failures, Biden would sit and do nothing, while the Russians spend weeks refurbishing failed birds, in service of getting maybe twenty hits on cities.

              If we are at war with Russia, our first step is getting Democrats out of power, and other house cleaning, because Afghanistan withdrawal clearly demonstrated that Democrat command authority can not be trusted in any conflict.

              That hurts, because this would otherwise be a great opportunity to kick the Russians’ teeth in. But, their path to a reliable deterrent is a long and difficult one, so we will have more opportunity later.

              1. Which is why the feisty ones wait until the beginning of a Democrat’s term of office to act up. This is easily provable by even a cursory look at the last forty or so years of history. They can get away with a lot more stuff on Democrat watch than when the R’s come back in.

                Two years, until the Congress changes out on the short side. They have around two years to do the deeds. Then, they have to play nice again. Assuming the R that gets in is in any way not an Establishment clone, of course.

              2. “My basic and fundamental concern is Biden. I think he would order the missile defense to stand down. I think he would order our offensive forces not to act.”

                Maybe, but…

                One of the ideas that Biden pushed when he was running for office was that he was the tough guy. Confronting Cornpop. Challenging someone to a push-up contest. The video where he talks about basically forcing Ukraine to fire its own prosecutor. Biden’s the tough guy! Further, there’s been a lot of (overly) tough talk from politicians on both sides of the aisle regarding what to do about Russia – particularly Putin. Biden’s been making some of those comments. What you’re suggesting is that the moment Putin actually provided a bona fide casus belli, the administration’s going to sit back and not respond.

                I just don’t see it.

                The administration must push the idea that Biden is tough. They must push the idea that Biden is in charge (even more so since he’s quite clearly not). They won’t be able to afford to play meekly.

                1. These people are too crazy for rational prediction, except for the fact that they are scorpions.

                  The precise way that they will sting is unclear, but they will sting.

                  Trying to reason out their decision process, and to manage the risk of being stung that way, is a losing game. They have no idea what their decision process will be, and some of them live for hurting humans.

                  It may be safe to reason out the physical limits of their ability to sting, and use that to plan around.

                  Lloyd Austin, clearly thinks that he can profit in the future by sucking up to defense contractors. Lloyd Austin fails to realize that he fundamentally screwed over the whole industry with that Afghanistan move.

                  1. If Russia were to use.one or more nukes, would that be when the anti-war, anti-nuke protesters come out of the woodwork? “See, nukes are horrible, we MUST NOT RETALIATE, so we are not complicit in destroying the planet!”

                2. I have begun to wonder if Cornpop was the good guy, angry about the rich perv sniffing at the local kids and asking them to stroke his leg hair…

        2. I’m suddenly reminded of the scene from the Simpsons when Showman Bob decided to nuke Springfield, but it fizzled out, because he decided to go for “old 1950s charm” instead of something more recent.

          1. Labeled, IIRC, “Best If Used Before 1955”. One of the very few episodes I saw, and only because recommended by another with as weird a sense of humor as mine. 🙂

        3. Tom Clancy (The Sum of all Fears) had a nuke in the novel that turned into a fizzle because the tritium hadn’t been replaced (half life of 12 years), though there’s other ways to get a bigger bang out of a fission bomb.

          One wonders just how much care and feeding is required to get the high explosive pieces to work over time

          1. I’d suspect the problem with conventional HE is long-term stability. And I rather suspect that has been long solved as things are apt to use TNT or something close – rather than, say, picric acid, or something Shiny And New (boring and reliable is GOOD).

            1. Still and all, the phrase “stable chemical explosive” is pretty much and oxymoron.

              1. Not really, unless “stable” implies time in the millennia range. Even black powder in 45-70 cartridges 130+ years old seem to work just fine, and Unique powder from the first batch produced in the early 1900s (stored on a windowsill in the plant) still meets the specs. And ordnance (UXBs) from the Battle of London, still explode when “tickled”.

              2. Several decades ago, when my dad ran a salvage warehouse for the railroad, he discovered he had a large box with multiple trays of vials….he promptly called in the bomb squad, who informed him he had enough nitroglycerin in there to blow up the whole block.
                The warehouse was not air-conditioned. Large sigh of relief by all when the bomb squad got it out of there. Very carefully.

                1. He should have immediately bought a lottery ticket; his luck was running really high. 😉

                  That said, IIRC nitro at normal temperature isn’t likely to go off by itself. Again IIRC, it does become more sensitive to shock with age, or maybe that’s just old dynamite that’s not been properly rotated and has “sweated” nitro. Either way, I wouldn’t have wanted to try to move it; like sleeping dragons, nitro is best left undisturbed…

            2. Knowing NOTHING! (Really, glowies) about nuclear weaponry beyond the Richard Rhodes books, I do recall that Fat Man used explosive lensing, so you’d need two explosives that had to keep the same relative kaboom characteristics. As Uncle Lar implies, they might possibly need some test and/or replacement after a while.

              1. bah. I guess all your nuclear missiles were lost in a tragic canoe accident.
                HOWEVER that lake developed a reputation for very large fish with many eyes…. 😉

                1. I learned a rather interesting factoid today. It may or may not be true, but it is possible that there exists in the bowels of some governmental office or other, a form for the private ownership of a nookleear device.

                  This was part of a discussion on the Second Amendment, and the limits thereof, Constitutionally speaking.

                  And, being a guy that occasionally scribbles down a post apocalyptic zombie story, it got me thinking… How to use that in a futuristic, zombie apocalypse incoming kind of scenario, if such a thing occurred. I mean, there are tanks in private hands these days. Legally. You just need the proper permits and suchlike.

                  Imagine a couple centuries in the future, what happens when private individuals have the equivalent of MBTs and private warships when the zombie apocalypse happens…

                  1. When I become dictator of the world, there will be nooks in vending machines.
                    Leetle nooks. (Otherwise they won’t fit vending machines.)
                    WHY ARE YOU STARING AT ME THAT WAY?

                    2. As I’ve seen a few places, “Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be a convenience store, not a government bureau”.

                    3. @Dan Lane:
                      Yep. Though Super Mutant Suiciders can be annoying. It’s why Piper can’t write anything nice.

                  2. Many years ago Analog published an article on building a DIY nuke, using a multi-story house as a frame. The biggest sticking point, as I recall, was needing some expendable minions to machine the U235.

                    1. Astounding published a story about building a nuke during WWII. Got a visit from some very humorless government types. You see as far as the Manhattan District could tell it would have worked. Feynman had to go out and buy that issue because the site library would not let him check it out. It was classified Top Secret you see.

                    2. I suspect you are talking about ‘Solution Unsatisfactory’ by Robert A. Heinlein. His story was not about atomic bombs, but radiological contamination weapons — radioactive dust spread by aircraft. I did hear that The Authorities had a few words with him about it.

                    3. Illustrative of why, as authors (and people in general on the interwebz) we should censor OURSELVES. There are things that need to be not said in public places. And anything on the interwebz in public.

                      My fiction is supposed to be unbelievable, but entertaining. Not explosive! Or irradiating! Zombies, nanites, Zero point energy, entangled particle FTL communications, and deliberately unexplained power and power storage and ship-pushing engines are what I deal in. There are better writers and better educated folks that write. That know stuff that is meant to remain private, or have ideas.

                      John Ringo, in the Black Tide Rising books, was asked to… adjust his zombie virus, I believe I heard. I stole a few ideas from those books, filed the serial numbers off, and made something kinda, sorta similar.

                      There’s reasons I get a bit annoyed sometimes when folks start theorycrafting on, say, how to cripple a city or something. Knowing the how is one thing. Saying it, entirely something else.

                    4. Actually John W. Campbell, editor of Astounding (later renamed to Analog) had a habit of planting story ideas in the heads of his regular short story authors. Often during editor funded meals, so usually well attended. Several took whatever seed Campbell planted and came up with stories that made the folks responsible for the Manhattan Project security extremely nervous.

                    5. To Dan, Frank Herbert said in the introduction to, “The White Plague,” he deliberately put in some inaccuracies so someone couldn’t get practical advice from his mad scientist.

                    6. I recall an article that even explained that if it was setup that could use a gun-type system rather than requiring implosion, you only needed [DISTURBINGLY SMALL NUMBER] of stories to drop Subcritical A onto Subcritical B to get a Very Big Boom Indeed and could dispense with the gun thing, if you didn’t mind a building in the way right off… There would alignment issues, of course. And the matter of how the drop happened. DIY is apt to lack appeal in most cases.

                    7. In Clancy’s book, he said he also fudged part of the nuke to make it a not-a-blueprint for the real thing.

                      The DIY U-235 device sounds interesting, though I’m rather glad that it’s a challenge to get enough of the right isotope.Hard/expensive enough so that I don’t believe they did enough U-235 to do a duplicate of Little Boy. As a weapon, LB was fairly simple. Take a howitzer (105mm, I think), add a subcritical ring of U-235 at the muzzle, and use another piece as the projectile. Pull the lanyard and you have (briefly) a supercritical mass.

                2. The official meme says that Jeff has fewer than ten nuclear weapons and we can neither confirm nor deny the accuracy of that meme.

              2. There used to bea nuke refurbishment Depot near here. They had a blast pit marked on the aviation sectional maps as a don’t fly over zone. It was said that part of the process was taking out the old explosives and detonating them in the pit and replacing them.

                1. That would make sense. Unlike the UXBs mentioned earlier, it matters a lot as to how the explosives go off, and in a case like Fat Man, if one section degraded more than another, you might just end up with a dirty bomb and plutonium fragments all over the place. Can’t imagine they’d stay stable enough to ignore testing and replacement.

        4. At least the missiles they test Minuteman III from time to time (warhead free) shooting them down range at the Rongelap/Kwajalein target range, Not sure if they do similar with the Trident D5’s. The warheads are more of an issue. Most of the ones on the Minuteman III are actually from the MX that were retired and so are mid to late 80’s vintage, The ones for the Tridents D5 are of similar vintage. The Primaries/Pits are likely plutonium implosion devices don’t know if they’re boosted, and use very stable high explosives for the implosion. If they’re boosted with Tritium that has a shortish (6 years?) half life and would need to be kept up to date. Secondary is likely lithium 6 based so very long lived. Maybe the initiators (the thing that provides the kick start of neutrons) or the electronics for the timing might go bad ( there was an issue of tin whiskers from traditional lead/tin/silver solder shorting things out in military electronics). More likely to have mechanical failures with ejectors and similar at the start of launch though testing ought to have kept an eye on that. I’d say a yield of at least 75% successful and maybe as high as 98% +. My concern with the Russian stuff isn’t the warhead, that part is probably very similar to ours. But maintenance on the ejectors and launch systems probably hasn’t been up to snuff and that could be very exciting when you turn the keys/ push the botton.

          1. Tin whiskers are a problem in lead-free solder, one of the Left’s more recent obsessions. Not an issue in old electronics that used real solder. Tin/lead with rosin flux WORKED. This new stuff that won’t melt and wet the metal properly, and the flux that smells like burning soap, not so much.

            1. Looks like an issue primarily with tin plating (see here https://nepp.nasa.gov/whisker/background/index.htm ) but a pure tin solder (i.e. lead free) would be an issue if it was also silver free. And yeah I was never GREAT at soldering, but I could do decent work in college and high school. These days as you say it takes forever to melt, won’t stick to the pads and has a real tendency to cold joints.

              1. Nudges half-pound spool of 60-40 solder behind the others…

                There were (are?) a few businesses that made a living repairing lead-free instrument clusters from the early Aughts. Looking at you, GM. (They’re have company, but my ’03 Chevy needed a rework.

                GE appliances from the same era had similar problems, according to my knowledgeable, but anonymous source.

                Thanks European safetyweenies.

                  2. The half-pound is .060 60/40. Not sure if I have one or two pounds of the really thin stuff for PC board work. They might be eutectic; I haven’t used it in a little while.

            2. There are more problems with lead free solder than tin whiskers. Tin lead solder experiences ‘grain growth’ at temperatures above 100 deg C. This results in the material being structurally weakened and failing mechanically if subject to any mechanical loads. The good news is that even military electronics are not stored at 100 deg C. The bad news is that lead free solder exhibits this behavior at room temperature.

              The Reader once told a DoD symposium on lead free solder that, if the Pentagon folded and adopted it, he and everyone else at every defense contractor associated with making mil electronics would retire on the spot. It would be impossible to specify a 10 or 20 year storage life on electronics made with lead free solder. As of his retirement in 2018 they had not.

              1. And mil-spec semiconductors were/are(?) supposed to work at 125C. Some of the early automotive controllers and other electronics were specced to 140C in operation. I had a bit of first hand experience as to the reliability (rather, lack thereof) of those.

                1. The semiconductors themselves were spec’d to work at 125C. The packaged parts soldered to boards either 70C or 85C depending. Most industrial grade commercial parts are also good to 70C.

                  1. And that’s junction temperature, so heat dissipation and thermal resistance come into play. (I don’t want to think about thermal time constants; that was more interesting than fun.) OTOH, most of my career entailed working with silicon at room temperature, with a loose definition of “room”–probably 15C if things behaved. We tried to stay away from wafer testing at elevated temps–that’s a heartburn and a half.

          2. Their guided munitions don’t seem to be as accurate as ours either. So them hitting the target they’re aiming at with their missiles is kinda iffy

            1. Looking online (https://missilethreat.csis.org/) I see a CEP of 200-900m for the SS-25 (Poplar) and one of 500m for an uprated SS-18 (Satan) of 500m. I.E. if you shoot a SS-25 at a target it will land within 900m (almost a kilometer) of the aiming point. For whats called countervalue (i.e. a city/populations) a miss of 900m will matter little the major destruction zone for a 400Kt weapon is 3km across, the heavy infrared(severe burns for exposed skin) is 14KM . If you’re going for counterforce (the other guy’s missile silos) either of those CEP is probably too big. As a comparison the Trident D5 has a 90m CEP, and that’s fired from a submarine, not a silo. It was designed for counterforce usage. And of course all of this information is publicly available info so take with several kilograms of salt…

        5. I know some of the routine used in testing a “random” missile to prove it can fire on demand, including all the extra maintenance and attention it gets between selection and launch.

