Pro-Kremlin Newspaper Posts Russian Death Toll Of Almost 10,000, Then Deletes It

The online report on March 20 cited the Russian Defense Ministry as reporting that 9,861 Russian soldiers had died since the start of the war on February 24.

This number is more or less in line with other estimates.

And not terribly well related, here’s a headline that might not make a whole lot of sense until you actually read the article:

“Cosmic horror” is a genre of horror invented – or at least perfected – by author H.P. Lovecraft. Most forms of horror have the protagonists being menaced with death by knife wielding maniacs, weirdos with chainsaws, werewolves or sharks trying to eat them, vampires looking to drain their blood, aliens looking to wipe them out. Whether good or bad, that type of horror is comprehensible to the protagonist, at least after they’ve had a little while to process what’s going on. But cosmic horror is horror based on the protagonist being wholly *incapable* of understanding the threat, what’s going on, what the future holds. The alien or the maniac can be defeated in the end with a shotgun blast to the face, or a nuke to the homeworld… but the cosmic horror cannot be defeated. It might be avoided, evaded, delayed or bypassed… but the protagonist will never “win,” nor will the protagonist ever really grasp just what the hell is going on.

By definition, this one is tricky to define, trickier to pull off successfully. Fortunately (?), recent event suggested to me an easy to understand analogy for cosmic horror. Take, for example, the story of “Stepan,” a cat made somewhat famous on Instagram. Stepan seems a perfectly normal cat, in perfectly normal surroundings, with perfectly normal humans. The usual sort of photos and videos of Stepan looking cute made the Instagram account famous and popular. But it wasn’t cosmic horror.

Until very recently. Because Stepan is a *Ukrainian* cat.

Stepan the Internet-Famous Cat Escapes Ukraine, Finds Safety

The shelling of Stepan’s town of Kharkiv caused Stepans humans to pack up and unass themselves and their cat to France. Now, a war, even a bad one, is something humans can understand. A human adult can understand it quite clearly. A human child will have difficulty, perhaps, but unless the child is stupid or incapable of communication, the war can be explained to him/her. The idea that “fire bad” and “bombs bad” and “incoming rockets bad” can be impressed upon them, and rockets and bombs can be explained as to what and why they are, how they work. But to an animal? Sorry, no. Explain all you want, a cat is never going to grasp the first damn thing about a war. All the cat knows is that their life was going along pretty well, then their food-monkey-butlers started acting strange. Then they started running around, then there were loud noises and the big warm cave they live in crashed down and burned, one of the monkey-butlers burst open and stopped moving, the other started making really loud noises then ran away, now the world is rain and snow and fire and wind and loud noises and other monkey-butlers running around making loud noises and sometimes falling over and stopping, and sometimes kicking at them and what is the foul smelling black goop that spilled on my fur and why is it suddenly bright red and why does it hurt and why when I run away the red crackling pain stays right on me ow ow ow…

Yeah. To a cat, a dog, a horse, war is *never* going to make the first bit of sense. It will always remain incomprehensible chaos and madness that will pursue them into their dreams, years after normality has returned. War (or an earthquake, or a house fire, or a tornado, or a hurricane, or one of their humans suddenly going insane due to booze or meth or bad news, or…) is simply beyond an animals ability to begin to comprehend. It is the very essence of cosmic horror. The trick for an author who wants to capture cosmic horror is to do for human characters what war would do for an animal character. The idea is straightforward enough, simple to understand, like “add one extra dimension to a line, you get a square; add one extra dimension to a square, you get a cube; add one extra dimension to a cube, you get a tesseract.” But while the concept is straightforward enough, that last step can be a doozy to really pull off.

By the way, here’s Stepan while being evacuated. This is the look of someone who has peered into the abyss and come away uncomprehending, hope and joy drained from them, refilled with a new fear. This cat has seen some ᛋᚻᛁᛏ. If your human protagonist looks like this at the end of the tale, you *may* have successfully introduced them to some form of cosmic horror. On the other hand, if real-life humans or animals end up looking like this due to actions you have taken… please consider that you may be the baddie.

Chinese Boeing jet crashes in mountains with 132 on board, no sign of survivors

Boeing was for a long time the premier American manufacturer of jetliners, with “If it’s not Boeing, I’m not going” being a sincerely held opinion among many. And then… Boeing merged with McDonnell-Douglas. In the process, the successful Boeing management approach, which was engineering-centered, was replaced with a more management-centered approach. Since then, Boeings ability to get *anything* successfully done, from the 787 to the 737 Max to the Starliner capsule to the SLS, seems to have been seriously compromised. Boeing is unlikely to produce a new jetliner within the next *generation.* They, the designer and manufacturer of the B-47 and B-52, are unlikely to ever again build a fighter or a bomber. The Delta IV launch vehicle is yesterdays news; the SLS is a hideously overpriced and underuseful dinosaur, the Starliner is so far behind schedule and over budget that if it ever carries out a manned mission it’ll be a miracle. All of this is Boeings fault.

Nobody else in the US is likely to build a jetliner anytime soon. Lockheed stopped trying with the L-1011, decades ago; Northrop-Grumman aren’t into jetliners. Nor-Grum are building the B-21; Lockheed is building the F-35. And… that’s pretty much it for the foreseeable future. Boeing is, for all intents and purposes, done. if this crash turns out to be the result of more Boeing incompetence, they could well find themselves is *serious* trouble quite soon. The phenomenally successful 737 line might end up a sky-pariah.

Having Boeing either go belly-up, or turn into an ossified tax-dollar sink that provides nothing usable in return are both bad results. This would be bad for Boeing employees, Boeing stockholders, American taxpayers, the US military, the US economy as a whole. So is it time to consider breaking Boeing up? Instead of one complacent conglomerate, take its various parts and pieces and separate them, give them separate and unrelated managements set them to compete with each other. Make the Phantom Works – formerly McDonnell Douglas turf – into its own thing. Turn Boeing HQ in Chicago into… I dunno, a WalMart or something; can all the business majors who have turned Boeing from a rampaging engineering success story into a freakin’ joke. Boeing has factories in Everett, WA, Renton, WA and North Charleston, SC. Make them separate companies. Set them to compete against each other for the next generation jetliner… BWB, LTA, electric, what-the-frak-ever. If one fails spectacularly, it doesn’t mean the others will suffer at all; indeed, a failed company could be seen as instructive. The failed former division could be picked up for a song by, say, the USAF and DARPA; the people responsible for the failure can be fired, better people brought in and the division set the task of cranking out experimental types.

The US used to have a *lot* of major aircraft manufacturers. Perhaps the days when the economy could simultaneously support the likes of Boeing and Convair and Lockheed and McDonnell and Republic and Grumman and Douglas and Martin and North American and Bell and Curtis and Sikorsky and Vought and Northrop and Hiller and Fairchild are over… but now we have *one* jetliner manufacturer, *one* fighter company, *one* bomber company. This is intolerable.

Behold: A Boeing.