Andromache mourning Hector, Jacques Louis David, 1783
More of British. Love it or hate it. Yum. Pork pies.
Open Thread – Tue 24 Jan 2023
- Open Thread – Mon 25 Nov 2024
- The more you gets the less you eats
- Open Thread – Weekend 23 Nov 2024
- Open Thread – Thurs 21 Nov 2024
- Open Thread – Mon 18 Nov 2024
Nostalgic Brits reminiscing. Picture, As we were not so long ago. some of the comments; “Powell tried to warn us,…
Oh dear turkeys and chickens coming home to roost — looks like Labor has a woman problem and BTW so…
Ben Garrison.
Gary Varvel..
Australia has some world class weeds and ferals. Best to stay quiet after fire rips through Spain or the California Hills. Take note Bruce Pascoe fanbois.
HOW TF DID UKRAINE GET 7,614 tanks, IFVs and SP guns???
C. O. P. E. !
Plus linking to rather ridiculous articles
Thanks all, sounds like I need to replace the bearings on both sides
Cheers
Think of a telethon. But just for governments and military manufacturers.
Looks like RAAF Flight Training School didn’t get the Invasion Day memo.
Just had a formation of six Roulettes fly past our hotel room window.
And trailing … gasp! …white smoke too!
“Putin is a failure and possibly the worst Russian leader in history.”
Really? Worse than Stalin? I don’t think so. Another ridiculous comparison.
..
Like this, you mean?
https://www.newsweek.com/ukraine-takes-out-russian-tank-showdown-video-1766514?amp=1
..
I’m not hoping for anything other than the damn thing to be over with and all sides and observers to conclude that modern warfare is too expensive and horrific to start in the first place.
JC its not illegal to kill snakes, possums, bats and other nuisance creatures. It only becomes illegal when you get caught.
Lining the pockets
“I’m buying a long-handled shovel later today.”
That’s how my grandfather used to kill them. I have a clear recollection of my father and uncle killing one with a shovel in Bundeena, which borders on the National Park here in Sydney. Snakes would run amok so there were lots of shovels around.
Note the only country with a map of Russia carved up is…China.
Xi is the happiest man in the world right now.
Cassie
Actually, you might have a point, but your point isn’t confined to “white males”. Please get on the next flight to Alice Springs and tell the young marauding indigenous males who, when not walking around supermarkets stealing and threatening decent people with bats, are bashing, raping and assaulting indigenous women and children. Please, please, please go and tell those young males to ‘lift their game‘, because you wanna know know what? They need to lift their game. And until you do this, eff off.
m0nty=fa of Malmo and the Great War Against Wussian Imperialism go to Alice Springs? ROFLMAO. He has enough trouble getting his fat arse from his bed in the basement to the breakfast table, where he sits inhaling fatty foods until lunchtime.
Churchill disobeyed Orders at the Boer War.
Shoulda been shot for it, according to a few Diggers.
Ed is Peter Fitzsimian- confirmed! *
Diggers is what Ed-Mong calls those little things that live in the same area he pulls his ed-facts from.
Apart from a whole book collated from research, diaries, operations reports, and personal testimonies there is no proof the spook/flamer Mr Churchill was within 40 miles of the trenches.
* In a glorious bit of justice entering fitzsimian into google brings up the pyrate on images straight away.
“I’m buying a long-handled shovel later today.”
Be careful, next door neighbour got KIA by a brown. Went to retrieve the long handled shovel to deal with a brown, second brown curled up around the blade of the shovel. Got him multiple times in the upper parts of his leg.
H B Bearsays:
January 26, 2023 at 11:43 am
Of course, only the rich should pay tax. Standby for some Emmanomics from our guest lecturer, mUnty.
Do those who married into the “upper middle class” count as “rich”?
Happy Australia Day, Cats.
We’re off to a street BBQ at the top of our cul de sac. Plenty of flags, food, drinks, kids-on-bikes and general good fun.
Australia, Australia we luvs ya!
Controversial expert is appointed to Biden food panel after claiming that obesity CAN’T be treated with exercise and good diet because it’s genetic – will now tell Americans what to eat
. Dr Fatima Cody Stanford said obesity is a genetic issue, not lifestyle
. She was recently appointed to a USDA panel that will decide new diet guidelines
. A recent report found the US is among the fattest countries in the world
PS Dr Fatima Cody Stanford possibly Amish!
Speedbox’s wife is Russian, she regularly returns to Russia to visit family. If Stalin was leader, returning to Russia was basically a death sentence and those who did (and there were a few) were arrested on arrival and either sent to a Gulag or shot in basement, usually the latter. Speedy, have you heard from your wife? Has she been sent to a Gulag? Has she been shot? Is she okay?
Richard Cranium
When The State systematically removes children from their families, no matter what fig leaf the apologists and huffers and puffers want to put on it, the life outcomes of 99.999% of those children affected are going to be extremely sub-optimal.
Let me re-phrase that.
When The State systematically leaves abused children with the families that abuse them, no matter what fig leaf the apologists and huffers and puffers want to put on it, the life outcomes of all of those children affected are going to be extremely sub-optimal.
I have heard it said that a most effective weapon for k***ing sn***s is a length of heavy gauge plain fencing wire doubled over and twisted around itself.
You just got done telling me that part of the deal with shifting to consumption tax is to increase the capital to labour ratio. And yet this dude assumes that savings are just delayed consumption.
Also, all that paper shows is that poor people pay a lot more of their income on mortgages/rents, which are not subject to sales tax.
Black Ball says:
January 26, 2023 at 12:39 pm
Lining the pockets
So Zelensky is driving out corrupt officials (again, from his own office) that were “part of a network embezzling budget funds.” This has reportedly been going on since before the Russian invasion began.
I realize that the guy has been a bit busy with the war and all, but if there was an entire “network” embezzling money in the capital for that long, either he knew about it or he’s too incompetent to be running a lemonade stand, to say nothing of a government.
Of course, Zelensky has been “driving people out” for a while now. Before the invasion, he locked up his chief political opponent. He also shut down media outlets that reported on his administration in a critical fashion. (Such as reporting on the money that had gone missing, for example.)
In any event, please feel free to tell me once again how the people in Washington (few though they may be) who are calling for a full accounting of all of the money and material we’ve sent to Ukraine are engaging in “conspiracy theories.”
How insulting, right? How dare anyone question where our money went? The whole system in Ukraine is clearly as pure as the driven snow.
Australia, Australia we luvs ya!
I luvs old Australia! We should throw shit stained woke Australia in the bin and bring back the original!
Bruce of Newcastlesays:
January 26, 2023 at 11:52 am
Monty – Why don’t you search ‘poll debt ceiling’ and come back to us after you read the news reports from the last few days?
m0nty=fa don’t do that research thing, he failed Economics 1 before the subject came up. Then he did a J’ism degree, where the skill is not necessary.
Roger, thank you.
Using the balls does work, albeit a slow process. Snakes have been know to swallow said ping pong balls, golf balls and white billiard balls.
JC, try a set of snake repellers. I placed a set in my front yard to keep the dogs safe. As other commenters here suggested, I am also placing netting over any openings and along the fence line. When looking for snake repellers, I have to say they have come a long way since those green spikes that went beep and ran out of battery within a week.
The set I bought are solar with a capacitor (not flux!) that has a three week back up in case of bad weather. They emit random vibrations and sound and also light up at night. So far, they seem to be doing the job. The rabbits haven’t snuck in either since I installed them.
Also JC, make sure you keep the rake and the shovel together. As I have mentioned before, those two implements were always kept with the outside dunny. Rake for holding the Joe Blake down and the shovel for whacking off the head.
Not even the BBC thinks its anywhere close to 123K killed. This is fantasyland stuff. As for the claims about Wagner ‘human wave attacks’, the videos I’ve seen are stock standard infantry fighting. Also, the difference between KIA/WIA and POW has a mighty smell to it.
Dotsays:
January 26, 2023 at 11:54 am
m0nty says:
January 26, 2023 at 11:38 am
Geez Dot, no wonder you aren’t an economist any more if you deny that sales taxes are regressive.
By definition, they’re not.
This was taught routinely in economics until activist hacks tried the definition changing game.
Don’t forget, m0nty=fa failed Economics 1, then did a degree in j’ism. He is not an eggspurt on anything except donuts.
I have heard it said that a most effective weapon for k***ing sn***s is a length of heavy gauge plain fencing wire doubled over and twisted around itself.
The advantage of this is that as long as you strike on the far side of the snake, the wire will flatten down and hit the snake. With a shovel you need to be 100% accurate.
Debt ceilings are an ineffective method of imposing a constitutional balanced budget constraint.
In general, effective constitutional constraints involve the division of power.
For a balanced budget, one should use:
a) be a federation;
b) the federal result each year, be it surplus or deficit, is allocated to the states – pass it down, not on;
c) an insolvency process exists for bankrupt states.
over greasing
under greasing
too tight (as rick said)
oils can weep out of the backing just because
oils can oxidise and go gummy
and the backing can gel
a good one is thermal runaway where say over-packing a bearing can cause heat that makes the other problems worserer.
bearings are cheap
pull them all down and start from scratch
About Turbans 4 Australia
Didn’t you know you were making involuntary contributions?
3 paras from the bottom
They really don’t want you to know how much.
I think the last snake I killed was when I was about 16. Rabbit shooting, walking along the edge of the river in the bush. This freaking enormous black snake glides down onto the track immediately in front of me out of the rushes. This resulted in a from the hip mag dump out of my Sportco semi-auto .22, dirt and bits of snake flying everywhere. Old Australia! 🙂
They are.
She’s thin and not very Amish looking. Admittedly her people do run to whale-size quite often, so maybe she has a point. On the other hand the Dems’ control of places like Baltimore is so miserable and disheartening I’d be inclined to eat myself to death too.
