Free Republic

Ukraine ping

Minority Republican: [Jet fighters are nice. But that is not going to work for Ukraine in this war.

The Russians will just bomb all the bases that the Ukrainians have parked their jets.

Then what?

The Russians are destroying Ukraine’s infrastructure.

Drones are the way to go. You can mass produce the drones cheaply. And it’s easier to hide the drones so the Russians can’t bomb them.

The Ukrainians are bombing the oil refineries in Russia right now. That’s smart because they are trying to stop Putin from funding his war machine. You do that by taking out his oil infrastructure.]

---

Planes aren’t buildings. They can be moved around. Decoys soak up a significant amount of ordnance. Runways are easily repaired. Most Russian missiles and drones are shot down.

The US bombed Serbia without eliminating its air force. During Desert Storm, the US bombed Iraq without eliminating its air force. (Iraq’s problem was an inability to get fresh supplies. Ukraine doesn’t have that problem). It dropped more bombs on Iraq than Russia has dropped on Ukraine during its entire war so far. Russia doesn’t have the capacity to come close to matching the US performance during Desert Storm, incomplete as it was.

A big part of Russia’s problem is money. The US spent $60b for ~1 month of war. Adjusted for inflation, that’s $150b. That paid for operating ~1500 warplanes in the theater, 100K sorties. Whereas Russia’s incremental war expense for Ukraine is not even $60b, with the lion’s share of that soaked up in salary expense. Combat pay of $24K per year for 1m troops in-country vs peacetime pay of about $4K - good for morale, but one reason Russia is fielding golf carts and motorcycles in place of armored fighting vehicles. And it is why Russia’s air force sortie rate per month in Ukraine is well under 1,000, two orders of magnitude smaller than Desert Storm.

Ukraine ping

Desert Rhino: [Call your flying monkeys Chinaman. I don’t care. But you are a loon if you think we can openly conduct airstrikes -inside- Russia and the Russians would never DARE hit us back. Hate to break it to you, but the pressure Putin faces domestically is that he is being too weak.
After the Russians got nukes, it became a near religious article of faith over there that Russia would never again face war on their own soil, as it has so many times from Europe, without the attackers being wiped out at that moment.

They think the days of Napoleon, the Crimean War, the US/Brit intervention in the Russian Civil War, WWI, WWII were finally in the “never again” zone because the attacker would not remain safe and untouched in their homelands ever again. Its’ a deeply held matter of doctrine.

Your whole argument is “they wouldn’t dare, even if we bomb them inside Russia”. So call all of your government Uke shill bots. Don’t care a bit. But I am glad to know you disliked what I said.

Flak.... Target.]

---

First off, I’m not Chinese. Not that there’s anything wrong with being Chinese, of course. I’ve been described as a genocidal Sinophobe, but I’m not that either. What I am is a longtime China watcher - hence the handle, which refers to a Chinese historical figure around the time of a tumultuous era of the Roman empire.

This ping list is meant to share insights and solicit occasional commentary. I don’t labor under the illusion that this is changing minds. This is basically a bull session on steroids. We have all strong views and most of the people on my ping list don’t agree with me.

As to the rest, you’ve expressed all kinds of violent hostility towards multiple domestic political figures. There are literally hundreds of thousands of people like you. And yet the people you talk about remain unharmed. The analogy to Putin being deterred from a nuclear first strike is simple. Someone could go after a domestic political figure and no one would go after his family. Whereas if Putin nuked the West, his family would be annihilated in a retaliatory nuclear strike. You may hope that Putin will nuke the US to fulfill your desire that the nation be punished for its sins. Putin, however, is deterred by the fear of death as well as the prospect of his entire nation dying with him. That’s a heavy burden. The same burden has prevented other Russian leaders from using nukes to achieve their territorial or other goals.

Ukraine ping

mactruck: [Also known as mutually assured destruction, without all the psychotic imagery.

Keyword is mutual, dummy.]

---

There is nothing psychotic about it. I really don’t understand the wholesale adoption of leftist pejorative by people allegedly on the right. To kill unlawfully for personal pleasure even when this goes against your larger goals is psychotic. There is nothing psychotic about killing Putin, his family, everyone he knows, and all of Russia in revenge for nuclear strikes against the West.

And there is nothing mutual about it. Once the nuclear sword is unsheathed, the side that does an all-out attack first wins. Since there is no such thing as a limited nuclear war, the moment he nukes us, the risk is that we hit him with everything we have. That’s why he can’t take the risk.

Same reason Hitler would not use chemical weapons. Fear of retaliation. Hitler was not, in principle, against gassing people. His infamous death camps at Treblinka, Sobibor and other locales are evidence of that. The possibility of being being gassed, however, kept him from using them against Allied troops, even though he was in no personal danger.

