Somebody needs to explain to Putin that a bridge being used to transport materiel vital to a war effort is a valid target in a war zone, in war time. Unlike, say, slaughtering the civilians in a village.
My late cat Raedthinn also knew how to open doors. He figured it out when I briefly lived in an apartment with door *handles*; he watched me use them, figured out what was going on and would reach up and pull the handle down to open the door. When we got back to door *knobs* he knew how they worked, but he could rarely get enough leverage on them to open doors. But “rarely” isn’t the same as “never.”
If your cat is opening doors when you don’t want him or her to do so, don’t get mad at the cat. Cat’s doing what a cat’s *supposed* to do. Be mad at yourself for being outsmarted by a critter with a brain the size of a walnut.
The ad below was published in magazines in 1982, showing a cutaway illustration of the then-fancy new B-1B bomber, recently rescued by the Reagan Administration. The background is here depicted as a rather dull gray, but the physical ad has a shiny metallic coating, which must have cost a small fortune at the time.
The full-rez version of this scan has been uploaded into the 2022-10 APR Extras Dropbox folder. It is available to all APR Patrons/Subscribers at the $4/month level and above. If you would like to help fund the acquisition and preservation of such things, please consider signing on either for the APR Patreon or the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program.
I have been astonished since the Russian invasion of Ukraine by support for Putin by many on the Right in the US. They support him for a few main reasons, seemingly:
1) Ukraine was well known as being corrupt (witness Hunter Biden).
2) Putin has been standing up against a lot of the things the Right stands up against… in particular, leftist lunacy.
3) Putin is “pro-Christian.”
Yeah, about #3…
Putin is apparently contemplating unleashing foreign Muslims onto Russian Christians. Is… is this “defending Christianity?”
It’s possible that this is a joke only for oldsters like me. But even if so… it’s a good one:
McDonald’s staff harvesting apple pie filling pic.twitter.com/7g6bhOiYAN
— Paul (@bingowings14) October 8, 2022
The Kerch Bridge that connects Russia to Crimea partially collapsed after an explosion – possibly a car bomb – went off overnight. A parallel span with a rail line had a fuel train at the time; several of the tanker cars caught fire. All in all, quite an impressive mess.
In related matters, it seems that the deeper strategy behind the Wagner Group recruiting Russian criminals has become clear:
"Wagner’s forces attack only so far before sending inmates with little support forward to face Ukrainian guns like 'cannon fodder'…tactics have left Ukrainian forces in the region with a flood of prisoners as the inmates frequently surrender." @Tmgneff https://t.co/mbDGljdfsh pic.twitter.com/7MMaYRnlZD
— Rob Lee (@RALee85) September 26, 2022
The prisoners, it seems, were never meant to be useful as any sort of fighting force, and barely even as cannon fodder: instead, they are being simply dumped into Ukrainian hands. This empties out Russian prisons, saving them some money, and are now Ukraines problem. Ukrainian military forces have to deal with the POWs on the battlefield; then the tattered Ukrainian economy has to deal with housing them. The Russians, it seems, views them as deserters and won’t trade them for Ukrainian POWs.
Genius. Evil genius, but genius nonetheless. It’s largely the same strategy that Turkey and such have used against Europe with floods of “migrants.”
Neato:
The music that’s mandatory for this sort of thing, but that NASA somehow failed to use:
If Putin absolutely loses his mind and decides to nuke UK, how might he go about it? The below analysis assumes a total of two ICBMs are used against the UK. Not to utterly destroy the country, but to turn it into a humanitarian nightmare and distract from Ukraine. Assuming Russia succeeded in setting off these warheads on the chosen targets… yes, Britain would very quickly be in very, very serious trouble. But I have the sneaking suspicion that even without NATO backing the Brits just might remember that not all that long ago their nation used to have a backbone, and as a result British nukes will quickly start appearing in the skies of Russia.
If one assumes this scenario and it actually ends with just the targets in Britain the video suggests (let’s say that five seconds after it’s announced that Russian forces have nuked Britain, the Russian people/military rise up and string Putin and his lackeys from lamp posts and start begging to not get nuked in response), the future of Britain would become very interesting indeed. Probably Britains biggest current nightmare is the vast number of foreign colonists. But if Britain ceases to be the land of free bennies, it’s safe to assume that many, if not most, if not *all*, of these “migrants” will pick up and migrate somewhere else. There has been a whole lot of lack of British pride/patriotism on display in many of these immigrant communities; there doesn’t seem to be anything holding these people in place. And if things get really bad in Britain, one wonders how tolerant the natives will be for antagonistic extra mouths to feed.
But I suspect that if Britain catches two ICBMs, they’ll soon catch more as a response to the British response. Might not be a whole lot of Britain left in the end.
Far and away the best thing to happen if Putin actually gives the order is if he very quickly has an unfortunate health episode, before said order can be carried out.
So long as it was those rubes in Texas and Florida being stuck with the bill, it was fine. But now that New York is getting the *tiniest* fraction of the problem…
Boo fricken’ hoo. Suck it up and do your part, Mayor Adams. You could start by advocating that illegal aliens be deported when caught, and prevented from invading in the first place.
And do not drop your battlefield missiles off the back of a truck:
Heck, you drop ’em on the streets of Russia, you can’t sell ’em to the Ukrainians.