BREAKING: Project Veritas: Pfizer Exploring “Mutating” Covid-19 Virus Via ‘Directed Evolution’ To Continue Profiting From Vaccines (VIDEO)
Project Veritas on Wednesday night released explosive video of Jordon Trishton Walker, Pfizer Director of Research and Development, Strategic Operations, admitting the pharma giant is exploring ‘mutating’ Covid-19 via ‘directed evolution’ so the company can continue to profit off of vaccines.
“One of the things we’re exploring is like, why don’t we just mutate it [COVID] ourselves so we could create — preemptively develop new vaccines, right? So, we have to do that. If we’re gonna do that though, there’s a risk of like, as you could imagine — no one wants to be having a pharma company mutating f**king viruses,” Walker told the undercover Project Veritas journalist.
“Don’t tell anyone. Promise you won’t tell anyone. The way it [the experiment] would work is that we put the virus in monkeys, and we successively cause them to keep infecting each other, and we collect serial samples from them,” he said.
Whether sales taxes are regressive depends on what they tax.
I don’t think even Monty would argue that Keating’s tax on luxury cars was regressive.
Yes.
That bit of flex is your friend.
Allegedly.
But always strike from side on. Never behind.
They can come back at you like lightning if you hit along their length.
Allegedly.
A lot of snake-hate speech here today.
This will change when you have a trans-snake in your family.
..
Discrimination against snakes of colour.
The proposal from Republicans today taxes everything at 30%, even groceries.
Staying a few weeks back at the SIL’s house in Richmond, Melbourne. They have pet chooks, believe it or not.
Recently two foxes were on top of the pen in the middle of the night, trying to get into it. Local council does nothing about it.
rickw says:
January 26, 2023 at 1:02 pm
I think the last snake I killed was when I was about 16. Rabbit shooting, walking along the edge of the river in the bush. This freaking enormous black snake glides down onto the track immediately in front of me out of the rushes.
This resulted in a from the hip mag dump out of my Sportco semi-auto .22, dirt and bits of snake flying everywhere. Old Australia! ?
Yep Outback Trip 1962, 1947 Ford Prefect (3 speed & reversed up last 3kms to top of Mt Kosciuszko with
Mate pouring water into radiator as boiling) having come over Dirt Dead Horse Gap road from VIC, 3 up – carried, single shot .22, winchester action .22 with scope, 303.25 bolt action with Scope, M1 carbine, Double Barrel Shotgun – good Roo & Rabbit shooting
The Left turns on our inspirational Australian of the Year: Outrage as Mike Carlton says Taryn Brumfitt is just someone who ‘makes a buck out of saying it’s OK to be a bit fat’ – as fellow middle-aged male TV journalist agrees
Daily Mail
bearings are cheap
pull them all down and start from scratch
Excellent advice.
Let’s say Putin wins and annexes Ukraine.
How many countries have now joined NATO and the EU? Since when has Europe cooperated to this extent?
How many people have died, become invalids or emigrated due to the war?
What is their age profile? Are they highly skilled or likely to become parents?
He now incurs the cost of rebuilding the Ukraine and their indigent.
The only thing in Putin’s favour is that Russia has a relatively low public debt.
The demography of a greater Russia is damaged permanently and a quarter of the population would then hate his guts regardless of any other specific policy.
Russia is strategically weaker than before the war and the only country suggesting a carve up of Russia is China.
All Putin gets out of this is he gets to colour in another blob on a map.
He could have called it a punitive mission and consolidated the east.
He can call a truce right now and just interdict any future Ukrainian attack, regardless of their position. He has the east and a corridor to the Crimea.
The longer the war goes on, the more cursed his prize becomes.
“Snakes, why’d it have to be snakes”
Indy.
Because they had more than that number of vehicles in 2022 in APCs and SPGs alone.
The point is that Republican populism is a complete lie. They are for tax cuts for the rich, and nothing else. That is all they managed to pass when they held all offices.
The Tea Party, the Freedom Caucus, MAGA, it’s all built on a lie. Republicans are the party of the Wall Street Establishment, who cares about low taxes, low wages and high immigration. Trump governed that way entirely, when you look beyond his rhetoric.
Trump can try to pull another con by faffing on about herrenvolk socialism, but voters would be particularly stupid if they fell for that wheeze twice. Not that Rhonda Santos would be any better. Those are your options, wingnuts: astroturfed falsity or the genuine globalist article. Populism is nowhere to be found.
flyingduk says:
January 26, 2023 at 12:10 pm
And, a cry for help from this forum of excellent advice:
Duk, re your bearing problem: husband says to jack up the problem side & spin the wheel by hand looking for any drag. If there is discernible drag, you can buy a bearing kit to replace bearings.
..
Monty coming out against an open southern border?
Trump was right?
Build. The. Wall.
Nonsense. Repeating this doesn’t make it true.
Sorry if this has already been posted.
Amazing how you can show monty the difference between the burden and incidence of tax, different models describing what happens in a particular market or generally, dynamic models of incomes and that the predictions are reflected in empirical models & data – he is demonstrably wrong. A flat GST is not regressive (not even considering real world stuff like the wealthy shielding their income tax liabilities; Hollywood accounting is legendary in shielding income).
“No I am right because of the incidence of the tax and savings are not investments or future consumption”
You are wilfully dumbing yourself down so you can try to score points against the US Republican Party. This is sad considering you live in Australia.
Remove, inspect and grease the bearing.
Torque to specification.
Replace it and the shell in the hub if there is play or drag after doing all that.
Or just replace anyway if they are cheap and plentiful.
Please tell us why you think Hollywood actors and producers paying very little income tax through tax planning is progressive and paying alternatively a 30% consumption tax is regressive.
It is laughable nonsense!
You are playing rhetorical games – which is all economics is, if done poorly.
ROFLMAO. Economics 1 failure m0nty=fa pontificates about economics. LOL.
Check and replace broken seals while you are at it.
Yes he can. I have outlined reasons, you have not. You’re assuming the most powerful man in the world can’t unilaterally impose a truce on an opponent incapable of entering into one voluntarily.
It’s not an argument at all, just shilling for imperialism.
Monty is funny. He agrees with us that elitist RINOs are the enemy, who spend a lot of effort in repressing actual conservative voters. Excellent Monty, the dark side is getting stronger in you. You are even closer now to metamorphosing into Ayn Rand acolyte Darth Monty!
No Chinese bearings.
Arky says:
January 26, 2023 at 11:49 am
I was wondering why the Germans were reluctant to supply their tanks to the Ukr.
Same as the US.
Could be a money spinner, but also could be a disaster for them.
Don’t go by the Iraqi experience, poorly trained crews in obsolete machines using the wrong tactics against a superior force are a different equation.
Plenty of examples from WWII where superior tanks were defeated by better tactics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ao6kE0WUTeo
mOron, this is what you stand for- creating enduring misery with the deviants in charge;
THIS IS AMERICA
https://twitter.com/The_Real_Fly/status/1618062777171742721
You have no cred at all to criticize any conservative ideal when you are so fervently supporting the Kiddy Groomer in Chief and his cabal of freaks and creeps.
Photo of Paul Hogan in a public bar, holding a schooner.
Caption: G’day viewers, have a cracker Australia Day.
No it’s not. Its any large city in the US run by demonrats.
..
Logistics, training and support.
Member (AM) in the General Division. Emeritus Professor Jennifer Jane Hocking Kensington VIC. For significant service to the preservation of Australian political history.
And for making bogus claims about it too.
Salvatore, Understaffed & Overworked Martyr to Govt Covid Stupidity says:
January 26, 2023 at 1:46 pm
GemmaTognini
@GemmaTognini
Posted this on my Instagram account.
It was removed as Hate Speech.
Photo of Paul Hogan in a public bar, holding a schooner.
Caption: G’day viewers, have a cracker Australia Day.
Your Story Goes Against Our Community Guidelines.
We removed your story because it goes against our Community Guidelines on hate speech or symbols.
Even if you didn’t mean to offend, our guidelines encourage people to express themselves in a way that’s respectful to everyone.
Story remove for hate speech or symbols
Jan 26 at 12.01PM
Perfect Photo of 6’Oclock Swill Tiled bar reafy for Hose Out
Yesireee, that edumacation system is just churning out perfect new citizens for our country, never disciplined at home or at school, with no respect for others.
Bus drivers in Western Australia are facing abuse, threats, or assaults on a near daily basis, according to their union, which is threatening a campaign of industrial action if safety on buses is not improved.
The Transport Workers Union (TWU) held a summit this week following the alleged assault of a female bus driver in Victoria Park earlier this month, in which police say she was kicked and spat on.
Bus drivers in Western Australia are facing abuse, threats, or assaults on a near daily basis, according to their union, which is threatening a campaign of industrial action if safety on buses is not improved.
Their PzH-2000 SPGs have been embarrassing. Add this to the Puma mess and you can join a few dots…
Cassie of Sydneysays:
January 26, 2023 at 12:48 pm
dotty has been as far from home as Walgett, I believe cassie. Maybe Dubbo. Not sure. In any case he is personally clueless about what real life is like outside our borders- which of course the protection of which he’d happily see abolished. He’s only repeating textbook academic related claptrap.
“Plus linking to rather ridiculous articles”
An honest looking girl, that one.
Salvatore, Understaffed & Overworked Martyr to Govt Covid Stupiditysays:
January 26, 2023 at 1:46 pm
Just wow. They really hate Australia
Real life!
Putin is going to annex a trashed country he ruined and at least 900,000 Russians have left Russia from its pre annexation borders. NATO is stronger than before the war and his materiel losses are staggering.
