Burly brawn doesn’t win wars anymore

Among the many things Ted Cruz would like everyone to forget is this tweet from this fall:

Right-wing media were orgasming over a Russian army recruitment ad which portrayed Russian soldiers as these manly masculine macho dudes, and were contrasting that with the tolerant, diverse American army. The word “woke” got thrown around a lot, in a disparaging way. A lot of Republicans weren’t embarrassed to show off their authoritarian views at that time.

Unfortunately, nothing has really changed. Now Ted Cruz is simultaneously saying we need to get tough on Russia, and blaming the Ukraine war on Biden.

A truly Russian-style government would have Cruz arrested instantly for criticizing the Maximum Leader. I don’t think he (and I) want to replicate Russian militarism.

Oligarchs with yachts

Yo ho, me hearties! A fat ship off the port bow! Roll out the cannons and let the black flag fly!

Soon to be oligarchs without yachts, I hope. The sanctions might be beginning to sting.

BBC understands that some oligarchs sanctioned by the European Union are “shocked” to find their debit cards no longer function, and they are now relying on using cash from safes.

The French acted quickly on Wednesday when customs officers noticed that Mr Sechin’s 88-metre “Amore Vero” – which translates as “true love” – was “taking steps to sail off urgently”.

It arrived in in the Mediterranean port of La Ciotat in January and had been due to stay there while being repaired until 1 April.

In Hamburg shipyard authorities seized Mr Usmanov’s 156-metre ‘Dilbar’, the world’s largest motor yacht by gross tonnage, according to Forbes magazine.

Seizing half-billion dollar yachts seems like a fair cop to me. Take ’em all. Although I don’t know what you can do with a seized yacht; they’re rather useless luxuries, expensive to maintain. The lack of utility is the only thing preventing me for getting letters of marque and embarking on a pirate’s life.

Texas Republican Rep. Lance Gooden is expected to roll out a measure Monday that would allow private U.S. citizens to seize yachts, planes or other property belonging to sanctioned Russian citizens amid Russia’s war on Ukraine.

Gooden would do it with legislation requiring President Biden to issue letters of marque and reprisal, an enumerated power of Congress mentioned in Article 1 of the Constitution, which were routinely used during the War of 1812 for Americans to seize property on behalf of the U.S. government, but have not been issued since.

“Putin and his inner circle still have yachts and planes sitting in harbors and airports all over the world,” Gooden told Fox News Digital. “The United States must use every tool at our disposal to seize them and hold Russia accountable for the disgusting invasion of Ukraine. The oligarchs who enabled this crisis are a good place to start.”

Uh, question. I’m see the word “oligarch” all over the place, and it only seems to be applied to Russians. But this is not what “oligarch” means, and it has no obligate connection to Russia.

Oligarchy (from Greek ὀλιγαρχία (oligarkhía); from ὀλίγος (olígos) ‘few’, and ἄρχω (arkho) ‘to rule or to command’)[1][2][3] is a form of power structure in which power rests with a small number of people. These people may or may not be distinguished by one or several characteristics, such as nobility, fame, wealth, education, or corporate, religious, political, or military control.

I’m all for privateers boarding and taking over yachts (preferable debarking the passengers and crew safely somewhere), but I don’t like that everyone seems to think it’s specifically a Russian thing. America has oligarchs.

You know, Jeff Bezos bought a yacht to accompany his super-yacht. His super-yacht is so big that he pressured a Dutch city to dismantle a historic bridge so he can get it out of the shipyard.

The Amazon founder’s 417-foot-long, three-masted ship that cost’s roughly $500 million is under construction in the Netherlands, but the pleasure boat will be too tall to pass under Rotterdam’s landmark Koningshaven Bridge, which has a 130-foot clearance, according to the NL Times, which cited Dutch-language outlet Rijnmond.

As a work-around, the megabillionaire and the boatmaker Oceano reportedly asked Rotterdam officials to temporarily dismantle the iconic bridge, and pledged to reimburse the city for expenses.

Taking apart and reassembling the middle section of the bridge known locally as “De Hef” was expected to take more than two weeks, the paper said. Rotterdam officials touted Bezos’ pet project as a revenue generator.

