60 thoughts on “Putin Losing, Now What?”

  1. my guess is all the above would be accomplished by blowing up the Zaporizhya nuke plant.  detaining for questioning AKA kidnapping its director hints toward that.  if that happens, UN should kick russia off security council and send in peace keeping troops forthwith or at least the countries that are harmed by the fallout blown their way need to respond forcibly.

  2. in the meantime while he’s conjuring up more dastardly things, putie will send draftees to the meat grinder with the help of extra pre-ground mercenaries from kim and others.

    david horsey had an op ed last week addressing the draft call and russian history at Putin’s pawns | The Seattle Times

    The core tenet of the Russian military has not changed very much since World War II: use savage tactics and throw hordes of soldiers into the meat grinder of battle. In the 1940s, that strategy eventually turned back a German army built on a similar philosophy, but in Ukraine in 2022, Russia’s near-medieval methods are failing.
    […]
    With his troops demoralized and in retreat, Putin has instituted a draft to round up 300,00 men to throw into the fight. The response has been something other than patriotic zeal. Young men have been streaming to airports and border crossings to get out of the country before they can be turned into cannon fodder. Protests have erupted. Recruitment offices have been hit with Molotov cocktails.
    Western military analysts say any fresh phalanx of reluctant Russian soldiers that eventually reaches the battlefield will very likely be poorly trained, inadequately equipped, and inclined to duck and run. …. {continues]

     

  3. also in the meantime, the little things can count too in undoing putie’s putsch.

    Miss Crimea fined for singing patriotic Ukrainian song | Crimea | The Guardian

    Two women in Russia-annexed Crimea, including Miss Crimea, have been found guilty of discrediting the Russian army by singing a patriotic Ukrainian song in a video posted on social media, local authorities have said.
    Olga Valeyeva, who won the Miss Crimea 2022 beauty pageant, and an unnamed friend sang the popular Ukrainian Chervona Kalyna song on a balcony.
    A video of the women singing was posted on Instagram stories, which autodelete after 24 hours.
    Crimean police said Valeyeva was fined 40,000 roubles (£590), while her friend was given a 10-day prison sentence.
    […]
    Last month, the Moscow-installed head of the peninsula, Sergey Aksyonov, warned Crimeans that authorities would react “harshly” to such songs after Chervona Kalyna was played at a wedding.
    “Singing such nationalist anthems – especially during the special military operation – will be punished,” Aksyonov said in a video on Telegram in September, using Moscow’s terminology to describe its invasion of Ukraine.
    “People who do this are acting like traitors,” he added.
    Aksyonov said there was a special FSB security service group working on the matter.

     

    as bink would say: “slava ukraini”

  4. in other news

    Georgia senate candidate Herschel Walker got caught in a big lie this week, and officials in Ukraine clapped back at Elon Musk’s plan to end Russia’s war against their country.

  6. Glad I don’t have to make such decisions. Whatever our response, I doubt it will involve the use of nukes. There are other responses that will hurt the shit out of Russia, and Putin. Blockades – physical and economic, ramping up equipment and aid to Ukraine, cyber attacks on Russian electronic infrastructure, economic pressure on China. There are options I can’t even imagine. Glad I don’t have to choose since we don’t know how Putin will react to any of those. 
     
    So in ‘61 Roger Maris hit 61 home runs to become the single season HR AL record holder, and held that distinction for 61 years until October 4, 2022 when Aaron Judge hit his 62nd HR. I bet Aaron believes in numerology. 

  7. Yankees and White Sox played an exhibition game here once so I saw Maris, Mantle, Nellie Fox, and all the orher little yankees and Soxes play ball.  Mr Fox was rude when i axed him for an autygraph–on my NELLIE FOX GLOVE.  I think he had a hangover. Suckiest glove i ever saw. Absolutely zero pocket.

  8. Ian reminds us that while stronger hurricanes may be among the more dramatic signs of climate change, beach erosion from rising seas is the bigger threat. WaPo 

    They stood sentry in the blue-green waters of the Gulf of Mexico: a string of white domes raised on columns that, depending on the viewer, resembled igloos or jellyfish or some sort of sci-fi creature.
     
