Plagiarizing Your Way To A Pulitzer - Ukraine

 Today, my hometown paper, the Denver Post (Ved Nanda), and the Times of London, (Max Hastings) are both running similar articles rehashing the old arguments in favor of buying off aggressive tyrants to somehow buy peace. Shades of Neville Chamberlin. Let the Germans Russians have the Sudetenland Donbas regions, and forestall the possibility of an a actual shooting war. Peace In Our Time!

I bet I know how that will turn out.

Both the abovementioned articles are behind paywalls, but you can get the general gist of both by searching for Chamberlins agreement with Hitler which he waved for the press on his return from negotiations.

The War - A View Closer To The Ground

 All reports should be viewed warily, as they are diminished by the fog of war and you have no real good idea by how much. Some observations, however, can be considered more reliable if they don't change much over time, or if they are backed up with images. Be careful, some of the "Ukrainian images" out there seem to be from Russian operations in Syria. The Traffic Jam on the road into Kiev from the north as been photographed repeatedly and doesn't seem to have changed much in the last 8 days. This is really bad news for the Russkies as large offensive operations generally require movement of some sort to be considered effective. 

Pictures of Russian heavy equipment, mired in mud, with the tires coming off the wheels does not inspire confidence, especially with people close to the situation describing this as a common problem with vehicles fitted with Chinese made tires. When you think about it, you have to wonder: With sanctions and a generally dismal Russian economy, what percentage of their ground forces have been serviced with parts from Harbor Freight? Tires? Diesel engine parts? Combat boots?

On the one hand there are reports that the Ukes have adjusted the dikes and levees in the area surrounding the roadway resulting in the "off road" becoming a swamp. The road itself seems to be best described as 2-lane blacktop with a breakdown shoulder on each side. The Russkies are taking full advantage of this by stacking their vehicles 3-abreast and some 40 miles deep. The problem here is that if the front ranks are out of fuel, the tankers can't get up to service them. If they are damaged, a T-84 tank becomes an 80 ton paperweight. Repairable? Probably, if you could get a repair vehicle up to it. Tankers and wreckers are relatively soft targets, and the Ukes know this. Shoot and scoot. A reliable technique for the last 2000 years.

Here and here are articles by people who seem to be much closer to the action than most of the pundits who are getting the media time. Give them a read and then consider the phrase "Potemkin Army". Keeping in mind. of course that while judicious use of force can drive a bear away from your trash cans, you do NOT want to run up and engage it with bare knuckles. It IS a bear after all.

Biological Warfare

 Let's play a bit of "What If" shall we?

Suppose some hostile country mounted a biological warfare action against us. Say they had developed a fast-spreading disease with a 3-5% mortality rate among senior management types. Let's say they started spreading it using widely traveled vectors in the international business community who would be the most likely to come in contact with the senior management types they wanted to target.

Here's what a caseload graphic might look like:

It seems that it might be 2-4 months before anyone who mattered actually noticed, and about a year before the maximum effects would hit. At this point, you should have your pre-vaccinated troops ready to rectify whatever borders you want, facing a demoralized enemy with its leadership significantly reduced. If your troops can offer a vaccine, however unproven, to your new citizens, they might even be happily welcomed, especially if  the actual source of the disease can be adequately hidden. The NYT produced a graphic suggesting that a Covid vaccine might take as long as 10 years to produce in quantity, assuming standard super cautious methodology favored by the FDA.

A biological war would therefore, be very slow at the start, be very confusing in the middle, and fairly quickly done with at the end.

Biological Warfare - Round 2

Here's the latest shot from our friends, the Chinese:

It's a Tyvek envelope containing a handful of seeds.

Clue #1: It arrives in your mail box unsolicited, from China.

Clue #2: It's labeled as jewelry. Jewelry is not subject to inspection. Agricultural products are.

These have shown up in mail boxes in Washington State, Utah, and Virginia. Got wide spread distribution. The U.S. Dept of Agriculture is asking that if you get one of these packets, that you do NOT open it. Especially do NOT plant them to see what comes up. They are probably not magic beans. Think Round Up resistant noxious weed. A leafy version of C19.

Do NOT trust China. China is A**hole! Feel free to write the U.S. Dept of Agriculture and ask them what these things are. My guess is an attack on our food supply.

Side note: Everyone likes to talk about WWIII. Listen up folks, WWIII ended Dec 26, 1991 with the final collapse of the Soviet Union. We won, they lost. We are now into WWIV which is pitting western civilization against an unlikely alliance of Islam and Chinese Communism. The Chinese are attempting to eradicate Islam in their Western provinces, and at the same time bolstering it in Iran. Eventually both sides are going to figure out that they chose their allies poorly, but until then, they have in the U.S. a common enemy.