          What if all those theories of overkill are just cover for “we only think between human and mechanical issues, no more than 1 in 10 weapons will detonate on target”?

              1. I suppose “Russia is stupider than any other member of the club despite having the 2nd longest experience” is possible.

                And if so that just means that a lot of their intended targets fail to be destroyed when the single warhead dedicated to it fails to reach and detonate.

                1. I wasn’t talking just about Russian weapons failing to be delivered on target and exploding.

                  I was talking about the oldest member of the club as well.

          2. Lets look at failure modes. For 2-3 stage fusion weapons (which all the US and Russian strategic warheads are) the warhead has two basic modes of failure. Mode 1 is something goes wrong with the primary (the”spark plug”) causing it to not yield properly and not ignite the secondary. Depending on how it fails you either anything from nothing (fuzing goes out of whack) to a pure chemical explosion (initiator fail or explosives fail) to a low yield (tons of TNT) dirty bomb (a fizzle, the pit or its boost was incorrect). Failure mode 2 is the secondary fails to ignite. Here what may have happened is beyond what mere mortals can speculate at in depth as the detailed design of the secondary is a VERY tightly held secret. That said the basic Teller-Ulam (and whatever Sarkharov et alia figured out which is likely similar, physics is physics, CF Dark Sun and Making of the Atomic Bomb) of the secondary seems pretty straight forward, and unless there was damage to the secondary or the materials were contaminated or wrong (this is the EX USSR) I suspect if the primary works you’re going to get at least some fusion. you may not get the design 500 KT- 5 MT yield but even the pits 20-30KT yield is a really bad day if you are nearby.

            That said even a 10% effective yield is not pleasant. As of New Start Russia has a declared 3200+ strategic warheads for ICBM and SLBM . We’ll ignore their bombers only Bears and Blackjacks have the range and the Bears are a suicide mission as the Canadian and US air defense would tear them apart and Blackjacks are like a couple handfuls functional. Their combined yield is ~2300MT. And that’s declared, want to bet the Russians haven’t been cheating on this treaty like they did for every other Strategic Arms Treaty?

            That’s 320 targets hit (presuming first strike full launch 10% effective yield). Russia is going to shoot counter value as they just don’t have the capacity for an effective counter force strike given hardware they have. That means Cities and unhardened Military bases (especially the two boomer sites and Strategic airbases). Bad day does not begin to cover that. And depending on your opponent to screw the pooch that badly is a really poor strategic choice

            1. Depending on the Russians to screw up is a poor strategic choice.

              Considering rocket engines, and the guidance systems, maybe 10% is a high rate to assume.

              Rocket engines in particular. Given totalitarian industrial safety, perhaps a lack of rocket engines blowing up during maintenance is a result of very few being kept in ready to launch status?

              1. This is hard to judge. Liquid fueled engines are hard (Ask SpaceX or even worse Blue Origin). Solid fuel engines are simpler, although design is critical and precision manufacturing is needed. Only the SS-18 in the current Russian fleet appears to be liquid fueled like our Titans/Atlas were. All the rest of the land fleet appears to be solid fuel derived from/related to the SS-25. It would be hard to judge failure rate as the Soviets/Russians were not in the habit of providing that info to NATO/US. Their tests tend to be out into the Pacific. We did have Radar ships (USNS Observation Island, replaced by USNS Howard. O. Lorenz in 2014) for observing launches and verifying treaty compliance as well as other “National technical means” (pretty much anything with the COBRA code name was at least partially for that purpose), but USAF/Navy are not prone to share that information. As I said I guesstimate 85-98% effectiveness for our strategic forces, I would not expect ex USSR/Russian hardware to be worse than 50% effective at least for the land launched solid fueled hardware. Even so if it was only 1% effective you are looking at 30 fully effective target hits. Out of morbid curiosity I used this https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ to simulate an attack on Bremerton with a 400 Kt airburst as likely this is a target that is heavily saturate in the Russian attack plan as it is one of our two SSBN bases and you MIGHT catch one in port. Fatalities are estimated at 35000+ with 65000+ injuries. That’s 10 9/11s and at 1% there are another 25+ of these likely at denser targets so ~3/4 million fatalities give or take. Damage to infrastructure that is already over stretched due to our idiot Brahmandarins would likely be severely damaged as many of the high value tagets( NY, Chicago, Los Angeles) are going to be over targeted. So food and energy delivery will become screwed up at Last Centurion+ levels. Thus even 1% is unacceptable if avoidable short of the loss the US and US independence (such as it is).

                My apologies for harping on this, I lived in the shadow of NYC’s potential fallout (not to mention weapons factories all of CT and Groton Sub Base too) most of my youth. I devoured anything I could find on the subject, Civil Defense documents (Dad had all of them), Scientific Americans (biased) analyses of Salt I and II, John Heresy’s Hiroshima, Los Alamos Primer, and Richard Rhodes books. I am like the apocryphal bird hypnotized by a deadly snake.

                1. keep in mind, that doesn’t even see intervening terrain, so its not very accurate.

                  1. Trident D5 has a reported CEP of 90m. That is it will land within 90M (about a football field, either type 🙂 ) of its aim point, plenty accurate with a 300Kt warhead for most silos all but the deepest buried bunkers. It does this by having a VERY accurate INS, and actually does star sights during launch (talked to/worked with one of the original software developers on the INS). Simple ballistics calculated out to the Nth degree. No GPS (years in the future from Trident D5 development), No TERCOM like cruise missiles, no ability to maneuver in the terminal phase (I believe SALT II actually forbade that though it is now expired). A terrain radar would be iffy anyhow, the Reentry vehicle (RV) comes in at a very steep angle and so gets far more heat than say a manned device (Apollo/Sotuz/Shuttle/Dragon) and so it has a very pointy conical shape. Also an RV’s shape is such that it sends radar energy at a 90 degree angle to any source ahead of it so it has a VERY small RCS from that direction. It was an unintentional stealhy shape discovered by some early British experiments when they realized they were having a hell of a time tracking one of their test RV. Thus emitting radar to do TERCOM would make the RV a much easier target, like turning on a flashlight in a dark room. Adding a window for visual would be pretty hard, and IR is going to be pointless as the RV itself is blazing hot so any IR sensor would get buried, and visual is going to be well and truly swamped by the gas being ionized by the reentry. That reentry corona is also going to make adding GPS for terminal direction hard as the signal might not get through

                    1. that’s not what i am talking about. the nuke sim doesn’t even see intervening terrain, it just throws the relatively easily calculated burst map onto a map. thus, shielding terrain isn’t even seen.

                    2. I Believe you are correct. Only so much brains you can put in a javascript app. I think it uses the Google maps app and numbers from the 1950s/60s effects as published in various US Government publications. Detailed pressure maps would take some serious calculations and decent contour information. It is probably be more accurate for Airburst as it uses a 3400ft hypocenter, although even that can be affected. I believe in the Nagasaki strike vs Hiroshima there was intervening terrain at Nagasaki even though both were airburst (1000ft if I remember right) damage at Hiroshima was much more intense even though the Nagasaki weapon yield was larger. Nukemap is free, you get what you pay for :-). I don’t know if the code is open source.

            2. I was talking about the testing of “pull a random missile to fire it” not “test a random warhead”. When they were doing this in the 80s (I’m not sure we have enough missiles to still do today), the missile essentially got rebuilt between silo and test pad to the point you could claim that that was the same was the shell and tail number.

              Perfect yield is useless (or less) if you can’t deliver it on target.

              1. agreed got to get it there first. Did not realize they rehabbed the missiles before launch. That removes the value as a test cross check. Inspect it so we don’t blow the pad up at Vandenberg yes, not any deterioration that does not directly affect the launch safety and have it checked for in the fleet yes. But fix things (Unless you then check the whole fleet for the fixes) no. And yes we gave up testing warheads altogether in the Clinton administration. At that point we had been down to just testing pits to see how they had aged I believe, all underground as above ground testing had been banned in the early 60’s

                1. Basically step one of the test being the same kind of preflight that a plane gets– with failure being a, well, failure.

                  1. Makes absolute sense, no sense breaking something as part of a test. Solid fuel rockets are pretty dependable, but when they go wrong the do it with style…

                2. Yeah, 80s testing apparently was testing our ability to build a missile and fire it, not fire from silo.

                  That doesn’t mean missile will all fail, it just means we have no real data on getting them out of the tube. The Navy does a little better as each missile boat fires a (probably new or refurbed missile) from depth for commissioning and after refueling overhaul (although the Columbia’s will have core lives that exceed hull lives so no refueling overhaul).

                  Plus, and I think this is a big question, do we know how many people will turn the keys in a timely manner to get a missile launch. That’s why I said human and mechanical factor.

                  I would not be surprised if someone ever did order a first strike if they had a 1 in 4 or higher rate of refusal to obey the order.

                  1. It’s not just one person, but 2 that have to agree (two man rule). The couple folks that went from AFROTC to missile were very serious folks. Would they have turned the key? Beats me, a lot would depend on how much input they got from the outside. Also remember our original intent was to ride out the initial attack and then reply. In that case I’m pretty certain they’d turn the key. Launch on warning changes that and some might hesitate, but I suspect many wouldn’t. First strike is VERY hard. I think as you suspect many would resist.

      2. Heck, look at how Russia is acting in the Ukraine, as far as the “do stupid stuff that kills off the ground pounders because it sounds good” goes.

        Would you want to be the nuclear equivalent of the guy who follows orders and then gets fried, and then THAT gets posted with the Numa Numa song or something?!

        (For those who haven’t seen what I’m talking about: https://twitter.com/N_Waters89/status/1519985198355652609 )

  2. I am not sure I needed the mental image of the leftists butt-chugging story X-P lol!

  3. Humph!

    How could any intelligent person get drunk on That Story! 😉

      1. ‘Progressives’ all believe they are Mary Sues — they will always win because they are always right. Their rude awakening will call for popcorn by the truckload.

  4. It took me a couple of moments to figure out that the “she” you suddenly were talking about was the woman who is being put in charge of spreading disinformation. What? Really, that’s literally what the board is named.

    1. Sorry. Might not be super clear. I’m tired. Slept very badly because I forgot to leave the light in the cat bathroom on, and Havey woke me to turn it on. You see, he’s afraid of the dark.
      STOP LAUGHING.

      1. Of course he’s afraid of the Dark. Valeria is Dark. She’s terrifying to him. Therefore all Dark is terrifying. Makes perfect sense in Floof-for-brains world.

        2. Heh. For some reason, this reminded me of something I learned about horses a while back: “Horses are afraid of only two things: things that move, and things that don’t.”

          1. Amen. Rode one that was no problem unless something white was on the ground (not snow, thanks be) . Road stripe? Rodeo. Bit of paper on the ground? Powder River, Let ‘Er Buck! Pale colored branch? Up up and away.

            Huge trucks with air brakes, people racing into the arena (chasing a hat, the idiot), flapping things, thunder and lightning? No worries, mate! That horse was . . . Yeah. Interesting.

    2. The fact that everyone is calling it the Ministry of Truth is telling.
      I’m hearing real anger from some very unexpected sources.

      1. Orwell was an optimist. His villains went for brazen lies rather that the weaseling of “Disinformation Governance.”

  5. The whole Russia/Ukraine thing baffles me. I certainly don’t want Russia taking any more territory, but I don’t see how this ends well for Ukraine. Not sure they’re up to the task of pushing Russia fully out of Ukraine (including Crimea). All this crap could have been avoided if FICUS hadn’t quickly quashed all Trump’s policies around oil. Somehow I don’t thing sending $40B in aid (whatever that actually consists of) to Ukraine will provoke Putin any further than he already is. He doesn’t have many good options either at this point.

    1. it won’t end well for Ukraine, even if they win back lands lost the last times, because of the damages done. But, it stopped having the ability of ending well for KGB Vlad long ago (like 3 days in). It’s like He read Weber’s “Short Victorious War”, and turned the PRH up to 11 and added more incompetency with less ability.

      1. It will end less badly of they win, than if they lose. The crew Putin set loose on the regions they took under Obama have utterly trashed those areas.

        Remember, the key thing is he needs the Donbas fields unable to compete with the Siberian gas fields. He does not need them operational, not for a long time than he likely has.

        2. The catch is that once Russia has to shut down an oil well because there is nowhere for the oil to go it isn’t coming back on for a very long time or without a lot of help from western companies.

    2. Russia and Ukraine have been fighting for hundreds, if not thousands of years (yes, usually under different names). We don’t belong there any more than we did in Vietnam, Bosnia, Lebanon, or Syria. To name just a few of the globalist cabal’s “get rich quick” schemes.

      1. That’s a major reason I don’t support sending troops there. But I support sending arms there because I don’t particularly want Russia to believe they can expand willy-nilly, and the more they are bled dry trying to win a stupid war they shouldn’t have started in the first place, the less able they’ll be in a position to do this again.

        As a nice bonus, rather than hide Pretendant Biden’s incompetency, it actually highlights it: this wouldn’t have happened had Trump been President, and what’s worse, Pretendant Biden is defending another country’s borders while leaving ours wide open.

        It’s also nice to see some of our newer weapons systems get tested in real-life conditions.

        1. Pretendant Biden is defending another country’s borders while leaving ours wide open.
          and providing aid and arms to a country at war with a country he has negotiating nuclear deals in our stead, with a country we are essentially at low grade war with.

          I too support sending what arms we can to Ukraine, and encouraging our actual allies to do the same.

          2. I encourage send arms and troops to our border and resolving that situation before sending more arms and money to one of the most corrupt nations in the world so our corrupt politicians can siphon off more funds and get more kickbacks from defense contractors while antagonizing a nuclear power.