    Built by an amateur inventor in the eighties to be self-sustaining, solar-powered and hurricane-resistant,theunusual retreat was once valued at $1.5 million, envisioned as part of a neighborhood of getaway homes on the white-sand Cape Romano, near Marco Island.
     
    Nature had other plans. Beginning in the early 2000s, hurricanes and erosion ate away at the land where the Cape Romano dome home sat. By this year, it was hundreds of feet off the shore — an otherworldly local landmark that drew a stream of sightseers who arrived by boat.

    Now, the domes have been lost to the sea. When Hurricane Ian tore through southwest Florida last week, they were destroyed. In photos taken by local shelling companies, all that remains were a few columns poking, just barely, out of the water. The much-mythologized home succumbed to the same forces it was designed to resist, becoming a symbol of the area’s enormous loss.

    “It was coming eventually,” said Brian Slager, who lived in the house from 1989 to 1991. “And a storm as bad as this one — if anything’s going to take it, this would. I’ve been around in Florida and living long enough to know that if Mother Nature wants to take something, it takes it.”

    ***
    …In 2005, a man named John Tosto purchased the place for $300,000 with plans of renovating and moving the house further from the shore, according to the Naples Daily News. Then Hurricane Wilma hit.

    That was the beginning of the end, eroding the beach significantly. Two years later, Collier County declared the property uninhabitable; hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines would follow for Tosto.

    Maples told the Coastal Breeze that she could remember a time “when it was actually an exhausting walk to the beach.” But over the years, the shore receded further and further from the domes. The other two homes were long since washed out to sea. The neighborhood, if there had been one, would have vanished, too.

    “Thumbing through historical photos, the shifting ground makes it appear the domes crept themselves into the sea, until today they are totally surrounded by water,” Cynthia Mott wrote in the Florida Weekly story. “Cape Romano got a makeover and the dome homes got a new yard.”
    (continues)

    The pics tell the story.

  10. According to Hiassen, replacing sand on florida beaches was a HUGE scam at one point.  Might still be. 

  13. OM & craig,

    nope, it’ll be a body double that “falls” from the window at the same time a very mysterious old woman in a burka using a Kalashnikov as a cane is seen slinking from the room. 

  14. sturge, you continue the story from there and we have the trail’s first hit movie-worthy mystery novel about how putin lives on in style at mar a lago.

    snl’s beck bennet plays putin & alec baldwin is SFB as his new butler (or is that spelled butt-ee)

  15. Ideal sitch: Someone on the inside takes out Poohtin. His supporters draw down troops claiming this was Poohtin’s failure, not theirs. 

    Good point: Let him fake his own death and live out his life in his opulent dacha. It doesn’t seem fair, at all…and could he live quietly, in obscurity? We know his orange mentee couldn’t do it.

    Realistically, my guess is B.

  16. More Russians flee than join Putin’s army after call-up for war
     

    Far more Russians have fled abroad than have enlisted in the military since President Vladimir Putin announced a mobilization to bolster his faltering invasion of Ukraine.
    Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said more than 200,000 people have been conscripted into the army since Putin’s Sept. 21 order for a partial call-up, Russian news services reported Tuesday.
    That matches an exodus of more than 200,000 Russians to neighboring Kazakhstan alone over the same period reported Tuesday by the central Asian country’s interior minister. Almost 69,000 Russians crossed into Georgia by Sept. 30, according to Interior Ministry data in the Caucasus republic, where vast lines of vehicles built up at the land border with Russia following the mobilization announcement.
    The European Union reported last week that 66,000 Russians had entered the bloc in the week to Sept. 25. Most came through Finland which heavily restricted Russian tourist arrivals on Friday in response to the surge in entrants.
    In Mongolia, which this week offered to ease residency rules for people from Russia, border officials reported that more than 12,000 Russians entered the country by Oct. 2.
    Other popular destinations such as Turkey, Armenia and Azerbaijan, where Russians can enter visa-free, haven’t disclosed data on arrivals since Putin’s mobilization order shocked the country and brought home the reality of the war in Ukraine that’s now in its eighth month.
    While not everyone who’s left Russia since Putin’s mobilization order would have been eligible for conscription, many rushed to get out of the country amid widespread uncertainty about the terms of the call-up. After Shoigu said 300,000 reservists were being mobilized, reports piled up of men being drafted who were officially exempt, including those who were too old or had chronic illnesses.
    Social media also filled with complaints from some conscripts about dire living conditions and a lack of training and equipment before being sent to the front.
    That all prompted a demand from Putin to “promptly correct our mistakes and not repeat them” at a meeting with his Security Council on Sept. 29. “Those who have been drafted without proper grounds must be sent home,” he said.

     
    https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2022/oct/04/more-russians-flee-than-join-putins-army-after-cal/

     

  19. I’m with Pogo… glad I don’t have to make that decision of what to do.  Can’t believe that Putey can give that order and that there won’t be multiple people willing to do what CBob suggests.
     
