Apr 082022
 

Marx wrote something that was profound, and reads like a description of the modern twitter mob. Just… not *that* Marx, Karl, but his father, Heinrich. From a letter from father to son, 1837, when the future father of the communist monster and it’s megadeaths from genocide and democide was still a teenager:

Frankly speaking, my dear Karl, I do not like this modern word, which all weaklings use to cloak their feelings when they quarrel with the world because they do not possess, without labour or trouble, well-furnished palaces with vast sums of money and elegant carriages. This embitterment disgusts me and you are the last person from whom I would expect it. What grounds can you have for it? Has not everything smiled on you ever since your cradle? Has not nature endowed you with magnificent talents? Have not your parents lavished affection on you? Have you ever up to now been unable to satisfy your reasonable wishes? And have you not carried away in the most incomprehensible fashion the heart of a girl whom thousands envy you? Yet the first untoward event, the first disappointed wish, evokes embitterment! Is that strength? Is that a manly character?

Another letter, same year:

On several occasions we were without a letter for months, and the last time was when you knew Eduard was ill, mother suffering and I myself not well, and moreover cholera was raging in Berlin; and as if that did not even call for an apology, your next letter contained not a single word about it, but merely some badly written lines and an extract from the diary entitled The Visit, which I would quite frankly prefer to throw out rather than accept, a crazy botch-work which merely testifies how you squander your talents and spend your nights giving birth to monsters; that you follow in the footsteps of the new immoralists who twist their words until they themselves do not hear them; who christen a flood of words a product of genius because it is devoid of ideas or contains only distorted ideas.

Yes, your letter did contain something — complaints that Jenny does not write, despite the fact that at bottom you were convinced that you were favoured on all sides — at least there was no reason for despair and embitterment — but that was not enough, your dear ego yearned for the pleasure of reading what you knew already (which, of course, in the present case is quite fair), and Herr Son could say to his parents, that was almost all that suffering, whom he had oppressed by a whom he knew to be senseless silence.

As if we were men of wealth, my Herr Son disposed in one year of almost 700 talers contrary to all agreement, contrary to all usage, whereas the richest spend less than 500. And why? I do him the justice of saying that he is no rake, no squanderer. But how can a man who every week or two discovers a new system and has to tear up old works laboriously arrived at, how can he, I ask, worry about trifles? How can he submit to the pettiness of order? Everyone dips a hand in his pocket, and everyone cheats him, so long as he doesn’t disturb him in his studies, and a new money order is soon written again, of course. Narrow-minded persons like G. R. and Evers may be worried about that, but they are common fellows. True, in their simplicity these men try to digest the lectures, even if only the words, and to procure themselves patrons and friends here and there, for the examinations are presided over by men, by professors, pedants and sometimes vindictive villains, who like to put to shame anyone who is independent; yet the greatness of man consists precisely in creating and destroying!!!

True, these poor young fellows sleep quite well, except when they sometimes devote half a night or a whole night to pleasure, whereas my hard-working talented Karl spends wretched nights awake, weakens his mind and body by serious study, denies himself all pleasure, in order in fact to pursue lofty abstract studies, but what he builds today he destroys tomorrow, and in the end he has destroyed his own work and not assimilated the work of others. In the end the body is ailing and the mind confused, whereas the ordinary little people continue to creep forward undisturbed and sometimes reach the goal better and at least more comfortably than those who despise the joys of youth and shatter their health to capture the shadow of erudition, which they would probably have achieved better in an hour’s social intercourse with competent people, and with social enjoyment into the bargain!!!

 

Seems like Karl would have fit in quite well with his modern followers who demand much, provide little, complain often. He blew through his families money (money he himself did not earn) at a very high rate; he produced nothing, but destroyed much; he complained all the time; he did not have any use for his family save as an ATM. Like many modern college lefties, he came from privilege, did not have the first clue how things were actually done, he valued nonsensical  dreaming over objective reality and he helped bring untold misery. He was very much the prototype for the modern SJW.

 Posted by at 4:46 pm
Apr 072022
 

Elon Musk bought 9% of twitter, and Twitter put him on their board of directors. The far left is having a meltdown.

Heh.

Lots of nuts are saying they are going to quit twitter, either by leaving their employ, or no longer using the platform. If this pans out (and let’s face it, these are basically the same type and caliber of people who said they’d leave the US if GWB won, or if he won again, or if Trump won, and yet they’re still here), then Twitter *might* end up not being the society-destroying hive of idiocy and degeneracy it has become.

 Posted by at 10:55 am
Apr 072022
 

Consider: Russias invasion of Ukraine has not gone well. They’ve lost a *lot* of troops and equipment; it has become apparent that the Russian military seems to have some serious problems with maintenance and logistics. Ukraine has shown that a lot of Russias perceived power doesn’t seem to exist, or exists in the form of rickety junk.

Putin invaded in order to rebuilt the Russian Empire. But as Russia pours it’s apparently unpectacular and limited military equipment into the black hole that is Ukraine, could some of the other regions and states that Russia has bullied decide that Now’s The Time? If Russia ends up drawing troops away from Chechnya and Georgia and the like, could *they* rise up to throw out the Russians? Could China change its plans from “let’s take Taiwan” to “let’s take Siberia?”