            Then maybe we could feed our babies first.

            1. We can do both. Or even all three.

              The fact that nothing is being done about the border, or about the formula shortage, has nothing to do with aid to Ukraine. And aid to Ukraine helps to highlight the fact that our government is willfully ignoring our own border.

    3. There’s a very good possibility that it ends with a Russian collapse. Putin has badly miscalculated. That won’t undo the damage done, but it’s really the only way out for Ukraine. Putin has forgotten, or never knew, the first law of holes.

      The other possibility is Ukraine cracks, then you’re looking at civil war and insurgency, these are ugly, ugly things.

      Of course, Putin could pop a nuke. All bets are off then.

      1. This war wasn’t born yesterday.

        Eastern Ukraine has been in a civil war for 8 years with the US funding/training one side and the Russians the other. Bunch of small a-holes funded by bigger a-holes.

        With the energy and food crisis made worse by the war, TPTB will leverage the large crisis to bring Europe and the Global South to heel with the help of the IMF.

        1. Russia invaded and took over a chunk of the Ukraine, sending in military guys who were literally tweeting home to mom about where they were and what they were doing, including shooting down a passenger plane.

          The face-saving pretense that the Russian troops were REALLY local revolutionaries was supposed to let them sacrifice a chunk of one of those horrible little Soviet escapee countries to pay off Putin, and he’d be happy with having what he wanted. One sacrifice in 2014, and he’d never bother anybody again!

          … it’s almost like that tactic doesn’t work.

          1. I think the idea was to destabilize the post-Maidan government and allow Putin to reinstall a puppet in Kyiv. When the Ukrainians saw through the ploy and kept electing pro-Western governments Putin decided on a decapitation strike.

    4. Ukraine has no chance of winning anything, and has only survived because Putin overruled the Generals who wanted to bomb any resistance flat, ala the US in Iraq..Now Zelensky is calling for face to face talks again, while fingering his British passport and checking his offshore account balances, 800 million they say…

      1. Ukraine doesn’t have to win, they just have to not lose. Sorry bud, your boy Vlad screwed the pooch big time here. Hell, he even gives Biden, sleepy Joe Biden, a chance to shine on the geo political stage as the Russian empire falls. Maybe it was Biden who paid Putin, hmmm.

        I have a lot of time for Russians, my DIL presumptive is Russian, but really, you should learn the first law of holes too. Putin is not the good guy and holy Russia died with the tsar, if it ever existed, which I doubt knowing Russian history as I do.

      3. With what air superiority?

        How do you know so much about the decision making within the Russian air force?

        It would seem at least as plausible that a) Putin’s totalitarianism suppressed the Russian ability to build an effective suppression of enemy air defenses (SEAD) doctrine that exists as something that the Russians practice b) Ukraine’s relative lack of totalitarianism, and the motivation of years of Russian intervention, permitted the Ukrainians to build a working air defense capability.

        Air Defense tech is inherently geeky. An intelligent person who cares can do a lot, if the initiative hasn’t been squashed from them. Totalitarianism squashes initiative, and totalitarianism is really bad for successful creative research involving making complex systems work.

        Putin’s initial plan for the war was shipping in paratroopers. Which apparently are not used in the American, etc., style, but are instead political troops, used to intimidate and brutalize rebellious subordinate governments. So, the primary screw up is conceiving of the war, against a whole one third of the population size, as against a rebellious subordinate government, instead of a possible near peer sovereign nation.

        Putin has screwed up everything but Russia’s fossil fuel exports. The drop in fuel costs was super difficult for him, and as soon as Biden got the prices jacked way up, Putin had money to try to do something about it. Russian hacking of that one pipeline was probably imagined as a way to gut the US’s expeditionary capability, in support of this war, or something similar. Because Russian intel assumes that all opposition to integration into Russia is an American plot, and said opposition will fail if the Americans cannot act.

        It is silly for the Russians to blame Nazism for opposition to Russian empire. Hitler’s deal was partly ‘where ever German is spoken, that is Germany’, because there were German speakers all over the place, and they were often enough mistreated and ‘mistreated’.

        Vlad Tepes, Dracula, the only real reason he has a bad rap is that there were German speakers there, and they were in politics, some, and they got friends back in, IIRC, Saxony to publish anti-Dracula propaganda.

        There were German speakers in the Ukraine, in the 1910s through 1930s. We know what they told their relatives in Germany, because they told the same things to their relatives living in America, and we have some of those letters in museums.

        The Nazis were pretty directly inspired by the Soviets. The Germans in the Ukraine didn’t get the worst of it, and they were able to tell the Germans about the plight of the Ukrainians. And, the Communists in Germany made several attempts to take over, that didn’t stick. See, the Bavarian Soviet Socialist Republic for one. So, the Germans knew that the Soviet Union was coming for them, and that then the Germans would get what happened to the Ukrainians. NSDAP leadership took that inspiration in a completely insane direction, and decided that they might as well go full totalitarian, and commit a lot of mass murder. Other Germans were also driven insane knowing about the Holodomor, but were less fully insane, those were the ones that after the war thought that Hitler had been prevented from saving the world.

        It isn’t a surprise that the Russians paint all opposition to Russian empire as Nazism, but that opposition was honestly earned by previous Russian empires, and it is partly the Russians’ fault for being insane bastards when it comes to imperialism.

        1. A couple of items –

          “Air Defense tech is inherently geeky. An intelligent person who cares can do a lot, if the initiative hasn’t been squashed from them.”

          I’m suddenly extremely curious about the PLA’s air defense and SEAD capabilities. It looks like while the Russians don’t have a dedicated SEAD aircraft (and, based on a quick glance at an article, I don’t think they have any dedicated squadrons), the Chinese do have a recently introduced (several years ago) aircraft that’s designed for the mission.

          “NSDAP leadership took that inspiration in a completely insane direction, and decided that they might as well go full totalitarian, and commit a lot of mass murder.”

          Hitler didn’t really help. What happened in the Ukraine while under Nazi German occupation was less severe than what he’d outlined in his book.

      4. Dude, take your head out of Putin’s alimentary canal. Unless doing so puts your life in danger. But if that’s the case, don’t bother posting that nonsense here. We ain’t buying.

    5. Bluntly, what do you see Ukraine doing that improves its options? Suing for peace?

      If all roads lead to disaster, may as well make your enemy miserable.

      1. My one worry about all this is someone – Putin or Xi, whatever, seeing he’s about to go down, saying, “Well, if I go, you go too!” and we get to find out how many nukes actually work.

        1. The good news is that the “Big Red Button” is just a metaphor, neither Putin nor Xi can themselves launch nukes. They have to give the order to someone who has to give the order to…until you get to the guy who actually sits at the button connected to the missile. If anyone along that chain decides that they don’t see a reason to go down with the Big Guy then the nukes don’t fly. And this isn’t hypothetical, there were a couple of instances in the Cold War where the Soviet system said to launch the nukes and one guy in the chain realized that things weren’t quite right and stopped the launch. I doubt Putin’s military is more oppressive than the Soviet one.

      2. Mary, all I can do is quote Churchill, “If you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed, if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not so costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance for survival. There may be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no chance of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.”

  6. Referring to Kamala Harris as you have: Isn’t it disrespectful? After all, she/xie/it is Vice Precedent with The Untied Stays!

                1. Oh, for the love of– Who is holding the garum-loaded spray gun?
                  Not all who wonder are lost, but this lieutenant is lost as sh*t. This Lieutenant has hypothermia…. Who let him wonder around? (I think the C is an exageration. ;))

                  1. Are you sure? The higher they go, the more rarified the atmosphere, and the greater brain damage. Look at the top of our command structure

                  3. applauds the pun show from a safe distance

                    LTC Ted, thank you! 2021, the year I taught Our Beloved Hostess to know and love FIDO as an acronym. 2022, she’s picked up the lieutenant variation on “Not all who wander are lost.”

                    Excellent!

                  4. There is no scarier thing than a butter bar with a compass.
                    (I still remember having to dig three mortar pits, in desert breccia, during the course of a rather endless night. )

                    1. Objection! Seeing an EOD guy at full sprint and swearing in panic outranks the butter bar with a compass in butt-puckering factor, I would argue.

                    5. Well I have no direct knowledge of the intellectual capacities (or threat level) of a 2nd LT, However among computer types the tradition and received knowledge is that the three most dangerous thing in the Universe (in increasing threat order) are
                      1) A Software Engineer/Programmer with a screwdriver/Soldering Iron
                      2) An Electrical Engineer with a Software Patch
                      3) A user with an Idea
                      I stand by this article of programmer faith…

                    6. On “user with an idea”, one job there was this user who had “great ideas” for an inventory report just before inventory time. He would accept my manager’s “Not Right Now” but never requested the idea when we’d have time to do it. 😆

                1. I have it on good Arthurgodfrey that OW!FISH in OW!FISH Etouffe is actually not a FISH, but a Rustacean.

                  2. Okay.
                    Puts on leather gloves.
                    Grabs the biggest Bacalhau in her armory, 3×5 feet, two inches thick, with the consistency of old hickory. Holds it in both hands., by the tail.
                    Chases Ted around, while hitting him over the head with it.

                    1. Is something fishy going on? [Very Big Crazy Grin While Flying Away Very Fast]

                    5. Haha, haha! Não é permitido bacalhau seco e fedorento no “Libertycon”, especialmente quando estou lá. Claro, não existe outro tipo de bacalhau seco. [all blame to Google translate]

                    7. Why are you wasting perfectly good dried codfish? Umm never mind that was a silly question, My wife’s Sicilian grandmother prepared Baccalat for Christmas eve every year. Only thing worse was the creamed fish product my Swedish Grandmother prepared. And I suspect a large piece of Bacalau/Bacalat would be a lethal weapon even not cooked…

                    9. Worry not, tregonsee, Libertycon will demand she “peace bond” her assault codfish.

                    11. As noted madam I was nevery fond of the Sicilian/Italian equivalent. Also as noted if someone of Swedish/Norwegian heritage offers you fish (usually cod but maybe also herring) in a cream sauce RUN do not walk from that place and never return hence. You’ll know its coming the smell is, shall we say, unique.

                    13. Cruel Madam. This thing is not officially lutefisk but its less palatable cousin(and that’s saying something 🙂 ). I am not sure of it’s proper name, Grandma was second generation Swede (mixed with Northern New York Dutch, and some French Canadian) and did not know much Swedish beyond please and thank you. However that dish was invariably present at Christmas Eve which is the big deal for Swedes rather than Christmas day. My wife remembered the same dish from her (First and Second Generation) Swedes, but by the time we had married they had thankfully stopped making it.

                1. Just keep a cover on the popcorn lest Garum and Baclau end up in it…

                    1. Point taken although salty is not always a felines favorite flavor (Umami for the Win!)

  7. And of course, to even actually find out if they work, you have to get someone to actually push the button. If there is one thing Communist societies are very very good at, it’s passing the buck.

    Round and round it goes. Where it stops nobody knows!

    On the administration, we’re going to have to decentralize stuff. Current thing is probably going to be how to mitigate the formula shortage. Sounds like the FDA’s shut down about a quarter of production since February and the DHS has been buying it up by the pallet to ship to the border, so it’s pretty thin on the ground right now.

    I’ve heard there were home made options that the FDA hates, but better than having a little one starve. Need to track those down and stock up the non-perishable parts.

    1. Now that you put it that way, I can’t help but wonder: is it possible that Russia has already tried using two or three nukes, but they just didn’t go off, either because of launch problems, or because of the go-around to try to hide incompetence and graft?

      1. ….you know, I hadn’t even thought about that, and I’ve been pointing out that I wouldn’t want to be anywhere near an attempted launch for months.

      3. The Russians shouldn’t have been provoked enough to consider a launch yet.

        Of course, the key word there is “shouldn’t”…

        And the loud proclamations that we’re basically acting as intelligence services for the Ukrainians certainly aren’t making a launch less likely…

    2. I wonder whether we need to start setting up some systems that use wet nurses or re-lactation. Obviously, someone who already went to formula because they couldn’t breastfeed wouldn’t be a good candidate for re-lactation, but someone who had no trouble and recently weaned would — and they could potentially provide milk, especially for the babies with the greatest allergy problems. And currently nursing women who have no problem producing milk could provide milk / act as wet nurses.

      I mean, that could be part of a solution if this problem continues on long term. Or to have set up to go in the near future if the road gets bumpy ahead.

      1. There are milk banks– I looked into them when we were in the Seattle area, because I milk like a Jersey, but for that one I could take multivitamins or eat allergens.

        But that’s Seattle.

        Wouldn’t help for the kids that are basically allergic to breastmilk, but….

        1. Well, the thing is, real problem solving involves lots of possible solutions. Some folks will have the scarce formula, some could use milk banks, and on the home-made stuff — I just wonder how you determine what is safe enough? There’s no “one size fits all” but there can sure be enough paths to get everyone taken care of.

          My breastfeeding days are long behind, and I had a lot of trouble with it, but it’s been really easy for my daughter, thank G-d. This baby feeding problem nags at my mind, but there’s nothing I can really do except come up with ideas. And I sure don’t trust TPTB to do anything at all helpful.

          1. breastfeeding days are long behind, and I had a lot of trouble with it

            –
            Same. Nursing itself was fine, but volume wasn’t, my system didn’t ramp up production, requiring supplementing. Which, because baby would not take a bottle after nursing, had to guess how much to supplement before nursing, which was always too much. That part my system got right. Baby didn’t need as much, production declined. Pumping never worked out.

            it’s been really easy for my daughter

            –
            Same for my sisters. They both nursed their 3 (each) for two years. (Adopted niece OTOH was on formula from the time they brought her home, obviously.)