The citizens of Rotterdam have suggested an entirely inappropriate response.

The city has not yet signed off on any bridge construction, but according to Jalopnik, some aggrieved residents are ready to take matters into their own hands. “Rotterdam was built from the rubble by Rotterdammers and we don’t just take it apart for the phallus symbol of a megalomaniac billionaire. Not without a fight,” reads a Facebook post calling for protesters to throw their old eggs at the boat as it sails by (per Jalopnik’s translation.)

No. Just no. This is a terrible idea. Don’t throw rotten eggs at the boat. Instead, organize boarding parties, storm the dock, take control of the boat, throw the crew overboard, and set sail for the South Pacific. If Bezos is aboard at the time, even better: make him walk the plank.

No pity for oligarchs!

If it bleeds, it leads

Newspaper editors must relish this situation. There is so much blood.

There are unknown numbers of dead — hundreds, the newspapers say, while also stating that many are uncounted in the chaos — and a million people displaced, bridges and roads and towns destroyed, and the Russian army rumbles slowly forward.

Just over 1 million people have fled Ukraine since the Russian invasion began, according to data from the U.N. refugee agency — an exodus that is set to become Europe’s worst humanitarian crisis this century. That figure already matches the number of refugees who were displaced from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan in 2015. The International Criminal Court has opened an investigation into possible war crimes in Ukraine, the intergovernmental organization’s prosecutor said in a statement.

It wasn’t that long ago that I’d open up the news in the morning to see graphs and tallies of how many died the slow death of COVID-19. Now I open the news to see the stories of sudden gory deaths, explosions, and families fleeing the onslaught. It is not an improvement, world. Especially since the pandemic continues, it’s just been bumped from top billing.

The lyrics are supposed to go “Forward he cried from the rear And the front rank died”, don’t you know

I have no idea how the war is going in Ukraine — it seems to be turning into a hard slog of urban warfare, with Putin committed to saving face by throwing everything he’s got at a couple of cities. He has turned his vicious elite Chechen units on the country. I’m going to take solace in the little victories, at least.

That bearded guy to the right is Magomed Tushaev, a monster who committed atrocities against LGBT people. He’s dead now.

A despotic general who ruthlessly rounded up and killed LGBT+ people in an act that became known as the “gay purge” has been killed in the fighting in Ukraine.

Magomed Tushayev, who was a military boss under the command of hardman Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, was killed in fighting at the Hostomel Airport, a key Russian target not far northwest of Kyiv.

Tushayev previously led the 141 motorised regiment of the Checnyan National Guard and his death was confirmed by a spokesperson for Ukrainian president Vlodomyr Zelensky.

Anti-LGBT+ purges were first reported in the southern Russian republic back in 2017 and reportedly involved kidnappings, torture and extrajudicial killings.

Under the leadership of the infamous Kadyrov, who recently said Vlaidimir Putin needed harsher tactics in Ukraine, Tushayev was key in the persecution of LGBT+ people.

Am I a bad person if I say, “Good!”?

It’s a worrying sign for the Russians that generals are getting killed. Usually it’s just the grunts on the front.

I didn’t ask to live in interesting times

But here we are. It’s been a rough decade — we had a terrible one-term president who appalled most of us with his incompetence and corruption, and seemed to inspire the authoritarians and racists and wanna-be fascists. One of our political parties tumbled down into outright insanity, which isn’t a good thing for a country run by a two-party system. We’re repeating the Gilded Age crap, with billionaires getting richer and richer. The ongoing climate crisis continues to be ignored by our capitalist overlords. Then layer a pandemic on top of all that that has killed a million Americans and triggered another million or so it flamboyant science denial, rapidly spread by the greed of the social network poombahs.

We should cry out like Job, I should think. But now we get a major land war in Europe to add to the world’s tribulations.

I have no idea how that war is going. One thing that has repelled me lately on the media are all the pundits, whether they have a cushy sinecure at some major newspaper or they are Joe Nobody, sitting in his car opining at a camera (oh, how I loathe those videos of middle-class, middle-aged white guys sitting in their cars talking at their phones) telling me which side is going to win. Worse is when they declare why their side is going to when. Near as I can tell, the Right thinks the Russians will conquer because they despise pronouns, while the Left thinks Ukraine will win because Zelensky is sexy. They don’t know. I don’t know. It’s a cacophony of pure noise that isn’t helping.