He has permanently weakened Russia. They already had a demographic problem, now it has been compounded.
Even Stalin, as evil as he was, did not imperil Russia as much as Putin is doing, even with a very ill thought out military purge.
Beat me to it. Bit of a lottery these days though.
Preferred brands are Fafnir, SKF, Koyo.
The Mocker in the Oz: …what if a waiter explained the menu to Burney in the manner she responds to questions about the voice model?
Waiter: Good evening and welcome. I’ll be taking your order.
Burney: Thank you. Could I please have the prawn dumplings to begin with, followed by the Mongolian lamb and…
Waiter: Sorry to interrupt, but we have revised our ordering process. This is our new menu. (Hands leatherbound folder to Burney)
Burney: (Opens folder, revealing only a single page) There must be a mistake. Where are the dishes?
Waiter: Look under the heading.
Burney: The heading says ‘food’. There’s nothing listed underneath.
Waiter: It’s what we call a principle-based menu. I’ll put you down for food for one, shall I?
Burney: I’m sorry, but is this a joke?
Waiter: I can assure you this new menu will be to your liking. The food will be delicious. It will nourish. It will enrich. It will bring diners together.
Burney: Look, this doesn’t have to be a complex question. What dishes are you offering?
Waiter: You don’t like the new menu?
Burney: How can I like it when I know nothing about it?
Waiter: Of course you will like it. The food is delicious. It nourishes. It enriches. It will bring diners together.
Burney: So you keep saying. But how do I know what I’d be getting?
Waiter: There is a wealth of information available on Chinese cuisine, which you can read for yourself. I suggest you start with ‘Classic Chinese Dishes’ by T. Calma & M. Langton.
Burney: This restaurant endorses that book?
Waiter: No.
Burney: But nonetheless this restaurant serves the dishes contained in that book?
Waiter: I didn’t say that.
Burney: Then what is the point of reading it?
Waiter: It will help you understand that the food we serve is delicious. It will nourish. It will enrich. It will bring –
Burney: Will you stop saying that! If you can’t answer simple questions, then forget it. You’re not getting my business.
Waiter: I urge you not to be divisive. After all, the Asian owners of this restaurant have generously extended their hand and asked you to walk with them on this journey. You don’t want to be associated with the xenophobes, do you?
Burney: That’s preposterous! And by the way, you don’t even list prices on the menu. What’s this going to cost me?
Waiter: It’s not our policy to reveal our prices upfront. But don’t worry, you’ll find out – eventually!
Sorry Mak – should have scrolled back.
Salvatore, Avi Yemini’s video below that tweet is revealing.
Replace bearings, cones and seals. If you are doing it. Do it right once.
Garbage. BBC stats below. I think it’s safe to say that the BBC has good access to UK Intel/Military numbers which of course will be very inflated for public consumption;
https://twitter.com/MyLordBebo/status/1617954373832945666
Does anyone have a link to any reliable stats on Ukr casualties?
I’m thinking they are desperate if they are forcibly conscripting overweight dudes like this;
https://twitter.com/AZgeopolitics/status/1618319841236254721
Bottom line is that it’s extremely doubtful the war is going as well for Ukr as the MSM shills want us all to believe.
the US is tone death
“Even Stalin, as evil as he was, did not imperil Russia as much as Putin is doing, even with a very ill thought out military purge.”
Enough, this is ridiculous. You’re losing the plot. Tell that to the at least twenty million (the figure is probably as high as 50 million) that Stalin murdered.
I’ve outlined the reasons twice before you’ve suggested this nonsense.
The Hogan pic was likely struck down by Facebook’s silicon brain because of ‘cracker’, which it would have assumed was a derogatory reference to poor white US trash rather than an endorsement of cool drinks on hot days.
Real Life, by Dot Zelensky. Get help.
Fantasy land. They are literally exhausting their military inventories so Ukraine can continue that little longer.
Snakes. Old Australia.
Sometime in the seventies, husband and kids return from walking through the myall paddock (sandy loam, buffel grass, myalls, probably good snake country). One of the kids came close to stepping on a snake. As described to me: “and he did a quick Rodney Marsh and got out of the snake’s way”.
I have heard of No 8 fencing wire being the preferred tool of execution, but have not seen it used.
What about Russia?
They have the factories and the resources to run them 24/7.
As a kid clearing the bunny traps I came across Tiger that was obviously heading down a burrow for a little kit supper. It was trapped about two thirds along its length and was displaying a degree of displeasure. It damm near tore the trap out of the ground.
I was having nothing to do with it and took off to get big brother with the shotty.
He missed first shot which resulted in hysterics on my part. Not a wise move upon reflection, he did possess a Celtic temper.
You know I only start making counter arguments each day once someone posts overly done Russian “information”.
I’d like to know why a career in the trades outside of Australia (apparently the only authentic life for Australian males, despite being only a couple of thousand people, maybe they’re alpha gigs chads) would make one think being a Quisling is a good idea. “Zelensky should have just surrendered”. Yet it’s a faux pas to say an Australian leader should do the same thing.
You are comparing the industrial output of Russia to North America and Western and Central Europe.
I’m the one not in touch with reality?
It is a historical fact that Russian armour has always been second rate, hence why Arab armies were routinely routed by America and Israel.
The Tea Party, the Freedom Caucus, MAGA, it’s all built on a lie. Republicans are the party of the Wall Street Establishment, who cares about low taxes, low wages and high immigration. Trump governed that way entirely, when you look beyond his rhetoric.
Dickless sprouts BS on Australia day, proving once again a lot of men have their brains in their dick and dickless has no dick.
Here’s the thing.
Tell us when and how Putin wins and what he does with Ukraine and why he isn’t in a bad strategic position to the east or west now.
I cannot see anything other than headaches for him.
Australia under the ElbowEasy and the Labor Party/Greens/LINOs
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=youth+crime
Why attack me for stating that the publicly available information makes it unlikely abrams are going to show up in Ukraine this year? Perhaps you need to cope harder? Or maybe just have a good hard look at yourself.
One way or another the truth of it all will come out eventually, but I find it hard to believe claims of things like use of T-34 tanks when they’ve got tens of thousands of far more recent tanks in storage.
People are so used to the pissant little insurgent wars the west has been fighting, they badly need to read some history like WW2, a genuine combined arms war is costly and requires enormous numbers of everything. It is not taking a city and game over, you must destroy the enemies will to fight.
This Ukraine conflict is not there yet, for either side.
14 out of 16 intensive care beds in Alice occupied by domestic violence victims. No information I presume on what, if anything, has happened to the perpetrators. So just patch them up, send them home, rinse and repeat. Welcome back to the stone-age; good times for everyone.
Would that be this video? (not everybody sees the same feed)
Some first class interviews on that. Even the dumbest most bogan conservative knuckleheads aren’t as air-headed as those lefties – and many/most of them are likely tertiary educated.
I would say Putin is far worse than Stalin because:
1. The 27 million dead in the Great Patriotic War is likely a greatly inflated figure
2. There’s no plan to end the present War, which has killed perhaps
300,000 men and depopulated parts of Ukraine, all in the name of GloboHomo.
Estimates are that 17 million of 44 million have fled the Country.
Russia is outnumbered by about 1.1 bn to 146 mn to countries with a much more sophisticated and intensive capital base.
I’m not sure why people are convinced they can win a war of attrition on industrial grounds. Their tanks have ALWAYS been second rate.
Then you have the issue of Ukrainian casualties. Russias invasion has failed and they’ve retreated a long way. You can argue this wins the war for a Russia but the war aims of Russia seem very flexible.
What’s the point of “liberating” a country by means of a war of attrition?
There are at least three separate claims as to what Russia’s war aims are.
If Russia wants to comprehensively defeat the Ukraine before their limited territorial war aims are consolidated, then claiming a danger of a nuclear calamity could happen if the war goes on is just bluffing.
I bet Putin regrets starting the war at all.
Are you really saying that the west will put their industrial output in the hands of Zelenskiy? You are a fantasist , dotty.
I linked above- the total tank “loan” does not reach a single brigade. The tank force such as it is won’t be there at full strength for several months. The Leopards are a very dubious item. As yet it’s not known how many will even reach the battlefield after traversing all of western Ukr – under attack no doubt. Mindless speculation on your part.
Is ChatGPT a form of magic or the apocalypse?
ChatGPT hit the headlines in November, but it’s based on technology that data scientists have been working on since the 1950s.
On the topic of how one goes bankrupt, Ernest Hemingway famously wrote that it happens two ways: gradually, then suddenly.
The aphorism has come to be retold in the longer formulation “First it happens slowly, then it happens all at once”, and it’s come to be applied to other phenomena, too, like the rate of uptake of technology, or hair loss.
Or, now, artificial intelligence.
Since the rise of what’s become known as “generative AI” in 2022 and the appearance of ChatGPT on November 30 that year, artificial intelligence has transformed from a steady stream of research and development over a period of half a century, to a gushing fire hydrant of technological innovation that, depending on whom you ask, suddenly promises to revolutionise and democratise entire fields of human endeavour, or threatens to bankrupt them.
Or, quite probably, both.
“I do think that ChatGPT marks the start of an ‘all-at-once’ moment in the human evolutionary journey with technology,” says Nicholas Therkelsen-Terry, the co-founder and CEO of Max Kelsen, an artificial intelligence and machine-learning software development company that for eight years has been using precursors of ChatGPT to create automated business applications for the likes of Domino’s Pizza and Johnson & Johnson MedTech.
“Knowledge work is now far more under threat than it ever has been in history, and we’re soon going to see a lot of change in what our workforces look like very soon,” he says.
It’s not a bad thing.
“Things change and jobs change and the nature of work changes, and we as humans roll on,” he says.