            The two nieces with babies are having mixed results also requiring formula supplementing. One because of her medical issues, the other is running into the same problem I had. Supplementing is going better for her new little one. She is also pumping when not at home so supplementing is a combination of natural and formula. Her baby is old enough to start introducing solids, baby cereal, fruits, and mashed foods, should it come down to that. Also, dad is thrilled. He gets to help feed their new baby. Bonding time for him. He wasn’t home when his son was born (enlisted navy at the time, he is now reserve).

  8. I haven’t met one person here in AZ, home of 207k “mule” votes for Biden, who is for this war, or even the aid to the Ukro-nazis….Whatever the polls say, we know they’re lying, as they did in 2020…

      2. At Best, they’re Nationalists which in the minds of Progressives means Nazis.

        Of course, for Putin, the fact that they don’t want to be part of Russia (or subordinate to Russia) makes them Nazis.

        1. IMO, to avoid devolving into Newspeak, I try to distinguish between fascist and dictatorial. A culture democratically united as to polity, culture, and economy may be fascist, as in the times of FDR, but if the electorate can change the goals, and the operators, I can’t think of that culture as dictatorial. So, IMM, fascist does not equal totalitarian, as all of the Left, and much of the literati have it.

          1. The Reader believes it is easier to visualize fascists, communists and assorted fellow travelers as enemies of freedom and treat them all as such. The remaining details are of interest only to those who pursue PhDs in political ‘science’.

            2. Yep. Since there’s essentially zero functional difference, using different names is silly. They’re all fanatical collectivists who value the State absolutely over the individual, and who are willing to do anything, up to and including murder and/or genocide, to get and maintain personal power.

              1. Someone much more knowledgeable that I am said it best:

                “Political tags – such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth – are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.”— Robert A. Heinlein

      3. Given that City University in NY invited a commencement speaker who advocates the complete elimination of Israel and global genocide of Jews, and the Democratic Party has an increasing number of officials, both appointed and elected, who openly demonize Jews, there are almost certainly more Nazis and in the Democratic Party than in Ukraine. It is the Democrats who are trying to impose totalitarian racial identity group socialism after all.

          1. City College, which was the vehicle for the Jews gains in America. Yep. It used to be entirely commie, now they call it progressive.

    2. Currently the definition of a Ukrainian Nazi is anyone from Ukraine who thinks their nation is a good one and wants the Russians to go sod off. See, Nationalist! They love their motherland, The horror! So Nazi they’ve outlawed being a National Socialist and elected a Jewish comedian. Unlike those good Russians who think Russia should run all their neighbors, and the only good country is Mother Russia.

          1. Will Smith slapped Chris Rock when offended by what Rock had to say. Donald Trump campaigned for and won the presidency when offended by what Obama had to say. Vladimir Putin launched an invasion when offended by what Zelensky had to say. Seems a bit excessive.

            1. One of the members of Pussy riot was telling her story of escaping from Russia by dressing as a food service worker of some sort.Seems Vlad is thinner skinned than Obama, and more willing to rid himself of any such annoyances. While Volodymyr”s jokes were not his (only) reason for invading, I bet you it was why he wanted Volodymyr grabbed and delivered to Moscow, or as a second best, killed.

              1. Given the deNazification plan calls for the extermination of the government. . . .

    3. Oh they are here. Have idiot coworkers saying should have natoized uke and have boots on ground.

      1. One of our employees’ son is currently in Poland with his unit (he’s just out of boot camp, to make things worse), waiting. And maybe helping train Poles.
        His mother is Not Happy. (I’m sure she got less happy when he told her their rations got lost).

        1. “Lost”. Ask me how all the steaks got “lost” in SE Asia commissaries, mess halls, and exchanges. On second though, don’t

      2. I think if we had sent a Stryker BCT to Ukraine on a training exercise (They’re supposed to be deployable in 96 hours, and sending one from Alaska to Kyiv would be a good stress test of that capability) before Putin invaded we probably would have deterred Putin. After all, a few hundred LAVs couldn’t possibly pose a serious threat to Muscovy’s mighty army* but it would make it difficult to invade Ukraine without involving US troops.

        Once Putin ordered his troops across the line of departure, however, deterrence became moot. Now our best strategy is to keep this as a proxy war against Moscow and make it very clear that NATO won’t be as accommodating to the Muscovite military as the Ukrainians have been if Putin wants to escalate the war. I’m pretty sure there are Polish tank commanders looking at what’s happening in Ukraine and calculating how many days it would take them to get to Moscow. And the number keeps going down.

        1. The Reader thinks the Poles are clearer eyed than that. They understand that the Russian soldier will fight far better on his own territory than they do as an invading hoard. ‘Don’t fight a land war in Asia’ includes Russia.

          The Reader also thinks that the Ukrainians have been surprisingly unaccommodating to the Russian military to date. The question in his mind is, if this is still going on come late fall, will the Europeans still be gung ho to support Ukraine when they are freezing in the dark due to lack of fuel. And how totalitarian will the European governments get when they start strict rationing of what fuel they have.

          1. “…how totalitarian will the European governments get…”

            I believe that the past couple of millennia have answered that…as has the maxim regarding lipstick on a pig.

          2. They might fight better, but they won’t have the logistics to fight well enough. Remember that unlike Ukraine, NATO would have complete air superiority over the battlefield. We also have much better artillery systems, which are just now getting into Ukraine. I don’t think it’s a serious policy consideration by anyone, but I do think that anyone paying attention realizes that Moscow’s conventional forces are about as intimidating as Iraq’s.

            European need for Muscovy’s oil and gas is falling by the day, while Muscovy’s need for high tech from Europe grows by the day. Sanctions are a long-term weapon, they take time to have a significant effect.

            I doubt this will last into late fall. As Moscow’s weapons get dumber and Ukraine’s weapons get smarter Muscovy’s going to be pushed back faster and faster. At some point Putin will negotiate a peace that gives him something, probably Crimea, and everyone will pat each other on the back. My only hope is that the peace deal costs Putin enough that neither he nor his successors try something like this again.

    4. or even the aid to the Ukro-nazis

      You need to get out more.

      Not only have you failed to interact with a very large range of the population, you’re falling for reheated Stalin.

      Seriously, there are things other than “obey the current czar or whatever he calls himself this week” and “is a (right wing) Nazi.”

    5. So, the Ukrainians are the Nazis?

      Not the “Wherever Russian is spoken, that is Russia” ideology Putin is pushing?

      1. Does sound eerily familiar, doesn’t it? Different language, of course… 😦

  9. I can’t see Putin wanting any of the sclerotic neighboring countries, but we have already seen that some areas with traditional Christian beliefs want to join Orthodox Christian Russia….The EU is a death cult, and some will want out…

      1. My builder is a Pole and my cousin’s wife is a Pole. One would think they’d dislike the Germans, and they do, but they HATE Russia. Hate it. Just get them going and step back. I suppose they remember the Russian occupation all too well.

        1. So do the Ukrainians, apparently – especially after the Holodomor. You gotta wonder, how brutally the Soviets treated them, that the Nazi’s were welcomed at first as appearing to be liberators…

          1. Latvians and Estonians collaborated with the Nazis because “We likely couldn’t win against the Soviets alone, but if we helped Germany win, we’d likely be able to kick them out shortly after.”

            1. Well, Finland allied with Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union (for good reasons).

              1. And, amusingly (given the war in question), had a (non-Nazi) swastika as their national emblem.

                Of course, to this day (and with good reason) they’re seen as the “good Axis” nation.

          2. I’ve wondered if some of that – the Soviets being so bad Ukrainians viewed the Nazis as liberators – isn’t behind Ukrainian support for groups like Azov and Right Sector today.

            And while Ukrainians as a whole certainly aren’t Nazis, the Azovites definitely are.

            OTOH so are a bunch of Russia’s Wagner troops, which are on the ground in Donbass right now. Not to mention Putin sent Chechens to fight in Ukraine, which after Beslan is just unforgiveable. So many of the Russian troops flying Soviet flags just makes it even worse.

            So IMO as far as the Nazi argument goes, it’s foul versus vile. It’s still jarring to see Western liberals who see Nazis under the bed defending Azov. And now after the Buffalo supermarket shooting yesterday, done by an alleged Nazi and white supremacist, we’re back to the American left condemning Nazis . . . despite the alleged shooter’s “manifesto” strongly suggesting he himself was an Azov fanboy.

            The mook was far more of a leftist nut than a rightist nut, but that’s not what the press is talking about, of course.

            2. And while Ukrainians as a whole certainly aren’t Nazis, the Azovites definitely are.

              Based off of an emblem they had for like three months, when first founded, before formalized, and in spite of the emblem, when they went into an area known for having a high rate of anti-Semitic attacks– the rate of such attacks went down. And went from physical assaults, to nasty spraypaint.
              Which is part of why they got made all official and stuff.

                    1. Sure, I’m all for giving everything in the area a looooong, hard look.

                      Which is how I found out about the objective drop in anti-Semitic attacks when they rolled in. It was reported in an Israeli newspaper, though I don’t know where I put the dang link.

                      And how I found out they changed their patch a long time ago, in response to the complaints.

            3. Does anyone have a good, solid source for what the Azov Battalion’s ideology is? I’ve seen descriptions ranging from “They follow everything in Mein Kampf but in Ukrainian*” to “hard-core, blood and soil Ukrainian nationalists but more like the Falangists than like the N.S.D.A.P.”

              *That one made me wonder if the person had ever actually read said book.

        2. There’s an old joke about who the Poles would have fought if WW3 had started while they were still in the Warsaw Pact – the Germans, or the Russians?

          The answer is that they would have fought the Germans. After all, business before pleasure!

      2. Putin’s set up an “autonomous” region in Moldova, which is one of the poorest countries in Europe. Moldova’s on the other side of Ukraine, so he hasn’t been able to seriously put pressure on the country. But he wouldn’t be backing the autonomous region I’d he didn’t have plans.

        In short, Putin wants to take back one of the poorest countries in the region.

        2. Poor but rich in resources. Which speaks to how Ukraine has been run, not that Russia would be any improvement on the kleptocracy and lousy economic policies that Ukraine has had. There is a reason Ukraine thought that to get ahead economically they had to pay lots of money to the Biden crime family through crackhead Hunter.

      3. And Estonia,and Latvia, and Lithuania, and a nibble of Norway and Belarus if he doesn’t toe the line, and threatened Moldova not long ago (week or two back)

        1. I mentioned here a week or two ago that there are currently “provocations” against state-controlled buildings being performed by “Ukranian intelligence forces” in Moldova’s autonomous region (Transnistria). No casualties, last I’d heard. And the “Ukrainian intelligence forces” apparently like to use Russian weapons.

            1. More likely they have “Transnistrian” accents. The current thinking is that Putin’s considering bringing Transnistria into the war. The region wouldn’t be a serious threat to Ukraine. But it would force Ukraine to draw off troops from elsewhere to watch the border.

    2. I can’t see Putin wanting any of the sclerotic neighboring countries

      Did you stick your head under a rock and then have someone jump on it for good measure before posting that?

      HE IS ALREADY TAKING A “SCLEROTIC NEIGHBORING COUNTRY” AND HAS SAID HE WANTS OTHERS.

      If you can’t see him wanting it that is a problem with your ability to see, not everyone else.

    3. but we have already seen that some areas with traditional Christian beliefs want to join Orthodox Christian Russia

      Also, could you explain for the class what a wonderful traditional christian family value it is to promote a military culture of ass raping every conscript that comes through?

          1. Yep. But the same “logic” would insist that most of the US would welcome a Brit invasion force. Same (well, sorta) language, doncha know? Sheeesh…

    5. Russia is a Christian nation? Really? Since when? Russia is a country with Christians in it, it’s is no different from any of the others. Also, why would the the Roman Catholic Hungarians or the Lutheran Finns decide to join the Orthodox Russians? Even Orban, Protestant that he is, is simply playing domestic politics against the bloody Germans. I suppose the Serbs might as a Slav/orthodox play, but the RC Croatians or Slovenes, probably won’t, Never mind the poor Muslim Bosnians.

      This Christian hero BS didn’t work under the Tsars, it certainly doesn’t work under Putin and the oligarchs — I saw them open for the Clash in the Ally Pally back in ‘79 before they were cool.

      1. You’ve seen the painting, right? The Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks? It’s a meme and a cultural reference. I would bet you that Putin is leaning on that legacy, using a bit of this and a bit of that from current issue geopolitics to confuse the issue.

        Standard KGB thug tactics, if so. Plausible deniability, bit of lying, intimidation when you can get away with it, more lying when you get caught at it, and it’s never your fault. Maskirovka, the whole kit and kaboodle.

        I’ve no dog in that fight, but if I did, my answer would be with the Poles: beat the snot out of Putin, Ukraine! And cheering from the sidelines. Maybe moving a few bits of materiel here and there, accepting some refugees. But no soldiers, no fighters of ours need be in that conflict.

        Upshot, maybe the EU will start to realize what a bloody danged stupid idea it was to become dependent on Russian oil and gas.

        Meanwhile, China’s up to no good. As is Biden. We’ve our own messes to address. They’ve been put off for too long now already.

        1. The Germans are the problem. Have been for a long time, accelerating under Mutti Merckle You can take the girl out of commie land but you can’t take commie land out of the girl.

          China is collapsing. I’m going to open a book on Xi’s survival. Who wants the over/under — 18 months?

          1. Scott Adam’s said he’d had a source tell him Xi was about to step down. From what you’ve said, I very much doubt it.

            1. I don’t think he’ll resign, if he goes, he’ll go out feet first. Nothing he has done is a sign of strength. I think he’s trying to eliminate his rivals and using Maoist methods to do it. Xi would rather reign in hell than serve in heaven I suppose.

              Not that it matters. I don’t want to sound like Gordon Chang, but China is doomed, it’s been slow for some time, is accelerating now and soon all at once. Had they not gotten slow Joe it’d be closer. It could happen Monday or not for several years, but a crack up is inevitable. It’s only a question of when and how far it goes.