So, what I do know…

Russia is making a massive effort, throwing all kinds of soldiers and artillery and tanks at Kharkiv. They could win the military battle, it wouldn’t surprise me. Ukrainians are brave, but bravery doesn’t stop a bullet. I have no idea what the outcome of the war will be, other than pain and death and misery, and we’ll have to helplessly wait and see what happens. Isn’t that annoying? Big dramatic bloody events occur, and we here on the other side of the world have to wait.

I do know that Russia is losing the diplomatic war rather brutally. Suddenly, coalitions and alignments and nations that have been around for practically a lifetime are shifting! I haven’t seen this kind of transformation since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Finland is discussing joining NATO? Sweden is increasingly antagonistic to Russia? Ukraine has requested to join the EU, and some countries want to fast-track that application? It’s all happening so scary-fast. We’re racing towards a polarization and alignment of forces that we haven’t seen since the Cold War, and let me tell you, that’s not a good thing.

What I do find encouraging, though, is that the world was quick to react with open condemnation of Russia for invading a sovereign state and killing citizens. I just wish that the world had been equally damning when the US invaded a sovereign state and murdered hundreds of thousands of innocents — we can hope that what emerges out of this new world is an agreement that bullying smaller nations by powerful ones will no longer be tolerated.

Unless, of course, the bullying nation decides everyone needs a good scourging with nuclear fire.

And that’s all I know. Sit. Wait. Watch.

Hey, Job has sort of a happy ending, right? He loses his family, his health, and his security, but God gives him new kids at the end? It’s kind of warped that the Old Testament thinks families and kids are fungible, so I’m not going to take much consolation from that.

Let’s start a social media site!

It’s easy, right? You could write it in BASIC and run it off the old Apple II in your closet. You just accept a text string from someone calling in, and you post it on a web page, and presto! Fame and money start rolling in.

Even Donald Trump could do it! Or think he could do it, because that man is delusional.

The rollout of Donald Trump’s social network has predictably been a disaster. Truth Social’s debut on Monday was marred by technical problems and a gigantic waiting list, while some people who actually were able to use the service complained of being “censored.”

Truth Social “has been almost entirely inaccessible in the first days of its grand debut because of technical glitches, a 13-hour outage and a 300,000-person waitlist,” The Washington Post wrote yesterday. Trump Media & Technology Group CEO Devin Nunes said on a Fox News show that Truth Social’s goal is to be “fully operational at least within the United States” by the end of March. The waiting list is now over 500,000.

I wonder how many of those half million are lookie-loos gawking at the train wreck, how many are reporters who figure they just have to report on this desperate ex-politician’s fantasy (they don’t, by the way), and how many are sincere followers of Trump AKA chucklefucks?

Of course he didn’t design this himself.

Truth Social was built using Mastodon open source software.

They just grabbed some existing software, plastered some graphics and revised some of the text messages, and called it good.

I have an account on Mastodon. I didn’t have to wait in line to get it, just found an instance that didn’t have the Donald on it, and started typing. Isn’t the point of Mastodon to have a decentralized distribution of servers, anyway?

Also, it’s a bit ironic to name the failing media site created by a politician known for constantly lying “truth”.

Ireland isn’t going to take it

This is what journalists were supposed to do, I thought. At least this one time, one confronts a liar for Putin with the evidence.

You know, this is exactly what I wanted journalists to do to American politicians when we invaded Iraq. We didn’t get much of it. Instead, we got polarization driving people to Fox News, that nest of lies. And now Fox News is demonstrating that they always were a propaganda mill for conservative authoritarians — could you imagine Tucker Carlson doing anything but fawning over a Russian ambassador making excuses for atrocities?

The Irish people are also protesting outside the Russian embassy, while Irish political parties are calling for the expulsion of the Russian ambassador (although the EU is asking to keep embassies in place, which makes sense if there is to be any hope of a diplomatic solution –– a forlorn hope, but I guess it’s there.)

