Private Mars Rocket II

Every once in a while, somebody comes up with a very good analogy which I have to point at.
This author is talking about the Ukraine war in light of the recent destruction of Russian strategic bombers. Quote:

"To put this all in perspective, remember that Russia set out in February of 2022 to duplicate the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. If OIF had gone like that, we would have been recommissioning M48 Pattons to use as mobile artillery pieces in the bogged-down fighting around Basra in 2006, when a surprise attack blows up half our B52s on the ground at Barksdale, AFB."

I'm not obsessed with Mars - I can stop thinking about the Red Planet anytime I want to. In the meantime, I got a new iPhone and found the wallpaper ugly so I changed it to a picture of Mars. In other news:

As part of getting a new iPhone, I got a 3-months-free deal on Apple TV. So far I've seen:

1) Greyhound, a gritty WWII movie about a convoy attacked by U-boats. Tom Hanks is the lead and it's a tense ride.

2) Blitz, another WWII movie. In this one, a woman sends her son away to the country in 1940 London, but he runs away and comes back. Also very good and unstinting - the son falls in with a group of crooks who are robbing bombed-out buildings, including one with the dead still inside. Also I learned that the London Tube did not want to let people use their stations as bomb shelters but was forced into it by popular demand.

3) The first two episodes of Black Doves, a British spy thriller. Of interest is that the spies have normal lives outside of spying and balancing that with being a spy is part of the show.

The latest book, Strawberry Gold goes live tomorrow!

Trump supporters frequently say "if Trump had been President in 2022 the Ukraine war wouldn't have happened." Trump opponents, on hearing Trump say "I can end the war in Ukraine in a day," say "sure, if you surrender the war is over." Both groups of people are wrong.

The Trump supporters have bought into what Putin is trying to sell them, namely that Ukraine is a US puppet and that they will dance to our tune. This is not the case. They can and will fight. Remember, the entire first month of the war was all Ukraine fighting with stuff given to them years ago. If Trump had been President, that first month of the war would have played out essentially the same. Also remember that Zelenskyy didn't believe our warnings that Russia was going to invade. It's questionable whether or not Zelenskyy would have even taken Trump's phone call let alone believe an invasion warning.

Regarding surrender - if Trump gets into office, he will undoubtedly withhold aid to Ukraine. It's doubtful that will do much to end the war, at least not quickly. It's also entirely possible that withholding aid will create a new nuclear power in the world. Ukraine has a large military industrial complex, understands nuclear physics, and is highly motivated.

What would happen, should Trump get back into office, is that Putin will be more emboldened and that our response to Putin's next gambit will be mismanaged.

Three articles I'd like to suggest you look at.

1) On Holding a Wolf by its Ears, in which the author ties the CSA and Hamas.

2) Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta - a seven-part series that deconstructs everything you thought you knew about ancient Sparta.


3) For the spooky season, a real-life Ukrainian ghost story.

Jinwar and Other Stories by Alex Poppe

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I met the author at a Chicago Writer's Association event where she read an excerpt of the title story. I found the excerpt and the reading moving enough that I tracked her down after the reading to get the details on the book, which I purchased.

It's a slim volume, but packed with emotion. The title story, Jimwar, is a story of rebirth and survival. Our unnamed narrator survived a rape in the military, and in the first chapter she meets her rapist and former CO in a VA hospital where she is working. He's lost both legs at the hip and she is charged with caring for him. It's a dramatic chapter. The rest of the chapters of Jinwar follow our narrator back to Iraq and Syria as an aid worker, albeit with a detour while working in a food truck.

Alex is a keen observer of the human condition, and her characters take no shit from anybody. The stories are gritty but interesting, and she always takes the side of the women in the world. I highly recommend this book.



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The Navigation Case: Training, Flying and Fighting the 1942 to 1945 New Guinea War by John E. Happ

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I'm not sure how I heard of this unjustly obscure book, but I did, and I'm glad I did. It was a great read.

The author, John E. Happ, is a Chicago native, as was his father, Leonard "Len" Happ. John knew Len had served as a pilot in WWII, but like many veterans of that era, Len never talked about the war. In fact, John did not even know that his father had served in the Pacific, fighting against the Japanese.

That is, until his father died, and in the family house John found an Army-issue navigation case which Len had used to store correspondence from the war. John then undertook a decades-long effort to research his father's military service, which started when Len, a private pilot, volunteered for the US Army Air Corp in January 1942. It wasn't until mid-1943 that Len saw action, flying ground attack missions in New Guinea.