The big question is, where are we rolling?
What is ChatGPT (and how does it work)?
ChatGPT is a so-called “large language model” (LLM) machine-learning chatbot that, according to the chatbot itself, was created by analysing billions of sentences of text taken from the internet.
The analysis built a statistical model that’s able to create human-like conversation by predicting which words are most likely to follow a given prompt (such as the question “how does ChatGPT work?”), and which word is most likely to follow or precede the word before or after it.
Large language models themselves trace their roots back to the natural language processing (NLP) research in the 1950s and 1960s, but the progress in NLP began to shift from the “gradual” phase to the “sudden” phase in 2017, when a team of researchers at Google published a paper called “Attention is all you need”, revolutionising the field and giving rise to a new breed of machine learning.
The paper proposed a way of analysing text, known as a “transformer”, that rather than just analyse a word in the context of the word that came before it, could look at an entire input sequence (such as a sentence or a paragraph) and weigh up which parts of the sequence were most relevant to the output the NLP engine was asked to generate.
Suddenly, the model could create a correlation between words at the beginning of a sentence, and words in the middle or at the end, vastly improving the model’s performance.
Since then, LLMs with names like GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) from Elon Musk’s OpenAI in 2018, “BERT” (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) from Google in 2018, and RoBERTa from Facebook in 2019 have been released at a steady pace, typically with open-source licensing that allowed competing researchers to learn from each other.
“BERT was underwhelming, to be honest,” Therkelsen-Terry told The Australian Financial Review.
“It didn’t give us a huge boost over what we were already doing. But RoBERTa was massively transformative. Facebook took BERT, they dialled up the number of parameters, and overnight it was better than anything we’d ever seen before by a considerable margin,” he says.
Parameters can be thought of as the rough equivalent of neurons in an organic brain. They take an input (say, a photo of food), apply a statistical weighting to it (what’s the likelihood it’s shaped like a sausage?), and pass it along to the next parameter, which applies a new weighting (what’s the chance it’s red?), passing the image though parameter after parameter until, at the end, the model decides that the thing in the photo is, in all likelihood, a hot dog (but it might be a red pickle).
Houston, we probably have a problem
This type of AI, known as “deep learning”, doesn’t deal in certainties, but is referred to by data scientists as “probabilistic”, or “stochastic”. There are other forms of AI that are more deterministic – that’s definitely a hot dog! – but it’s deep learning that is in the ascendancy right now.
(Deep learning is so popular among data scientists, Tesla has even adopted a completely probabilistic approach to autonomous driving, abandoning lidar sensors and other, more deterministic sensors and relying solely on in-car cameras and deep-learning-based computer vision. Critics of the purely deterministic approach, like the Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at New York University, Gary Marcus, say this explains the infamous video of a Tesla Model Y driving itself into a private jet. Maybe there’s an object there, but then again . . . )
With each new generation of LLMs, the number of parameters has been ballooning, starting with 117 million in GPT and 340 million in BERT.
GPT-3, the LLM upon which OpenAI based ChatGPT, has 175 billion parameters. Google’s GLaM (Generalist Language Model) has 1.2 trillion.
The result is a kind of magic: machines that have ingested an internet’s worth of data, weighed up the relationships between things, and are able to generate content that appears to be new and original.
But transformers and parameters, it turns out, aren’t everything. Even LLMs with vast numbers of parameters can still make egregious errors, both of fact and of judgment.
If the data the model was trained on contained false information (which it does) or racist or sexist comments (which it does), then the LLM might still spit out erroneous or racist or sexist responses, if it judges those are the most likely responses to a given prompt.
In a paper on the dangers of LLMs, AI researcher Emily Bender described the models as “stochastic parrots”: they can regurgitate what they’ve been taught, often in new and seemingly intelligent ways, but they don’t understand a word of it.
Humans to the rescue
Hanno Blankenstein, the CEO and founder Unleash live, a company that creates AI business solutions in the field of computer vision, likens AI models to infants.
The “AI kids” have been exposed to all the data in the world, but they still need to be taught the rules of the world, he says.
One way to do this, he says, is through reinforcement learning administered by humans, who train the AI model with a regime of repeated “treats and penalties” until its outputs closely match the real world.
Creating a machine learning model that could help electricity providers lower the cost of maintaining powerlines, Unleash live used a generative AI to create millions of artificial photographs of cracked electrical insulators, and then used those images to repeatedly train a computer vision system until it could spot a crack in an insulator in a real photo, he says.
The result, he says, is a system that can trawl through countless hours of imagery taken from drones flying close to powerlines, and automatically identify problems that humans should look into.
OpenAI – the company behind ChatGPT, and which Microsoft on Tuesday announced a $14 billion investment – did something similar to train its LLM GPT-3 not to parrot hateful or harmful content in its responses to prompts.
In an effort to build a more ethical version of GPT-3 (the version that became known as GPT-3.5, which is used by the ChatGPT chatbot) OpenAI hired humans to painstakingly provide the LLM with the mathematical equivalent of penalties and treats, whenever it did or did not come up with harmful or hateful responses.
The ethics of OpenAI’s method for creating an ethical AI have since been questioned, however. A recent investigation by Time revealed that OpenAI hired an outsourcer that used low-paid workers in Kenya to teach GPT-3 how to identify toxic content, and avoid reproducing that content in its outputs.
The toxic content the workers had to deal with “described situations in graphic detail like child sexual abuse, bestiality, murder, suicide, torture, self harm, and incest,” Time reported.
And traumatising workers in order to generate ethical AI content isn’t the only complaint about the sudden explosion of generative AI.
Upon discovering that their artworks had been used without permission to train a generative AI to produces images in response to prompts, three artists recently commenced a class action against its creators Stability AI and Midjourney, as well as the company DeviantArt, which used to create portfolio of AI artworks.
The lawsuit alleged that the generative AIs “flood the market with an essentially unlimited number of infringing images (that) will inflict permanent damage on the market for art and artists”.
Nick Cave, the Australian singer and songwriter, has voiced similar concerns about generative AIs that have been trained on the lyrics of his songs, and that can write new songs in the “Nick Cave style” when prompted to do so.
“I understand that ChatGPT is in its infancy, but perhaps that is the emerging horror of AI – that it will forever be in its infancy, as it will always have further to go, and the direction is always forward, always faster,” he wrote on his blog.
Describing a song written by ChatGPT in his style, Cave wrote: “this song is bullshit, a grotesque mockery of what it is to be human, and, well, I don’t much like it”.
“The apocalypse is well on its way. This song sucks,” Cave blogged.
It’s possible, though, that the solution to all of this will simply be more of this.
Google is already working on LLMs that provide far more source-attribution to their outputs, helping to deal with the copyright infringement issues raised by artists, and helping to add more confidence to probabilistic responses to questions.
It might only be a coincidence, but source-attribution might also help Google sell advertising through generative AI responses, says Therkelsen-Terry: if a reply to a question is identified as coming from a business, that business might one day be hit up for an ad fee, he says.
And, in response to the problem posed by ChatGPT for schools and universities, enterprising individuals have already started to build AI models that can detect when an essay is written by other AIs.
Indeed, LLM makers like OpenAI are planning to add “watermarks” to their machine-generated texts, in the form of words, letters and punctuation discreetly embedded in the text that show where it came from.
What we’re experiencing right now might merely be the growing pains as AI leaves its infancy and suddenly grows up; the initial snap of G-force as the technology moves from “slowly”, to “all-at-once”.
Or, as Cave intimates, it might be a form of creative bankruptcy from which humans may never recover.
Therkelsen-Terry, who uses AI in his job every day, says it’s the former.
“If we have the tools to build this stuff, we have the tools to correct for the downside risk that it creates.”
As well as that, Putin is Full Steam Ahead on Vaccination for COVID/19.
Unless he’s brought down, that’s the end of Russia.
Cassie of Sydney says:
January 26, 2023 at 12:48 pm
Speedbox’s wife is Russian, she regularly returns to Russia to visit family. If Stalin was leader, returning to Russia was basically a death sentence and those who did (and there were a few) were arrested on arrival and either sent to a Gulag or shot in basement, usually the latter. Speedy, have you heard from your wife? Has she been sent to a Gulag? Has she been shot? Is she okay?
Afternoon Cassie. Happy Australian Day. Thank you for your enquiry – I can report that Mrs Speedbox is alive and well and currently in Australia. During her frequent trips to Russia she has never been locked up, tortured and/or shot at. She moves freely around that country without police or government oversight or interference. (as have I)
We are soon to book the next trip to Russia and at this stage looks like August/September 2023.
Nods sagely – in Iraq we called this a ‘complex ambush’.
No, I wasn’t making a comparison. I said that Russia was quite capable of covering their losses and then some given the availability of industry and resources. Nevertheless, I think that the Russians currently outproduce the West re MBT production.
dotty fantasy. Russia is not liberating Ukraine.
Obligatory: Both sides are shit – Vlads is more shit.
Dickhead mongs are celebrating that its finally becoming a “West vs Russia” war and whistling past the graveyard of nuclear attacks, even on a limited tactical basis.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jan/25/tanks-ukraine-western-war-russia-volodymyr-zelenskiy
The final reason why this week’s announcements matter is that this is now, more clearly than before, a western war against Russia over the independence of Ukraine. That is not to say it is a war the west has sought. Nor that Ukraine’s forces are simply proxies for western interests; that argument, as Prof Lawrence Freedman says, would deny Ukrainians the agency they manifestly possess. Nor are the west’s aims other than defensive; they do not extend beyond helping to liberate Ukraine from its invaders.
whoops..
Biden on Putin: `This man cannot remain in power’
Vlad – bae will be left considering if hes prepared for defeat & being overthrown/ killed or making other people die.