              I haven’t written about Evergrande recently since it’s one of my special subjects and I tend to go on, and on, and on, but essentially all the Chinese real estate developers have defaulted and only CCP lies hides that. Certainly the dollar denominated ones have, they’re harder to hide. Sunac, third largest, defaulted just this Wednesday. Property sales are down 75% YOY. That’s 20% of GDP and almost all local government revenue.

            2. BGE has better sources about the current state of affairs in China. But I know enough to be able to explain the significance of what Xi has done during his time in office. It’s important to keep that in mind when evaluating what Xi might or might not do.

              When Deng Xiaoping took over in China, he had to deal with the wreckage that Mao had left behind. Among other things, he recognized the problems inherent in having the same leader running the country for decades on end. So Deng pushed through a series of rules and changes to the country that included, among other things, term limits and restrictions on the leader of China. Deng himself voluntarily left office when he had reached the end of his time in office under the new laws (though he took the equivalent of an emeritus position that basically left him with plenty of political levers still in his hands).

              Xi has spent much of his time as leader of China carefully and systematically undoing all of the changes that Deng put into place on the power of the country’s leader. Most importantly, he’s made it possible to spend the rest of his life in office (assuming a political power play in the party doesn’t do him in first), being the first head of the PRC with that option since Mao. You don’t go to all the trouble to set something like that up, only to leave office right after you finally succeed.

              1. This should surprise no one. XI very clearly envisions himself as being he new Mao, and his policy is aptly described as “back to Mao”. Thus, he has embraced Mao’s idea that the CCP can “win” a nuclear war (or biological war for that matter), and the full totalitarian control over society that Mao envisioned which is well beyond the power asserted by Deng or even Deng’s immediate successors. XI views himself as god-emperor of not only China but of the world.

              2. Most importantly, he’s made it possible to spend the rest of his life in office (assuming a political power play in the party doesn’t do him in first), being the first head of the PRC with that option since Mao.

                The problem with setting it up so that you can only leave office in a wooden box is that, eventually, some political rival is going to say, “Your terms are acceptable.”

                I have no way to read tea leaves from the CCP, but I do wonder if Xi is getting closer and closer to that day.

                1. They started arresting officials today for “incompetence in addressing pandemic”. The standard of competence is Xi. I think there’s a good possibility that he goes under but just a s good a possibility that China implodes but he stays in power over the husk. Wouldn’t be the first time I. fhina’s history.

                  Oh, Xi had to be hospitalized at the end of 2021 for a cerebral aneurysm. He chose traditional Chinese medicine rather than surgery. This was reported on May 11, 2022. One wonders why, exactly, we were told this now.

                  1. And whether he actually chose Chinese traditional medicine, or just said he did after getting surgery first.

                    1. Yeah. I’m pretty sure that some part of that is BS. “Traditional Chinese medicine” is a con the CCP uses to cover up the fact that the can’t deliver quality health care. One way to read this is that they’re preparing the ground for the collapse of the actual health care system. I truly do not know, but I do wonder why this was made public now. US press — spit —, of course, didn’t cover it.

                2. Not exactly. So far as anyone can tell, the CCP has avoided the sort of infighting that leads to assassins being sent against those in power. Instead, political power is flexed by arresting your rivals and putting them on trial. That avoids the destructiveness that murdering your political opponents can lead to. Xi can still be forced out of office. But it’ll be due to someone outmaneuvering him in politics.

                  So if Xi loses power, it’ll probably be like what happened to Kruschev, at least initially. His successor might force him to stand trial eventually. But initially, it’ll be a “voluntary retirement into the hinterlands”, probably for medical reasons. It’ll be interesting to see whether his daughter stays in the US or China if that happens.

                  1. They’re restricting travel. It’s now much harder for a Chinese official or his family to get to their Canadian bolthole.

          2. Whatever you forecast, they’ll say everything is fine (better than evah!) and everything will be worse than anyone can guess, unless the collapse is drastic and massive.

            And yeah, Merkle is and has been a giant steaming pile of greasy poo. I worry for my friends in Germany. I haven’t heard from them in a few years now, and things were not the best in Northern Germany even then.

            1. There comes a point where what they say doesn’t matter any more. When even the believers no longer believe.

              1. Yeah. There are still those out there that believe the bullfaeces coming out of the CCP these days, though. Fewer than there were, thanks be.

                On the way out, there’s going to be a lot of death going around, though. Granted, they’re doing more than their fair share of killing right now. but murderous regimes get more stab happy, not less, as they fall. I worry for Taiwan. Most of their young people fled in the past year or so, once the crackdowns started to get bad and it became obvious that the Chinese were not taking no for an answer WRT fair elections.

                Maybe those far flung children can come back once China finally diminishes, as will happen absent a miracle, at this point. Time will tell.

                1. I worry about Taiwan too. I have friends there and always enjoyed going there. I agree there will be a lot of death as the regime falls. Still, I think it will be civil war among the CCP leadership and wouldn’t be surprised to see warlordism in China again. That’s an even bigger human disaster. I look at history and see it filled with psychopathic monsters like Xi, or Alexander the Great, or Caesar, or Napoleon. Sometimes it’s hard not to despair,

                  Something to consider, Taiwan can close China’s ports with artillery and Taiwan has a lot of artillery. Kinda hard to make a landing when your enemy can hit your ships as they load. I don’t think China has the capability to make a contented landing in any case, so China would either have to succeed in a decapitation, like the one Putin attempted, or nuke them, both very high risk operations.

                  1. A civil war is looking more and more possible, as Xi cuts down the most likely usurper/successors. Nobody will be obviously strong enough, so everybody is going to try and take the top spot. I don’t want to add to the despair, but you have seen the PLA plagiarizing the National Socialists of old German infamy, yes? I am not entirely certain what is real and what is fake from what I see coming out of that part of the world. Everything is suspect. We think the surveillance state in the US is bad, but our wannabe peeping Toms have nothing on what goes on over there.

                    I think you may be right about Taiwan. They may yet stave off Xinny the Wuflu Poo, but Hong Kong is pretty boned. China is already there. John Lee looks like nothing more than a sock puppet the a CCP hand up his butt, from what I can tell.

                    Our future here is still in the balance. Things are pretty bad. But one thing for certain, I am glad that I will be nowhere near China for the next few years. May Himself watch over His faithful and the poor innocents over there. It’s going to get bad. Real bad. Before things ever get better.

                    Worse yet, we’ll not be able to help them for some time, not until we get back on our feet ourselves. For generations, the US has been there to blunt the force of disaster, be it natural or man-made, across the globe. That’s not something that we’ll be capable of for some time yet, I think.

                  2. You sure about Artillery ranging to mainland? It looks about 80mi to the nearest point on the CCP coast the M777 has a range about 17 miles, the old 16″ Mk8 guns from the Iowa topped out at just past 20. With the Rocket boosted excalibur you can get out to 65mi. The MLRS (rockets) top out at 45mi. There is a rocket with a 310km/190mi range (ATACMS) in the US Arsenal, not sure if Taiwan has them, but probably a little late to buy them now if they don’t.

                2. Taiwan? Or Hong Kong?

                  I’m not aware of any recent crackdowns in Taiwan, particularly ones started at the instigation of the Chinese Communist Party.

        3. Zaporozhye, and indeed all the Cossacks, are Ukrainian. Russian Orthodoxy is Kievan Orthodoxy, and thus Ukrainian. Russia has a lot of nice heritage (Vikings et al) but a lot of it is from other places, and is a mixing process.

          So yeah, “Russia owns everything” is less convincing than “everywhere else owns Russia.”

    6. some areas with traditional Christian beliefs want to join Orthodox Christian Russia

      Defined as “anybody that Putin’s pet bishop hasn’t excommunicated for declining to obey Russia.”

    7. Putin is like Lenin – “if it once belonged to Russia, it still belongs to Russia.” See the Russo-Polish War 1919-1922, WWII, Warsaw Pact, current day . . .

    8. Orthodox maybe. Russian? Ha ha ha ha ha ha. No. Or at least not in Eastern Europe. Even Hungary, which was somewhat sympathetic to some of Russia’s arguments, is not in favor of Russia now

      I suspect the new Ukrainian patriarch, presuming he permits traditional Old Church Slavonic rites etc. will get a ton of former Russian orthodox churches who prefer not to be led by a patriarch with lots of bling and underlings who can’t do photoshop.

      Eastern Europe is strongly catholic and in general they like the current pope about as much as our hostess does, but that dislike doesn’t mean they want to change to a different sect

      1. Sort of like Americans in the US. We may not like the current resident of the White House (at all), but we don’t want to move to another country. We want to fix our country. Same with a lot of Catholics. Catholics may… disagree strongly with some of the positions that the current Pope has taken. It does not follow that members of the faith will abandon said faith just because the guy at the top of the clergy stack is being a flippin’ idiot.

          1. Much like the American disagreement with the ‘Resident- he’s not being American and pushing pro-American policies.

            The Pope… seriously, how can you be Catholic and tolerate abortion? Among many other things, but that one sticks in the craw. How?

              1. Well, to be honest they don’t like humans in general. The not liking babies is kind of a piece with being anti-human.

                A particularly loathsome and vile piece.

    9. One of the worst problems with the EU was/is Merkel’s Germany, which did a lot of evil things, including screwing over the energy sector there, resulting in Germany becoming attached to Russia’s fuel teat.

      Putin’s totalitarianism is a death cult, and its ideology, if Orthodox Christian, is not recognizably Christian by the traditional standards of the Western Church.

      Christian regimes do not accident people at the rate Putin does. Whichever patterns of murder you select to look at, they pretty clearly are not in service to any non-heretical practice of Christianity.

      You would as honestly defend as a Christian practice babies burnt on literal Moloch idols. Or sacrifices to the Roman emperor, or collaboration with the state cult of the Aztec triple alliance.

      I’m unsure if you are honestly crazy, or if there is no truth in you.

  10. Is @pyrrhus Vlad’s Mom? /joke

    Seriously though, only idiots and chickenhawks push for war… And they aren’t the ones who have to do the fighting.

    We should follow Deorge Washington’s advice to “avoid foreign entanglements”.

    1. George Washington was talking to a brand new nation clinging to the edge of a continent and he was talking about getting involved as the junior partner in conflicts between much larger and wealthier European powers.

      Now we’re the largest and wealthiest power, and the entire history of the 20th century shows us that we can’t avoid getting entangled in foreign matters. In that case, it makes sense to get involved early so that we can shape events rather than burying our head in the sand and reacting to events.

      1. Not to mention a weapons delivery environment that involved “flight times” of weeks rather than minutes.

      2. Definitely agree with the first. The small guys have to be careful about getting involved in Big Guys’ fights.

        1. Knowledge, not belief. There’s always a hegemon and we were it for the New World shortly after Washington’s day, something like the Monroe Doctrine couldn’t have been promulgated by anyone else. With today’s technology the scope of the hegemony is truly global. So the question becomes who will be the hegemon? What nation would you like to set the global order if not the US?

          1. US under Washington? Or under Puddingpants? I’d rather we, as individuals, not some nonsensical collectivist hegemon, find God and do the good He has planned specifically for us to do. We do not need to make ridiculous agreements that will inevitably lead us into meaningless wars. We did not need to legally murder 63 Million unborn after Roe v. Wade. We do not need to support dictators in foreign countries while American Veterans remain homeless…

            We may agree on a lot; but we need to take care of our own before we start demanding others follow our commands.

            1. Who is demanding others follow our commands? As the most powerful nation on the planet any major war, meaningless or otherwise, will eventually involve us. It’s in our interests to be involved globally so that we can shape events rather than simply react to them.

                1. Just a pragmatic one. If you have a problem with it, take it up with reality.

  11. For myself, in regard to the war in the Ukraine, I’m seriously puzzled at the absence of the usual “give-peace-a-chance/candle-light vigil-for-peace/war is not good for children and other living things” in the West. The rumor has always been that the peaceniks were commie fronts anyway. I guess the Russian checks bounced, and that’s why the peaceniks are staying home…

    1. Nah. The commies are in on it with Putin, I think, and it’s a grab for world domination.
      I mean, in what world are we using Putin to broker Iran while villifying him?
      The silly bs goes ALL THE WAY DOWN.

      1. We’re living in a comic book.

        Vilify Putin, but have him broker a “peace” deal with Iran?

        Start a Disinformation Governance Board to deal with foreign disinfo, but place it under the domestic law enforcement DHS. Then head it with an off the wall moonbat who still believes legitimately debunked stories?

        Throttle domestic energy production while begging foreign powers that may not like us to increase production?

        If you wrote this in a book/TV script/Movie you’d be laughed out of the office unless you pitched it as a comic book with the villain in charge.

    2. I think the initial plan was to convince Zelensky to leave the country, and hand it over to Russia. Given that, there was no need to get the peace groups ready since the war would last as long as the Georgia invasion, at most. So logistical plans for the groups weren’t implemented.

      Needless to say, that hasn’t worked out.

      Instead, Zelensky refused to leave. Then, he was able to handle popular world opinion and parley that into a wave of international support, which made the politicians decide that they needed to go overboard to support him.

      I’m also wondering if his corruption investigations turned up proof of wrongdoing. If it was suspected he might find evidence, that might explain why the White House wanted him out. And if he actually did find it – and is threatening to reveal it – that might explain why so many world leaders are tripping over themselves to “help” Ukraine. And, also, it would be in the best interests of such leaders if the peace groups stayed out of sight.

      1. That theory would explain why the only talking points they had ready were that Zelensky had been put in place by a coup that drove the Rightly Elected guy out…they didn’t expect folks to be paying enough attention to notice that the “coup” was a stinky election where the leader fled to Russia after doing some suspiciously Russian positive stuff, and then shooting protesters. Nor that there was an elected leader between then and now. Nor that this guy is in a totally different party than that guy….

    3. I think the give-peas-a-chant group suffered brain-cavity* implosion with they had to discontinue “My Body, My Choice” for the duration of covidiocy. It’s fun watching them try to bring it back, only to have to deal with the ain’t-gonna-vax arguments. With an imploded head, they’re going to go with Current Narrative.