Putin, on the other hand, is highly exposed to nuclear attack, as are his family members and close personal associates and their kin. The threat of nuclear retaliation keeps nuclear powers from initiating first strikes against powers with a second strike capability for the same reason that hostage exchanges once guaranteed peace treaties. Except in the past, a king could always hand over some idiot son he never considered a worthy heir as a hostage. Whereas in the nuclear age, rulers are themselves hostages who will be killed by nuclear retaliation, if they launch a first strike.

Ukraine ping

Minority Republican: [Trump will figure out and develop a plan by giving somebody like Elon Musk a contract to build all the drones for Ukraine.

Trump knows that the MIC is not interested in the war ending soon so he will sidestep the bureaucracy in the MIC.]

---

It takes many years to develop new weaponry. Musk has zero experience in that field and no one knows if he would be any good. What if Tesla EVs had to deal with other vehicles on the road trying to destroy it? That’s a level of mutual adaptation non-defense companies never have to deal with.

What Ukraine needs is jet fighters in quantity. Hand over hundreds, and the availability for all kinds of strike missions would go through the roof. Strike fighters are essentially a fire brigade asset. A hot sector where you’re warding off an enemy advance or trying to advance against the enemy can benefit from judiciously employed air strikes.

Part of the recent Russian successes come from Putin’s decision to use his strike fighters more aggressively. He is losing a dozen top of the line fighters monthly, but making some gains. Ukraine needs fighters to conduct similar air strikes against Russian positions.

Footage released by both sides exaggerates the impact of drones. Only 10% successfully hit their targets, and the impact is limited, due the payload being limited to under 20lb pounds of HE. Whereas even the smallest air-dropped bomb holds 250 lbs of explosive material.

Ukraine ping

Desertrhino: [Very different in several ways. One, that was the USSR was a very different entity than Russia. And the war was a proxy war 6000 miles from either of our homes.

Second, this time our proxies are having Brit technicians shoot missiles at targets inside Russia proper. NATO (quit pretending it’s the idiot Ukes) has hit one of their strategic missile radars deep inside Russia. That’s equivalent to someone hitting our DEW radars.

They have hit their Engels nuclear bomber base in Saratov. They have attacked the Kerch Bridge and the German Air Force was just caught on an open zoom call discussing their plans to use German missiles, fired by Germans, to hit Kerch again. The Moskva cruiser sinking was US P-8 Poseidons doing the targeting for British missile crews to conduct an over the horizon attack.

For your analogy to work about Vietnam, Russia would have had to be hitting our DEW line in Alaska, maybe hitting Barksdale and Minot airbases, sinking a US ship in international waters etc.

It’s a foolish game we are playing, and for nothing except globalist power games on behalf of a resurgent nazi country...and of course, our leaders are getting enriched.

This is nothing like Vietnam. And last but not least. The leaders we had then, as bad as they could be, were all light years smarter than ours today.

You put Biden, Sullivan, and Nuland against Nixon, McNamara, and Kissinger? Put any leader today against childless Macron, childless Boris Johnson, Childless Olaf Sholtz, senile Joe Biden, etc.
No comparison.

These clowns are horny for war. They have wanted war with Russia for two decades at least. And now the EU gnats think they are going to be able to take the Russians down.

They have successfully got us into a new cold war at the moment our economy is collapsing. And these clowns could actually miscalculate and get nuked. They won’t stop until forced to.]

---

The folks who ran the Vietnam War were a bunch of incompetents. Only two decades after large scale city-bombing completely destroyed the morale of conquered populations, leading to a complete lack of postwar guerilla activity in the razed Axis countries, they convinced themselves that repeating these operations was a mistake. And yet every single time North Vietnam made concessions was in response to a large scale bombing campaign. They snatched defeat out of the jaws of victory.

Putin won’t nuke the West because if he does, we will kill him, his family, all of his friends and all of their families, as well as all of Russia. There’s no coming back from that. Russia can recover from foreign conquest, as it did from the Mongols. It will never recover from physical extermination.

And he won’t attack the West conventionally because it would invite not only defeat in Ukraine, but also the destruction of his conventional forces in Russia proper. The US has plenty of air assets in Europe to deliver ordnance against Russian targets on Russian soil. Putin’s not going to give the US the excuse it needs to start flattening Russian air bases and supply nodes.

Ukraine ping

hardspunned: [Oh yeah, totally the same. The Russians had 750,000 troops within 100 miles of the US forces, the U.S. weaponry had just killed 75,000 Russian troops and Russia was maneuvering their 1000 tactical nukes in Vietnam and threatening to launch attacks on London and Paris. Yeah, this is the same deal! Stop with the comedy. This is serious business.]