Now we are half way in the next step will be a no fly zone or outright engagement over Ukrainian airspace.
Lets try a hypothetical.
The new allied wonderwaffe have been concentrated and with great combined arms tactics have punched a ole in the Russian lines and are poised to roll up their flanks.
You are the Russian leader/commander.
Do you
a: Cop it up the blurter and wait for General Winter to arrive
b: Drop some canned sunshine where most of the forces are concentrated and with one fell swoop make the war existential, and cripple the offensive capability of your enemies for months?
Wont someone try and negotiate a cease fire/outbreak of peace?
It would be very difficult to imagine the Soviets, sorry, I mean Russians, could leave thousands of armour, trucks and guns photographed smashed to shit all over Ukraine, and not have racked up close to 100,000 KIA.
Comparisons to casualty and equipment loss lists for previous battles and wars say otherwise.
Makka says:
January 26, 2023 at 2:45 pm
You are comparing the industrial output of Russia to North America and Western and Central Europe.
Are you really saying that the west will put their industrial output in the hands of Zelenskiy? You are a fantasist , dotty.
I linked above- the total tank “loan” does not reach a single brigade. The tank force such as it is won’t be there at full strength for several months. The Leopards are a very dubious item. As yet it’s not known how many will even reach the battlefield after traversing all of western Ukr – under attack no doubt. Mindless speculation on your part.
Tanks for Ukraine Break Through German Lines
It took far too long, but the U.S. provides allied political cover for reluctant Chancellor Olaf Scholz.
By The WSJ Editorial Board
This explains Mr. Scholz’s constant need to surround himself with allied political cover before he dares challenge the SPD left. In this case he demanded that the U.S. supply its top-line Abrams tanks so it wouldn’t appear that Germany was going it alone. Washington delayed but finally agreed, with the Pentagon announcing Wednesday that it will send 31 M1 Abrams tanks, or one tank battalion, to Ukraine on an unspecified timetable.
But the U.S. announcement is less helpful than meets the headline because the tanks won’t be driving onto C-17s from U.S. stocks. Instead they’ll be delivered through the military procurement process, which will take months or longer.
This delay is hard to understand given that the Marines are decommissioning their Abrams tanks as they adapt to becoming a more mobile, dispersed force. Why not send those? At least the Leopards can be deployed sooner, which will help Ukraine this spring.
The tale of the tanks is all typical of the Biden Administration’s Ukraine decisions over the last year. It resisted calls to supply lethal drones only to send them under pressure from Congress and media critics; the same with Himars rocket launchers, Patriot missile-defense batteries, and now with tanks.
We appreciate the need to keep the alliance together, but Europe will never move without firm U.S. leadership. The U.S. and NATO have a major strategic interest in seeing Russia fail to subdue Ukraine, which includes pushing the invaders out of the territory they’ve taken by brutal force. The faster Ukraine can achieve that objective, the better for everyone except the Kremlin.
The U.S. and NATO have a major strategic interest in seeing Russia fail to subdue Ukraine, which includes pushing the invaders out of the territory they’ve taken by brutal force.
The Lack of American Self Awareness is Amazing – Guys – Libya, Afghanistan, Middle East?
Not a good day for TGA, ATAGI, CHO’S and the pro jab experts.
Twitter gone viral with the Project Veritas Pfizer Director clip mentioned by Old Ozzie. PV have also provided proof he is genuine employee. Ok about to be ex!
Then there is the UK advisory committee saying no more boosters for under 50’s (via Dr John Campbell on YouTube).
these are nuclear capable hypersonic missile. you cant get much more clear message to the neo-cons
Thanks for all the tips on the hot wheel , presumed of bearing aetiology
I jacked it up and spun the wheel – almost no resistance, just a slight ‘hiss’ as you can get with a lightly touching brake shoe. Drag was similar to the good side.
Hence pulled the bearing cap, lovely clean fluid grease revealed – this thing really has done NO work in the 5 years since it was built. ‘One sick elderly owner who didnt use’ it certainly looks true.
Knocked out split pin and undid the castle nut – it was not over tight
Removed hub and drove out both bearings – no evidence of heating or damage.
Will replace the bearing (have destroyed the seal in anycase) and retest, but am unconvinced I found any anatomical pathology so far.
Will wait till tomorrow before looking for a bearing set – dont want to dilute the sacred value of invasion day – yep it was an invasion, your lot lost, victors dictate the terms, always was that way, always will be
😉
seems b is the goal
The US should just Stop. Stop with the failed interventions.
The Americans have got weapons the Russians can only dream of.
What sank the Moskva?
Secret squirrel.
What hit the Kersk Bridge?
No one wants to talk about that either.
Bottom line:
The war is progressing nicely, by, say, 2040 Ukraine and European Russia will be emptied of people.
Russian tanks were better than US tanks in WW2, and as good or better for most of the Cold War.
The US should just Stop. Stop with the failed interventions.
Too damn right. As we would be better off without canbra, they would be better off without DC. These departments in DC are an abomination- state, ‘justice’, FBI. Stinks.
The problem with your theory is that some kind of nuclear exchange (thermo, false flag, dirty bomb or otherwise) may very well intervene in the meantime. Like, any time now.
US disarms itself to aid Ukraine
by Byron York, Chief Political Correspondent – January 25, 2023 01:28 PM
U.S. DISARMS ITSELF TO AID UKRAINE. The United States has shipped massive amounts of military aid to Ukraine since the Russian invasion in February 2022. There has been bipartisan support on Capitol Hill for the aid, although some Republicans have questioned the price tag — $27.5 billion so far in military aid, or “security assistance” alone, which does not include tens of billions in financial, humanitarian, and other types of aid. Some GOP lawmakers have also expressed concern about the lack of safeguards in sending so much money to a notoriously corrupt country.
But there is another growing worry about the amount of U.S. military aid to Ukraine. The Biden administration is sending so many weapons to Ukraine that the U.S., already underprepared for a major war, is running low on munitions for its own defense.
In effect, the U.S. is disarming itself to aid Ukraine. That would be troubling in any event but is especially so amid growing tensions with China over Taiwan.
The scope of the problem is detailed in a new report, “Empty Bins In A Wartime Environment,” from the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. Author Seth Jones writes that “the U.S. defense industrial base is not adequately prepared for the competitive security environment that now exists.” Citing analysis of stockpiles and usage rates, plus several CSIS war games, Jones writes that supplies are so low that “the United States would likely run out of some munitions — such as long-range, precision-guided munitions — in less than one week in a Taiwan Strait conflict.”
Jones writes that the U.S. has been underprepared for years. But the war in Ukraine is making the situation worse. The American effort in Ukraine has “depleted U.S. stocks of some types of weapons systems and munitions, such as Stinger surface-to-air missiles, 155 mm howitzers and ammunition, and Javelin anti-tank missile systems,” Jones writes. “For example, the quantities of Javelins transferred to Ukraine through late August 2022 represented seven years of production [at 2022 rates]. … The number of Stingers transferred to Ukraine is roughly equal to the total number built for all non-U.S. customers in the last 20 years. … As of January 2023, the U.S. military has provided Ukraine with up to 1,074,000 rounds of 155 mm ammunition, significantly shrinking the availability of 155 mm rounds in storage. Because of the limited availability of 155 mm howitzers and ammunition, the U.S. military began sending 105 mm howitzers and ammunition instead.”
“Since many of the weapons systems and munitions have come directly from U.S. inventories,” Jones concludes, “U.S. assistance has depleted some stockpiles that could be used for training, future contingencies, or other operational needs.”
Jones notes that lower weapons stockpiles make it difficult to deter China — why would China be deterred, knowing its adversary would run out of ammunition in a week? A major argument in favor of U.S. support for Ukraine has been to send China a message that aggression like Russian President Vladimir Putin showed in Ukraine will meet stiff resistance. But what if it has also shown China that the U.S. has exhausted its supplies on Ukraine and will take years to recover?
And it will be years. Weapons systems take a long time to develop. Weapons are stockpiled and supplies not renewed. Then, all of a sudden, they are needed, and there’s no quick way to replace them. “The history of industrial mobilization suggests that it will take years for the defense industrial base to produce and deliver sufficient quantities of critical weapons systems and munitions and recapitalize stocks that have been used up,” Jones writes. “It might take even longer to materialize facilities, infrastructure, and capital equipment, making it important to make changes now. The long timelines are manageable in peacetime but not in the competitive environment that now exists.”
Things never work out as expected. U.S. defense planners put a high priority on preparing for a possible conflict with China. And then they found themselves “directly aiding Ukraine in an industrial-style conventional war with Russia,” according to the CSIS report. The U.S.’s new proxy war with Russia is burning up weapons and ammunition at a rate the planners didn’t plan for. “While the Pentagon has focused on fighting wars with small numbers of more expensive precision-guided weapons, Ukraine is largely relying on howitzers firing unguided shells,” noted the New York Times.
Right now, the goal is to make more weapons — for Ukraine.
“Before Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, the U.S. Army’s production of 14,400 unguided shells a month had been sufficient for the American military’s way of war,” the New York Times reported. “But the need to supply Kyiv’s armed forces prompted Pentagon leaders to triple production goals in September, and then double them again in January so that they could eventually make 90,000 or more shells a month.”
It is important to increase U.S. weapons production. The No. 1 reason, by far, is that the U.S. might need the weapons to defend itself. Now, the U.S. is ramping up production because it has gotten progressively deeper and deeper into a proxy war with Russia, a war that could burn vast amounts of weapons and munitions in the months, or perhaps years, to come.
As they increase U.S. military capacity, civilian leaders might also want to consider how deeply and for how long they will be committed to the current war.
US disarms itself to aid Ukraine
Milligan boasting on socials she’s opening the batting with an Opus Dei expose. Chortle.