Is it conceivable that this could end up being one of the more spectacular self-owns in history… a project to expand an empire ends up ending the empire?

 Posted by at 3:45 am
Apr 062022
 

Normally mass shootings are the sort of news stories that have not only media but politicians and celebrities falling all over themselves and each other to bleat and strut. But the recent event in Sacramento that killed six? Yes, it’s pretty much gone. I wonder why that might possibly be.

Sacramento mass shooting suspect released from prison early weeks before tragedy, has violent past

He was sentenced to 10 years in 2018 for for domestic violence and assault with great bodily injury

Let’s do the math on that. Sentenced to ten years in 2018. January 2018 plus ten years is… hmmm… carry the two… ah, yes, released in February 2022.

He was a felon who was not legally allowed to have a firearm, never mind the illegally modified fully automatic firearm he actually had. The story is less a “boo hoo, we need more gun control” story and more a “maybe if we locked these monsters away for anything like how long they’re supposed to be locked away for, they won’t be out here doing this.” But we’re in the era of “defund the police” and “abolish the prisons,” so… kinda unfortunate narrative this story came with. Plus, kinda difficult to pin this one on Orange Man Bad or white supremacy. But I’m sure we’ll see some wild flailings for just that soon enough… if the story is remembered at all in another day or two.

This fine upstanding gentleman has a long record of violent criminality. A sane society would have permanently separated him from the rest of humanity long ago, but oh no, some geniuses decided it would be best to release him back out onto the streets to terrorize the citizenry. I’m getting to be more and more of the opinion that those responsible for signing for early release should be held responsible for the behavior of those they let go.

 

 

 Posted by at 10:37 pm
Apr 062022
 

Well. One more thing to add to The List.

Ukrainian zoo says it may have to euthanize big cats, bears after enclosures destroyed

“Yesterday and today [Feldman Ecopark] was again subjected to massive shelling and bombardment. Infrastructure destroyed, enclosures destroyed,” zoo founder Alexander Feldman said in a statement. “The biggest problem is large predators.” 

“Maybe we will save baby jaguars, baby panthers, but all adult animals will probably be liquidated,” Feldman said.

The zoo, located in Kharviv, said that its specialists are trying to place the animals in temporary housing, noting this is the only option they have outside of euthanizing bears, lions and tigers. 

Understandable but… dayum. I am reminded, unhappily, of Marjan the Kabul Zoo lion. That story *still* pisses me off to no end, twenty years later. I had the great misfortune of first reading about Marjan and seeing photos of while at work back then. Uuuuuugh.

Even for cats as massive and majestic as lions, for animals as powerful as bears… humans waging war has to be a cosmic horror. Their experience of such things would be like the Greek gods warring with the Hindu gods would be on primitive Man.

This video shows the place in October of last year. The Feldman Ecopark Zoo was certainly no San Diego Zoo, but it seemed like it was a nice place, with what appears to have been well designed, well built and well maintained enclosures with healthy animals given a good amount of space. Until Putins goons decided to “deNazify” it.

Apparently there is *some* effort to evacuate some of the big cats:

 Posted by at 7:46 pm
Apr 052022
 

Ha.

Bonus video: this one claims to be a strike on a Russian convoy in the Donbas region. But… none of the vehicles are moving. I don’t see troops running away. It looks almost like someone is tearing up a road full of abandoned hardware, which seems maybe wasteful. Surely there are *some* farmers around to tow away some of the untrashed vehicles?

 Posted by at 3:45 pm
Apr 052022
 

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has brought guided missiles to the fore, to a very great cost of Russian tanks, armored vehicles, trucks and basically anything that moves. Anti-tank guided missiles have proven to be perfectly capable of turning kinda-modern armor into scrap metal. Swatting aircraft is a somewhat more difficult task, but it’s being done. The video below seems to show a Ukrainian-made “Stugna-P” anti-tank missile (a manually-controlled laser guided missile that can be set on a tripod and fired remotely) promptly deleting a Kamov KA-52 “Alligator” attack helicopter. The Stugna-P would seem a  *terrible* missile for going after a moving aircraft, but this one was hovering… and I don’t care how armored your chopper is, if it gets hit with a missile meant to take out a modern main battle tank, your chopper will do like what this one did, and immediately fall from the sky as flaming wreckage.

For as long as there have been projectile weapons there has been armor. And since then there has been a constant competition between the two for supremacy. And right now, it’s pretty clear that arms (in this case ATGMs) have the advantage over armor. We don’t know how well a truly modern MBT such as the Abrams would hold up against missiles like these, but it’s safe to assume the answer would be “not well.” The traditional response of adding even more armor to the tank is likely not tenable; the M-1 is already so massive that merely transporting it is a problem. So the future of defending vehicles will have to be active: not just the reactive armor that Russian tanks are covered with and that doesn’t seem to be doing them much good, but point defense systems that use guns, lasers, missiles, jets of explosively generated molten metal, blast waves, hell, maybe even force fields. None of these will be “cheap.” This will put effectively-armored vehicles outside the reach of many militaries in the face of relatively inexpensive missiles. Perhaps for a time war will simply be cost ineffective. Won’t that be a hell of a thing.

 Posted by at 8:12 am