Tag Archives: Russia

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random thoughts of the day

1) I’m on extended travel, and for the first time in my life (I’ve stayed in hundreds of hotels) I bailed. I didn’t expect five star anything, the price was the point. But when the room is clearly not cleaned and bugs greet you at the room door, it’s time to bail. The poor clerk up front totally understood, I guess this happens a lot. She did everything right, and then told me to complain to the company. As in, not her boss, who it’s quite clear doesn’t care. She probably hates going to work. I can sympathize. The problem is I’m well compensated for my day job misery, whereas she is not. Be kind to service workers, in 98% of the case they make less than you and suffer for the privilege.

2) Muhammad bin Salman is proving to the planet that money matters. And he has a lot of it. So he can buy out crass golfers, get Biden to grovel, and now is doing the same to a recently legislatively impotent Macron. This guy didn’t just murder a man, he had him dismembered and melted in acid. He’s a monster. Yet he knows the same thing that Putin knows, that Xi knows, which is that significant portions of the West are for sale. You just have to pay the right price. I was in Boston yesterday and they had a Miller Lite ad at street level with one of the LIV sell outs. A person had scrawled in sharpie next to his face “Saudi Blood Money”. Yep.

3) Speaking of selling out, Brittney Griner will eventually get home, because the Biden administration did what the West does. They caved to most of Russia’s demands. Only on Ukraine does the West show strength against a country that has a GDP close to Spain’s (one of 27 EU nations). And Vlad is just buying time until he hopes the alliance cracks (see Italy’s upcoming election). But to me the question becomes, why was Griner in Russia anyways? Easy: $. It’s why golfers play for LIV. I’m just gonna go ahead and say this, if you’re an athlete or business person, or even just a tourist: If you go to Russia, or China, or about a half dozen other places on the planet and they put you in jail as a political playing card? You deserve it. You asked for it. Don’t go to these places and then be shocked that you have no rights, your own government has very little power to help you, and the leaders of these nations spend human lives like currency. Just don’t go to them, it’s rather simple.

4) I’m traveling for the first time in years and it’s been great. I’m seeing so many sights, driving around, sometimes planned, other times random. It feels great. I missed it, more than I remembered. Get out there and make it happen. Explore, see neat things, talk to interesting people, live life.

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the best mercenary gig since December 25th, 1776

So pretend for a moment we know a dude in Damascus and let’s just say he’s a day labor construction worker.  Business is pretty good for him.  Much of his country has to rebuilt since his President, along with some Iranians, and some guy named Vlad utterly destroyed most of it.  But let’s face it, working in construction can be dull and repetitive.  So our bored Damascene (we’ll call him Fred) is looking for a little zest in his life.  Then one day he hears he can earn a few grand a month as a merc.  All he has to do is join a few thousand of his Syrian buddies and head off to Ukraine.  For you see, Fred’s heard that some guy named Vlad needs his help.

For you see, Vlad has a problem.  He needs an army to win a war.  But the problem is that when his troops aren’t looting gas stations, shooting rockets and artillery at apartment buildings, or getting main battle tank turrets blown clear into the stratosphere, they’re executing a total clusterfuck of an invasion.  This makes Vlad angry.  And everyone knows you don’t want to make Vlad angry.  But when 1/4 of the army has become casualties courtesy of brave, freedom fighting Ukrainians, then Vlad needs more bodies to feed into the inferno.  Or as ordinary average gentlemen titan badass Volodymyr Zelenskyy has termed it: “…throwing Russian soldiers like logs into a train’s furnace.”

We think Fred might have before him the best mercenary gig since December 25th, 1776.  After all, once Fred and his Syrian buddies are ambushed and most of them killed or captured, Fred will sure have a story he can tell his grandkids.  But in general, here’s why Fred should take this gig, hands down:

– Gets a firsthand view of the supposed second most powerful land army on Earth, only to wonder why they haven’t figured out how tires work

– Has the chance to remember his Damascus days when the civil war was at its height and he was starving, as he now starves again as the supposed second most powerful land army on Earth also apparently hasn’t figured out field rations

– Might get the chance to meet a real swell, beautiful young Ukrainian woman who he might imagine they could get married one day, right before she shoots him in the face

– Might get the chance to meet a real swell, beautiful old Ukrainian woman who might feed him a real meal, but who will likely tell him how her witchcraft will cause his dick to fall off or shine him on by giving him sunflower seeds so that when he dies his corpse can produce something useful

– Everyone loves explosions, even Fred.  And boy oh boy when a 46 ton main battle tank goes, it goes spectacularly.  Fred will have plenty of opportunities to marvel at just how high in the air a tank turret can actually fly

