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.
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?
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.
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.
“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:
A few days ago I posted a video that explains Putins hatred of the known universe, showing how he came to start his little war. Now we see that the same will happen with Gropey Joe.
Call me unsympathetic, but there are times when I see someone I don’t know and have never heard of completely melting down over the most ridiculous stuff, and it just makes me laugh. Remember the loons freaking out and screaming at the sky because Orange Man Bad won an election? Yeah, I know we’re not supposed to make fun of people with mental illnesses (you know, CRAZY PEOPLE), but it’s a basic human instinct.
All that said… here ya go. Someone else to laugh at, shake our heads, and despair for the future if she is at all representative of Kids These Days. All *that* said, I’m *kinda* sure she’s putting on an act. You know, for kids.
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?
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.
Satellite images from March 19th show bodies laying in the streets of Russian-occupied Bucha. The Russians decamped from Bucha March 30, so it seems that they killed civilians in the streets and left them there for at least 11 days. That’s just *strange.*
Bucha is on the outskirts of Kyiv, near Hostomel Airport, final resting place of the AN 225 Mriya. Seems the Russian forces enjoy killing things and just leaving them there to rot. One of the photos in the article shows a woman holding a cat walking past two bodies… said to be those of her husband and her brother. Numerous other photos of bodies, included mass graves seen from both ground level and from space. Kinda hard to hide this sort of thing these days.