Teslag said:
Spin it however you want. It's your reach.
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He also comments that "there are some people in Washington making a lot of money on this war at the expense of the 30,000+ American soldiers who have been killed or injured on the frontlines.
Teslag said:
From your own link…Quote:
He also comments that "there are some people in Washington making a lot of money on this war at the expense of the 30,000+ American soldiers who have been killed or injured on the frontlines.
Jesus. I think we are done here.
You seem to have noted that a half dozen or more times, yet it's interesting that is pretty close to the daily valuation of US $$ vaporized daily in Ukraine. So, perhaps a break even day.Teslag said:
The Russians fielding a $250 million anti arty weapon only to have it immediately blown up by American HIMARS is the most Russian thing ever.
Way to keep spiking the ball in the end zone there for your 'team.'Quote:
The $113 billion of aid approved by Congress averaged over the 583 days of war between February 24, 2022, and September 30, 2023, comes out to $223 million per day or $6.8 billion per month. Military aid to Ukraine has averaged $86 million per day or $2.7 billion per month.
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"River of Death" The Washington Post writes about the losses of the Ukrainian Armed Forces while holding a bridgehead in Krynki, Kherson region.
"They threw it like a piece of meat to the wolves," Ukrainian marine Dmitry describes his mission. "We're taking a lot of casualties. We're just losing people and there's no result," another Marine said.
Infantrymen spoke of wounded soldiers drowning, unable to swim due to their injuries, or being dragged to the bottom of the river by their heavy backpacks, the newspaper writes.
"The crossing was so dangerous that the bodies of several Marines who died during the first wave that crossed the river two months ago remained here," WP writes, according to the Marines. Also, according to them, many of those who control the boats that the Russians are targeting are dying.
Of the group of 45 people who were thrown onto the eastern bank, five died and another 20 were injured, Dmitry said.
The publication writes that Ukraine did not liberate a single settlement during the operation in Krynki.
"With the counteroffensive stalled, Ukrainian military and political leaders were eager to demonstrate to their Western backers some progressany progress," the publication explained the rationale for holding a bridgehead.
Just send everything to Ukraine to erase Russian launch pads, Russian military bases, and Russian infrastructure. Before Russia starts launching North Korean nukes against Nato targets.
— Sergej Sumlenny, LL.M (@sumlenny) January 4, 2024
Well, at least now he's admitting that the Russians are targeting Ukrainian civilians.Teslag said:PlaneCrashGuy said:Teslag said:PlaneCrashGuy said:
That conscription video is tough to watch and really highlights the importance of the 2nd Amendment.
The 2nd amendment is that one written to arm the populace from a foreign invasion right?
If only our founders had the goodi sense to immediately surrender and save lives because fighting back would be wrong.
You were less annoying when you couldn't stop laughing at the slaughter of Ukrainian civilians. (yesterday)
I thought it was a flying ammo dump?
But wait! There's more!PlaneCrashGuy said:
Oh my god it keeps getting better
"American Blood" is a song by Texan Red Dirt band Reckless Kelly, for their fifth 2008 studio album, Bulletproof. It is "an anti-war anthem"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Blood
Damn that Biden for forcing Putin to invade when he really really didn't want to...Teslag said:
War is hell. Every single one of those Ukrainians would be alive today if Putin had not chose to invade a sovereign nation.
They're also aiding the PAC-3s by giving them live flight test data.nortex97 said:Just send everything to Ukraine to erase Russian launch pads, Russian military bases, and Russian infrastructure. Before Russia starts launching North Korean nukes against Nato targets.
— Sergej Sumlenny, LL.M (@sumlenny) January 4, 2024
WaPo confirms this war is aiding North Korean ballistic missile programs by testing them vs. Patriots etc. These are just being used as terror weapons, yes, but the NoKo's of course want to be able to use other missiles as threats, with nuclear weapons, against CONUS.
Take away: the Biden proxy-war continues to undermine American strategic capabilities/interests.
Russia is likely preparing for a large-scale offensive near Kharkov in the coming weeks , - The Telegraph
— Olga Bazova (@OlgaBazova) January 5, 2024
▪️Yesterday, the Russian Armed Forces shelled the city and 15 surrounding settlements, which fits into preparations for a large-scale offensive in the coming weeks, a… pic.twitter.com/CNzzRbu088
The Russians could shut down the Ukrainian beachhead on the Dniper in an afternoon, but why would they? They've convinced the idiots in charge of the AFU to feed an entire division into a deathtrap a platoon at a time. Maybe they'll send more! https://t.co/yjtWWWtwsa
— Armchair Warlord (@ArmchairW) January 5, 2024
The Russians pay half the amount for a 152mm shell compared to what the Germans pay for a 30mm ammo.
