Another 1100 bodies, mostly civilians who had been tortured, have been found near tank emplacements in Izium, Ukraine. If we want people to believe us when we say "Never again", we probably need to say it with a few A-10 Warthogs and some M1A1s, and definitely with those MIG-35s that Poland offered.
Watch the attached video. It's Katyn all over, except that the Russian army doesn't even have the excuse that their victims were combatants.
I grew up taking (as far as I know) the full vaccine schedule of the time, and also grew up with asthma--thankfully a mild to moderate severity. Now doctors have found, apparently, a correlation between asthma and aluminium in vaccines. The obvious question, given that I also grew up eating food that was cooked in aluminium pans, is that would be the effect of other sources of aluminium. Other studies apparently do not find a correlation between other sources and asthma, so what we could have is a statistical anomaly or an interaction of aluminium and the immune system.
That noted, it strikes me that prior to mass vaccinations, polio killed 2000 annually and paralyzed 1600, and then you've got measles,mumps, rubella, diptheria, pertussis, and other diseases we no longer fear due to vaccination. So even if aluminium is a fairly significant contributor to asthma, I think I'll take my chances with vaccines for now.
(side note; yes, I am very aware that one major reason infectious disease isn't as bad as before is that we no longer live in tenements and boarding houses, thank God. But there's a good argument that vaccines have been pretty helpful, too)
If you're going to lie, at least make it a believeable lie. No, no sane person believes that the "referenda" for inclusion into Russia got 97-98% support, especially when pre-war surveys showed no more than 20% support for political union with Russia in any district of Ukraine. Certainly shelling people's homes, schools, hospitals, and churches didn't win 80% more support than was previously the case, and reputable sources note that voting is not by secret ballot, and is often in the presence of armed Russian soldiers. Putinozhka delenda est!
In related news, in addition to the tens of thousands of Russian men who have fled to Georgia, Finland, Sweden, and other countries, 98 thousand Russians (apparently mostly young men of draftable age) have fled to Kazakhstan. Let's just say that the Russian response to Putin's draft resembles the U.S. response to Vietnam era drafts a lot more than it resembles the response during WW1 and WW2, or even Korea. Going way out on a limb (right by the trunk), it suggests that the claims of high support for Putin's war are "bovine scat."
Pro Tip for those Russian men unable to flee; "Lake Como, Italy."
Vladimir Putinozhka has granted full Russian citizenship to Ed Snowden, and rumor has it that that to prevent Snowden from repeating his stunts and victimizing his new country, he's just been drafted and is on his way to fight in Ukraine.
Author Sophie Lewis is arguing that the family ought to be abolished because it's somehow a terrible way to enshrine love and care. Lost in the equation is the question "Didn't we try this before in the Soviet Union?", and the answer to that is "Yes, and it led to widespread poverty, economic and moral stagnation, and the world's highest abortion rate to this day."
Apparently being a "feminist" means that you don't need to learn lessons from when your ideas are actually put into practice, under the notion that "well we must not have had the right people running things." It's pretty amazing, given all the state run childcares in the old Soviet Union, China, and the rest of the Warsaw Pact, as well as many of those in the U.S. run along the same lines, that they've never, ever found the right people to run things.
So I guess the family is indeed the worst way to assure love and care, well, at least except for all the others.
I had the thought that, with Putinozhka's draft, some enterprising young man in Russia ought to translate part of Alice's Restaurant into Russian and see if some young men would walk into the recruiting officer's office and sing a bar of Alice's Restaurant, then walk out. As Arlo noted, if one person does it, they might think he's really sick sane, and they won't take him. If two people do it, in harmony......
Putinozhka delenda est!
....to be taught at the Air Force Academy. How so? Well, a new big of guidance tells cadets to avoid "gendered" language, even to the point of referring to "Mom" and "Dad". Apparently someone desperately needs to tell administrators that referring to group A does not necessarily disparage group B, though if group B, the alphabet community, truly believes that referring to mothers and fathers as a biological reality disparages them, perhaps they need to be acquainted with some real disparagement. It reminds me of the assurances we had with the decision that mandated same sex mirage that it would not impinge on the rights of the majority. I dare say that perhaps we need to revisit that decision, because that obviously was not true, and advocates knew it at the time.
