How is that for a headline?


Is it absurd?  If so, no more than the dozens of headlines that grab your ears and eyes every day in  the FSOA.

Considering the oil and weapons money being made, my headline is not absurd.  It is in the category of amusing over-generalizations.  And less offensive than the headlines JP show in his video.

Would Vlad the Impaler actually DO that?  Because hitting the Brits is basically identical to hitting the FSoA.  It was the imminent threat that Hitler would invade England that got the FSoA into WWII much more than the Jap attack on Pear Harbor.  The Anglo-American Alliance precedes NATO and the ties between Wall Street and the City of London form the economic heart of Capitalism.

If he was to attack Brit targets, what would they be?  Would it be North Sea Oil platforms?  Pipelines?  Direct bombing of the British islands?  Hitting Brit targets inside Ukie borders is no biggy other than some political fallout if Brit soldiers are killed, but all that might do is get the Brits to withdraw any troops they have there, not their equipment and munitions.

How will the Brits respond to the threat?  Will they stop sending military hardware to Ukraine?  What kind of hardware do they actually supply?  Who are the bomb manufacturers supplying the Ukies, and where are their munitions factories?  What sort of identifying marks are there on the bomb casings that could be used to identify who made the explosive?

Of course, if you are goingto retaliate against the Brits if their hardware is used, logically you would also have to retaliate against FSoA or Israeli targets if their bombs or missiles are used.  Any of these retaliations is a direct escalation to WWIII.

It seems beyond reason that Vlad would actually do this.  War however often is not a reasoned outcome.  Diner opinions welcome.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russia-says-it-will-strike-british-targets-if-uk-weapons-are-used-hit-its-2024-05-23/

Russia says it will strike British targets if UK weapons are used to hit its territory

RE

Quote from: RE on May 23, 2024, 10:34 AMIt seems beyond reason that Vlad would actually do this.  War however often is not a reasoned outcome.  Diner opinions welcome.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russia-says-it-will-strike-british-targets-if-uk-weapons-are-used-hit-its-2024-05-23/
RE

Well, I will put in my 2 cents, representing about 1/3 of total active Diner opinions. I agree with RE. I think every time Putin has threatened nuclear alerts and issued other random threats, Biden has pushed into them and Putin turns out to just be a pussy. It is unlikely he would go after another nuclear armed power because...well....pussys tend to be pussys.

This doesn't help him of course.

No One Knows If Decades-Old Nukes Would Actually Work
https://www.wired.com/story/nuclear-weapons-testing/

Quote from: TDoS on May 23, 2024, 03:43 PMNo One Knows If Decades-Old Nukes Would Actually Work
https://www.wired.com/story/nuclear-weapons-testing/

Doubtful it would be a nuclear response, that's too disproportionate.  Either an attack on oil infrastructure or a military base would seem the most appropriate.  First though,there has to be some confirmed evidence of an attack with Brit weapons on Ruskie soil.  I don't think there has been one of those, and the only thing I can guess the Brits provide would be close attack VTOL Jets, aka the Harriers.  Or maybe Helicopters or drones.  I don't think they provide missiles, I think those are all FSoA manufacture or maybe Israeli.  They may provide tanks, but the Ukies are on the defensive, I don't think they are rolling tanks into Mother Russia.

It seems to be mainly political posturing to sway political opinion in the UK to join the Krauts in not committing so much aid to the Ukie goobermint.

RE

Nord Stream already gives Putin reason and international justification to retaliate.  That Russia has not is strategic.  Russia does not want to play tit for tat while the economies of the west flush billions down the toilet while Russia builds military strength.

One nuke into Ras Tanura will ruin the economies of the world and Russia could easily do it.  But that would hurt the whole world so taking out North Sea oil platforms with small hypersonic nukes makes more sense.

Calling Putin a pussy promotes war, and I am not going to allow it.  The next time I see Putin called a pussy someone is going into the cooler.  The fact is Putin is a civilized and refined man and I will not be intimidated into Bad rapping Putin because it is the American and British thing to do.

Putin will do what is in the best interest of Russia, whatever that is.  Guessing Putin would not have the stones to take out a large British Asset forgets that Putin might want to stop a shooting war where hundreds of thousands have already been killed.

John Bull arrogance may make a response necessary.  From Russia's point of view.

Calling Putin a Pussy is just another example of Tdos  need to insult somebody in every post.  He closed his last posts insulting me because I don't remember meeting an anonymous stranger at an open air festival attended by thousands of people.  He says he talked to me while I was cruising around on the scooter I bought, which cuts the number down to a couple of dozen faceless people I spoke with.  Meanwhile continuing to maintain I confirmed his identity, which I haven't and which he continues to refuse to do.  Pointless waste of time again, so further posts on that dead horse will result in a cooler trip also.