All 14 of them.
flyingduk says:
January 26, 2023 at 2:58 pm
Thanks for all the tips on the hot wheel , presumed of bearing aetiology
Will wait till tomorrow before looking for a bearing set – dont want to dilute the sacred value of invasion day – yep it was an invasion, your lot lost, victors dictate the terms, always was that way, always will be
As previously stated make sure “Not Made in China”
Both US and Russian tanks of WWII were inferior to the standard German panzers. Russians mass produced a simple heavily armoured tank that could be scavenged or repaired in the field without complex support.
The Sherman was a victory of component manufacturing. Parts readily available and rapidly repaired or replaced within days.
The factories win wars.
Portugal are sending 4. Ukraine is saved!
Media: Portugal preparing to hand over four Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine (25 Jan)
Tucker: This is scary
Fox News host Tucker Carlson analyzes Jeffrey Epstein’s death
Lend lease and several Arab armies losing very badly multiple times say otherwise.
In ’41/’42, T34 was as good or better than Pz III and IV. By the time the Panther came into service T34-85 was as good overall, and T-44 kept up with later variants of Panther, like the Panther G, although the latter was now better but the numbers just weren’t there. These mediums weren’t heavily armoured, just well-sloped in comparison to PZ III/IV which were box tanks. The Panther was pretty much a German version of the T-34.
Quantity has a quality all on its own.
My grand uncle commanded an anti tank battery. To quote him, “the Russki tanks kept rolling over the hill. We kept killing them. Unfortunately we ran out of shells before the Russians ran out of tanks”
https://hadagutful.com.au/ – There’s More to Life
Yes of course – the pulled bearing was a Timken btw, and a nice large robust unit.
I am struggling to understand how it could have been the cause given its condition on removal. We shall see.
Very true and so do logistics and supply chains.
Nazi manufacturing was leveled by Allied bombing and raw materials/resources were denied by Allied interdiction. Transport lines were destroyed wholesale across Nazi territories. None of this is happening to Russia and their supply chain is only hours/days long, not oceans or nations long.
It’s not only the tank- it’s operating them effectively, supplying them, maintaining them , ammo and tactics.
How many Ukr technicians know how to properly maintain a AGT1500 Gas Turbine Engine for example?
Duk, is that axle braked?
Are the brakes biting equally both sides?
A battalion with javelins given to each platoon or company and one modernised Leopard II can hold back a larger infantry opponent and several pre 2000s tanks. (Maybe a brigade and squadron).
Ukraine isn’t going head to head with columns of T-90s. 186 in service as of 2020 and 43 destroyed in Ukraine.
aka: ‘Amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics ..’
Republicans are the party of the Wall Street Establishment, who cares about low taxes, low wages and high immigration.
m0nty=fa criticises Republicans for having DemonRat policies on Wall Street and immigration (the latter impacts heavily on wages).
More on – Project Veritas Catches Pfizer R&D Official Stating Company Mutating COVID Viruses to Proactively Create Vaccines
January 25, 2023 – Sundance
Project Veritas goes undercover and finds another top-level Pfizer Research and Development executive admitting the company is mutating COVID viruses to create vaccines. Instead of calling it “gain of function” research, which is illegal, they are calling it “directed evolution.” This is very disturbing.
[NEW YORK – Jan. 25, 2023] Project Veritas released a new video today exposing a Pfizer executive, Jordon Trishton Walker, who claims that his company is exploring a way to “mutate” COVID via “Directed Evolution” to preempt the development of future vaccines.
So much for consumer being king-these companies are evil. Maybe JKG had a point after all.
I’m still a bit non plussed why this ‘transgender’ muck is being foisted on the demos with the meja fully onboard of course. Destabilize society? Ensure many young people will never become parents? I never believed such evil would be possible. It’s being driven from on high too.
Abrams was the first qualitatively better US tank.
Why do you think they and the Krauts spent so much time and money trying to build something better than fielded by the Warsaw Pact?
16, if the Cheeseheads decide to send both working ones.
Far too much influence for their number. My theory is that there are many people in powerful and/or influential positions throughout our social and governance structures leading double lives with their trans “silent partners”. And they are beholden to do their bit for the cause.
Wow. this woman certainly doesn’t mince words.
“Feminism was never sane. It was never without deep rancor and bitterness against men, never free from the claim that women were absolute victims of male predation, never uninterested in destroying the family, never accurate in its claims about women’s social situation, never unwilling to slander men in the most vicious and unpitying ways, and it never expressed any appreciation for men nor recognition that men had made any contribution to society or that men had ever acted out of love and concern and compassion for women in the laws that had been made or social instruments that had been developed over time. It was always a deeply misandrist, man-hating, man-blaming kind of movement.”
Janice Fiamengo, c/- Bettina Arndt.
I stand corrected lotocoti. Thanks.
No, they don’t. T34s were better than M4s. ISs as good or better than Pershing. T-54 was as good or better than Patton. Etc. The Israelis respected the capability of the T-54/55 very much.
I know that many Cats are tired of the material relating to the Covid vaccines. However, there may be others who would like information on the extraordinary explosion of excess mortality figures across the western world – particularly in the teenage to 65 group. The FLCCC has enlisted data experts like Ed Dowd (who has done a lot of work with insurance company data) to discuss the implications. They are saying that the “sudden” adult death syndrome in the USA in particular is being explained away by government medical departments as due to either Covid or Long Covid. This, of course, can be disproven in relation to Covid mortality figures, and it is patently medically ridiculous in respect to the post viral syndrome of Long Covid.
From a personal post of view, I was astonished when I made a “catch-up” call to a pro-vax friend, & her first words were …”everyone is dying” & her examples included an otherwise healthy 30 year old. I am also very concerned for a grandson who has a sudden sinister growth as yet not positively identified.
The discussion by Drs Marik, Kory from the FLCCC and Ed Dowd can be viewed on:
[email protected]
BTW Kory & McCullough are discussing their experience over the last three years in a visit to Sydney on 13 February.
Its one axle only, with electric brakes but I dont think its a brake issue because
– no drag felt
– wheel spins easily when jacked up
– problem not solved by running with plug disconnected
Fox News host Tucker Carlson analyzes Jeffrey Epstein’s Murder.
FIFY.
US disarms itself to aid Ukraine
This is a real issue.
Some of the military supply chains come down to specialist machinists in their 60’s & 70’s working in their own independent labs & workshops.
Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund has backed some very smart cookies to fortify this part of the supply chain.
The shiny bums at the Pentagon know this but they pretend it isn’t an issue.
Unsurprising considering they are a pack of politicians.
Their kill ratio in the Yom Kippur war was 5:1.
Next in popular mechanics.
The timing of retractable fingers on a P8
MacDon pick up front.
pfizer looking at @directedevolution
..
Media and governments suddenly not interested in rolling tallies of deaths and daily announcements of new “cases”.
Where are the solemn reports of hospitalisations and counts of intensive care patients? Nowhere.
When there is no profit or motive in scaring the pants off the citizenry, it’s a different story suddenly.
Interestingly Egypt still has over 4,600 tanks, which I’m sure keeps the Israelis on edge despite the peace treaty.
Visualizing The World’s Top 25 Fleets Of Combat Tanks (19 Jan)
Duk – re the bearing/brake problem:
Husband says when you next attend to it – pack the bearings with grease when you install…& when you assemble the brake drum take 2 clicks to loosen brakes…..again, when you spin the wheels you should not feel any resistance.
duk,
Bearings can take a LOT of punishment before they become un- serviceable. And if removed/inspected and found to look almost new, they certainly aren’t the problem. I’ve confidently put back plenty over the years successful every time.
If you can remove the brake caliper and spin the wheel, you remove that component from suspicion. Sometimes pads can sit crooked and make a racket without any drag. Good luck!
Rita Panahi:
The notion that changing the date will cease the attacks on Australia Day is at best naive.
The assault against our national day has little to do with the date and everything to do with delegitimising modern Australia.
Changing Australia Day from January 26 will only embolden the activists, not satisfy them.
It will do little to change the ill-feeling of the malignant Left nor their determination to falsely paint this country as one that is rooted in racism and genocide.
The view that this “always was and always will be” Aboriginal land is deeply xenophobic.
It denotes that those who do not have the right ancestry are unwelcome interlopers and not entitled to think of this land as their own.
As I wrote some years ago it’s a politically correct way of saying “go back to where you came from”.
Little wonder then that so many migrants find the attacks against Australia Day particularly egregious with polls showing an overwhelming majority of migrants feel positively towards Australia Day.
Sadly, among young people the anti-Australia Day propaganda, led by media, academia, celebrities and increasingly corporates, is having a real impact.
Of course this campaign doesn’t operate in isolation but together with a plethora of messaging rooted in grievance, victimhood and race obsessions.
As it stands, a significant majority of Australians, around two in three, support Australia Day remaining on January 26, according to a number of polls including by Roy Morgan, CoreData and Deakin University.
But that majority view is not reflected in the media coverage nor campaigns run by corporates from The ABC to Telstra to the Australian Open.
The media’s fatwa against the national holiday was underway even when polls showed that over 90 per cent of Australians supported the national holiday and less than one in three Indigenous people felt negatively towards the day.
A poll commissioned by far Left publication The Guardian in 2017 revealed that only six per cent of Australians felt negatively towards Australia Day and only 15 per cent favoured changing it from January 26.
Among migrants the number was even lower.
Nowadays some self-loathing white folks, including inner-city dwelling CEOs and ABC hosts, can’t even bring themselves to say Australia Day – they simply say January 26.
How long before they join Greens Senator Lidia Thorpe in the “pay the rent” campaign requiring Australians to pay weekly rent to Indigenous people for “using their land”?
