dan/california

The editor wouldn't let me select and delete it, no clue why. I will attempt to be more careful about not doing it in the first place. On a related issue that may just be some quirk of my computer, does anyone else sometimes have to reload the last page of the thread more than once to get everything to show up in correct chronological order?

https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/170aq2t/destruction_of_a_russian_selfpropelled_gun_2s3/ There is an extra kicker at the end. Edit: I just realized this was a reddit video, and wants to autoplay, and now it won't let fix it, sorry

Some of the original mistakes go back to the writing of the Constitution, the founders had a huge blind spot with regard to political parties. They were opposed to them in principal and had a severe attack of wishful thinking about their ability to create a system that would discourage them in practice. The great historical irony is that they were all founding parties of their own within an election cycle or two. Some of the details of the Constitution do more or less lock in a two party system. Then they figured out how effective it was to draw districts with ever more artistic license, a task now designated to merciless computer programs. There is a reason that very, very few countries have tried adopt the U.S model wholesale, or even anything much like it. The only electoral reform that that doesn't require an utterly impossible constitutional amendment is a combination of nonpartisan unified primary with instant runoff voting. That why we have nice sane person as Alaska's only Congressional representative instead of Sara Palin. I think that needs to go nation wide myself. But it is a state by state decision.

Zaporizhzhia front. It would be more accurate to say that a SF drone unit spotted, and artillery with PGMs destroyed the Russian unit. There is video in the article, ~six Excalbur rounds equaled six Russian vehicles, minimum.

I was about trust, anybody who was paying attention lost all faith in McCarthy after January 6th. He hade broken numerous deals agreements with the Dems after that. People were frantic to read the bill because he hadn't even told them in advance he was doing a more or less clean CR. They would have been crazy to pass it WITHOUT reading it. And then he offered them nothing on the motion to vacate.

You just can't keep bleeping the side you are relying on for most of the actual must pass votes.

Dems need to get in a room with five or six sanest GOP guys, and have discussion about ambassadorships and pretty much any other job they might want in 14 months.

Really interesting article, they are bringing in a bunch of modern production techniques.

The on the other hand of the way you put though, is that these bomblets are extraordinarily effective little tools for killing Russians, and it just happens to be extremely efficient to deliver some of them in a different way. Most of the drones used in this war are still wonky adaptations of civilian tech, with whatever explosives happened to be available. It just so happens that DPICM bomblets are the right size, and probably have suitable, or at least easily adaptable fusing. It just happens to be the best short term solution on offer. We still haven't seen new from ground up military drones in real numbers for a lot of roles. I expect that is coming quickly, and the side that brings it to the fight first is going to have a large advantage.

I am not saying you are wrong about any of this, but I think you just told Poland to start a covert nuclear weapons program if they haven't already done so.

The rest off China might or might not agree with him. Like any autocrat he is invincible right up until he gone. And there are clearly factions in the leadership, or senior cabinet officials and the equivalent of four star generals wouldn't keep disappearing. China looks shakier than Russia in that regard, and they haven't even started losing war yet.

I like him, he is my friend! Make it very clear this will hurt you more than it will hurt us. Because that is what deterrence actually means. I would still love a missile that could do it without conventional explosives. That might or might not be possible, but the math needs doing. I would feel bad about writing this if what China has done in Xinjiang was not exactly what it wants to repeat in Taiwan. It is also the near exact model of whole country gulag Russia want want to inflict on Ukraine.

The only thing he leaves out is that the MAGA will cheerfully betray Ukraine to Putin, and then turn around and campaign against Biden for "letting Russia win".

The good reason that they did it this way was because they wanted a cushion for exactly this circumstance. The bad reason is that they are still trying to get to a negotiated settlement instead of just beating the Russians until they can't take it anymore. What is the balance between those two? We will have to wait for the books to find that one out. hopefully the Republican Party will finish imploding quickly and we can get everything back on track. I am however extremely unhappy with a report that they let a couple of billion in spending/drawdown authority expire at the end of last year. Although I am not sure that is actually confirmed. I am still sort of losing my mind daily over not shipping ATACMS, and the M26 cluster bomb version of MLRS that the HIMARS can also use. Both of those have near zero additional training, and the ATACMS especially would not take that much shipping capacity.

I stopped believing that on 2/25/2022. I think if Taiwan had a non-nuclear way to hit them that hard it might be one more thing for them to have to weigh. Of course you don't officially call it the dam-buster that would be against the rules. You call it most excellent new heavy bunker buster. Let them read the spec and figure it out. When you are down to one aging guy with absolute power, things just get unpredictable. We have to be ready to put more of their navy and air force on the bottom of the South China Sea, than they sink of ours. The near continuous Chinese temper tantrum exercises are also what they would do if they were planning a real attack. The only way to avoid a war that will wreck the world economy, and be far worse for Taiwan is to make the price so obviously catastrophic someone might shoot XI instead of following orders. That didn't work in Ukraine, because Putin thought it would be short, and the West would just get over it. All we can do is make it absolutely clear to Xi nether of those things is the case. .Well said Bill, it is a time to be ready, not to give up.