    As for Florida… Rick and I celebrated our 40th anniversary on Fort Myers Beach…  I blogged here about it at the time.  Yesterday we celebrated our 47th.  Time flies… but we still have great memories.  Can’t believe it’s all destroyed.  We were talking about spending our 45th on Sanibel Island…  but of course Covid changed those plans.

  20. Honeymoon was a couple weeks in Venice and Naples, almost fifty-two years ago.  I even scouted out Naples the last time I was deployed to Florida looking for a retirement home.  I suppose some building sites will be available now.
     
    For those who did not follow the full path of Ian, the damned thing has been sitting on top of the D.C. region for six days.  The first little bit of sunshine just blinded us.  It is clouding up again, hopefully for not as long.

  23. So, Bob, Rick Scott says the state also needs to invest in mitigating sea level rise and flooding.  Now I may be wrong, but Florida is a peninsula that has highest elevation of 345 feet – Britton Hill, on the Alabama/Florida border (likely dropping relative to mean high tide as we speak) and an average elevation of 100 feet statewide with a VERY gradual rise from sea level along every coastal area to not very high elevations in roughly the middle of the peninsula and the northern border of the panhandle.  the lower roughly 1/3 of the peninsula is less than 10 meters above sea level , with about half of that less than 5 meters above sea level. Exactly how does he propose mitigating the sea level rise and flooding? Are those crickets I hear?

  25. https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/04/politics/white-house-lobby-opec-oil-production-cuts-gasoline-prices-midterms/index.html

    “…following Wednesday’s crucial meeting of OPEC+, the international cartel of oil producers that, as expected, announced a significant cut to output in an effort to raise oil prices.”

    “On Wednesday morning, OPEC+ oil ministers meeting in Vienna agreed to an even larger production cut than the White House had feared — 2 million barrels per day, beginning in November…”

  27. if you didn’t see, Elon Musk posted an offensive poll on his twitter polling his readers as to what concessions Ukrainians should make to Russia, Ukrainian officials responded with a hearty “fuck off”
     
    Slava Ukraine 

  28. Interstate overpass = Florida mountain.
     
    Someone living on a boat in Sanford Florida says the water is still rising there.  The power at the marina is off so any live aboards need either have a separate source of power, they have solar and generator, water, they have a water maker, and sewage holding tank good enough for a week, they have compost toilets.  As she puts it, it is like living on the hook, except they can slosh along the dock to climb up to the parking lot where they have their van parked to go driving through the water to go food shopping.

  29. Pogo –
    And it’s all a sponge ,  so sea walls ain’t gonna cut it. 
    My solution  …………. Brooms. 
    Every day at 5 PM , everyone goes down to the beach , and sweeps the water back for 30 mins. 
    Problem solved .

  30. Elon Musk should “fall out of a window.”
     

    He’s manipulated crypto with his comments, but the SEC turned a blind eye.

    Oil prices will fluctuate, but the loss of bodily autonomy is forever.   ROE-vember is coming.

  32. Wow the usually circumspect Leon Panetta went further than I’ve heard him so far in predicting Ukraine will kick Russians out entirely, plus this: “If he is totally defeated I don’t see any way that Putin will survive in Russia”. (CNN) 

  34. so how does that impact the recent filing to SCOTUS?  does clarence wait until after the new hearings and lump both 11th circuit decisions together or does he jump the gun?  since the whole defense ploy is to delay delay they probably want the former before clarence makes his move… that is if the chief doesn’t make him let someone else handle what happens next.

  35. Heard a new phrase last night on Amanpour  …….
    ” Bonfire of the Veils ” 
    The Iranian protests have moved into the schools below university levels. 
    Another term they are using  … 
     
    “They can’t lock all of us up”
     
     
    The world is truly rolling over . 
     

