In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

The video above gives what I think is a good representation of the current state of affairs in Ukraine. It's been produced and released by the Ukrainian authorities, but I've got to conclude that from what's available from open source intelligence, it reflects what must inevitably be taking place. (Basically, anything taken from a drone is from the Ukrainian government, but the problem is that the drones don't lie.) First, at this point, the Russians are less and less able to move. The Institulte for the Study of War's summary of yesterday's action is pretty brief: Main effort—Kyiv axis: Russian operations on the Kyiv axis are aimed at encircling the city from the northwest, west, and east. Russian forces did not conduct offensive operations northwest of Kyiv in the past 24 hours for the third day in a row. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces prioritized reconnoitering Ukrainian positions in preparation for resuming attacks on K...

One of the independent aggregators pointed me to a brief essay by Francis Fukuyama Preparing for Defeat , which is his take on the Russo-Ukraine war. I never quite understood why there is a Francis Fukuyama , and indeed, along the line of Elon Musk's remark about Sen Sanders, I maybe thought he was deceased if I thought about him at all. The basic problem is that in 1992, he published The End of History and the Last Man in response to the Soviet Union's collapse, "which argues that the worldwide spread of liberal democracies and free-market capitalism of the West and its lifestyle may signal the end point of humanity's sociocultural evolution and become the final form of human government". To which I have two responses. The first is, "So you're gonna quit your job and retire, right, if there's nothing more to be said?" The second is, "Tell that to Osama bin Laden." To the first, he's occupied academic sinecure after sinecure at ...

With Russia clamping down on information inside the country, it's hard to evaluate what's leaking out about internal developments. But moving from most reliable to least: In the wake of Putin's acknowledgement that conscipts had been sent to fight in Ukraine against his explicit orders (and apparently against Russian law), "materials have been sent to the Chief Military Prosecutor's Office to verify and legally assess the actions and punish officials responsible for failure to comply with this order," according to the Kremlin's military spokesman . The claim has been made that these conscripts have already been withdrawn, and the search for scapegoats is now under way. There are multiple versions of a story that the heads of the Fifth Service of the OSB, the section of the FSB ex-KGB that oversees foreign intelligence, have been placed under house arrest , ostensibly for misuse of funds. There may have been a larger-scale raid of multipl...

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...