      (*) I think the vacuum was too good for their skull bones.

    4. It occurred me to wonder if they’ll come out if Putin uses a tactical nuke…to scream at us not to Make Things Worse by retaliating.

          1. The Dayton Peace Museum had a statement back in February saying that they had believed war among modern countries was impossible, that they stood with Ukraine, that they also stood with Russian peace protesters… And then they have pretty much avoided talking about Ukraine, in favor of some kind of 1960’s Chicago exhibit, and retweeting local lefties.

  12. Gotta say, it’s very strange watching the American Left hellbent on waging a war of choice and questioning the patriotism of those who don’t want to. It would be even stranger to some of those same people, circa 2004.

  13. We simply don’t have ENOUGH young males, proportionately to have an uprising.

    –
    Maybe not, but i’m sure we can find enough pissed off old farts to make up the difference.
    ———————————
    “What’s your secret for living to a hundred?”
    100-year-old man: “Don’t die.”

      1. And as our Hun Poet Laureate Kipling noted
        “For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.” Although I would NOT relish messing with a lot of old farts from flyover land, Many of them have seen the elephant…

  14. As to “drunk on story,” there are some stories that are contradictory, yet being pushed. For example, the Dobbs decision will not outlaw a b or tion. It will return the matter to the states. Likewise, where the heck did this idea that the Republicans are against birth control come from? That’s something I wish the GOP would clarify, or at least push back on.

    I don’t see the hysteria the left were expecting on this issue, because (in my opinion), anyone young enough to conceive has been thoroughly educated on the use of contraception. Modern methods work. My children’s peers have not had any unwed mothers yet. If they were to bear children out of wedlock, there would be a line of adoptive parents waiting to adopt. That is, if their grandparents would let them go out of the family, which…they wouldn’t.

    Another contradictory story. The left has pushed policies that are killing the cities. If you don’t feel safe in the city, and can’t educate your children, you won’t choose to start your family in the cities. Their own policies are whittling down their power base.

    1. I saw a claim back in 2012 that Romney would outlaw birth control. As best as I can tell, it started with claims about Santorum (who is RC, and IIRC doesn’t use it; he’s never said anything about outlawing it, though), and just kind of mutated.

    2. 11 years ago, I thought that Harvard students walking out of a lecture in introductory economics was bizarre. I did not realize it was a preview of coming attractions: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2011/11/2/mankiw-walkout-economics-10/

      The law of supply and demand works whether or not you believe in it.

      Right now, though, we see the Democrats thinking that government price controls would control gas prices. All it will do is cut off supply.

          1. 😉

            How long does one have to sit in line?

            Hey. I earned money, ’72 – ’74, by taking neighbors vehicles down to wait in line to fill up tanks, so they wouldn’t have to. Took parents vehicles too, but the $ amount was limited … I got to borrow the car.

            Serious though. Do not want to see long lines or even/odd allotment days. As it is, we won’t get in long lines to get gas. Locally fuel is up to $4.50/gal at Costco. There are pay cash options that are slightly less. Kroger equivalent, has been running $.15 to $.20 higher.

            1. This morning in Plano Sam’s was up to $4.09. They run about 10 cents cheaper than the RaceTrac’s, etc. Diesel is about $5.49 a gallon.

          1. The Reader believes it hasn’t. Economics is 50% common sense (admittedly not all that common) and 50% BS. The BS starts when you see math. Another way to view it is that microeconomics is mostly common sense and macroeconomics is pure BS.

            1. There is a science of economics. There is, alas, also a great deal of pseudo science In economics. They would have done better to listen to Marshal and burn all the mathematics.

        2. Pshaw.
          Science allows you to isolate variables and repeat experiments under identical conditions.

          Economics is Natural Philosophy, but it is categorically not Science.

          Treating it as a science is an invitation to your model “Unexpectedly” failing, in a “Black Swan” event that was inevitable in hindsight.
          (But everybody wants to wear the robes of the Scientific Priesthood. And everybody wants to predict the future.)

          I will note the irony that Austrian School of economic thought is denounced as heterodox for denouncing scientism, but has been bang on with respect to predictions.

          1. Physical science is not all of science. None of the interesting questions can be answered using the methods of physical science, but they do keep on trying, or at least pretending, because physical science uses maths and maths are hard and so allow one to bullsh-t at will. As you say, it’s the mumbo jumbo of a godless priesthood.

            Austrian economics is a very good way to understand the world. I’m less impressed with many Austrian economists since their narrow orthodoxy is just as narrow as their opponents. They have their own mumbo jumbo.

    3. One woman who may or may not be real ran a thread on Twitter claiming “red-state legislators,” were discussing how to prevent pregnant women from leaving their states to get abortions. If she was serious and not a parody account, she needs serious help.
      The most obnoxious takes I’ve seen are: children are so expensive to raise, you can save money with abortion; and “remember, pregnancy is dangerous and your child has a tiny chance of being born defective, but abortion is MUCH safer.”
      Evil, evil, ecil.

      2. A couple of the Leftists I used to associate with on Facebook were putting up posts offering to take women on “camping” trips to abortion friendly states so they could testify they went “camping” no matter who asked.

        They were less than pleased when I reminded them that the same technology and techniques they were cheering on when it was being used to trace “MAGAts” who were even in the area of the January 6 rally by cell phone location records and gasoline purchases would show if they stopped in at an abortion clinic on their “camping trip”. “That technology will answer to any hand that can wield it. You should have remembered ‘Do not call up what you cannot put down.’ “

        1. Those same leftists no doubt denounce any criticism of the Taliban’s horrific treatment of women as “Islamophobia”.,

          1. Oh, they already have, repeatedly. It’s their ‘cultural heritage’ to treat women like cattle. Although, they don’t actually treat cows as badly as women.
            ———————————
            My grandpa voted Republican until the day he died — but he’s been voting Democrat ever since.

      3. Speaking of “evil, evil, evil,” apparently the Satanic Temple folks are trying to get abortion bans struck down on the grounds that it abortion is a sacred ritual for them.

        Yes, I know these people are atheists and don’t actually worship Satan (or at least, don’t think that they do), but that one was just a little too on the nose.

        1. Playing around with Satanism is a good way to get noticed…and I don’t mean by human beings.

        1. Opposing them making medical decisions for our kids is probably a big part, too.

          They’re really pissed off at the idea of a 12 year old not being able to start taking contraceptive hormones, the flip to trans was a pretty easy rhetoric shift.

          1. Just read an article by a guy with the handle of Cutdown Tree, destransitioned guy, and what he described as the underlying ideology of trans is pure, old-fashioned Gnosticism. The flesh is inherently evil, spirit is pure, to suffer (via transitioning) is to rise in purity, and therefore anything one does to encourage others to mortify the flesh is good and virtuous by definition.

      2. I like to point out that if taxpayers are going to fund something we have the right to demand the maximum bang for our buck. In the case of birth control there’s a method that’s nearly 100% effective (there was that one case that’s made a big splash, but the circumstances around it are disputed) and, best of all, it’s free: Abstinence. Anything else is just demanding that I subsidize your sex life. Which is fine if I’m a part of it, but really creepy if I’m not.

      3. I got into a huge discussion about this with someone on Chris Nuttall’s FB page. That one actually started with the student loan thing. Because she objected to verbiage about choosing majors that would pay for themselves. “Poor people should be able to go to college just to get an education, too, not just something that will pay.” Sure, they can do that. On their own dime. She just INSISTED that not being willing to pay for something (for someone else) was the same thing as saying that person couldn’t do it at all.

    5. Also I believe the leaked Dobbs decision explicitly calls out that its logic is unique because of balancing Life vs Life and does not apply to Griswold (Birth Control), Obergefell (same Sex Marriage), Loving Vs Virginia (Miscegenation) or Lawrence Vs Texas (homosexual practice). All of which the left are screaming are next to fall. I do not know if it calls out Brown vs Board of education 🙂 but you’d think that was in trouble too. Although the Tranzi/SJWs seem to want to put racial segregation back for “the good of the victim class(es)”.

  15. The whole narrative thing just isn’t working for the lunatics on the Left any longer! Nothing they say passes the plausibility test! Sadly though, in their Absurdiums everything is all-too real to them.

  16. As to the Russian nuclear threat, well … in a kleptocracy where the top generals are keeping the common soldiers’ pay to spend on their dachas and mistresses, and those soldiers are selling the fuel out of their tanks just to keep themselves fed and warm, what do you think is the state of the missile systems? In a world with chip shortages, do you think some circuit boards might have gone missing? How about uranium from the warheads? Gee, you just can’t trust anybody, can you?

    1. Some of their missile systems seem to work considering the damage being done in Ukraine. Also consider they were the only taxi service to the ISS until SpaceX came along with the Crew Dragon and the Cargo Dragon.

      All it takes is a handful of missiles on key cities or an EMP strike to send us back 200 years.

      So I’m not going to dismiss their capabilities when the current administration lost 80 billion dollars of arms and equipment to a bunch of hill-billy goat fkers funded by Pakistan.

      2. Yeah, I’ve seen how their munitions blow the top off of their own tanks, since they decided the best place to store spare ammo is a full circle around the exit….

        :FWOOOSH!:

        Even then, though, there’s a rather high rate of the shells landing and… not going off. One of the Iowa state farmers that lives over there was talking about it delaying planting.

        There’s a reason they had to send in their “elite” civilian slaughtering teams to make mass graves of civilians.

      3. All it takes is a handful of missiles on key cities or an EMP strike to send us back 200 years.

        Yer gonna have to spell out the logic on that one.

        1. If I remember correctly, it’s a permutation of the early 90’s calculation that was explaining “why we need to harden our systems against EMP,” and it made all the be-safe assumptions that you’d expect for that.

          In the next quarter century, there have been both improvements in design, and examination of opportunities for investigation which showed it to be a vast over-estimate.

          I’ll see if I can find it again.

              1. WHAT? How could we live without NYC, LA, DC and Chicago?
                (we’ll have to get BGE out of there, first.) And if they’re taking Denver, get my friends back.

                1. It’d take a LOT of 5 mile radius circles to take out….

                  For an idea of how many, the narrowest point across Denver I could find was 20 miles.

                    2. Yes, but you need much larger bombs than are actually in use to get 5mi destruction.

                      And the few larger warheads are too precious to waste on any target that doesn’t require the higher yield.

                    3. And, well, as I’ve noted before, LA is pretty big geographically. REALLY big.

                  2. You don’t take have to take out the cities. You take out the energy sector by targeting refineries and ports.

                    In the long run you will get a better megadeath per megaton yield by crashing the economy and letting people starve instead of frying them instantly. Fewer warheads, more bodies.

                    This is the way. The dark way.

                    1. And what makes you think that Putin would do that targeting, instead of a counter population strike?

                      The polonium and nerve agent murders speak of someone who has folks killed for emotional effect.

                    2. Except for the tiiiiiiny little problem that the five mile radius is for any effect, including “just need to restart it,” and you are not going to crash the economy with a dozen five mile radius “same effect as a nasty storm.”

                    3. Oh, and there’s that tiny little side-effect that doing this would get a bunch of incoming nukes shoved down your throat.

                    5. Have you met our enemies, sir?
                      Sure, that’s what YOU’D do.
                      What they’ll do is go for biggest casualties.
                      Also, those goalposts are moving at relativistic speed now.

                2. Thank you, I suppose life in the provinces would be better than death. I suppose, a bit?

                  Chicago seems to becoming the new Detroit so they’d do more damage leaving it alone. Death would be an improvement over living in LA and the only thing holding me back from nuking DC myself is the fear that a few honest hookers and other servants would get caught up in It. They don’t deserve that, Oh, and the fact that I’m fresh out of nukes, I lost them in a boating accident,

                    1. Speak for yourself. I am an excellent Sailor.

                      Oh, you meant something else. Not all of us can be proper seamen.

                3. The cities themselves we could likely live without although the losses of the people would be horrific (see estimates for 30 warhead strike in a previous comment). However we already have distribution issues with the rail and highway system as it is. Take out major rail yards like Chicago, NYC etc and rail traffic gets to be a major issue. Bulk items (grain, flour, sugar, general manufacturing items like acids and other starter chemicals) move primarily by rail (except where we have working waterways, or pipelines). Take out the ports (Baltimore LA NYC and ruin the St Lawrence seaway etc) and water transport and incoming materials start to get scarce and we depend GREATLY on incoming raw and manufactured materials. Similarly the Federal Highway system flows through major cities. You dont just wipe out the city with nuke. If it is a ground burst much of the area around it becomes impassible due 100 rem/hr radiation band that easily 100 KM long. If the wind was from the south you just cut off most access to New England as I 95 goes through the city and I 90 crosses the Hudson maybe 50 km upstream There are other roads, but bridges across the Hudson and the Connecticut are limited.. At 200 strikes you’re well into little tiny cities and minor military targets. Not back 200 years, but the crap from Last Centurion is well and truly on and some areas are going to starve plain and simple. Probably back to early 20th/late 19th century tech after a couple weeks where things hold together (middle of the country likely, maybe rural areas in populated states if the wind favors them). LA is dead (water), Coastal NE is dead (heavy fallout, dependence on delivered food and materials) Coastal VA/MD/Delaware) likely dead (lots of military targets heavy dependence on outside food and materials),eastern NJ/ PENN dead. Somewhere between 10 and 50 years to get back late 20th century tech and we’re a third world crap hole even at that. Actually today is probably far worse than 1950-1960s. We had more manufacturing, more rail lines remained in place, more local food production. We’ve gone to the big factory model on everything and everything needs to get shipped around to do things. Coming out we’d be able to buy from others, but we’d probably have to offer up raw materials like oil and even that takes lots of tech to do as we used much of the easy to get stuff in the 20th century.