If you’re “woke”, you oppose Putin

Yesterday was my day for despair. Now that’s over with, and it’s time for rage.

I can’t do anything about Russia or Ukraine, but jesus, do we ever have a bunch of walloping idiot apologists here at home. The curious thing is that they’re neatly lining up across the chasm that has formed in our political divide. If you’re a Trumper, now you’re in Putin’s pocket — and that’s an about-face from Republicans I would never have expected. If you’re into crypto, of course you’re going to take the Russian side, since crypto is little more than a money laundering scheme for oligarchs. And now the IDW is rationalizing for Russia.

It’s like everyone is projecting their pet obsessions onto Ukraine. No, we don’t spend more time talking about pronouns that it does about things that matter. First of all, pronouns do matter, obviously, since they send the Heyings of the world into a frothing fury. And they seem to matter most to the people who hate the idea. If you tell me that you prefer to be addressed as “he,” “she,” or “they,” I’ll accept it as a matter of course and as a matter of courtesy. The anti-woke brigade will react as if you’ve just launched missiles into their Donbass. We aren’t fighting over pronouns, that war was won by the people who recognize that humans live cooperatively in a society.

The people who don’t recognize that side with Putin.

Here’s another thing that pisses me off: when they decide that they must be über-rational because they accept evolution, and therefore evolution must side with the Russians.

The evolutionary lens is logic and first-principles driven, rather than conclusion or ideology driven. Jesus fucking christ. Evolutionary biology is not a formula that you can plug your variables into, and out pops a fixed, flawless solution. Evolution is a diversity machine. It makes peacocks and parasitic worms. It produces humans with a battery of emotional and social needs, and the more complex the organism, the more unpredictable the outcome. Heying is the classic reductionist dudebro who thinks it is reasonable to strip away the complexity of reality to claim that Science with a capital S has decided that their narrow world view is the correct one.

And then they pretentiously announce the superiority of their perspective. I am one of the initiated, and I can tell you that Heather Heying is full of shit. She’s just a dogmatic reactionary who has found a rationale that feeds her ego and allows her to dismiss everyone else as wrong.

Also, Jesse Singal and Heather Heying joining hands to agree that the Woke are bad makes me want to puke.

A tiny glimmering of good news

The police officers who assisted in the murder of George Floyd have been found guilty.

A jury has found three former Minneapolis police officers guilty of violating the civil rights of George Floyd Thursday afternoon. All three officers were found guilty on all counts.

Tou Thao, the officer who held back bystanders when George Floyd was killed, was convicted of depriving Floyd of his right to medical care and willfully failing to intervene. J. Alexander Kueng, who helped restrain Floyd by kneeling on his back, was convicted of the same charges.

Thomas Lane, who held the 46-year-old Black man’s feet, was found guilty of depriving Floyd of his right to medical care as well.

It’s a good start. Now let’s see changes in the culture of the police in Minneapolis.

It’s WAR in Europe

I’ve been reading various articles on events in Ukraine, and I thought, wrongly, that it was going to be one of those prolonged smoldering affair, with Russia taking bites out of a country with regions that leaned towards Russian unity, but oh no, it’s just flat out total war, with the Russian army moving to take over the whole country of Ukraine.

Russia launched a broad attack on Ukraine from multiple directions early Thursday, bombarding cities, towns and villages and advancing toward the capital, Kyiv, as Ukrainian forces tried to stem the onslaught of Russian ground forces and air power.

Ukraine’s Interior Ministry said Russian troops were fighting to break into the wider Kyiv region and crossed the regional border, where Ukrainian forces were battling to repel them.

Putin’s excuse is that they’re carrying out a program of “demilitarization and denazification”. Riiight. This is nothing but imperial conquest. People are dying. Cities are being bombed.

Meanwhile, here in the US, fifth-columnists are buckling down to the dirty work of painting Putin’s gangsters as the ‘good guys’. Why? Because the Russians are “anti-woke” and label their bathrooms the way god intended them to.

It’s insanity everywhere. Don’t listen to Erik Prince & Steve Bannon — they’re just evil.