— Patricia Marins (@pati_marins64) January 5, 2024
A while back, I wrote a post about Rheinmetall selling their Caracal 4x4 to the German government for over $600,000. Recently, I've been looking into the variations in ammunition… pic.twitter.com/LpkCSjklG6
A good discussion (starts about halfway in) about various Ukrainian dissidents/views of Ukrainian nationalism alternatively vs. the totalitarian Zelensky 'servant of the people' war party;Quote:
Meanwhile, the Ukrainian military is discussing that at the end of the second year of the war, the Russian army is better armed and equipped than the Ukrainian one. This was stated by the battalion commander of the third assault brigade (one of the main strike forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine) Rollo.
This is how he answered the question of what the average Russian military equipment is and "how much worse it is than ours."
"The Russian army is no worse than the Ukrainian one, even better. Technologically better equipped, more equipment, better weapons, better equipment than the Ukrainian one. What makes you think they're worse? This is even some kind of humiliation that turns out to be ours. Like, "**** you're fighting the law and there's nothing you can do?". But because they are stronger - this is objective, " Rollo said.
According to him, the Russians not only have better equipment, but also state programs for equipping and providing the army.
"Don't underestimate the opponent, this is a very serious opponent. More serious than most armies in the world. Treating them like dol***bam and lo*am, that's what we do, dol***oby and lo*i, if we do that," Rollo added.
Other commanders advised turning off the telethon at home, which promotes the idea that the Russian army is weak.
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The first of these habits of thought may as well be called the Orc Fallacy. Orcs? Those are the foot soldiers of the Dark Lord Sauron in Tolkien's trilogy. They're bad. They're so bad they're a caricature of badness. Not only that, they don't even pretend to believe in the rightness of their own cause; they know they're on the wrong side, and glory in it. In Tolkien's world, no orc anywhere ever had a generous thought or did a kindly action. The closest they get to loyalty is a kind of malicious team spirit, coupled with stark terror of what their bosses will do to them if they don't follow orders. The closest they get to courage is bloodlust coupled with a clear sense of what everyone else in Middle-earth will do to them given half a chance. When they're winning, they swagger; when they're losing, they panic and run. For all their apparent strength, in other words, they're lousy soldiers, and their main function in the trilogy consists of showing up in vast numbers and then being slaughtered en masse by their outnumbered enemies.
As a literary device this sort of gimmick has its problems. As a basic assumption about reality, shaping the way that liberal politicians and bureacrats in the Western world think about the people they hate, it has much greater problems. There are plenty of examples, but the one that comes first to mind just at the moment is the fate of last summer's Ukrainian counteroffensive.
It's a long piece, but explains some of the blisteringly frustrated retorts from those individuals who seemingly can't accept any dissent/heresy from the narrative they have chosen to believe.Quote:
The third bad habit of thought I have in mind didn't feature so obviously in the total failure of the Ukrainian counteroffensive, but it's had an overwhelming role in the entire Western response to the Russo-Ukrainian war. We can call this one the Sauron Fallacy: the conviction that the only reason there's any trouble at all anywhere in the world is that some wicked individual makes it happen out of pure malicious evil, and somehow comes up with armies of orcs that have to be slain by Anduril. Sauron the Dark Lord, the Enemy, the Shadow in the East, is Tolkien's most disastrous invention, and that same invention has been rehashed over, and over, and over again in the pop culture of our age. Lord Voldemort, Emperor Palpatine, Donald Trumpwhy, the list goes on and on.
It's a very convenient mental habit if you don't want to think about why other people might not appreciate the consequences of your actions. "Always, after a defeat and a respite, the Shadow takes another shape and grows again"if this happens to you, dear reader, you need to reflect seriously on the possibility that the Shadow in question is one that you yourself are casting, and your own actions are making it rise anew. That's certainly what happens when, as Tolkien did, you live in an empire in decline that's propping up its faltering prosperity by stripping wealth from the rest of the planet, and trying to fight off jealous rivals who want to do the same thing for their own benefit rather than yours. Blame it on the Kaiseror, if you prefer, Putin.