---

Russian weaponry killed 38,000 US troops in Korea and 58,000 in Vietnam. That totals the 100K GI dead lost in the Pacific War, for which the US razed almost 50% of just about every major Japanese city. The two cities that had less damage, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were singled out to get a clear picture of the destructive effects of the A bomb. 900K of the 1m Japanese city dwellers killed in air attacks were incinerated with conventional bombs.

Putin won’t nuke the West because if he does, we will kill him, his family, all of his friends and all of their families, as well as all of Russia. There’s no coming back from that. Russia can recover from foreign conquest, as it did from the Mongols. It will never recover from physical extermination.

And he won’t attack the West conventionally because it would invite not only defeat in Ukraine, but also the destruction of his conventional forces in Russia proper. The US has plenty of air assets in Europe to deliver ordnance against Russian targets on Russian soil. Putin’s not going to give the US the excuse it needs to start flattening Russian air bases and supply nodes.

Ukraine ping

Trump will likely cut the Gordian knot and give Ukraine everything it needs to win. It comes down to one thing. If Putin wins, he becomes the big man in the Trump era. Now, if we were in the Age of Imperialism, Trump could one-up Putin by, say, conquering the Americas, and come up on top. But the American appetite for territorial conquest died with that last gasp of the Spanish American War - the Philippine-American War. So the way Trump stays on top is by denying Putin his victory. Similarly, any Xi attempt to conquer Taiwan during Trump’s tenure will run into Trump’s determination to prevent any foreign leader from one-upping him while he’s in charge.

Ukraine ping

hardspunned: [More reckless insanity. The Russians have made it unequivocally clear what will happen to those NATO air defenses if brought to bear in such a way.]

---

Not particularly reckless. Russia shot down hundreds of US airplanes over North Korea and North Vietnam, killing as many as a thousand air crew. The US did not, in response, attack Russian territory.

If Russia attacks NATO installations, NATO would, of course, be justified in attacking Russian forces on Ukrainian territory. Given that in Korea and Vietnam, the US did not respond to Russian attacks on US personnel by attacking Russian forces on Russian territory, Russian attacks on NATO territory would invite reciprocal NATO attacks on Russian forces in Russia proper.

[My dad moved from an 88 to a ‘73 Imperial. I had to use that for my first driving test. Like parallel parking a house.

A friend won the local demolition derby with it years later.]

---

That’s the thing about these classics. Familiarity and age breed contempt. Rust (and Big 3 unreliability) apart, it’s one reason you don’t see many of them on the roads any more. Takes decades and scarcity before these classic designs are treated with the respect they deserve. Contempt morphs into reverence.

[I lost my wife of 35 years last December. But we must go on. Life is too precious and short. Stay strong and cherish all the good memories. It is unusual for couple to not argue in a long marriage. But the happy memories are paramount and helps us heal the pain of loss.]

---

My sincere condolences. May you find comfort in the children she gave you and (hopefully) the grandchildren who resulted.

Eric Adams 2028. You heard it here first.

[Felon should not possess firearms while incarcerated. But allowed back into the general population, everyone of adult age should be able to protect one’s life with arms. They are not to be used while in the process of, or to perpetrate a crime; nor to threaten, the way I see it.]

---

Indeed. What we need isn’t gun bans for felons. It’s three strikes laws for serial felons.

Glad to see this. The idea that felons lose the right to own firearms never made any sense. It was a fig leaf for gun grabbers. The kind of people who would obey this law aren’t career criminals anyway. The ban is a solution looking for a problem.

[HAMAS is built on a foundation of hate that is near total in Gaza.

Israel can kill every member of HAMAS but the hate will live on in Gaza (and in the USA among those Joe Biden’s team imports) for many decades.

The hatred is now magnified by Israeli war destruction and damage.]

---

Slaughter breeds submission or at least resignation. 12% of Germany was killed in WW2. Germany’s hatred, such that it attempted to kill the world and repopulate it with Germans, died with its huge losses. As a % of population, the Russians lost half as much. Without large scale slaughter to induce submission, Palestinian hatred will never die.

Muslim massacres of Christians in the Middle East killed Christian hatred. Christians there became resigned to Muslim butchery, eventually becoming aligned with Islam against their Christian brethren who showed up during the Crusades. Middle Eastern Christians often hate the West. The fusion of Nazism and Communism that was Baathism was dreamed up by Michel Aflaq, a Middle Eastern Christian. George Habash, a prominent and vicious Palestinian terrorist leader, was a Christian.