If you think the two issues are not connected, you are not paying attention.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the loud minority would stop stoking racial divisions and instead, on this Australia Day, reflect on just how blessed we all are to be living in this corner of the world in a country that is peaceful, prosperous and where anyone regardless of class, colour or creed can achieve amazing things.
What makes a great Australian isn’t their ancestry but their contribution to the country.
But those values are under threat; the silent majority better find its voice and soon.
After watching the Project Veritas stuff, it’s going generate theories about Pfizer tweaking an earlier strain of COVID into a current or future variant.
The onus will be on Pfizer to prove they didn’t not for others to prove they did.
This wasn’t some low level chump at Pfizer.
It was someone senior enough to be across a lot of silos & he was speaking specifically about a division he is (or maybe was after today) head of.
yes, but does the grease have any oil in it?
If it was me, I’d do the bearings anyway
just so I knew they were good.
… too many freeway stranded trailers in my history.
just thinking out loud here … the tyre wasn’t a little bit too flat on the hot side was it?
The last 3 years have turned my mind to questioning the vaxxes in general, not just the COVID vaxxes, and it is particularly alarming to discover that:
1) Sudden INFANT death syndrome also has a temporal relationship to vaccination
2) Autism rates have EXPLODED (from 1/10,000 to 1/32) in synchrony with the expanded paediatric vaccine programme
3) The same old tricks (fraudulent safety trials, rigged results, gaslighting the injured, deregistering Drs) have been used to silence criticism for pediatric vaccines as well.
Sometimes pads can sit crooked and make a racket without any drag. Good luck!
Husband agrees.
No.
Russian industrial output was 220 bn USD in 2019.
US industrial production in 2019 was 3.47 tn USD. Even without Europe Russia is dwarfed.
Russia cannot win a war with the west on industrial grounds, despite the west handicapping itself.
As for Russian tanks being no good against the West: The Arabs never had the good stuff. That’s reserved for Russian use. The Arabs got simplified versions aka “monkey model” tanks and had Arab training and diligence.
One Israeli General when asked to what he put his success down to answered ” I was fighting Arabs”.
Looks like the Ukes will be eventually getting downgraded M1’s too :
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/m1-abrams-tanks-in-u-s-inventory-have-armor-too-secret-to-send-to-ukraine
I’d love to know if the export F-35’s have stealth/radar/ etc as good as the US ones.
Yep, I noted the old style drum adjuster (my first job was grease monkey in a shell station and I have tinkered ever since). I will undo it a click or 2 when rea assembling, but it spins fine, just makes a slight hiss as the drums touch the shoes. The cool side is similar.
No way my OCD would let me re-use however 🙁
Maybe those Arab armies were just a bit shit.
In 1939, France was operating tanks superior to anything out of
Germany or Czechoslovakia.
Some of the Soviet armour at Khalkhin Gol was better too.
Under Gemma Togninni’s tweet, Anthony Dillon left an Australia Day message for us all.
What a great man.
About the tanks that will be sent from Germany and other countries:
You are Commander of a tank unit. You get orders to send 2, 4 or more tanks. Which ones do you send? The known good ones that hardly give trouble or the workshop Queens?
Black Ball says:
January 26, 2023 at 3:52 pm
Rita Panahi:
The notion that changing the date will cease the attacks on Australia Day is at best naive.
The assault against our national day has little to do with the date and everything to do with delegitimising modern Australia.
Changing Australia Day from January 26 will only embolden the activists, not satisfy them.
It will do little to change the ill-feeling of the malignant Left nor their determination to falsely paint this country as one that is rooted in racism and genocide.
The view that this “always was and always will be” Aboriginal land is deeply xenophobic.
It denotes that those who do not have the right ancestry are unwelcome interlopers and not entitled to think of this land as their own.
As I wrote some years ago it’s a politically correct way of saying “go back to where you came from”.
Little wonder then that so many migrants find the attacks against Australia Day particularly egregious with polls showing an overwhelming majority of migrants feel positively towards Australia Day.
Sadly, among young people the anti-Australia Day propaganda, led by media, academia, celebrities and increasingly corporates, is having a real impact.
Speaking with my Wife moments ago, she mentioned she was standing out the Front on the footpath with 9 year Old Grandson this morning, when a car full of young people went past with Australian Flags hanging out the windows and decorating their car – she commented “They are very Patriotic people” – he asked what Patriotic meant – “Proud of your Country, it’s Australia Day” – he replied it’s Invasion Day, my wife said No, it celebrates the landing of Captain Phillip with the 11 ships of the First Fleet in Sydney Cove on 26 January 1788 to establish a Convict Settlement, and my youngest Daughter joined in and supported that it was Invasion Day and only a Holiday since 1988 – Bi Centennial
In 1818, 26 January was declared a legal holiday, marking the 30th anniversary of the British settlement in Australia.
That is Arab tank losses v Israeli and they are fielding different varieties of tanks. Both sides fielded Pattons and T-54/55s in that war. Given the poor training of the Syrians, for instance, and the air superiority the Israeli ended the war with that ratio makes sense. Still, can’t find a firm figure on Israeli tanks losses, some I’ve seen in the 200s, another up to a thousand.
The Wiki entry on the combat history of the T-54/55 has this to offer:
That is a pretty good performance.
Arky.
What the Russians demonstrated is its fine to have the “thunder road’/decapitation/airborne bridgehead planning, but unless your troops are well trained in combined operations you just cant pull it off.
I know the portable anti-armor missiles were a very nasty surprise for the Russkis, but I think another partially overlooked component was the surface to air man portable stuff which wrecked the russians helicopter support which would have provided a great deal of support for their armor.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GvH_Vfyjn0
So they may have had a great idea, but forgot the enemy gets a vote as well.
they didnt expect they were fighting nato
dotty, Russia has whole cities devoted to tank and heavy military vehicle production. Their lines of supply for materials and parts manufacturing untouched for many decades. Well established. I’ve been to a few. You are promoting false and misleading comparisons.
There is no claim that Russia manufacturing compares to the US. The legitimate comparison is how many tanks the Russians can field/maintain/operate/replace vs what the west is willing to supply to Ukraine and how many of those Ukr can effectively use. All else is your horsehit.
“Pogriasays:
January 26, 2023 at 4:04 pm
Under Gemma Togninni’s tweet, Anthony Dillon left an Australia Day message for us all.
What a great man.”
Yes, Anthony is also incredibly intelligent, thoughtful, and decent. He was a great friend of the late Bill Leak.
Another day, another death wish from Hallward Hughes.
Hey Hallward, how many dolls do you have with pins stuck in them, you deranged twat?
The ‘Aviationist’.
Jerkoff Cretin? Are you still here? Go away and play in the traffic…………………T.W.A.T…………
By the time the Israelis are finished with them they will be better that US ones! 😀
The Israeli’s had the air- end of. Also, an indestructible will to survive against a numerically superior enemy. Not to mention some pretty handy pilots.
The Arabs meanwhile unfortunately has 600 years of in-breeding to contend with and leaders who were more interested in their Swiss numbered accounts and gold braid than deadly military stuff.
By the time the Israelis are finished with them they will be better that US ones!
I suspect they already are. I think the US gave the Israelis the source codes. Wonder if we’ll get the same?
I doubt it. We didn’t on our classic F-18’s but I remember fatso Beazley boasting that we had reverse engineered some of it.
Great Reset Watch: EU Gives Green Light for Use of Two Insect Species in Human Food
The European Union has given the green light for two more species of insect to be used as food for humans.
As of Tuesday, a powdered form of Acheta domesticus — better known as the house cricket — will be given the green light for human consumption within the European Union, documents from the body have confirmed.
This is soon to be followed by further approval for the sale and consumption of the larval form of Alphitobius diaperionus — also known as the lesser mealworm — which will be given the green light for human consumption in frozen, paste, dried and powder forms within the European Union later this week.
The new insect-based products for human consumption represent the latest push by the European Union to normalise the consumption of bugs through legislation, with many bigwigs from a variety of organisations pushing insects as a food item for both economic and environmental reasons in recent years.
In a press release confirming the approval of the insect products, the EU emphasises that while it is “up to consumers to decide whether they want to eat insects or not”, the bug-based food can serve as an “alternate source of protein”, with the bloc being keen the emphasise that many bugs are already eaten in other parts of the world.
The union also emphasises that both approved products “are safe under the uses and use levels” and “do not pose any risk to human health” so long as they are produced and consumed as outlined as provided for by the bloc.
“Food safety is the top priority for the commission,” Der Spiegel reports a spokesman for the European Commission in relation to the approval.
Global elites have been keen to move western populations away from meat eating over the last number of years, with the topic once again receiving attention at the World Economic Forum’s annual conference at Davos earlier this month.
“If a billion people stop eating meat, I tell you, it has a big impact,” Jim Hagemann Snabe, the chairman of German manufacturer Siemens, remarked during a panel on climate change at the conference.
“I predict we will have proteins not coming from meat in the future, they will probably taste even better,” he continued. “They will be zero carbon and much healthier than the kind of food we eat today, that is the mission we need to get on.”
Many national institutions have gotten on board with this move away from meat, with schools in the Netherlands even going so far as to feed children mealworms last year in the hopes of opening them up to it as an alternative source of protein.
However, such a push does not appear to be to the taste of all involved, with many within elite globalist spheres seemingly keen on holding on to their own meat-eating habits despite an attempt to move middle-income workers away from the food type.
For instance, high-class meals containing beef, chicken and salmon were all served at the U.N.’s COP27 climate conference in Egypt last year, despite the fact that the international body has been pushing for a transition to alternative protein sources.
On the subject of Soviet tanks.
