Bummer... They missed out on seeing Montana.

"He's going to scuttle the ship!"

one ping?

Putin: hey let us spend a hell of a lot more money that we have on more of these subs. What could go wrong.

Every 5 years or so, eh? Now I know when to ask for extended leave.

Shouldn't have imported those screen doors from Poland.

Some of the things in there dont react well to bullets

Today we shail into hishtory!

And this is why we shouldn't be exactly too worried about the reemergence of Russia as a rival super power. Because either this shiat happened because of one of 3 reasons: either a) Russia's military equipment is inoperable shiat, and they couldn't match us technologically on the battlefield, or b) thier military personnel is poorly trained, resulting in things like this occuring, or c) some combination of a and b. Plus we're packing more nukes than anyone else currently is, and everyone knows it.

One Thirty-two and Bush: Shouldn't have imported those screen doors from Poland.

Hey! It's their own damn fault for using our submarine screen doors.

"Andrei, you've lost another submarine?"

NewportBarGuy: Today we shail into hishtory!
Ha...vodka.

my son is on a missle sub in the pacific right now. luckily the US has a better safety record than russia in sub matters. last one that sank was in the 60's. I still worry though.

I'm just guessing, but I assume it puts out a fire something like this:
-Alarm sounded
-Doors close and seal
-Haylon released

Maybe the first step got skipped, or the last one was supposed to be skipped, but wasn't.

hockey fool: one ping?

Give me a ping, hockey fool. One ping only, please

I am stunned, with all these comments, no one has mentioned "The Hunt for Red October".

/I got nothing

You know, it o-Kursk to me that... you know what, I'm not finishing that.

Maybe it wasn't an accident...
I blame:


/obscure? I hope not
//slashies

RandomExcess: I am stunned, with all these comments, no one has mentioned "The Hunt for Red October".

/I got nothing

This is totally like the hunt for red october! Only nothing like it!

/slashes for the cure to cancer.

We were in the middle of watching Red October tonight when I looked at my phone with an email update with the CNN headline. It was spooky! We yelled "It's not our fault!"

Sarah Palin watched the whole thing from her front porch

Not shocked. Too bad it wasn't Putin and the gang... they'd rather aimlessly kill nobodies with faulty equipment than be a legitimate military power.

FTFH:
At least 20 die in accident on Russian nuclear sub.

How does the boat's method of propulsion matter here?
Or did you include "nukuler" as a attention-getter?

(Yes, I know that the MSM included that scary word in their headlines as well, but I expected better from FARK)

bigfatdave: FTFH:
At least 20 die in accident on Russian nuclear sub.

How does the boat's method of propulsion matter here?
Or did you include "nukuler" as a attention-getter?

(Yes, I know that the MSM included that scary word in their headlines as well, but I expected better from FARK)

For the sake of information? What the heck kind of a comment is that, anyway?
Had it been a diesel one, we'd be wondering why on earth were they using one.

rfenster: "Andrei, you've lost another submarine?"

Came here for this.

This business will get out of control. It will get out of control and we'll be lucky to live through it.

/got nothin

tfm_copycat: bigfatdave: FTFH:
At least 20 die in accident on Russian nuclear sub.

How does the boat's method of propulsion matter here?
Or did you include "nukuler" as a attention-getter?

(Yes, I know that the MSM included that scary word in their headlines as well, but I expected better from FARK)

For the sake of information? What the heck kind of a comment is that, anyway?
Had it been a diesel one, we'd be wondering why on earth were they using one.

Makes sense to me. Now you're wondering if it was some sort of reactor issue, or if there was a really bad case of food poisoning. If it had been a diesel sub, you might have learned that diesel subs are not nearly as dead as you think. Also, you would have been wondering about carbon monoxide poisoning. It's a piece of the puzzle. Don't throw it back at the person who gave it to you.

matt2891: And this is why we shouldn't be exactly too worried about the reemergence of Russia as a rival super power. Because either this shiat happened because of one of 3 reasons: either a) Russia's military equipment is inoperable shiat, and they couldn't match us technologically on the battlefield, or b) thier military personnel is poorly trained, resulting in things like this occuring, or c) some combination of a and b. Plus we're packing more nukes than anyone else currently is, and everyone knows it.

Which part of your list is the part that says we shouldn't worry again?

An anti-submarine ship, the Admiral Tributs, was providing assistance...

Hmmmmm...

/yeah I know
//I got nothing

matt2891: And this is why we shouldn't be exactly too worried about the reemergence of Russia as a rival super power. Because either this shiat happened because of one of 3 reasons: either a) Russia's military equipment is inoperable shiat, and they couldn't match us technologically on the battlefield, or b) thier military personnel is poorly trained, resulting in things like this occuring, or c) some combination of a and b. Plus we're packing more nukes than anyone else currently is, and everyone knows it.

