In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

I've had a running commentary on the Institute for the Study of War and the conundrum of how they seem to have so many highly credentialed experts to write their Russian campaign assessments who manage to say so little. This is particularly intriguing as we seem to be entering an inflection point in the Russo-Ukraine War, since by all accounts, not only have the highly publicized HIMARS artillery systems reached combat, but all the other Polish Krabs, French Caesars, German Panzerhaublitzen , and US M270 advanced artillery systems as well. If these have begun to be effective, we should be seeing results by now. The problem is that the ISW has been putting all its money on, first, a Russian offensive pause to regroup, resupply, and rethink, and then second, a renewed resumption of the offensive following this pause. A big problem with this theory, as I've pointed out, has been that reports differ on whether there has actually been such a pause, despite Russian official announ...

I note that Donald Trump is beginning to reinsert himself into public discourse, and as he does, espeically in his recent social media exchanges with Elon Musk, he's reminding me of his appeal. That appeal, of course, took him from long-shot vanity candidate for president in 2015 to his asymmetric defeat of Hillary the following year. The 2024 election is a long way away, but it's worth noting that the right people are already starting to get nervous. Here's wishful thinking from David Brooks: [T]he 2024 presidential primaries could be wild. Sure, conventional candidates like the Republican Ron DeSantis or the Democrat Gavin Newsom may run for the nominations. But if the hunger for change is as strong as it is now, the climate will favor unconventional outsiders, the further outside the better. These sorts of oddball or unexpected candidates could set off a series of swings and disequilibriums that will make the existing party systems unstable. Furthermore, if ever th...

As sometimes happens, I sat up in bed early this morning suddenly recognizing that nobody has pointed out that the Russian abandonment of Snake Island on June 30 was an unacknowledged victory for the asymmetric strategy in the Russo-Ukraine War. After four months of trying to defend the island, losing major naval assets in the process, including the flagship of the Black Sea fleet, the Russians left -- but Ukraine chose not to reoccupy the island. It would have been just as expensive for them to defend as it was for the Russians. and as long as the Russians deem it prudent to stay away, they don't need to. According to the Guardian, Maritime tracking services showed a logjam of ships waiting to pass into the Danube since a second route through the Bystre estuary was opened after the recent Russian retreat from the nearby Snake Island. . . . Although large carriers cannot pass through the Bystre estuary, limiting the amount of grain that can be exported, Ukrainian officia...

A big problem I had throughout the 40-mile convoy phase of the Russo-Ukraine War was the daily YouTube posts of Russian armored columns being defeated in detail by small Ukrainian units with anti-tank missiles. These were just everyday occurrences, and I kept wondering why the conventional wisdom kept asserting that these somehow didn't happen or weren't important. And they weren't important until the Russians simply abandoned their whole northern offensive. The YouTube indicator has been changing lately. Throughout May and June, while the attritional battle in the Donbas was under way, there were far fewer YouTube posts from the front of any sort. But since early July, we've been seeing several things. The first is that there have been almost no retired US general talking heads prognosticating on the course of the war. Isn't that strange? You couldn't keep them away from the camera during the halcyon days of the 40-mile convoy. Now, zilch. The second thin...

Right now, as far as I can tell, there are two people running for king of the world, Elon Musk and Jordan Peterson. As I noted yesterday, Musk recently visited Pope Francis to talk about his ideas on improving the world and humanity. Jordan Peterson has occasionally done the same with Bp Barron, but yesterday he scolded NATO, the EU, and the whole Western alliance for wanting to start World War III if they don't appease Putin in Ukraine. Today he turns to the Christian churches. His heavy-lidded pose at the start of his video above verges on self-satire. Indeed, I wonder if he isn't just running for king of the world; he must be running instead for philosopher-king of the world. What intrigues me about Peterson and Christians -- whether he is a Chrstian of any identifiable type has been, and continues to be, open to debate -- is that his arguments for Christianity, or for that matter any religion, track mainly with Jonathan Swift's An Argument Against Abolishing Chr...

Trump's recent remarks about Elon Musk reminded me how refreshing his perceptions of other public figures used to be: Nancy Pelosi is “highly overrated and highly incompetent”. Jeb Bush is "an embarrassment to his family. . . . Frankly, he’s a stiff." Hillary Clinton "may be the most corrupt person ever to seek the presidency of the United States.” Drs Fauci and Birx were "two self-promoters trying to reinvent history to cover for their bad instincts and faulty recommendations, which I fortunately almost always overturned,” I hope that, regardless of the outcome, we get this sort of thing back, even for a little while. In the case of Elon Musk, I'd been having doubts already that even if he was the richest man in the world, he maybe wasn't the smartest, but Trump's assessment pushed these questions to the front of my mind. In the meme above, which it appears Musk put together himself and posted on Twitter, he seems to be laughing just a ...

If you go to YouTube and do a search on words like "HIMARS ammo explosion", you'll get well over a dozen hits, most representing recent attacks from Ukraine's new NATO high-precision rockets and artillery into Russian rear areas. The resulting detonations of ammunition depots can continue for hours, and in recent weeks, multiple strikes of this sort occur daily. It's difficult to think this isn't having an impact on the Russian campaign: if the assertion is that they've been firing tens of thousands of artillery rounds per day, how can they sustain this rate if some tens of thousands a day are going up in storage instead? This question has other ramifications, but I'm less interested in how the war is progressing than I am in how this question is being handled by some of our most prestigious analysts, viz , those employed by the Institute for the Study of War. Yesterday I posted on cogent commentary from the UK that suggests that whole cadres of pre...