Thus you'll hear endless diatribes by American punditsagain, seconded by their Mini-Mes in other countriesinsisting that if only something happened to Vladimir Putin, surely the Russians would happily consent to the dismemberment and despoliation of their country that think tanks in the West have been planning right out there in public for decades. It's all got to be Putin's fault! If you believe this, dear reader, I have a pair of Russians to introduce to you.
The man on the left is Nikolai Patrushev. He's the secretary of Russia's Security Council, a leading figure in the current Russian government, a close ally and adviser of Putin, and is widely thought to be the most likely person to succeed to the presidency if Putin dies. The man below on the right is Dmitry Medvedev. He's the most influential of the younger generation of Russian politicians, the deputy chairman of the Security Council, and has also been named as a potential Putin successor. What makes these men relevant to our present discussion is that they're both far more hostile to the West than Putin is.
Both of them, like Putin, belong to the leading party in Russian politics, the United Russia Party, which is squarely behind Putin's war aims. So are most RussiansPutin currently has an 80% approval rating among the Russian public, which makes an interesting contrast with Biden's far more flaccid ratings. Most of the people who don't approve of Putin, by the way, think that he's too soft on the West. The #2 party in Russian politics? That's our old friend the Communist Party, whose members consider the fall of the Berlin Wall to be one of the great tragedies of the twentieth century, and look back fondly to the days of the Cold War.
The point of this quick lesson in current Russian politics, of course, is that if Putin dies suddenly, the Russian forces in Ukraine won't break and run, the way the orcs did when Sauron suffered his improbable defeat via a couple of hobbits and a magic ring. They'll do the same thing that the US forces in the Second World War did when Franklin Roosevelt died: they'll brush aside a tear for someone they'll consider a fallen hero, and keep on fighting under new leadership. They might find themselves fighting alongside a few hundred thousand more Russian soldiers, too, because Putin is a cold, cautious bureaucrat who's held back most of Russia's military strength from the Ukrainian war. Patrushev is unlikely to be so restrained.
And of course many of these same points can be made of that Dark (or rather Orange) Lord of current American politics, Donald Trump. It's astonishing to watch the political establishment scurrying around like a mob of drunken hobbits, flinging every available scrap of magic jewelry into every volcano in sight, under the frantic delusion that if only they can make Trump go away, the populist movement that adopted him for its leader will vanish in a puff of smoke. Not so; once again, the Shadow will take another shape and grow again, because what drives that movement is the embarrassing failure of the current managerial class to address the problems that matter to most Americans, coupled with the shrill hatred that this same class directs toward every American who doesn't instantly kowtow to the latest twist of the party line.
Of course it's not hard to see what underlies all three of the habits of thought I've sketched out above. All of them are attempts to insist that nobody really disagrees with the political class, the self-anointed Good People of the tawdry narrative we're discussing. In their imaginations, there can be no other side of the story, no counterpoint to the monotonous theme brayed out endlessly by the trumpets of the status quo. No, the orcs have to know that they're orcsthey have to recognize that they're on the wrong side of history, and flee in terror once somebody draws some simulacrum of Anduril and waves it in their general directionand the only reason the Good People haven't achieved everything they want has to be the evil actions of some titanic scapegoat who can be blamed for everything and then, at least in theory, banished forever by some gimmick or other.
It's not at all uncommon for the decadent aristocracy of failing imperial powers to fall into such counterproductive habits of thought in the last years of their power. I'm reminded just now of the plaintive words Nicholas II, the last Tsar of All the Russias, said to the people who came to let him know that the Russian Revolution had just broken out: "But the Russian people love me!" The one great difference, of course, is that Nicholas understood that he was living in Russia. He never made the mistake our current political class is making; he didn't convince himself that he lived in Middle-earth.
Loaves are not the only things coming hot off the production line at the Tambov Bread Factory in central Russia………
— Polina Ivanova (@polinaivanovva) January 5, 2024
On the civilian businesses turning to weapons production as Russia moves economy to war footing, with @maxseddon https://t.co/FCGGIwFAyP
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The drones' simple design and specification means tracking their supply chain is difficult: Russian customs records for the Tambov bakery and an affiliated company that produces the drones come up empty. Chinese 3D printers are particularly difficult to track because their components are usually shipped separately, Maggard said. Since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine nearly two years ago, 22,531 shipments of goods have been sent to Russia from three Chinese 3D printer companies featured in Russian FPV drone communities on Telegram, according to trade data compiled by C4ADS, including 659 shipments with the keyword 3D, Maggard added.
