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?
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.
Oberlin College sounds like a terrible place to send your kid… unless you don’t much care for your kid and you’re making ’em pay their own way. Oberlin has popped up in this blog before (like HERE and HERE) for the wokeness of some of their idiot students, but the big story was from 2016: some students decided to rob Gibson’s Bakery. They were caught in the process, and since the thieves were of a protected class, students made up charges against the bakery and began to protest. But what was legally actionable about the story is that element of the student government and school administration actively aided in libeling the bakery and attempted to financially harm them. The bakery sued the school for damages and won; the school appealed the multi-million dollar judgement and just lost:
There don’t seem to be too many options left for the school now but to either declare bankruptcy or write a check. Eithers good, though of course the best outcome would be that they write the check, the check gets cashed and the bakery gets their funds in full, and *then* the school goes bankrupt and then gets bought by, say, Elon Musk who proceeds to turn it from a “liberal arts” school into a “STEM Colonialism” school. Students are selected solely based on their merit, and their focus is on the hard sciences, math and engineering, specifically for the purpose of training the next generation of colonizers and exploiters who will go out into space and culturally appropriate the Moon, Mars and asteroids. Very few of the current staff or administrators would seem to be worth carrying forward.
That, I suppose, is unlikely. But a man can dream.
There are multiple videos from the scene, though none I’ve seen show the actual gunfire… just a lot of people acting like fricken’ morons, then gunfire is clearly audible. You hear a *lot* of semiautomatic fire, doubtless pistols… and some high rate of fire fully automatic shooting as well, likely a modified Glock with a “switch.” I would bet a dollar that not a one of the firearms involved was legally owned and registered with the wise government of California, thus they were already illegal… yet we can be assured of hearing some idiot yammerings about how *new* laws are needed.
Note in the video below that there seem to be quite a number of guns being fired, only one of which seems to be full auto. Sounds like it magdumps, and that’s the last you hear of it. Full auto in a pistol is great if you’re looking to mow down a crowd, but actual combat? Nah. But it’s about what I’d expect from the level of intellect that tends to be involved in incidents like this… unable to think further than two seconds into the future, or more strategically than “this is cool.”
— Re na K. (@renaaaa_k) April 3, 2022
One of the more shameful facts to come from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is how many Americans on the political right are siding with Putin. It is a minority, but the fact that *any* American right wingers would side not only with a dictator, but one who clawed his way to power within a communist system, is to some degree baffling and to a large degree irritating and stupid.
One of the reasons why some right wingers are siding with Putin is because Putin is “against the gay Agenda” and such. Yeah, well… Hitler liked affordable cars, good highways and dogs, but that’s not reason enough to side with him. Still, here we are. One of the big points against the “LGBTQAWTF agenda” is that they deny biology: men are not women, women are not men, and they’re not interchangeable. This is a fact which cannot be rationally denied; those who argue otherwise are arguing madness. Fine, whatever. How is this relevant to Ukraine? Well, Russian forces were driven out of the Ukrainian town of Bucha and left a bunch of civilian corpses in their wake. This is backed up not only by video from the scene, but interviews with eyewitnesses and satellite recon photos showing mass graves while under Russian occupation. The Russian Defense Ministry, of course, denies it all, blames everything on the Ukrainians, because of course they do. The “statement” is HERE. Again, how is this relevant to this post? In amongst the expected nonsense that basically boils down to “nuh-uh,” there’s this gem:
“Of particular concern is the fact that all the bodies of people whose images were published by the Kyiv regime, after at least four days, have not stiffened, do not have characteristic cadaveric spots, and blood has not turned up in the wounds.”
The argument is, in part, that the bodies aren’t stiffened. What causes corpses to go rigid? Rigor mortis, a chemical reaction that causes the muscles to tense up. But… rigor mortis doesn’t last forever. It typically starts up within a few hours… and it fades away, leaving the muscles slack, within another 12 to 48 hours. So bodies left in the street for *four* days? Rigor mortis is *long* since over. The Russian government is arguing that rigor mortis operates in ways that science says it doesn’t. As to the lack of blood: I’ve seen a lot of videos of people getting shot. Sometimes people *fountain* blood. And sometimes they hardly bleed at all. If the first shot stops the heart… the blood stops flowing. And all the civilians in the street kinda seem like a message: they were probably shot somewhere else and dragged there. Beyond the psychological value to displaying the corpses of your slain enemies, it’s a dandy way to delay pursuing forces: Not only do you not want to run over human bodies, you don’t want to run over human bodies that may well have been boobytrapped.
Virtue signalling time: most of the Russian troops I kinda feel sorry for. They didn’t sign up for this, and at least initially, you could see a reluctance on their part to screw with the Ukrainian citizens. But recently that reluctance seems to have evaporated. Whether that’s because the Russian troops have been traumatized by having their asses handed to them by Ukrainian forces, or because they’ve been forced into it by their leadership, or because the worst of what we’re seeing is actually being done not by run of the mill Russian soldiers but by Syrian, Chechen or other rather more barbaric forces, I don’t know. In any event, if the reports of slaughtering civilians and mass rapes are true… they gotta go. Off this planet, out of the food chain, evacuate the gene pool, ASAFP.
Cool, but bad news for trustworthy news audio in the future. A commercially available bit of software will change your voice on the fly to closely resemble any voice from an extensive list of voice actors. These actors were hired specifically for this purpose, and apparently put in two or three hours of jibbajabba to collect sufficient information on their voice and accent and such. Which means that if you have enough recordings of some other person, you can copy their voice as well. Of course it might be difficult to get enough of the *right* stuff in adequate quality, especially if the “target” doesn’t regularly plop their face in front of a microphone. But actors should probably be copyable, as should politicians and other celebrities.
So about the Time Amazon decides to reboot Fellowship of the Ring, they can have Humphrey Bogart as Frodo and John Wayne as Aragorn.
Only six ratings of my book, “Boeing B-47 Stratojet & B-52 Stratofortress: Origins and Evolution” on Amazon. Five of them are five-star… and one is two-star. No actual review, though, to back up that rating. Hmmm. Was that you, Putin?
Why not buy a copy or three and leave a review? Also available directly from the publisher in Britain.
In a world filled with horrors like Russia/Ukraine, rapes, theft, murder and Star Trek Discovery, sometimes there’s good news… even if the good news is news only because it’s growing out of evil behavior.
… the vet who treated buddy, along with her husband, will serve as his foster home as he continues to recover from his injuries. And, that foster home could very well turn into a forever home for “Buddy,” because they — the couple did not want their names to be released to the public — have said they want to adopt him.
Still no word about the identities and proper defenestrations of the “kids” responsible for this story.
The video in this news piece has it all:
A month ago I mentioned (I think… that was a lifetime ago) that I thought it odd how tolerant the Russian soldiers were of Ukrainian civilian protestors. That has clearly come to an end. With Russian military defeats, failures and frustrations, the soldiers are falling back on old school barbarism… rape and murder on a virtually industrial scale. Once again, reality teaches us that people who screech about Nazis are not to be trusted… they stared into the abyss and the abyss didn’t just stare back, it moved in and set up shop.