RE

Quote from: RE on May 23, 2024, 06:53 PM

Quote from: TDoS on May 23, 2024, 03:43 PMNo One Knows If Decades-Old Nukes Would Actually Work
https://www.wired.com/story/nuclear-weapons-testing/

Doubtful it would be a nuclear response, that's too disproportionate.

Bullys generally stick to proportionate responses?

Quote from: K-Dog on May 24, 2024, 11:10 AM
Calling Putin a pussy promotes war, and I am not going to allow it.  The next time I see Putin called a pussy someone is going into the cooler.

I see. Because not only are the Men In Black watching and erasing seditionist posts related to oil but the new age KGB is concerned the opinion of 1 of the 3 Diner regulars might be...significant?

Never know who's reading, only who's posting.  There's usually a half dozen or so guests on at any given time.  Most today was 14.  They're mostly bots of course, but it could be anybody.

RE

It's tough to fight a war these days without tons of high explosives.  It's not like the good old days when all you needed were some swords and battle axes which were reusable.  Even arrows could be collected from the corpses once all the bad guys were dead and  reused for the next battle.

Unfortunately those days are long gone and the stuff that makes bombs go boom and bullets leave a rifle barrel at supersonic speeds can only be used once, so you gotta keep making more of the stuff.  Where does it come from?  OIL of course!  TNT for instance is trinitrotoluene, a neat configuration of carbon atoms in a ring shape with Nitrate groups sprinkled around it.



Now, your barrel of oil straight out of the ground doesn't have much toluene in it, its mostly straight chains of carbon atoms with hydrogen atoms sprinkled around.  That's why they call them "hydrocarbons" lol.  So to make the gobs of toluene you need you wanna start with just the fraction of oil in the barrel that has the right number of carbon atoms, 7. There's also Benzene occuring naturally in there that can be distilled out, it's already in a ring shape but only 6 carbons.  Precisely how much of these various fractions there are in any given barrel I don't know, that is something Tdos probably can answer for us.



There are also synthetic tricks you can use to take shorter fractions and hook them together to make longer ones, and take longer ones and chop them into shorter ones.  However, every additional synthetic trick you use to get the ton is TNT you need for a bombing campaign takes energy and makes the production more difficult and costly.

Finally, once you have the required amount of your basic toluene molecules, you need to add your Nitrate groups.  This you do sequentially using Nitric acid, catalysts, heat and pressure in some combination that gives you the good stuff at the end.  This is the tricky part because each Nitrate group you park on the ring makes it more unstable so it wants to fly apart and reconfigure very rapidly into hot gases which then further rapidly oxidize with the oxygen in the air and gives you your big boom.

Anyhow, this whole bizness besides consuming a lot of oil as the substrate consumes a lot of electricity  or heat to perform all these synthetic tricks and give you the explosive material at the end.  That's what munitions plants do.  I tried to find details on exactly how much energy it takes to produce a kilo of TNT in a munitions factory, this info is not EZ to come by.  EZ to find how much energy is in a kilo once it's manufactured, 4x10⁶J.  About the same as a kilo of gas, just it's way more unstable and once it's detonated the reaction happens nearly instantaneously, it doesn't burn slowly to make gases.

Anyhow, it's not that important, just important is you need a LOT of the stuff to run a war and there aren't that many munitions factories around producing gobs of it all the time, they only ramp up production when they have a big war to supply.  Apparently, the munitions factories in Europe have not been able to meet the demand of the Ukies for enough bombs to match Vlad the Impaler, who probably has nearly as many munitions factories as the FSoA does, plus his own supply of oil to ake the bombs with.  Mother Russia is a one stop shop for bombs, no supply chain from other countries, no shipping of materials or completed bombs.  All relatively cheap for him since he gets it at cost. lol.  All the Western countries have to pay for the bombs they kindly donate to the Ukies so the stockholders of the munitions company make a profit.  So it's costing them more than it's costing Vlad to run this war.

This is not even counting the fact that there's a big difference in price of the missiles and artillery shells depending on how "advanced" the systems are,  and FSoA bombs tend to be expensive and technically complex whereas Ruskie bombs are cheap and stupid.  But they blow up pretty much the same. lol.

Now, the question is how committed are the NATO allies to supplying the Ukies with the bombs they need to match Vlad's relatively limitless supply when the Ukies can't PAY  for these bombs, except with promissory notes?  Somebody has to pay for it, because the stockholders are not in business as a nonprofit charitable organization.  If the German or Belgian taxpayers don't wanna fund it, then they need the FSoA to pony up the money.  I suspect at this point support for paying for the bombds is dwindling over there.

