In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

h I was only mildly disaappointed to see absoutely no insightful commentary or update on the Ukraine war from either corporate or independent media this morning, to the point that between simple nonfeasence and eager groupthink, they're managing to get just about everything wrong. I've learned to look for more reliable and insightful open-source intelligence sources, including The Oryx tally of verified equipment losses on both the Ukrainian and Russian sides. As of this morning, close to 1100 tanks, armored vehicles, missile launchers, trucks, and so forth have been destroyed abandoned, and captured on the Russian side. This number is increasing on an hourly basis, with the reminder that captured equipment is refurbished and its ammunition is taken over by the Ukrainian army. The updates on the Ukrainian conflict on the Institute for the Study of War site. These tend to run a day or two behind, but they're at least far more accurate than media reports and assess...

The video above was viral on YouTube and elsewhere this morning, although the version here carries subtitles with an English translation of the Russian radio communications. It's been known for at least a week that the Russian radio encryption system isn't working in Ukraine, so that the Russians must communicate in the clear, a major intelligence exposure that probably led to the Ukrainian ambush of this column in the first place, which I assume took place yesterday, March 9. The commander of the regiment who was killed, referred to in the radio chatter, was Col Andrei Zakharov, who had been awarded the Order of Courage by Vladimir Putin in 2016. The map below is from the Institute for the Study of War site and provides a context for the attack's location. (It's worth pointing out that, as with all such maps of the Ukraine invasion, the areas colored pink overstate the territory under Russian control; as the video above makes clear, their control basically exte...

When I started this blog, I began to tease out a theory of the post-2020 agenda as a Götterdämmerung strategy a lot like people who expected the world to end on December 21, 2012, but took this as a sign that they could run up their credit cards until that date and never have to repay them. What we saw over the course of 2021 was instead the gradual repudiation of the 2020 agenda, the legislative failure of Build Back Better, the marginalization of BLM, the Squad, and Defund the Police, and even more recently the functionial disappearance of many 2020-era COVID restrictions. With Putin's invasion of Ukraine resetting Western security priorities, you'd think the 2020 agenda would continue to fade. Instead, for now, I'm beginning to think the elites are cooking up a way to reconstitute key parts of the 2020 agenda as Götterdämmerung Lite. The main problem with this approach is that events are coming so quickly that they're getting inside the lizard people's OODA...

A puzzling factor in the generally flaccid US national debate on Ukraine is what advocates self-characterize as the Red Pill view. In general, it says that Zelensky is a tool of the globalists; we should not be risking World War III to defend Ukraine; Putin is after all reasonable in wanting Ukraine to stay out of NATO and the EU. There are numerous variations on this view. One of the more justifiable is from Don Surber : NATO was formed to stop the Soviet Union from taking over Europe. The Scandinavians stood on the sideline. Now they want in? No thanks. We already have too many countries to defend because NATO doubled its size since the USSR dissolved on December 25, 1991, collapsing under the weight of its own economic and social failure. The United States should firmly tell Finland and Sweden to take a hike. In the face of evil, they stood on the sidelines while the Czechs, the Hungarians, the Poles and others trapped in the clutches of the USSR fought bravely from with...

US coverage of the Ukraine war continues to be inexcusably bad, and this is across the board, from big corporate media including Fox all the way over to smaller independent outlets like Salem Media and Breitbart. Look at this below-the-fold piece at Salem Media's Red State : Analysts I’ve discussed Russian military activity patterns with note that, until this weekend, their use of force has been remarkably constrained and surgical. They’ve made little attempt to engage the Ukrainian military in a full-force, armored mobile front battle, even though they clearly have the mass and firepower to do so. As of today, they are playing cat and mouse games with the mayors of the cities they’ve surrounded, engaging in combinations of harassing bombardments and offers of refugee corridors. It’s not hard to see that they have orders to absorb some casualties, while bearing in mind that, when the war ends, their country will have to rebuild everything they blow up. Forget about the so-call...

By yesterday, I grew increasinghly frustrated with what I was hearing, especially from US corporate media (including Fox), on what is actually going on in Ukraine. The retired US general talking heads seem to have settled on a consensus that, for instance,the 40-mile column stalled north of Kyiv will get moving any time now and begin reducing the city with artillery. That's how Russia operates. But this hasn't happened, while I get the impression that Ukraine is learning how the Russians operate, is following a coherent strategy, and is having increasing success in the field. I worked hard for most of the day to find better sources. One of them is in the link above; it concentrates on the level of corporate corruption, nonfeasance, and incompetence in the Russian armed forces that explains some part of their current predicament. Another source I found just this morning, a post on the Chicago Boyz blog , concentrates on actual Ukrainian military strategy that's another cl...

As of yesterday, Los Angeles County, one of the major holdouts on loosening COVID restrictions throughout the pandemic, dropped its indoor masking rule . County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer said that given the CDC revision of the county's classification, a new Health Officer Order will be issued that removes the county's long-standing mandate for people to wear masks indoors regardless of vaccination status. That move will put the county in alignment with the state, which dropped its mask mandate on Tuesday. Mask-wearing, however, will continue to be "strongly recommended,'' particularly in crowded settings or while interacting with people at higher risk of severe illness from the virus. Masking will continue to be required in higher-risk settings, including health care facilities, transit centers, airports, aboard public transit, in correctional facilities and at homeless shelters and long-term care facilities. It's still likely to take yea...