In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

BTG wipe out The video above gives an idea of the challenge in trying to sort through what's going on in Ukraine. Its title is fairly straightforrward, "Ukraine War: 15.03.2022 Aftermath of battles in Kherson region", but you definitely can't trust the date: that appears to be when it was uploaded, and possibly even about when the drive-by video was taken, but that doen't say much about when the battle took place. It looks like the photographer was able to pass over the road in a truck, so this suggests that rubble had been cleared, bodies and body parts removed, and Ukrainian forces had already scrubbed the scene for usable trucks, supplies, ammunition, and intelligence, -- a day or more earlier, I would think. For now, I'll trust them for the location, near Kherson. This would suggest it was a Russian thrust north from that city toward Mykolaiv along the axis in the map below: Media accounts generally imply that this is part of an effort to reach Ode...

As I suggested in Sunday's post, I think the current Russo-Ukraine war is just one theater of a larger, worldwide conflict that I'm calling the Great Plebe War. This pits a current world ruling class against a broad working class that includes both traditional blue-collar workers and bourgeois professionals, while corporate upper-level managers, academics, bureaucrats, intellectuals, media, and artists are allied with more traditional rentiers and financiers in an overall gentry class. I don't disagree with Marx in my view that the objective of the gentry is to make life miserable for the workers. The question has always been precisely how to do this and how far to go. Under the worst despots, the explicit goal is to depopulate them, and this is effectively what's going on in Ukraine, although programs to encourage abortion, transsexualism, and disintegration of families in the more genteel west differ only in degree. As with other worldwide conflicts, each theater ...

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...