As it happens, I have a personal connection to this theater as well - a great uncle served there. All he ever said about his service was that the place was hot and wet and the natives ran around naked. Len never said even that much.

The book is a mixture of Len's personal story of training and combat, interspersed with a solid layman's history of a slog of a campaign, conducted by under-supplied US and Australian forces fighting in what was then literally an uncharted land. Len's service in New Guinea was exemplarily, and Len was rotated back to the US after over 60 combat missions. There he flew medical transport planes, until an unexplained medical issue grounded Len. A few months later, Len was discharged, and he returned to civilian life.

Overall, I found the book a very good read and an interesting story. It will shed a light on an underappreciated theater of WWII. My only complaint was that the maps in this book were hard to read, but that's a quibble. Overall, I recommend this book.



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So, I've seen on various pro-Russian sites a tendency to describe Ukraine as "Banderstan." I didn't know why. Now I do. A Ukrainian figure of the WWII era who went by the name Bander fought at various times with the Germans and against the Communists. The history is complex - read the whole thing.

There's a saying that history doesn't repeat itself but it rhymes. I've made some predictions based on that, in a series of posts the rest of this century, where I say the 21st rhymes with the 19th century. Here's another such rhyme - Napoleon III and Putin.

Napoleon III was the nephew of the more famous Napoleon Bonaparte. His real first name was Charles, but he used an outsized ego and his family history to become Emperor of France on a platform of "make France great again." (No apologies to any recent politician.) As part of that plan, in 1862 he embarked on the Second French intervention in Mexico.

The details of how and why said intervention came to be aren't important, although I found a fascinating bit of history on the Duke of Moctezuma de Tultengo, a descendent of the last Aztec emperor who is a current Spanish noble, while researching this. The basic thrust of the Intervention was for Napoleon and the Mexican nobility to install an emperor to rule Mexico and cooperate with France. There was a long war, in which France and the Imperials won some battles but never scored a knockout blow. France, bloodied and broke, withdrew, then got their asses kicked in the Franco-Prussian War.

If you assume Putin, a former KGB agent, is playing the Napoleon III role, the parallels with the current situation are obvious. It's also looking like a repeat of the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan - wars in which a conventional force may take territory but get bled to death.

For the record and so I may refer to them later, my thoughts on the situation in the Ukraine.

First, there is no moral, legal or ethical reason for Russia to invade Ukraine. The "republics" Putin recognized are creatures of Russia, created by Putin to weaken Ukraine. They are not only not under any threat but are in fact causing threats, and Russian "peacekeepers" are not keeping peace but threatening war.

Second, although Putin needs to be punished, I am not in favor of going to war to do so. Arming Ukrainians, yes. Sanctions, yes. War, either ground combat or some "no-fly zone" (which is an act of war) - no.

Third, we as the West need to assume that Putin is a clear and present danger. Whether he's crafty as a fox or high on his own supply I don't know, but we can't assume this will be the last bite of the apple. We need to move significant heavy forces to NATO now, move them as far east as we can, and expect to be there for years. If Finland and Sweden want to join NATO, get them in and integrated as rapidly as possible.

Fourth, we as Americans need to recognize that we will inevitably be drawn into any long-duration war in Europe. The US was created in large part as a result of the Seven Years War. We got drawn into the Napoleonic Wars (we call our part the War of 1812). We got drawn into both World Wars. We have a choice - sit back fat, dumb and happy until we get sucked into a war and scramble, or try and prevent that war while ensuring should one come we are in a better situation.

Like the label on the tin says:

Thing The First

Star Trek's "Genesis Trology" proved you don't need to have a plan. As somebody who committed trilogy by accident, I fully endorse this idea.

Thing The Second

Afghanistan Isn’t 1975 South Vietnam, It’s 1948 China. Basically, we "lost" China because Chiang Kai Shek’s Kuomintang (AKA Nationalist) Party did a shit job of governing. To paraphrase Dean Wormer, corrupt, greedy and incompetent is no way to run a government.

Ditto Afghanistan. In both countries, as George Marshall said of China, "A great deal must be done by the Chinese authorities themselves…nobody else can do it for them.” The key difference is that in China, some US policy-makers were honest about the situation. In Afghanistan we stuck our heads in the sand.

Thing The Third

Much ink has been spilled about why the job market is so tight. Since the extra Federal aid has ended, that can't be the cause. I agree with Robert Reich when he says "American Workers Are on Strike Over 'Low-Wage S*** Jobs."