Comments by "David Himmelsbach" (@davidhimmelsbach557) on "FALL BLAU 1942 - Examining the Disaster" video.
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@at6686 One additional point: no-one knows how much petroleum is out there to be extracted. VAST areas are politically impossible to explore: Russia, Red China, ... and a slew of 3rd World nations. Libya could've been discovered when the Italians ran the joint. But hole-punching had to wait until the 50's... and American firms. Then Libya was discovered to have as much, perhaps more, crude oil than the USA. It took until the late 50's for the industry to even scope out the size of KSA's reserves. Then, further exploration was STOPPED by royal edict. Once publicized, said discoveries caused the price of crude oil to crash in international trade. It was THIS price drop that caused OPEC to be formed -- by Venezuela and Iran -- not the Arabs. KSA and Kuwait jumped on board PDQ once they got the sales pitch. (The common man thinks that OPEC was an Arab creation.)
We now know that Russia sits on top of an oil strata that runs from the Urals to the Baltic and off to the Black Sea that has dreamy light crude oil. It's not economic without fracking. Even though its total volume utterly dwarfs that of Venezuela and KSA, it's a pretty thin strata. (1,000x as large! ... Centuries of global demand. )
When Ukraine brought in Americans to frack her slice of the pie -- Putin was furious. He invaded Eastern Ukraine as a result. (Check the time-line.) The Ukrainians have aimed their fracking effort at natural gas, because for them, natural gas is their big import deficit. They were importing more gas from Russia than crude oil from anyone.
When Putin went to shut off oil exports to Ukraine (they were dead-beats) the Saudis stepped up -- big time.
Putin subsequently countered with a charm offensive with the Saudis -- which has led to them dickering back and forth about production volumes -- so much in the news.
The whole NordStream II dust-up is so that Putin can totally cut-off natural gas deliveries via Ukraine.
BTW, Putin, PERSONALLY, is the largest single owner of Gazprom. So the completion of said NordStream is putting billions into his wallet. Thank you slow ol' Joe!
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@michaelhart7569 You alluded to it up-thread, but PLANTS a starving for carbon dioxide. It's the RATE LIMITING compound for plant growth all along the tropical zone. There, there is sunlight aplenty, water aplenty and soil aplenty. So, at the margins, atmospheric carbon dioxide -- the ultimate plant fertilizer -- determines yield per acre of everything vegetative: wood, crops, weeds, grass, -- and that which eats them.
If the Greens have their way, more souls will die from starvation than those consumed by WWII. For it is in this belt that poverty is concentrated. Note how it is from out of the tropics that the US is being invaded by the poverty stricken.
In Biblical times, Sodom was a filthy rich city. Why? it was raising crops just north of the Dead Sea -- by canal irrigation in the desert -- and the local Partial Pressure of Carbon Dioxide there is the highest on Planet Earth. Think about it. It just took far less effort to grow food, and Sodom was at the cross roads of trade -- being right next to the world's first 'highway' -- meaning International Road. Traders were not compelled to pay off locals to transit it.
They were getting their cut by being hoteliers. (Actually, running RV parks. Bring your own tent.)
And then, out of the blue, Sodom was hit by a meteor that terminated in an air burst. Green trinitite micro-spheres are now to be found all over Sodom's ruins.
( For centuries, folks had been looking at the wrong end of the Dead Sea for Sodom. Isn't that a hoot? The pile of rubble that is Sodom is glaring to the eyeball. )
The whole Biblical tale is just that. A morality saga laid on top of a cosmological tragedy.
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@at6686 I can't argue with that. Europe is doing absolutely everything wrong. But then, they have their legacy from the first fifty-years of the 20th Century.
What's happening is that smart phones are broadcasting back to Nigeria, et. al what a cruise it is up in Paris, London, Berlin. The Africans have absolutely no conception of Winter. They do identify with living in hovels on the street, though.
Europe, as a whole, is NOT a net food generator. France exports a lot -- but it's to Germany, Britain and Italy -- and just a touch to the USA. Britain, Germany, Italy, Spain are net food importers -- and have been for quite some time. (More than a century.)
France is directly headed for civil war -- and even though the generals have told the politicians -- the latter do not want to listen. The result: carmagedon, and car-B-ques. Most young Africas simply go on the dole, pimp out women, or distribute hard drugs. As you can imagine, the social service bureaucracy LOVES them.
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@nicholaskelly6375 My counter argument is that coal is super-strategic. It rarely travels across the seas -- unless it's met coal. But each nation that industrializes does so on the back of its own coal mines:
Britain
America
Germany
France
Japan ( It invaded Korea and Manchuria to steal coal for steel.)
Red China
India
What this means is that it never appears as important as it really is because outside powers can't effectively throttle the coal mining and distribution of other countries -- until NOW.
Yes, the Red Chinese and Arabs and Russians are doing their damnedest to stop the West from burning coal. Without government intervention, coal produces the cheapest electricity on the planet -- unless you're blessed with hydro-potential. (Brazil, Bolivia, Venezuela -- and such)
This lowest cost power impacts the entire national economy. So, it's super-strategic, but it can't be fought over -- except by religion. For the faith in Global Doom by Global Warming is based entirely on pure faith. The statistics so often proffered have been revealed to be frauds -- time and time, again.