As we move forward here, energy and substrates for bomb manufacture are going to become a significant factor in prosecuting wars.  Ammo will become more scarce as well.  This won't happen overnight, but much more than WWI or WWII, producing explosives in the necessary quantities for big wars will be much more difficult.  In a major European theater war, the munitions factories for both sides are within EZ reach of cruise missiles.  We may be back to fighting wars with swords and battle axes sooner than expected.

https://www.economist.com/europe/2024/05/26/there-is-an-explosive-flaw-in-the-plan-to-rearm-ukraine

There is an explosive flaw in the plan to rearm Ukraine

RE

The FEAR level is being ramped up in media propaganda now, likely in order to bolster waning public support for backing the Ukies in the neighboring NATO countries.  How much the Ruskies are actually DOING right now of this sort of sabotage is an open question.  It quite difficult to PROVE any of these supposed acts of sabotage were committed by Ruskie "sleeper" cells supposedly in place since the days of the old USSR and Cold War.  Those sleepers are pretty old guys by now, unless of course you figure they had kids who have taken over the job from mom and dad and sit waiting for coded instructions to come in over the shortwave radio hidden in the basement. lol.

Besides old fashioned short wave and Rip Van Winkle saboteurs, the media propagandists also postulate Social Media is being used to recruit Gig-job saboteurs who will set fires at the local Mall for a few hundred Euros dropped into their crypto wallet online.  The one thing they don't mention is the possibility some of these supposed acts of sabotage are false flags executed by their own black ops security services in order to generate fear as they are blamed of the Ruskies.

This is not to say Vlad is not doing some of this, I mean he IS ex-KGB after all and if the operations had political or logistical value, I'm sure he'd consider using them.  I just don't see what that political or logistical value is right now to do so,  I don't think he needs to do this to reduce support for the war among Belgians or Germans.  At the moment, this type of action does more harm than good as far as his side is concerned.  REAL sabotage where munitions production or ammo dumps are sabotaged yes, random fires and telecommunication disruptions not so much.  It's hardly "unfair" war tactics though.  What do people think he will do if Ruskie assets are confiscated by Western banksters, sit on his duff and do nothing?

Definitely with both the trade war escalating with the Chinese and increasing propaganda surrounding the war in Ukraine, the geopolitical drift toward an expansion of hostility between the major powers has increased.  The only question is how it will evolve and what forms the conflict will take.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/5/29/as-ukraine-war-rages-russia-activates-sabotage-plans-in-europe-experts

As Ukraine war rages, Russia activates sabotage plans in Europe: Experts

RE

Where's Tony Stark when you need him?  lol.  Nothing like paying billions of dollars to FSoA military contractors for weapons that don't work.  Is anybody even held accountable for this?  You would think some general should be fired, right?  Except nobody even wants to admit the failures, and between the Congress who appropriates the money, the military planners who recommend the equipment and the contractors who build it, each group passes the buck on who's responsible.

Thing is, this stuff is just Small Potatoes, wait till real aerial combat starts taking place and $Billion$ in fighter jets start getting shot down by $10K shoulder fired laser guided missiles.  Aircrafte carriers and Dreadnoughts doing the Titanic when rammed by dozens of remote controlled speedboats and mini-subs loaded with high explosives.

The high tech stuff looks great in the movies.  IRL, not so much.

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/ukraine-us-weapons/

Ukraine War rips veil off of US weapons superiority

RE

Quote from: RE on May 24, 2024, 08:11 PMNever know who's reading, only who's posting.  There's usually a half dozen or so guests on at any given time.  Most today was 14.  They're mostly bots of course, but it could be anybody.

RE

Is there a point to putting this subject matter on the internet if you are worried about who is reading? Isn't that the entire point of doing this on the internet, to be interactive, get points of view out, managing those inbound to make sure they don't interfere with the notions of the site owner, etc etc?

Otherwise wouldn't you just lock it down, vet those who want to participate, background checks, whatever it takes, and then stop worrying?

It doesn't matter to me who reads it. I find the topic interesting so I write about it.  The bots and database intrusions are an annoyance, but they don't affect us much, just occasionally posts disappear and need to be  restored, which is a pain.  All part of the modern internet environment.

RE

Quote from: RE on May 30, 2024, 06:14 PMIt doesn't matter to me who reads it.

I imagine that was true when you were the head dishwasher of the Diner, and I'll take your word that the same is true now. But the new head dishwasher does for some reason. The concern as to who reads this site is unclear to me. No one here is passing around nuke codes or discussing what info they have for sale to the Russians or anything.

It is no different than some folks who know each other and meet up for beers on a Saturday night because they don't have much of a social life the rest of the week. So why care that someone put a microphone in the peanuts?

Quote from: REI find the topic interesting so I write about it.

That is obvious and has been so since at least 2007/2008 when I first bumped into you. You aren't the only one. You haven't embedded nuke codes using steganography in your dissertations have you?

Quote from: REThe bots and database intrusions are an annoyance, but they don't affect us much, just occasionally posts disappear and need to be  restored, which is a pain.  All part of the modern internet environment.
RE

Any pattern to what they erase? Besides my insight into the geosciences of course.