Though the US sanctions designation is likely to limit the number of foreign counterparties willing to supply the Tambov bakery with components, the low cost and small scale of the operation means the company appears confident that the restrictions will have no effect.
After the decision, Valery Lyashchenko, the bakery's chief drone builder, was shown on state television filling a box with bread rings and crackers before sending it off to the White House as a "thank you" to US president Joe Biden. Yuri Chicherin, the bakery's director, told the channel that making the US sanctions list was a major achievement: "We are proud, we are glad. When else would anyone talk about our factory at such an international level?"
⚡️ State Department: US may not continue supporting Ukraine at level of 2022, 2023.
— The Kyiv Independent (@KyivIndependent) January 5, 2024
The U.S. is committed to supporting Ukraine for "as long as it takes," State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said at a press conference on Jan. 4.https://t.co/S3n8Kio8PR
When did Russia ever say that???
— -- GEROMAN -- time will tell - 👀 -- (@GeromanAT) January 5, 2024
She is such a cheap fucking liar pic.twitter.com/5cpORa4T3S
Teslag said:
There is nothing disingenuous about pointing out Russia's complete inability to mount an offensive. Then again, I could be wrong and Russia wouldn't be struggling to take an uninhabited village of 9,000 people as their first offensive achievement in almost two years.
PlaneCrashGuy said:
When the Russian offensive begins, what is "no ability to mount an offensive" guy gonna say. HAHA i can't wait to watch him crawfish.
PlaneCrashGuy said:Teslag said:
There is nothing disingenuous about pointing out Russia's complete inability to mount an offensive. Then again, I could be wrong and Russia wouldn't be struggling to take an uninhabited village of 9,000 people as their first offensive achievement in almost two years.
Teslag said:PlaneCrashGuy said:Teslag said:
There is nothing disingenuous about pointing out Russia's complete inability to mount an offensive. Then again, I could be wrong and Russia wouldn't be struggling to take an uninhabited village of 9,000 people as their first offensive achievement in almost two years.
Nothing I said was wrong or has been shown to be incorrect.
PlaneCrashGuy said:Teslag said:PlaneCrashGuy said:Teslag said:
There is nothing disingenuous about pointing out Russia's complete inability to mount an offensive. Then again, I could be wrong and Russia wouldn't be struggling to take an uninhabited village of 9,000 people as their first offensive achievement in almost two years.
Nothing I said was wrong or has been shown to be incorrect.
Yet.
Teslag said:PlaneCrashGuy said:Teslag said:PlaneCrashGuy said:Teslag said:
There is nothing disingenuous about pointing out Russia's complete inability to mount an offensive. Then again, I could be wrong and Russia wouldn't be struggling to take an uninhabited village of 9,000 people as their first offensive achievement in almost two years.
Nothing I said was wrong or has been shown to be incorrect.
Yet.
Ah okay. Russia is super serous this time.
PlaneCrashGuy said:Teslag said:PlaneCrashGuy said:Teslag said:PlaneCrashGuy said:Teslag said:
There is nothing disingenuous about pointing out Russia's complete inability to mount an offensive. Then again, I could be wrong and Russia wouldn't be struggling to take an uninhabited village of 9,000 people as their first offensive achievement in almost two years.
Nothing I said was wrong or has been shown to be incorrect.
Yet.
Ah okay. Russia is super serous this time.
I think Uke's capability (or lack thereof) is the one that you should be worried about.
Teslag said:PlaneCrashGuy said:Teslag said:PlaneCrashGuy said:Teslag said:PlaneCrashGuy said:Teslag said:
There is nothing disingenuous about pointing out Russia's complete inability to mount an offensive. Then again, I could be wrong and Russia wouldn't be struggling to take an uninhabited village of 9,000 people as their first offensive achievement in almost two years.
Nothing I said was wrong or has been shown to be incorrect.
Yet.
Ah okay. Russia is super serous this time.
I think Uke's capability (or lack thereof) is the one that you should be worried about.
Russia couldn't roll Ukraine BEFORE we helped them. They sure has hell couldn't do it now in a far weaker state.
PlaneCrashGuy said:
What would it take to prove you wrong? Be specific so we can actually come back to this and measure.
PlaneCrashGuy said:
Also she is a liarWhen did Russia ever say that???
— -- GEROMAN -- time will tell - 👀 -- (@GeromanAT) January 5, 2024
She is such a cheap fucking liar pic.twitter.com/5cpORa4T3S