What really kills me is that carbon dioxide phobia is derived from the Montreal Convention WRT Freon. This was the first man-made global atmospheric pollutant ever discovered. Three chemists got the Nobel in Chemistry in 1995 over this matter.
As for myself, Rowland was MY professor. Freon was MY research white paper presented to him -- all those years ago. Rowland dropped EVERYTHING to follow my advice: that he'd get a Nobel if he pursued Freon, Fluorine chemistry, generally. It was I that spent countless hours going through Chem Abstracts - - 1906 to the time (1974) tracking down EVERY SINGLE abstract on Fluorine. (!!!)
Freon research was what I wanted to do. That was supposed to be MY Nobel.
Instead, Rowland has written me out of (chemistry) history. His (fake) history is up on the Web. He got his Nobel for starting the research, Molina was his grad student, and in my same class. I was the only Junior undergrad in that class. To attend, I needed Rowland's specific permission. Since I was the smartest kid he'd ever seen, I was in.
[ I held the thickest scholastic record in North America coming out of high school. It ran two reams and could not be filed in the cabinets. It took two-days to read. Wonderlic rated me +8 SD up. This was so high that Wonderlic spent Large to prove test fraud. They gave up upon getting my academics. So you can see why Rowland dropped all other suggestions to pursue Freon. He even pulled strings to get on a cruise ship convention entirely dedicated to atmospheric research. Yeah, he was a nationally known chemist even back then.]
I coughed up my project to Rowland KNOWING that he'd get a Nobel. I told him so. ( The number and quality of my predictions would totally freak you out. The less said, the better. No-one can handle such truths.)
So here I sit watching the West going pagan-religious over carbon dioxide because the reverend al Gore is preaching from his bullpit. This is the idiot that had to attend three-universities -- Animal House style -- to get a degree. So, he gets global attention for the "sky is falling" while I'm unknown now... and forever.
The idea that a melting Arctic ice cap can raise sea levels is nonsense on stilts.
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TIK's best exposition, yet.
OKH's fumbling -- logistically -- was epic for Case Blue.
Straight off it HAD to be apparent that Mykop without a rail connection was no asset at all.
So the tempo of Nazi victory for Case Blue had to be the advance of the rail net.
Yet OKH treated the rail net as a peripheral issue.
The 11th Army was the controlling army for the Romanians.
So 11th Army really DID get split up after the Crimean campaign.
It never should've been sent north, as the ONLY strategic prize that could end the war in the east was the Volga -- the Red's energy throttle.
The 'sickle' of Case Blue ran from Voronezh down to Stalingrad. That should've been transparent from the first. The 'sickle' deserved its own army group -- which should've been 'Army Group Don' from the first. Von Manstein ought to have been promoted up to command it from the very first.
AGD was the focus of Case Blue. Once the 'sickle' was in place, then AG South would've had free reign to consummate Mykop. Grozny was an oil field too far. The demand upon the rail net troops would've been entirely too much.
AGS- AG"A" was too strong... required too much gasoline.
The whole scope of Case Blue was determined by how fast and far the rail net could be expanded. Neither OKH, OKW nor AH seemed to ever grasp this.
So, TIK is correct, Case Blue blew up even during conception. Even perfect martial performance against the Reds would not have redeemed the German failure to get the rail net up and running ASAP.
The consistent blind spot: why did Nazi Germany not see that she HAD to Dieselize?
Diesel-electric locomotives would've been fantastic assets for the Ostheer. For you just knew that the Reds would destroy every water tower essential for steam locomotion.
The Ostheer needed locomotives that could roll the moment the rails were squared away, preferably smaller locomotives that would be easier to shift around in the field, barged in, even.
The British, the Soviets and the Americans constantly schooled the Germans in logistics.
But they never picked up a CLUE... even after the war was over.
( For those curious, look at the British use of their Egyptian rail net when it counted. The great DAK was so blind that they missed just about everything logistical. Absolutely no lessons were learned... but, of course.)
[ Imagine, the Germans and Italians NEVER thought to punch holes into Libya. Even though the British and American oil firms had LONG established that water and oil was commonly to be found under the deserts. ( Iran, Saudi Arabia ) ]
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@James
In point of fact, the Germans used barges -- both in the Baltic and Black Seas.
These were pre-existing assets, and had such shallow drafts that they were designed for the Rhine and Danube -- both were linked by canal, BTW.
A single barge of this type is equal to ~700 tons in capacity. So one barge per day could shift enough to support a corps. They aren't the fastest, but they do carry a lot. France, Germany and the low countries have large fleets of these barges -- even now -- typically family owned -- with the owners living on them, too.
The larger issue would be that such barges are ALREADY committed to the internal economies of said nations.
Germany did use barges, but only in tiny amounts, yes, all the way to Rostov-on-Don.
Logistically, the Germans never had their head screwed on right.
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