The Germans re-used lots of foreign armoured vehicles. Some of the panzer units invading France and Belgium in May 1940 drove Czech made tanks. Many French tanks were re-purposed as assault gun chassis after that, particularly Renault R-35s.
The Germans also used captured Soviet anti-tank guns, some being captured from them in North Africa.
But, even though many must have been captured by them, I do not recall reading about T-34s or other Soviet tanks being used by German units, nor Soviet 122mm and 152mm field and medium artillery. Have I missed something?
Russia has entire cities dedicated to tank production and they have less than 150 modern MBTs. How is that impressive at all? We have 59 M1 Abrams ourselves.
A Javelin costs about 200k USD. A new Russian tank costs at least 4 mn USD.
North America and Europe have about 30 times the industrial output of Russia.
Russia cannot win an industrial war of attrition.
Vicki,
Until the last business or Govt department has stopped the Vax pushing and coercion I will remain very interested in vaccine matters. Not so much for myself but my kids not paying attention and my grandkids.
Booked for McCullough and Kory on GC.
Another day, another death wish from Hallward Hughes.
Dick head. His name was Howard Hughes. You T.W.A.T…………….
JR
Dang …. It felt like the source was the hub not the tyre, but I didnt check that …
All good, 35 psi both sides – now up to 45
dotty, links your not opinions.
Booked for McCullough and Kory on GC.
Lucky you! When I tried it was booked out. But a friend who has been involved in such events reckons they will find a bigger venue because of the great interest & will reopen ticket sales.
Just entered a Hoyts cinema and prominent signs with Aboriginal flag and acknowledgement of their country BS.
Naturally never seen such a sign before.
Wokness is going to kill the country.
https://www.washingtonpost.com › business › 2023/01/25
Attrition has since effected both sides of course.
Russia cannot win an industrial war of attrition.
Dotty Dot what a Plonker you are…………………Here come the tanks,,,,,,,,,,,Rumbble rummble…………….lol
The American Amish, Middle Eastern Cousins at Work in Europe!
German officials say knifeman who stabbed two people to death and wounded seven others in brutal train rampage is a stateless Palestinian
. The attacker sparked chaos as he lunged at horrified passengers on board train
. Onslaught came to an end when the suspect was tackled by cops and arrested
At least two people have been killed and seven more injured in a stabbing rampage on a train in Germany today.
The attacker sparked chaos as he lunged at horrified passengers on board the train from Kiel to Hamburg shortly before 3pm, sending commuters screaming down the carriages as they tried to escape his onslaught.
The bloodbath came to an end when the suspect, a 33-year-old stateless Palestinian man according to officials, was tackled by cops and arrested on a station platform in the town of Brokstedt.
A police spokesman said the investigation into a motive was focused on ‘all directions’ including possible extremism or psychological problems on the part of the assailant.
Three of the seven injured passengers are in a serious condition following the attack condemned as a ‘horrible act against all humanity’ by regional interior minister Sabine Suetterlin-Waack.
Europe is giving 14 Leopard II tanks, America is giving Ukraine 31 M1 Abrams.
The UK is giving 14 Challenger II and SP guns.
Given the massive Russian losses and vulnerability of their tanks (even their best) to the Javelins, this is significant.
Poll: Trump Towers over Potential GOP Primary Opponents with 35-Point Lead
Former President Donald Trump holds a whopping 35-point lead over the rest of the potential 2024 Republican primary field, according to a poll.
The Premise Data poll conducted between January 19-23 found that 59 percent of U.S. adult participants who view themselves as Republicans back Trump in his bid for the GOP presidential nomination, more than doubling the support of his nearest competitor, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), at 24 percent.
No other potential candidate reached double-digit support. Former Vice President Mike Pence landed in third place at eight percent, followed by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), and former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley with two percent of the response each. One percent of poll participants back Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC).
Premise Data also gauged a hypothetical general match-up between Trump and President Joe Biden among 2,288 U.S. adults, finding they are in a dead heat at 50 percent of support apiece. A Biden versus DeSantis general election also yielded a 50-50 split among the same sample.
Another survey released by Emerson College Polling on Tuesday also showed Trump dominating the GOP primary field and holding a three-point lead over Biden among registered voters at 44 percent to 41 percent, as Breitbart news reported. Trump’s lead over Biden in that poll marked a surge since a November survey from the polling outfit, in which 45 percent of respondents backed Biden and 41 percent supported Trump.
This current poll from Premise data also examined what a Democrat primary field would look like if the 80-year-old Biden, whose approval rating registered at 35 percent, does not seek a second term. Vice President Kamala Harris leads the pack in that scenario, with 33 percent of support among the 987 U.S. adults who said they were Democrats. Twice-failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton sits behind Harris with 19 percent of the support, followed by Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) – who seems to have taken calculated steps to build his national image – at nine percent.
Eight percent of respondents say they would support Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, seven percent report they would vote for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), five percent would back Sen. Liz Warren (D-MA), and another five percent are behind twice failed gubernatorial Stacey Abrams in that scenario. Sen Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Gov. J.B Pritzker (D-IL) failed to breach the five percent threshold.
The poll was conducted from January 19-23, and a margin of error was not listed.
Yeah, we know that Woddenhead. How’s the ladyboy going. “Me loves you wong time”.
Dotsays:
January 26, 2023 at 4:25 pm
Russia has entire cities dedicated to tank production and they have less than 150 modern MBTs. How is that impressive at all? We have 59 M1 Abrams ourselves.
Dotty Dot, is such a good thing that you have any fin’k to do wi’v any fin’k to hav any fink’ to do wiv’ the war………………………lol
Dotsays:
January 26, 2023 at 4:25 pm
Russia has entire cities dedicated to tank production and they have less than 150 modern MBTs. How is that impressive at all? We have 59 M1 Abrams ourselves.
You would be the worst Commander ever………………………
About to dock at Palermo. Stood out on the deck for a while. Very refreshing.
Last cultural activity in Naples visiting the Treasure of San Gennaro.
They claim the value of their lot is greater than what is held in the tower of London. Don’t know but the mitre which I assume once adorned a bust of the saint was splendid.
Apparently no contemporaneous accounts of the saint who was maytred in 305 under Diocletian but I’ve seen saints venerated all through the Roman Empire who died under his suppression of Christianity so why not.
Managed to board the ferry with only two misteps, wrong company first then got sent back to the ticket office to get a paper ticket. I reread my email and I was supposed to print a hard copy of my booking, a little panicked but unnecessary. I’m not going to be able to print a ticket when I book for Malta in any case.
I quite like catching the ferry but still not at all inspired to go cruising. There was a massive cruise ship docked next to the ferry which explained the sudden appearance of German tour groups in town.
Dawn now breaking
Not particularly.
Even once the logistics of shipping them by sea and rail to the front line, as well as organising paramilitary contractors to man them ( it won’t be Ukrainian crews) NATO still needs control of the skies.
Russia currently controls the airspace in that area, which means that tanks are easy targets.
I don’t think the U.S./NATO will be stupid enough to try and implement a no fly zone over Ukraine, but they may surprise me, they’ve been dumber than expected so far…
In Ukraine, it appears America will soon be arming both side’s combatants
I happen to be one who believes that the escalating war in Ukraine is entirely Biden’s fault, that the current Ukraine government is completely corrupt, and that the entire thing, which has seen tens of thousands of Ukrainian deaths and the destruction of large swaths of that country, has become a profitable boondoggle for politicians and military contractors. Call me cynical or naïve, but that’s where I am.
I also think the whole enterprise has taken on a truly hallucinatory quality, exacerbated by the news today: Putin is negotiating to buy abandoned American weapons from Afghanistan while Biden is sending 31 Abrams tanks to Ukraine. We will have armed both sides to the battle.
In August 2021, Biden abruptly ordered American troops to retreat from Afghanistan. Doing so wiped out almost 20 years of the American military effort, both blood and gold, led to the death of 13 American troops and untold numbers of Afghan citizens and saw Biden abandon around $90 billion in American weapons to the Taliban.
Those weapons, which should have been returned home to America as part of our arsenal in our defense, haven’t gone to waste. Some, surely, ended up in the hands of warlords in dangerous places, but it seems that many of them will end…in Putin’s hands. The Sun reported that a Russian mil blogging social media outlet has chatter about Putin negotiating with the Taliban for the weapons:
That sounds like a plan. According to The Sun, the list of weapons potentially available to Putin is impressive:
It is thought Taliban fighters may have stolen as many as half a million US weapons and up to 50,000 vehicles.
Estimates state 22,174 Humvees, 634 M1117s armoured cars, 115 Maxx Pros trucks, and 549,118 machine guns, assault rifles and pistols were given over by the US.
Some 33 Black Hawk helicopters, 23 Super Tucano fighter planes and 4 C-130 transport planes were also given to the Afghan Air Force.
Other support gear was also given over, with some 16,035 pairs of night vision googles, 162,043 radios and some 8,000 trucks.
While all of that isn’t necessarily functional, we are facing a scenario in which American weapons will be turned on American allies.
And for still more of the weapons merry-go-round, Biden is promising to send Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and six other Latin American countries (three of which are obviously hostile to us) new American weapons if they send their old Russian stuff to Ukraine. So it’s also possible that Russian weapons will kill Russian troops. (The only thing that really matters, though, is the Big Guy’s 10%, right?)
This cannot end well. There’s a surreal quality to a war that carries no benefit to America but that we’re nevertheless arming, especially because it seems we’ll soon be arming both sides of the war.
Watching a decrepit fossil like Joe Biden leading us ever closer to Armageddon is one of the most unnerving things that’s happened in my lifetime.
Yeah, we know that Woddenhead. How’s the ladyboy going. “Me loves you wong time”.
And if you know that then Jerkoff Cretin keep on crapping on as you like to do. You