            2. If you have a few dozen missiles with MIRVs, what does the most damage long term? Taking out the population directly or making sure they starve? Sit down and talk to a few experienced supply chain experts and you could pinpoint the most optimal targets so you get the best bang for your buck.

              Be the evil genius characters that you write. Spend some time and role play destroying a country with the least of amount effort. Apply it to different countries. How about China? The Three Gorges Dam looks like a juicy target…

              Just hitting the major oil refineries alone would seriously destroy transportation and mass agriculture along with plastic production, etc… Add in a handful of critical ports, rail junctions and places like Cushing, Oklahoma and you could cripple the US to the point it would take a few generations to rebuild.

              Even if you don’t take out all the refineries, taking out a significant percentage will cause enough damage there will be mass die off due to starvation, exposure, civil unrest, etc…

              You can see the damage already being done just through inflation and supply chain issues that the current administration is intentionally making worse. Imagine another 2 to 8 years of the current idiots in charge. Imagine no fuel for trucks and tractors. No food. No medicine. No power.

              So you don’t need 6000 warheads, that’s overkill. You could probably fk the US up with several dozen. And that’s without seeing if an EMP attack works or not.

              1. Ok so we are definitely talking Mad Dictator Mode then. Because nothing in your post is part of a normal targeting list. Which isn’t surprising: anyone who starts their impression of targeting with “cities” doesn’t know anything about nuclear war.

                You seem to be assuming that after a strike everyone tries to carry on under the same rules as before as if nothing happened. That absolutely no one will take an attitude of “fuck the regulations, this is an emergency”.

                Also rail yards are nightmarish to take out.

                1. Also rail yards are nightmarish to take out.

                  And with nukes, oil refineries are an easy soft target that is hard to replace and has great downstream economic damage to the target nation. The energy sector is the greatest “soft underbelly” of the nation.

                  I know the targeting priorities in a all-out nuclear exchange. Just pointing out that the US could be economically crippled and mostly depopulated by just targeting a single industry with a smaller number of missiles. Without attacking the military and leadership.

                  The point being is that you don’t have to kill everybody out right with MAD, economic damage will take the majority out. And you may not need ICBMs, just do some research, have some mad funds and hire some skilled mercenaries that won’t sell out. Think 9/11 on steroids.

                  1. And you can only get that with Mad Dictator Mode. Because not targeting your opponent’s nuclear forces means they have their entire arsenal to take you apart with.

                    1. Ian the issue is much of the Russian missile fleet is NOT usable for effective counter force. The missiles in the SSBNs certainly aren’t. The new quieter Russian SSBN mostly aren’t in service yet and you can bet the first thing to go out on the ELF after a strike aimed at the US is an order to sink the boomers who likely have tails if they’re even out of port. The land missiles Mostly have CEP in the HUNDREDS of meters. You won’t get many silos with that, and you still haven’t dealt with the 10 Ohio SSBN or the US bomber force. You can hit Bremerton and Norfolk, but at most you’ll get one Ohio in each port, and likely its in for long term repair/service. We still have Some ready bombers, but you can get some of those, although if tensions are high they will have been disbursed and more will be on ready status. You can tell the Mad Bomber strategy is the ex soviet/Russian Strategy. Dead Hand, Poseidon (a 100 MT slow torpedo) and their resurrected version of our old Pluto Nuclear Ramjet show they want to make sure they get the last licks in. That’s NOT a precision strike strategy. Tactical weapons are another issue. They kept lots where we decided they were far less useful, especially after we thought the USSR coming through the Fulda gap had gone away. We’d be MUCH more circumspect in response to say a 50kt strike on Mariupol. We’s be unlikely to go for a first strike if it was a response to NON Nato country. Hit Britain or France and I suspect we’d say have at em boys while quietly putting any Russian boomers at the bottom of the sea. If they hit Poland or Germany or other non nuclear Nato allies response gets fuzzy. I’m certain someones gamed this out, but I suspect that gaming is pretty meaningless, and mostly ends up in some variant of an all out exchange nd we’re in the hands of St Liebowitz…

                  3. Ah yes, I remember the hordes of starving Americans post-9/11.

                    What your analysis ignores is the fact that boot-strapping is not only possible, it’s rather easy. The wreckage of an oil refinery contains all the materials you need to build a field expedient refinery. It won’t have the capacity or the quality of the old refinery, but it will do well enough to keep the system running while a rush-job refinery is built, which will have more capacity and higher quality, which will allow the building of a cheap refinery, which will allow the rebuilding of the old refinery. Recovery will be measured in years, not centuries.

                    1. From the Market-Ticker: https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=245855

                      You immediately will have no semi-conductor anything, zero lithium batteries for anything at all from electric cars to cellphones, 75% or better of the pharmaceuticals in common use will disappear instantly, finding tires will be nearly impossible, automotive and machine parts, specifically wear parts such as bearings will all become unobtanium and more. Even something as simple as a circuit breaker for your house will not be able to be sourced. ALL of the large transformers used to distribute electrical power in the United States, never mind nearly all of the switchgear, are made overseas in whole or part and thus if they fail, whether due to natural or man-made cause they cannot be replaced in such an event either. Within a few months spares for critical parts that are considered wear items and thus must be replaced on a schedule will run out in our energy generation and distribution system and failures will begin to occur with impact from local areas to entire regions.

              2. Have you read ‘The Weapon’ by John Ringo?

                He started with 200 saboteurs, lost a couple dozen during the insertion phase, and the survivors wrecked most of the planet. They only used a few very small nukes.

                1. Oh, it is no John Ringo.

                  Michael Williamson. It was one of his Freehold books.

                3. It helps having god on your side.

                  In other words, those acts took place on a world specifically created by the author to tell that particular story. Assuming that they’d map to our world is foolish.

              3. Sure. With several dozen.
                Do you believe Russia has several dozen? Let alone several dozen that will fly. WHY? They didn’t at the height of the cold war. Sure, they SAID they did.
                And they’re markedly poorer and even more kakistokratic now.
                Try again. This time reasoning through.

          2. I have a recollection of a test about a decade or so ago (Insty had a link, of course; Insty has links to everything!) to evaluate the effects of an EMP on a US city. IIRC, while there was a noted short-term effect, the study found that the majority of devices (including vehicles) would be able to start back up again after the EMP detonation.

          1. …especially if DC was one of the cities, and both FICUS and Congress were there at the time.

    2. Keep in mind that systemic problems require “A” system. The Russian nuclear forces are not in the same budget as the army. That doesn’t mean they are not being pilfered just as badly, but it also doesn’t mean they are. The nuclear threat is all that keeps Russia from being a third-world power. Someone is probably paying attention.

  17. I saw the headline and thought, “That explains why I’ve been writing so much so fast.” Then I started the article. cue Church Lady voice NnnnnEEEEEvermind. end Church Lady voice

  18. I’ve been thinking about the breaking point of the wave. Everything is falling apart for the left now. They’re losing their control on the handles of information. Putin is going to have to go under the knife for cancer and the chances of him coming out of surgery are dicey. Roe V Wade is going to be overturned and the left is showing it’s demonic child-sacrificing face for all Americans to see. Xi is evidently sick, and who’s seen Kim Jong Il lately? George Soros is melting into a Jabba the hut pile of goo. Bill Clinton looks like the Crypt Keeper. The masks are gone, the virus has burned out, and De Santis is turning Florida into a laboratory of freedom.

    I’ll give you my take. It was when the father was protesting the rape of his teenage daughter in a school bathroom by a boy wearing a skirt. When the police handcuffed him and dragged him from the meeting. That was the day the wave broke. June 22, 2021.

    1. Yeah. I think that’s the day. Awful lot of people had their WTF moment right there,

    2. Pregnant people. And all the other euphemisms for woman.

      The cancellation of women was my WTF moment.

    1. On the one hand, I’m glad to see the shelves are full. The Russian Far East is not a place to be when the supplies get low. The people living there need that.

      On the other hand, they had more stuff on the shelf there than we do at my local supermarket. I’m not complaining about them having plenty. But I am pissed off at the incompetency that keeps our own shelves from partly empty.

  20. Thing about winning a nuclear war with Russia, now?

    If it were in the cards, it would be a practical first step for settling our outstanding business with IRan, PRC, North Korea, etc.

    It is not in the cards.

    If we were at war with Russia, and had a pressing /need/ to wage war effectively against the Russians, step one is Democrats willingly resigning for the good of the nation, or Americans shooting a bunch of Democrats.

    Democrat failure to resign is among the most significant bits of evidence that, in fact, they are not committed to war against Russia. If Democrats in Congress and Senate were serious about the war, but unable to convince Biden, Harris, Pelosi, Schiff, STeyer, Schmaur, etc, to resign, they would be telling us that they would not object if the refusers were shot. If someone is /not/ saying that Biden needs to die, they are not primarily motivated by fighting and winning a war with Russia. As such, we have zero obligation to respect the ‘sincerity’ of Democrat calls to war.

    Biden is credibly senile, and may be senile. Everywhere you look, you do not see the unity of policy that you would expect from a mentally competent president, that you would want in a president when we are waging a war to win. Add in Afghanistan withdrawal, and there is zero grounds to expect a favorable outcome from a war while Biden is in office. Or kneepads Harris, who seems to lack even the wit and political skill of Professor Edith Biden.

  21. According to Steny Hoyer, Republicans must stop criticizing Biden and Democrats “because we are at war”. As I noted when Russia first invaded Ukraine after Biden’s “invitation” via has “small incursion” statement, it is clear that Democrats want a war with Russia so it can be used as a pretext to silence and eliminate all domestic political opposition and to impose their full “fundamental transformation of America” by decree,

    1. I saw that. Aside from his near Germanic grammar (which does not work in English, Rep. Hoyer), the assertion that we are at war boggled me. OK, the White House is at war, although with whom I wonder (The VPotUS? The Senate? Florida?), but I was not aware that the Congress had passed a Declaration of War, nor that the War Powers Act had been invoked.

      1. No Declaration of War and No Asking Congress for Permission to take military Action.

        The Second was submitted by both Bush Administrations (in place of Declaration Of War).

        1. But the Second would commit Biden* to actually do something beside Talking.

    2. “Shut up” they explain… so they can do whatever damn fool thing they wish.
      AND then when it comes crashing down the same bunch of useless wastes of $ELEMENT will say, “Well, YOU didn’t raise any objection to warn of problems…”

      Suggestion: ANYONE with a “SHUT UP, I explain” gets Groucho Marx “Pop Goes the Weasel” treatment as described in Duck Soup.

    3. Steny Hoyer has been an idiot for decades. His only “good” points (for values of “good”) are that he’s both more intelligent and more photogenic than Maxine Waters.

      And what the Dems want is not what they’re likely to get, more so every day.

  22. No. I know there’s half a dozen of you. Stop it. Just stop it. KGB trained dictator is not defender of anything, except himself.

    There is a difference between supporting Putin and saying you don’t think current Russian expansionism is unexpected, a danger on any reasonable timeline to us, or worth American lives to be sacrificed by the government to stop it (free citizens who wish to travel and fight for either side are welcome to do so, but not to demand my nephews be conscripted for their fight).

    And yes, Russia will gobble up ring by ring until someone stops them…like Germany and Austrian have and the Ottoman Turks and Swedes did before there was a United States.

      1. Bingo, but early on that, combined with trying to point out adding nations abutting Russia to NATO or the EU was going to cause problems (maybe not war now, but problems) regardless of who led Russia, at least of the realistic possibilities (see the paranoia you mentioned) got you called a Putin apologist, even by a few around here (which is why I didn’t say much).

        Then again, I think it was the EU, being a German led ’empire’ that worried them more than NATO, I just think Russia doesn’t see the difference between the two (and not without reason if you put on those, well not rose colored, glasses (what color are paranoia glasses?). After NATO rearmed West Germany which is the real source of government after reunification and NATO is hovering up all the territory between the two (odd fact, if you’re watching WW2 in Realtime which is covering 1943 right now, a lot of the fighting they report on is on the current Russian-Ukraine front lines…Ecclesiastes 1 proven right again).

        1. My issue, honestly? Is the people who come over and write hagiographies of Putin. And the person who quit because we wouldn’t buy the hagiography

        2. Thing is, if the Russians are operating on crazy people logic, then there may have been no alternative course of policy in which they do not invade.

          There is the price of crude/natural gas argument, and there is Biden weakness argument. Both models might predict war now, regardless of any choices or communications made wrt EU or NATO membership.

          I am a NATO skeptic.

          Merkel’s Germany was pretty clearly a hostile power, and I am not comfortable with the way NATO complicated recognizing that.

          1. Well, Putin didn’t attack while Trump was in office. I suspect he’s random enough to throw the Russians, who are planners (the plans working or not not withstanding) so that’s one strategy.

            But, yes, Putin wanted war somewhere. The long term plan was to replace them and agree for Ukraine and the Baltics to be a kind of DMZ. Then hope it lasts the several generations it would take to tamp down the paranoia.

        3. I just think Russia doesn’t see the difference between the two

          They can’t even tell the difference between Musk and NATO.

          And from their perspective……… well what is anyone but a deniable organ of the state?

        4. “…and NATO is hovering up all the territory between the two…”

          This confuses the subject and the object. NATO didn’t hoover up eastern Europe, it was the nations of eastern Europe that asked to join the alliance against Muscovy. Because they had been the victims of Muscovy and didn’t want to be in that situation ever again.

          1. Fine…NATO is accepting memberships up to the Russia border which Russia views as an encroachment into its legitimate sphere of influence (and by definitions since the Treaty of Westphalia established the modern system of nation states they are correct on that).

            Even if you deny Russia’s claims about sphere of influence giving membership to a nation bordering Russia out of fear Russia will invade it is a tacit admission of willingness to go to war with Russia.

            1. The concept of sovereign nation states and spheres of influence are contradictory. Ukraine is either a sovereign nation or it’s a Muscovy vassal. The Ukrainians aren’t interested in being a vassal of Moscow, much to Putin’s chagrin.