Along the same lines, the Michigan Department of Education is encouraging school employees to enable students to start transitioning without their parents consent or even notification. Suffice it to say that this is first of all a great reason to choose private or home education, and secondarily, it ought to be noted that participants in the maiming of young people ought to fear "acute lead poisoning" at the hands of the parents.
Looks like we might be seeing, thank God, the twilight of Soviet armaments, as one response to Putinnozhka's call-up of reservists is met with "that's weapons they don't have." So if NATO chief Stoltenberg is correct, that means that the country that flooded the entire developing world with AK-47s and RPG-7s is suddenly unable to provide the same to new conscripts.
The Ukrainian defence ministry notes that the last mobilization for Russia was in August 1914, and somehow a nation that today cannot provide rifles, uniforms, and body armor for its soldiers seems analogous to the last mobilization of the Tsars. Again, hopefully someone gets to Putin before hundreds of thousands of Russians (and Ukrainians) are needlessly dead.
Putinnozhka delenda est.
An executive for "Beyond Meat" was arrested after an Arkansas football game for biting another man's nose. Now I want to be as nice as I can to vegetarians, but perhaps this is simply a sign that they really need a bit of real food to eat. Get a burger, friend, and maybe some of this will be better.
They're apparently buying weapons from North Korea, where....let's just say quality is not the biggest deal.
Worse yet, it's about 150,000 or so tons of material, meaning about 1500 train cars, so if Ukrainian partisans just might to have some operatives along the railroads of Russia, the opportunity for mayhem could be huge. All you need to do is track cargo ships leaving North Korea for Vladivostok or St. Petersburg, then figure out what railroads are going to be used to get the weapons to Ukraine. There aren't a whole lot of them going west from Vladivostok, or south towards Ukraine.
And if you could, say, get a nice incendiary round hitting one of the carriages right, difficulty getting ammunition to their army in Ukraine could be the least of Russia's problems.
I've been noting for years that outside of major cities, abortion cannot pay the bills for those operating the clinics, because at ~$500 per abortion and ~500 abortions per abortionist, the revenue cannot possibly pay the bills for a whole clinic. Enter the state of New Mexico, which is spending ten million dollars to create an abortion clinic in Dona Ana County, about 50 miles from El Paso.
Now I had previously noted that with the then-prevailing wage for obstetricians being about a quarter million dollars annually plus benefits (probably 30% higher today), you can really only justify an "abortion only" clinic when you get to cities of a million or more--assuming that abortion clinics are really pretty "lean" in their operation (not much for buildings or auxiliary staff) and the "doctor" gets a large share of the revenue.
However, with the Governor of New Mexico admitting that building the building and setting it up is going to require about ten times more money than I'd counted on, but the nearby city--El Paso--is really only about 900,000 people. So Governor Grisham has informed the nation, inadvertently, that the economics of abortion are far, far worse than I would have guessed. Thank you, Governor.
The USDA is apparently encouraging farmers to plant multiple crops to help deal with supply shortages created by the war in Ukraine, but a couple of options don't seem to be on the table; stop subsidizing grain and stop burning it in our fuel tanks.
If grain were not subsidized, the price of corn would rise, and that would be a far bigger impact for those eating meat and dairy--and all of a sudden, more grain, legumes, and oilseeds would be available for humans to eat.
Leave it to the USDA to skip the obvious and insist on something that could have some pretty big environmental, fuel usage, and capital issues.
As I review comments from Russian politicians about the passing of former leader Mikhail Gorbachev, the consistent theme I see is that Gorbachev's role in the end of the Soviet Union is lamented. This strikes me as strange, because anyone old enough to remember the old Soviet system ought to remember the pervasive surveillance, bread lines, shoddy and nonexistent consumer products, and the like.
So what's going on? Well, as far as I can tell, this is another admission by the Russian ruling classes that the KGB didn't go away at the end of the Cold War, and its heir, the FSB (or perhaps a shadow organization in parallel with the FSB) is actually calling the shots, as is evidenced by the Russian Army flying the old Soviet flag in its war in Ukraine, their raising of statues of Lenin there, and most recently as evidenced by the head of Lukoil, a Putin critic, falling to his death out from a sixth story hospital window.
Unless you believe that extremely sick elderly men tend to do this, your best assumption is that, yes, Putin ordered him to be defenestrated. I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, and yes, I've seen this before. Pray that Russia loses here, because if they don't, it'll be extremely bad news for freedom in the world.
Putin delenda est!