The Russians are good at developing simple, rugged weapons. Their weaponry is often very effective (e.g., RPG, AK-47). But they seem to have problems with sophisticated weaponry. The Russians also regard people as very expendable. Witness their behavior in Chechnya and Georgia.

great song. perfectly relevent...just listen. theres no offical vid

Link (new window)

Lars The Canadian Viking: I'm just guessing, but I assume it puts out a fire something like this:
-Alarm sounded
-Doors close and seal
-Haylon released

Maybe the first step got skipped, or the last one was supposed to be skipped, but wasn't.

Shouldn't really matter. The entire reason Halon 1301 is used it because it can suppress fires at a volume levels not harmful to humans. Unless their system was screwed or there was a Class D fire in which Halon 1301 will decompose and release toxic byproducts of course.

I read another article on this incident and blame was placed on "unsanctioned functioning of the fire extinguishing systems". Sounds to me like a botched PMS checklist. Or what passes for a PMS checklist in the Rooski navy.

You arrogant ass. You've killed us.

Brisketeer:

The Russians also regard people as very expendable. Witness their behavior in Chechnya and Georgia.


Don`t forget WWII. Local civilian populations were "volunteered" to march through minefields alongside conscripts. German machine gun nests were cleared by marching hundreds or thousands of (mostly unarmed) soldiers in the open directly at them.

Korzine: Shouldn't really matter. The entire reason Halon 1301 is used it because it can suppress fires at a volume levels not harmful to humans. Unless their system was screwed or there was a Class D fire in which Halon 1301 will decompose and release toxic byproducts of course.

Oh right, nm.

Amusement: Sub was slated to be leased to India and was being worked on.

/hotlinked

I wonder how they work out their international deals there when the "delivery" has a bit of a problem. Somewhat like baby food in China just with heavy armaments?

It remindsh me of the heady daysh of Shputnik and Yuri Gagarin, when the world trembled at the shound of our rocketsh. Now, they will tremble again, at the shound of our shilensh. The order ish: engage the shilent drive.

you arrogant ass!

BigPoppaPorno: my son is on a missle sub in the pacific right now. luckily the US has a better safety record than russia in sub matters. last one that sank was in the 60's. I still worry though.


more likely it'll surface onto a japanese fishing boat full of kids

Bith Set Me Up: It remindsh me of the heady daysh of Shputnik and Yuri Gagarin, when the world trembled at the shound of our rocketsh. Now, they will tremble again, at the shound of our shilensh. The order ish: engage the shilent drive.

Because apparently Vilnius is in the highlands of Lithuania.

/heading off to New York harbor for some missile drillsh

Paris1127: You know, it o-Kursk to me that... you know what, I'm not finishing that.

Maybe it wasn't an accident...
I blame:


/obscure? I hope not
//slashies

No, I'm afraid nothing on Fark is obscure. And that, I think, concludes our business. Before you go however, I very much regret to inform you that a dangerous development has recently been brought to my notice. Someone has been attempting to sell the plans of our tracking project to competing world powers; someone intimately associated with the project.

matt2891: Plus we're packing more nukes than anyone else currently is, and everyone knows it.

Not true, but not particularly relevant anyway...

GungFu: BigPoppaPorno: my son is on a missle sub in the pacific right now. luckily the US has a better safety record than russia in sub matters. last one that sank was in the 60's. I still worry though.


more likely it'll surface onto a japanese fishing boat full of kids

At least when the U.S. is killing kids, it's an accident. Ever heard of Beslan or the Moscow Theater: they had to kill a bunch of children in order to save them (and send a message to the Chechens, who remain Russian Citizens).

This is long, but worth it. I still have it clipped.

TIME
Monday, Nov. 06, 2000
"I Am Writing Blindly"
By Roger Rosenblatt

Besides the newsworthy revelation of Lieut. Captain Dimitri Kolesnikov's dying message to his wife recovered last week from the husk of the sunken submarine Kursk--that 23 of the 118 crewmen had survived in an isolated chamber for a while, in contradiction to claims by Russian officials that all had perished within minutes of the accident--there was the matter of writing the message in the first place.

In the first place, in the last place, that is what we people do--write messages to one another. We are a narrative species. We exist by storytelling--by relating our situations--and the test of our evolution may lie in getting the story right.

What Kolesnikov did in deciding to describe his position and entrapment, others have also done--in states of repose or terror. When a JAL airliner went down in 1985, passengers used the long minutes of its terrible, spiraling descent to write letters to loved ones. When the last occupants of the Warsaw Ghetto had finally seen their families and companions die of disease or starvation, or be carried off in trucks to extermination camps, and there could be no doubt of their own fate, still they took scraps of paper on which they wrote poems, thoughts, fragments of lives, rolled them into tight scrolls and slipped them into the crevices of the ghetto walls.