              Of course we’re willing to go to war with Muscovy, but that’s a far cry from wanting to start a war. And it’s hardly a new position for us, perhaps you’ve heard of a little thing called the Cold War?

              I’m sure there will come a time when NATO won’t be necessary, but that won’t be for decades after Moscow stops acting like it owns everything east of the Oder (East Asia still doesn’t trust Japan after WWII. They’ll accept the JMSDF’s “helicopter destroyers” because they trust China even less, but they’re still nervous). And that clock still hasn’t started ticking.

    2. Skepticism about the utility of intervention is reasonable.

      I dislike Russia, but then I also dislike Canada and New Zealand.

      Even I have to admit that we have quite a few idiots playing silly games and having imperial ambitions, and that these idiots are substantially dangerous to the American people. I am not sure if the danger is greater or lesser than any possible foreign threat, but it is definitely at least comparable to some foreign threats.

      The welfare of other populations of the world should not be our first priority. However, one of the better things that we could do for the welfare of other populations, is grabbing our idiots, and preventing them from creating such messes.

      1. I’d rather invade Canada to liberate my fellow North Americans from their dictator than Ukraine from the Russia one.

        1. Can’t make people cast off chains that they choose for themselves.

          I’m not entirely sure that the Canadian cultural situation is that much better than the Russian cultural situation.

          All my nattering about foreign policy is pointless, as step one of any viable American foreign policy is getting the Democrats out, and I don’t understand the doing of that.

    3. Free citizens may travel and fight, but if they do they are no longer citizens. If America lets such a person return, we have committed an act of war against those they were fighting. (see the Spanish civil war.)

      2. What about the Flying Tigers or Americans who flew for the RFC and then the RAF in the two world wars?

        1. The Flying Tigers required a bill being passed by Congress; I’m not sure about the others.

          1. The bill had to be passed before they could be put into the AAC as part of 14th(?) Air Force. Basically it restored citizenship.

            1. I think you confused what the Flying Tigers asked before they headed out (“will this hurt my citizenship?”) vs what the bill was– that retroactively made them US military veterans.

              More at the link, but the relevant chunk here:

              https://warbirdforum.com/legal.htm
              II. Legal Analysis
              The concern over loss of citizenship held by some of the Flying Tigers proved groundless. Under the Nationality Act of 1940 the grounds for loss of citizenship included joining a foreign military force (1) if the foreign nation was at war with the United States or (2) if the individual became a commissioned or non-commissioned officer in the foreign army. By the time the Flying Tigers got into action the U.S. was in a declared war with Japan, and China was an ally. As noted above, none of the Flying Tigers actually became a member of a foreign army. Years later the Supreme Court would hold under a later version of the Nationality Act that in addition to running afoul of specific provisions of the Act citizenship was not lost unless the individual intended by performing the proscribed act to abandon his citizenship. Under the Laws of War lawful combatants are privileged to engage in combat. Their acts, conducted in accordance with those laws, are not crimes in either their own country or that of an adversary. A lawful combatant who is captured is entitled to become prisoner of war. He may not be tried by the capturing force and is entitled to certain humane standards of treatment. On the contrary those who “take up arms” unlawfully and commit acts of violence are subject to criminal prosecution and, if captured, are not entitled to prisoner of war status.
              Lawful combatants include members of national armies. “The laws, rights and duties of war apply_also to militia and volunteer corps, fulfilling” certain conditions. It appears fairly clear that the Flying Tigers were neither members of the Chinese army (air force) nor the American armed forces. If they were eligible to be considered lawful combatants they would have to meet the criteria applicable to “volunteer corps.” There are four applicable conditions. Arguably, the Flying Tigers met three of these: have a fixed and distinctive emblem; carry arms openly; and, conduct operations in accordance with the laws of war.

    4. Democrats are deliberately ignoring that distinction because they want to be able to use anything that anyone has ever said about Russia that does not reflect the current Democratic Party line as being proof of treason entitling the full force of the federal government and its oligarch arm to crush the thought criminal It is intended as a domestic political weapon, not a coherent or intelligent foreign policy.

      Even though it has been demonstrably disproved, the Democrats are committed to the “Trump is a traitor in service to Putin” narrative and that anyone who supports Trump is likewise a Russian tool and traitor.

      1. Foreign policy is a null expression to them. They can only see other countries as clubs to beat their domestic political enemies with. EVERYTHING is about beating up their domestic political enemies. Nothing else is real.

        Everybody not 100% with them is an Eeevul Kulak enemy, to be sent to the Gulag.
        ———————————
        ‘Progressives’ suppress free speech because they don’t have the means to suppress free thought.

        Yet.

    1. Yes, because as we all know, what demographers study is the rare, exceptional individual. That makes all the difference.
      Are you incapable of understanding things, or were you rendered thus by education?
      Sure. There are feisty elder men. More so in an age when men worked at physical jobs.
      However, what determines if a POPULATION tips into violence is the number of MILITARY AGE men, which is usually in our day 18 to 40. I’d guess in the past 18 to 30.
      Older people are prone to thinking before they leap.
      Kindly do me the favor of checking the age of suicide bombers. It’s not elderly men.
      PFUI. Specious and trivial.
      Try reasoning.

      1. Aggression is a young man’s game. Almost all violent crime (e.g.,) is committed by young men and 6% of all males commit between one-half and two-thirds of all violent crimes. Studies supporting this finding have been conducted in jurisdictions as far-flung as Denmark; New Zealand; Philadelphia; Racine, Wisconsin; and Orange County, California.

        All that said, we have a lot of young men in America, what we don’t have is a concentration of young men. I’m afraid, dear hostess, that I don’t entirely agree with your position.

          1. OK. I agree that the proportion of young men is lower than it was during the baby boom (e.g.,) though the absolute number of young men is higher. Still, both the number and proportion are higher than they were a decade ago, which is one of the reasons for the societal issues and uptick in violent crime we’re having today. Bad governance doesn’t help, but we’d be having a surge in violent crime whomever ruled.

            the only thing that worries me is the number of over educated, under employed young people. It reminds me of the surplus of provincial lawyers with poor prospects that came to prominence during the French Revolution and the similar group in Russia under the Tsars, On the other hand, they seem to be entirely opposed to working class aspirations, so their finding foot soldiers and sergeants is problematic.

  24. A dozen of us?

    Well I’m #13 then. I’m Team Putin on this one. Ukraine is a corrupt dumpster fire used by the ruling class to launder money. If Putin wipes that out I won’t complain one bit.

    2. I’d also like to point out: There it is, the stupidest thing I’ve read all year. POSSIBLY the stupidest thing I’ll read all year.
      Well done. I expected the left to take that prize.
      Unless of course, you are the left.

      1. It’s up there, but I’m afraid I have to leave room at the top for some of the utterances of the Biden* Regime and its spokesdemons.

          1. When it comes to economics in particular, the stupid lies and attempts to divert blame, and stupid yet coherent utterances, have been pretty darn stupid. Raise taxes to fight inflation, inflation is all Putin’s fault, high gas prices are Putin’s fault, etc.

            1. “Raise taxes to fight inflation”

              That one almost makes sense if you squint: the government put the money in, so the government can take it back out….. Which might work if they were burning it / zeroing it, but they aren’t. Instead, they’re saying “Look at all this money we have…. Let’s spend it!!!!”

              1. “Look at all this money we have…. Let’s spend it!!!!”

                Hmm. Gee. Sounds like they have not figured out that if you put everything on a credit card, that the money in your bank account, or under your mattress (wherever you’ve stored it), is not an unencumbered bonus that can be spent. Then wonder why they have their shiny new car repossessed, or apartment, or mortgage. All one of the same. Inability to manage money within their means.

                At least our state government is required to balance their budget off anticipated revenues, cannot borrow any shortfall, requiring cuts in budget if there is, then refund excess received. Latter does happen frequently. Mumbles are often heard from PTB that they cannot spend excess on favored whatever. Luckily they have to go to a general vote, not a legislative process to change it. Not even Portland metro, etc., are that stupid yet.

    3. What, so Putin and Xi are the only foreign actors with their nasty hands up our politicians’ nethers? O_o

    4. So, are you saying that the death of Magnitsky, and various aftermaths, in your mind, indicate that the Russian government is completely honest with regard to financial dealings?

    5. Ukraine is a corrupt dumpster fire used by the ruling class to launder money.

      — which then made effective efforts to stop the corruption, which pissed of Pootie and ‘the big guy,’ who thought he’d be able to sit back and finger-shake while oh, dearie me, that investigation about corruption for the prior Ukrainian administration got interrupted.

      One of the “tells” on this is how the folks screaming Ukraine is horrible keep talking about their mob boss.

      And yeah, one of the really big, nasty, head of multi-national organized crime guys IS Ukranian. Born near Kiev, I think.

      He lives, openly, in Moscow.

      Has for years.

      See, once Ukraine wasn’t owned by Russia, they actually started cleaning up some of that organized crime stuff….

    7. There’s a concept in equity law called “clean hands.” To give an example, if you come to claim a contract is unfair, you have to be in compliance with that contract, in escrow,perhaps, but in compliance. You have to have clean hands. No one will deny that there was and is corruption in Ukraine but Russia has unclean hands themselves. Putin and his oligarchs are THE most corrupt group on Earth, and that’s saying something on a planet that contains China.

      Given the choice between two corrupt systems,one would tend to favor the party that was attacked not the attacker. Add to that that the current government was attempting to cut the corruption and the choice becomes simple. Add to that that weakening Russia is good real politik and the choice becomes even simpler.

  25. Fellow dudebros,
    The lying thieving bastards in the US congress passed the Magnitsky Act, because they felt confident in persuading various people that Putin was a murderous thieving crook, even by their own standards.

     If Big Jake is being square with us, this suggests he thinks that congress should have just nuked Russia instead.  

 What say yee?  Should America have nuked Russia, in place of congress passing the Magnitsky Act?

  26. On nukes. First American nukes were built by low bid (or bribed) contract to government specs.
    Russian nukes were built by the children and grand children of people who used the 2nd worse farming techniques all under the threat of line extinction for failure.
    There was never a nuclear war as no one involved believed they would work.

    1. I’ll point out Russians have a BIZARRE relationship with tech, anyway. Culturally. Kind of like Chinese have a weird relationship with “science.”

    2. “LOWEST BIDDARRR!!!!!one!”

      nope, not often.

      explain the F-35. it was not the lowest bid at all, they just had a very detailed after-the-sale plan that Boing didnt.

  27. Second, to back up first, I had a friend who had the job of observing nuke tests.
    The tests were not done o randomly selected warheads pulled from the field. They were done o specially built ones made for the testing and often filled a truck trailer.
    Half failed to fire. Most fell short of expected yield.
    Imagine using ones that have been sitting in a silo for years.

  28. Third, in researching a story I found that most people in the US do not live close to major cities. A spasm attack that hit the major cities might dust the country but radiation is not the killer people thought. Increase of cancer down the road but immediately not much.
    Even the loss of ports is short lived. There is a lot of coastline and a lot of places to build ports.
    No cities full of environme talists to stop it either.

    1. There’s the upside! Removing the leftist city-dwellers. Too bad about the non- leftist cityfolk who get caught in the attack.

    2. Most people do not live close to major cities and ports and the loss of ports is short lived. Do they ARE making it seem worse than it is..

      Very encouraging.

      Thank you.

  29. I think our opposition on the Left is getting desperate. Many of them are getting up there in age, and if they want to have any enjoyment of the world they conquer, they have to be getting it under control pretty damned quick.

    And, they haven’t made the unleavened proles scrape and bow to them. Much fun, not.

      1. They don’t even have that “lovely” aspect of the classic nobility that they were at least somewhat competent artisanal mass-murdering bastards. Now, they’re all just dull, grey men that send off the kulaks to the gas chamber and the mass grave with the same elan and style as ordering a boxcar load of potatoes.

  30. No one is buying any of this clusterboink – not even the Left. They just want to hate us. They hate us even more than they hate the Russians, simply because they were given permission. They whole lie is nothing more than a death-support system for hate.

  31. “ Not fully putting it past these geniuses, but keep in mind it’s demographics. We simply don’t have ENOUGH young males, proportionately to have an uprising.”

    And the young males we do have, like the African refugees in the Ukraine, will say “I don’t know why they expected us to fight, we aren’t American, we are (insert ethnicity).”

      1. Iowa definitely has a good supply of very American young men.

        Of course, I notice that the slightly older young men also tend to be married with kids, too, which Everybody Knows doesn’t happen.

        1. I went to an air show, yesterday. I was very surprised by the number of families. Perhaps it was event Selection Bias, but I don’t recall seeing that many families at any event I went to in twenty years of living in Denver. I am so glad I’ve left.

  32. Here in flyoverland it seems like a bunch of ignore the federal government or even make a counter law is the current mode. The left started this with their sanctuary cities. And the right is just using the new rules. I used to expect a violent National divorce but now I think, seeing how the mask 😷 behavior works, we will just have organic federalism county by county, until Federalism is the new normal.

    I do worry about the Democrats using nooks, possibly even on flyoverland if people don’t ‘respect their authority’ like they want. Democrats don’t have a good grasp of consequences, it’s why they are democrats.

    They see symbols (guns, diplomas, name plates on doors, public offices, houses, high respect jobs) as magical things that give power. Not virtues (persistence, patience, hard work, creation, gifts of service) that make people want to trust power to others voluntarily.

    Biden is trying to be Trump. He and his handlers do not understand the finesse of the saber rattling that Trump did to get misbehaving leaders in line.

    A disturbing thing I realized lately is that if someone on the left says they have a weapon, they want to use that weapon to show their power. If someone on the right says I have a weapon, they want someone to back off or leave them alone. It’s one of those almost impossible to translate things across left-right thought patterns.

    Things are going pretty well as long as nooks aren’t used, and effective nooks aren’t worth worrying about, and fizzled nooks are why I’m extra supplementing my iodine. 😉

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