Wouldn’t require a single bomb. Cut off the water. In three days, some of the population is either dead, or wishing it were. In 14 days, everyone is either dead or so weak from thirst, the IDF can march in arrest or kill Hamas with minimal opposition, turn the spigots back on.

[Shannon Briggs was a professional boxer with 60 wins, 53 by KO.
Jake Paul is a social media influencer.

Maybe when Tyson is 79, Paul could beat him.

Tyson was one of the hardest hitters in boxing. He seems to be in good shape. It doesn’t matter that he’s 57, it matters he’s a top professional and he’s fighting an amateur.

This shouldn’t be legal. If this fight is legitimate, Tyson could kill Paul, or leave him with lifelong damage.]

---

Exactly what I was gonna say. Only way to limit the damage? Make this a bare knuckle event.

Bit mealy-mouthed about his navy career. Says naval aviator to suggest Tom Cruise, when he flew a P-3 from a land base. A P3 is exposed to substantial risk, but an F/A-18 or even a helo would be sexier and might have sealed the deal.

Democrats give blacks a lot of freebies Republicans do not. That’s why they get the black vote.

Although black people are, on average, more conservative than white liberals, a significant break among black voters from the Democratic Party should be unlikely, because the Democratic Party treats black people collectively as an interest group it services, and the GOP does not.

Giving stuff to and doing stuff for black people is one of the main things the Democratic Party is about. Central to its messaging is that they do things for black people. That is why Joe Biden promised to nominate a black Supreme Court justice, and Gavin Newsom promised to fill a Senate vacancy with a black appointee.

The Republican Party’s messaging to white people isn’t as explicit, but the subtext is clear. They’re saying that the Democrats want to take stuff from “you,” their prospective voter who is probably white, and give it to “somebody else” who is probably black or an immigrant.

For black voters to switch in large numbers from the party that promises to give stuff to black people to the party that opposes giving stuff to black people, the Democrats have to err spectacularly. Basically, black people have to hate the stuff the Democrats are giving them.

One major thing the Democrats have been giving black people since 2020 is the Black Lives Matter agenda: Less policing, less traffic enforcement, less pretrial detention, less imprisonment, fewer police interactions with black men in areas where a lot of black people live.

It is possible that a lot of black people actually hate the Black Lives Matter agenda. It is possible that they are upset that people are driving sixty miles an hour down the street where their kids play. It is possible they blame Democrats for the rise in crime and disorder.

Black people bear the brunt of rising crime much more than white people do, so when white liberals believe crime is a conservative bogeyman, they think they’re being antiracist, but they’re actually dismissing the concerns of black people who are experiencing rising crime acutely.

The other thing that might be happening is that the GOP message that the Democrats are taking something from “you” and giving it to “somebody else” is appealing to black voters more than it has in previous cycles, because this time, the “somebody else” is migrants.

A lot of black voters live in large cities and a lot of migrants have flowed into those cities in the last couple of years, and black people in those cities are experiencing more negative impact from this than white liberals are.

The school gymnasium or the community center in a black neighborhood may have been turned into a shelter for migrants, or migrants may be congregating in a park in a predominantly black neighborhood. City programs that historically benefited black residents may be cut to defer funds to migrant services.

White liberals experience the migrants as, like, an unlicensed vendor selling cut mango in front of the art museum, and black voters experience the migrants as MS-13 selling fentanyl on their block.

I still have a hard time imagining that a lot of black voters are going to support Donald Trump, who, for better or worse, has successfully been tagged as a racist. But if black people are really fleeing Joe Biden, then it reveals a stunning disconnect, because the Biden administration has been more dedicated to “stuff for black people” than any Democratic administration in my lifetime.

If Biden is losing the support of black voters, then that means that crime and immigration are more important to black people than the BLM agenda, the appointment of black judges and executive branch officials, affirmative action and diversity policies, and student loan forgiveness.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Puppet_Masters

[~”annual income 19 pounds 6”
~”annual expenditure 20 pounds”

What matters in measuring poverty is the net income after withholding to fixed expense ratio.

Chattels are usually not a realistic measure of wealth or poverty.

If you have a $2,000 rent monkey on your shoulders it can be a problem if only making $15/hour.]

---

Renting out rooms is a thing. This isn’t rocket science. Renters and homeowners have been taking in boarders since pretty much caveman days. Back in the day, a perfectly sober hobo without any hope of employment who had to sleep under a bridge, rummage through garbage heaps for scraps of food, and often went hungry, was considered poor. Today, an overfed welfare recipient who spends the entire day in air-conditioned comfort watching TV, getting high or playing video games is considered poor. There’s a difference. Poverty has been redefined to mean something other than absolute material deprivation.