Why did they bother? With no countervailing news from the outside world, they assumed the Nazis had inherited the earth; that if anyone discovered their writings, it would be their killers, who would snicker and toss them away. They wrote because, like Kolesnikov, they had to. The impulse was in them, like a biological fact.

So enduring is this storytelling need that it shapes nearly every human endeavor. Businesses depend on the stories told of past failures and successes, and on the myth of the mission of the company. In medicine, doctors increasingly rely on a patient's narrative of the progress of an ailment, which is inevitably more nuanced and useful than the data of machines. In law, the same thing. Every court case is a competition of tales told by the prosecutor and defense attorney; the jury picks the one it likes best.

All these activities derive from essential places in us. Psychologist Jerome Bruner says children acquire language in order to tell the stories that are already in them. We do our learning through storytelling processes. The man who arrives at our door is thought to be a salesman because his predecessor was a salesman. When the patternmaking faculties fail, the brain breaks down. Schizophrenics suffer from a loss of story.

The deep proof of our need to spill, and keep on spilling, lies in reflex, often in desperate circumstances. A number of years ago, Jean-Dominique Bauby, the editor of Elle magazine in Paris, was felled by a stroke so destructive that the only part of his body that could move was his left eyelid. Flicking that eyelid, he managed to signal the letters of the alphabet, and proceeded to write his autobiography, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, with the last grand gesture of his life.

All this is of acute and consoling interest to writers, whose odd existences are ordinarily strung between asking why we do it and doing it incessantly. The explanation I've been able to come up with has to do with freedom. You write a sentence, the basic unit of storytelling, and you are never sure where it will lead. The readers will not know where it leads either. Your adventure becomes theirs, eternally recapitulated in tandem--one wild ride together. Even when you come to the end of the sentence, that dot, it is still strangely inconclusive. I sometimes think one writes to find God in every sentence. But God (the ironist) always lives in the next sentence.

It is this freedom of the message sender and receiver that connects them--sailor to wife, the dying to the living. Writing has been so important in America, I think, because communication is the soul and engine of democracy. To write is to live according to one's terms. If you ask me to be serious, I will be frivolous. Magnanimous? Petty. Cynical? I will be a brazen believer in all things. Whatever you demand I will not give you--unless it is with the misty hope that what I give you is not what you ask for but what you want.

We use this freedom to break the silence, even of death, even when--in the depths of our darkest loneliness--we have no clear idea of why we reach out to one another with these frail, perishable chains of words. In the black chamber of the submarine, Kolesnikov noted, "I am writing blindly." Like everyone else.

Are the Russian journalists involved in the story gonna be charged with treason like the ones who leaked the story about dumping nuclear waste in the Sea of Japan were?

Kenwhat: Pretty soon we'll be seeing tragic accidents like this at home. Obama has promised to underfund the military and it will have consequences. We'd better get used to it.

And speaking of "things that we better get used to..."

Is there any topic where some butthurt McCain/Palin fan, crestfallen his candidates suffered one of the most humiliating defeats in the last century, doesn't feel the need to connect the story in some tenuous fashion with a psychic caution about how Obama has already failed us in the future?

STORY: "Orange Juice Found To Decrease Common Cold Duration"

FORUM COMMENT: "There's no question that Obama will round up what remains of the family citrus farmers and have them ground up into feed to be exported to Chicom stockyards, and then transfer that property to his two negro sons-in-law! And there's an investigation that links the number of infectious colds in white people to Obama's executive order dated June 2010 to the National Institutes for Health to find viruses that specifically target caucasians."

You sound like that. Unhinged. Seriously.

This is not a repeat from 2002...or 1997...or 1992...or 1987...or 1982

No, but according that pattern, it's a year late.

I hear it was shabotagsh

Shadyman: This is not a repeat from 2002...or 1997...or 1992...or 1987...or 1982

No, but according that pattern, it's a year late.

The Russians don't have as much money to spend on killing their sailors as they used to.

The boat is a Project 971U Shuka-B (NATO code Akula II) "Nerpa" Construction began in 1987(construction not completed until 7-4-2006, possibly because it was updated during construction from "Improved Akula I" specs) at Amur Shipbuilding Plant Zavod imeni Leninskogo Komsomola Shipyard No. 199(They can be reached at: Phone (42172)4-50-22 Fax (42172)4-38-58). "Nerpa" is roughly as quiet as an early LA class attack sub at best, but under most conditions is inferior. Sonar system is said to be "by far inferior" to even the LA class boats launched in the mid-late 70s. Akula IIs are thought to be slightly faster yet have a much slower quiet running speeds than there western counterparts. Also lacking is endurance, reliability, maneuverability. Its only real advantage is its operational depth of 1475ft compared to LAs >950