In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

The Institute for the Study of War site, which appears to be the most prestigious commentator on the Russo-Ukraine war, has made what strikes me as a meaningless pronouncement : Ukrainian forces have defeated the initial Russian campaign of this war. That campaign aimed to conduct airborne and mechanized operations to seize Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odesa, and other major Ukrainian cities to force a change of government in Ukraine. That campaign has culminated. I've noted on YouTube for the past week or two references to Clausewitzian "culmination" as a point where an attack exhausts itself. But that can take place either before it achieves its objective, in which case it's a victory for the defender, or after, in which case it's a victory for the attacker. But in either case, it leaves open the question of what happens next. Clausewitz himself seems to have recognized the problem : The success of the attack is the result of a present superiority of force, it being u...

Something's up. A comprehensive report about the ongoing federal probe into Hunter Biden’s tax filings published by the New York Times on Wednesday night confirmed the existence of the first son’s infamous laptop. The puzzling thing is although the New York Post broke the story in October 2020, and other outlets have since acknowledged the laptop is authentic, that the New York Times would belatedly report it is clearly big news. But nothing has changed about the story at all, except that the Times now says it's a story. Trump's reaction is understandable : Former President Trump said the New York Times has admitted being a part of an effort to 'rig' the election for Joe Biden with their report confirming the authenticity of Hunter Biden's laptop and its contents. Trump said in a statement on Friday, 500 days after the November 2, 2020, general election: 'The New York Times just admitted that it participated in an effort to rig the election for Joe B...

The video above doesn't look like it was produced by the Ukrainian government. It may or may not have been released with their approval. I find it particularly interesting, though, because it was taken by two women driving in a civilian car along the length of what must have been a Russian battalion tactical group some days afer it had been attacked by the Ukrainians. Around the third time I watched it, I realized that between the occasional remaining burned-out trucks, there are large patches of bare roadway without snow. This says to me that there had been no snow on the ground before the battle, but it did snow soon afterward. Over a day or two following the battle, the Ukrainians were able to drive or tow away most of the Russian armored equipment, which explains the rectangular bare snowless patches in the road where the tanks and so forth had been. That's a lot of tanks. And if, unlike in some videos, there weren't a bunch of burned-out tanks, trucks, and personne...

Although Ann Coulter is some years past her sell-by date, having veered from Trump is the Messiah to Never Trump in the meantime, her current take on Ukraine is representative of all too many on the right: Until the war in Ukraine, the Democrats were facing midterms after having spent the previous two years mandating masks and an endless series of vaccinations — even for the vaccinated or previously infected. , , , What could even Stalin’s media do with that record? . . . By now, the media have whipped the public into such a frenzy over Ukraine that a majority of Americans want the U.S. to start shooting down Russian planes, starting World War III with nuclear armed power. A small price to pay for Democratic dominance. I'm not sure where to start with this. The media was reporting on the war for the first two weeks, when the narrative was universally about the 40-mile column about to close in on Kyiv. Once Ukraine began to demonstrate success, as far as I can tell witho...

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...