In Honor of St. Patrick’s Day

Come out Ye Black and Tans

The Broad Black Brimmer

The Men Behind the Wire

The Red Hand of Ulster will get their moment here on Virtual Mirage when it’s time for Orange March in Belfast in June 2022. With the passing of the plague, they’ll be back with the drum and collections solicited at the pubs.

 

The Russian War Machine

There are a number of things that detail the Russian Federation’s ability to wage war effectively that have been revealed during the invasion of Ukraine. In some cases, they dropped their pants by shooting munitions that revealed countermeasures that they didn’t need to employ. In others, their newest armor has been stopped by modern anti-tank missiles. How good are their airborne troops? To put it kindly, they will need to recruit new guys.

They seem to fight the way they have always fought – with a reliance on mass at the point of kinetic combat and little regard for losses.

Despite the fact that China is an ally of convenience, you know that they are looking at the Russians and asking themselves whether or not they overextended themselves and whether they are sufficiently weak on the “Eastern Flank”.

T-80BVM, captured.

Reactive armor is a key part of armor protection in Russia, but they may need to re-think all that.

 

Problem Solving 101

(polya) It’s not difficult. When you look at it simply, it appears that a trained chimp could figure things out. And maybe a trained chimp can, but world leaders struggle to work it out.

 

Identify the Tank

 

RELATED ARTICLESMORE FROM AUTHOR

39 COMMENTS

  4. T 34/85 with improvised stand-off protection against the Panzerfaust threat.
    The tank is standing in front of the Brandenburg Gate in BERLIN and so the time period of that picture must be end of April/early May 1945.

  5. saw an article that said 35% of americans want to us to fight russia even if it means nuclear war. the talking heads are claiming the ua is mounting a counteroffensive. they also said we asked china for help, and that putin asked china for help. and they wonder why we don’t trust them….i think china is looking at it and asking themselves “are our tanks etc. that vulnerable too.” i wonder if their nukes work, but i don’t want to find out the hard way. not even sure ours work. i read back during the trump administration that scientists trying to update the warheads couldn’t figure out how we got them to go boom, something about tritium and cobalt. seems the old guys left some things out of the manual, lol. i hope the new guys figured it out. wouldn’t it be funny if both putin and brandon launched all the missiles and none of the worked?

    • I read something along the same line. Sometimes you sit back and wonder at the stupidity of the American voter. A nuclear war, even if 50% of the Soviet/Russian warheads were duds would be bad. I’m quite confident that ours would work. And for the record, the Russians and Chinese think that they’ll work. The cobalt sheaths are said to magnify the radiation yield from thermonuclear (tritium) warheads. I’m sure that I could delve into the math, but that is all very nasty stuff.

      Once the Russians launch, the US retaliates, saving some for China, Israel might just take the moment to flatten Iran and so forth.

      • oh well, rip off the bandage and get it over with. but i’m told by a “friend” we have things that make nukes look like a firecracker. guess they’re itching to try them out.

        • Maybe after 30 years of no real education, they don’t understand what the deal with nuclear war is?

          -Kle.

          • Defense contractors in the beltway who own the Neocons/Neolibs see a big payday in a nuclear war. I doubt that they look any farther than that.

    • Always wanted an AR 18. I did have at one time the next best thing, a BRN 180 and it ran great. Damn I need a more stable canoe.

    • One might say that we are all Provos now. But not me; I don’t say that.

      I say we are all being made into Suidlanders now.

      • …a South African organization that anticipates an eventual collapse of infrastructure, and advocates and plans for the evacuation of South Africans from the major cities when the anticipated revolution begins and negroes begin to kill white people based on race alone.

        That could be in South Africa, but if it happens in the US, I think it’s more likely that the South Koreans will end the purge all on their own.

        • It’s already happening in South Africa, it just doesn’t get any international news. And, unfortunately, it’s more dangerous to be white and on a farm or out of the cities than in the cities. Friend came from SA about 15 years ago, a peace advocate type of gal, and she had the 1000 yard stare as she’d seen stuff that nobody in Liberal America would believe.

          And now we’re seeing the same thing happening here. If we treated hate crimes equally, there would be a huuuuuge uptake of hate crimes with the haters being, primarily, of sub-Saharan Africa non-white decent, if you get what I mean.