They would start screeching about it being poison gas. The highest form of resistance in Russia is railroad sabotage. Every control box or piece of switch gear that gets burnt is a problem. Enough of those problems at once could be a very big problem. Clearly if someone in shell or missile factory wants to have a smoking accident, that would be good too. The Ukrainians seem to be improving quickly at having drones attack both targets, happily. There are two things everyone in Russia can claim are innocent if they are searched, cigarettes and vodka. Conveniently they make fire... Edit: My typing really is inconceivably awful...

I pick number three, with a dump truck full of salt down the hole afterwards. All the West wanted was to ignore Russia and make money, as you eloquently point out the RUSSIANS were making good money, and winning some small victories they could propagandize about. For reasons that remain incomprehensible on some level, they gambled all of that and lost. We are all far less well off for Putin's little three day SMO adventure, but come he!! or high water Russia is going to be a lot sorrier than the rest of us. Sorry enough to stay educated on being sorry for three or four generations.

Sorry if I misunderstood something. The thing about the Russian problem is that the way to keep it a smaller problem than the usual stuff of peoples lives is to break the Russian Army in Ukraine right now. Being so worried about other things that we DON'T do that will eventually result in the Russian Army being the ONLY problem for a great many more people than just Ukrainians. A lot of very crooked politicians on both sides of the Atlantic a lying to a lot of stupid and/or miseducated voters about this fundamental truth. If we let them get away with it things are going to end badly, or worse than that. What am I missing?

Taiwan should also be working a non-nuclear missile that could crack that dam, it might be the best guarantee they could get.

https://www.reuters.com/world/yellen-says-legal-obstacles-remain-seizure-russian-assets-aid-ukraine-2023-02-27/ The other option is to ram through giving Ukraine Russia's money. There are complications, they do not remotely compare to losing this war.

And this is on a smaller population base. The problem is that we are past the low cost decision point for ending the war one way or another. A competent autocracy would have cut bait at about two months in, and briefly propagandized whatever deal they got as a huge victory, and then memory holed the whole mess. China did that very successfully in Vietnam in 1979-80, outside of this forum less than one percent of the world is even aware that conflict happened. Putin wasn't that smart, and nobody else was brave enough to shoot him before he managed to transition from an autocratic regime where the governments overwhelming goal was to maintain a state of apathy in the population, too a totalitarian one that is all in on winning this war. So we are sadly past rational cost benefit negotiations. One way or another the Russian regime is going to have to break, the economy, the army, or both. As we are seeing right now though screwing up the internal politics of much of the West is really the only thing Putin has managed to do right, so this is going to be an unpleasantly near run thing.

Democracies end because voters believe some loud mouth who proclaims that he can fix all their problems if they just give him all the power. Voters have been this stupid right back ancient Greece, on and off.The number of times it worked out well for the voters in question might be as high as two or three percent, but I doubt it. Competent autocracy almost always gives way to kleptocratic autocracy, that gives way to something worse. If you think Putin coming out ahead in Ukraine is going to make things better in anywhere in Europe in five or ten years, well I don't think you think that, but I don't think you have admitted yet that stopping it is going to be expensive. There is no cheap option here. These are the guys you want to recruit, you need soldiers that want to fight. Churchill had a famous quote about being shot at and missed. See above The more you read about central and eastern Europe/Russia the shocking it is that anything resembling civilization has survived. Whether we are damning him or thanking him is still unpleasantly up in the air. Either Biden, McConnell and the pro Ukraine people in Congress have a brilliant plan, or they have just committed the worst unnecessary bleep up in human history. Because the cost benefit ratio of of keeping Ukraine going is one of the better bargains, EVER.

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/10/02/congress-shutdown-ukraine-aid-00119380 GOP senators weigh go-big-or-go-home strategy on Ukraine The GOP confrontation last week over continued aid was a rude awakening for Mitch McConnell and other senators who back Ukraine funding.

Anyone who hasn't read Timothy Snyders "Bloodlands" book should do so.The extent of the 360 degree awfulness pretty much anywhere between Berlin and Moscow was simply incomprehensible from 1900 to 1950. Not to say that it was the same everywhere in that large expanse of territory, but it was some flavor of awful in almost all of it. There was a whole lot of intentional forgetting after that, because it was the only way to get thru the day. BTW I almost always read a book in a week or less, "Bloodlands" took me six months just because it is to awful to take more than little tiny bits.