  38. https://www.texastribune.org/2022/10/04/greg-abbott-eric-adams-busing-new-york/

    Lyin’ Greg Abbott

    “Abbott previously said Eric Adams’ office had not reached out to him about coordinating migrant arrivals in New York…”

    “Gov. Greg Abbott on Tuesday acknowledged New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ office sent an email that was apparently a follow-up to a conversation seeking greater coordination of Texas’ plans to bus migrants to the city— but the governor stressed that the mayor himself had not made direct contact.”

    During the debate last Friday, Greg said “the mayor” never contacted him. That’s like taking two cookies because your mom says you can’t have “a” cookie. Weasel.

  40. https://www.texastribune.org/2022/10/03/texas-cryptocurrency-mining-bitcoin/

    “By March, Rodriguez had quit farming cotton — something he called “just another job” — and began training to work in a cryptocurrency mine.”

    “The county had exactly what London-based Argo Blockchain was looking for: plenty of open land and easy access to affordable power, thanks to a large wind farm built there more than a decade ago.”

    “Texas political leaders have been promoting the state as a destination for companies producing bitcoin and other digital currencies, touting the state’s reputation for low taxes and cheap power…”

    “Like some other industries, crypto companies can shut down operations when high demand puts stress on the grid. This summer, when the grid operator asked Texans to conserve electricity due to tight grid conditions, Bratcher said crypto companies quickly shut down.”

    “Some communities with new crypto mining facilities have complained about the constant noise.”

    “A grassroots group in Navarro County, northeast of Waco, has rallied some citizens to oppose a bitcoin facility proposed by Riot Blockchain, claiming that it would create pollution by using large amounts of electricity.”

    “Crypto mining involves using powerful computers to produce digital currencies, called tokens, which can be used like traditional money to make online purchases. The crypto transactions run through computers rather than through a centralized entity like a bank, with the goal of providing people the ability to achieve wealth outside the traditional financial system. The computers require large amounts of electricity.”

    REGULATE THIS SH/+!

  41. To paraphrase  Ann Richards  …………….
    Poor Tucker , he can’t help himself. He was born with an aluminum TV tray in his mouth.

  42. Blue in “D”  ………… 
    Bitcoin is the future , if I could only find someone to buy my “Beanie Baby” collection, I’d jump in with my gold plated Buffalo  knuckles , and “Avoid Future Regret” .  
     

  47. Vocal Fry on these sounds from the tv persons.  Grating. The “A” as in Ask At Act fact tact packed, natural;  every time they hit that sound it’s like the proverbial fingernails on the chalkboard. 

  48. Sturge –
     
    Camp Lejeune  lawyers. The carrot penis people .  And the girl who peddles to stop crotch rot.  She tells us she’ll  place it in her butt seeks, but dances away , all the time telling us our crotches can smell poorly. 
     
    I didn’t know about this , when you wrote about it, but  Bingo came very soon. 

  55. Geez, Gingrich on FOX defending Herschel Walker because “he’s had a lot of concussions and suffered from PTSD”. Yet they attack Biden for cognitive issues. 

  56. Billy the Mountain –
     
    Live at UCLA  with  Flow and Eddie from the Turtles ,  (Happy Together).  For 20 mins. 
     
    The satire is amazing , and it is flawless . Watch this , it’s 50 years old. 

     
     
     

  57. https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/05/politics/russian-hackers-state-government-websites/index.html

    “Russian-speaking hackers on Wednesday claimed responsibility for knocking offline state government websites in Colorado, Kentucky and Mississippi, among other states – the latest example of apparent politically motivated hacking following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”

    “The Kentucky Board of Elections’ website, which posts information on how to register to vote, was also temporarily offline on Wednesday, but it was not immediately clear what caused that outage.”

  58.  Gingrich on FOX defending Herschel Walker because “he’s had a lot of concussions…”

    lolol

  59. CC –
    Walker  never had a very large sack of marbles. He is playing with about 2 or 3 .  His brain needs to go to the brain study in Mass, not the US Senate. 
     
    His son has the bit in his teeth , that dog has just begun to bark .
    He’s about to saw that branch off tree. 

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