          • Yes, but the left has exempted inner city and Sub-Saharan people from the list of people who can commit hate crimes.

  7. Today I’m identifying as more Scots-Irish than Polish or German or Hungarian or Czech or English, therefore a joke is in order:

    An Englishman, Frenchman, and Irishman walk into a Scottish bar, each order a whisky.

    The Englishman sees a fly in his, picks it out, and drinks it down.

    The Frenchman sees a fly in his and yells, “Mon Dieux! I can not drink this, give me another!”

    The Irishman sees a fly in his, reaches in, picks it up and says, “Spit it out! Spit it out!”

  8. A little Sr. Patties day ditty from the ould sod.

    Go on home British Soldiers Go on home
    Have you got no fucking homes of your own
    For 800 years we’ve fought you without fear
    And we will fight you for 800 more

      • The best line from John Ford’s classic The Quiet Man: “Well, it’s a nice, soft night. So I think I’ll join me comrades down at the pub and talk a little treason.”

        God Bless All Here.

  10. i’m watching 3 tankers circling over sw va, another doing long loops over oak ridge nl, tn. and one hauling tail south to n.c. i’m seeing c17’s out the wazzoo too, but all the fighters are flying blacked out in cloudy weather. they usually fly “no call sign” or spoof as a cessna but a flight went overhead with nothing showing up on the screen. things must be more serious than we have been led to believe. happy st. patrick’s day!

    • Haven’t seen any really unusual stuff here lately. There were some “REACH” flights that went over, along with some VIP stuff and some Hueys from Warren AFB, but that’s it.

      • the weird part was three tankers were running the same loop over southwest va. i have never seen even one there. its usually off the east coast.

  11. Family lore. Our Irish ancestors belonged to some sect both the Anglicans and Catholics hated and escaped to America to survive. Some in the family dispute this. Their version is our ancestors were such assholes both churches paid for the emigration.

  12. Red Hand? More the Bloody Hand of Ulster. From the time when the Scots became Irish and the Irish became Scots. Which explains why that particular section of the world has been, is and always will be screwed up. If only they’d acknowledged their Norman masters as their masters and just gotten over it all. Bog-trotters one and all.

    As to Vlad’s paratroopers, from what I hear they’ll need to train a whole regiment or two as the ones dropped in basically disappeared from life.

    For years the Russians/Soviets have been saying their home versions of their tanks were much superior to the chimp (as in dumbed down) versions sold to the Arabs and ChiComs and Viets. Seems that the ‘superior’ home versions aren’t that much better. As Gomer Pyle said, “Surprise, surprise, surprise.” The reactive armor doesn’t work, the tanks are poorly maintained, the tankers are poorly trained, and they’re using tactics that seem more Field Marshal Montgomery in a Market-Garden way than anything sensible.

    Wondering how much pull the ChiComs had in delaying the invasion until after the Winter Olympics. And thus dooming Russia’s invasion to mud and flood. 4-6 weeks earlier and they’d have been rolling across frozen fields and replaying the push to Berlin.

    Still can’t get my brain around Russians not understanding the spring thaws and mud. Russians, who created a wagon/sled/boat thingy to deal with spring thaws and mud. Who now don’t understand spring thaws and endless mud.

    I do believe that Putin and his leaders believed that the Ukranians were much more corrupt and degenerate than they actually are, or at least uselessly corrupt and degenerate like the Russian Mafia. Seems the Ukes have some stiff in their pissle.

    • It’s safer for the Russians to stand off and lob artillery into cities and reduce them to rubble than it is to drive into them with infantry and engage in a “war of the rats”. There must be a few Russians who have read of the glories of the Battle of Stalingrad.

      The tank war (now in its fourth week) has been a big disappointment to Vlad & friends, but in time, given an infinite number of Russian casualties, they can take Ukraine. Never underestimate the cruelty of Turks or Russians.

  13. Just for S&G’s, there are no snakes in Ireland, then or now. The most deadly animal is the wasp (The badger can be vicious but rare) St. Patrick was Scottish, taken to Ireland at 15 to work as a shepherd. The color blue was the first to be associated with St. Paddies Day. The three-leaf shamrock was meant as a tribute to the Triad (Father, Son & Holy Ghost) The 10 biggest parades are not in Ireland. (NYC the largest) Don’t you just love trivia?

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