– Has the opportunity to realize just how wonderful the job of a day labor construction worker is

– Will remain puzzled how he never meets a Nazi, because Vlad kept telling him there were Nazis everywhere.  Fred just guesses it might be a cow he sees every now and then, but he’s not so sure

– Learns a valuable life lessons about avoiding con artists once he realizes Vlad has no intention of actually paying him the promised merc salary

– Can kindle a new interest in history as Fred becomes one with the spirit of an old Hessian dude as he’s likewise mopped up in an ambush by freedom fighters

– He gets to conduct the classic, ever memorable Tour of Europe after throwing away all his weapons, deserting, and trying to join a cousin he knows who lives in Bremen

give me more

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witchcraft against tanks

While I have a lot to say about Ukraine, I have refrained because frankly what I think doesn’t actually matter.  Maybe I’ll write about it later after I’ve had more time to think.  But this caught my eye this morning from The Economist and I felt compelled to share:

“Spirited resistance across Ukraine—from Berdyansk on the Azov Sea to Sumy in the north-east—has been backed up by a widespread unwillingness to acquiesce in the parts of the country where Ukraine has lost control. There is no evidence of Vladimir Putin’s soldiers being welcomed anywhere. The mood is generally one of contempt. In Konotop, a town in Sumy oblast, a local woman was filmed asking a Russian tank-driver if he knew about the town’s literary association with the occult. “Every second woman is a witch here,” she told him. “Tomorrow you won’t be able to get your dick to stand up.”

The Ukrainians might lose this war.  Or they might have to fight a smoldering conflict for years where the violence constantly ramps up and down, like in Donbas since 2014 only throughout the whole country.  But in general, as human history shows, you at least have a decent shot at a future provided a people, a culture are willing to tell evil people to fuck off.  Here’s to witchcraft.

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Vlad the Untouchable

Alexei Navalny will hopefully live.  And even more hopefully not have permanent damage to his body.  But who know what rabid poison they flushed into him.

I may not have always seen eye-to-eye with some of Navalny’s ideas, but you can’t argue the courage of a guy who’s gone face-to-face with one of the world’s most dangerous men for years.

Let’s face it, Putin is untouchable.  Vlad could stroll into a senior citizen’s bingo hall wearing a $10K custom made three piece suit, dual-wielding a pair of Yugoslavian machine pistols, shoot everybody in the room, and still get away with it.

So if you’re the doctors in Omsk, how awkward is this for you?  Do you save the guy’s life?  Of course.  Do you now have to look over your shoulder for as long as you or Vlad lives?  You bet.

On a separate note, execution methodology says a lot about how cultures work in today’s modern society.  For example:

Russia – poison in public without trial

North Korea – antiaircraft gun in public with show trial

China – needle or gunshot in secret with or without trial

Saudi Arabia – beheading in public with trial

USA – needle with trial, seconds after Supreme Court refuses to intervene

Iran – hanging in secret, with or without trail

Russian President Putin listens to his Kyrgyz counterpart Atambayev during their meeting in St. Petersburg

“Welcome my friend, welcome, please sit.  Some tea?”

“Uh no, no Vlad, I’m good.  Ah, thanks though, bro.  Appreciate the offer.”

[Vlad smirks, knows you’re drinking the tea one way or another]

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two Rus pilots get free vodka for all time

It’s amazing that catastrophic bird strikes don’t happen more often.  I know most major airports employ various forms of anti-bird action, but birds are, like, everywhere.  Anyways, here’s a Ural Airlines Airbus 321 belly down in a field.

ural airlines

Everybody walked away.  Take a gander at this map.

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So many different bad ways this could have gone.  So many areas of concrete to avoid.  Less than a mile down from the runway, mere seconds to act.  Fortunately, there was a nice smooth cornfield to set down in.

Even so, this is an insane feat.  These pilots deserve every bit of credit they’ll get.

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Leviathan – the movie that makes you realize your life ain’t so bad

Movies can do many things to improve your quality of life. They can make you smile, entertain the hell out of you, make you laugh, scare you of the dark in a good way, and so on. They can also make you realize your life just ain’t that bad. Thus when you wake up in the morning after viewing such a movie you’re like, oh, well, at least I’m not those people.

This is Leviathan. It’s essentially an ancient tale. The weak have their land stolen by the powerful. And things go from there. It just happens to fascinate me because the tale is Russian, and is one of the better Russian movies of the post-Soviet realm. Please be sure to enjoy this kind of thing while you can. For one of two things will likely occur in the near future:

– Filmmaker Andrey Zvyagintsev will eventually give up his independent streak and be coopted (he’ll sell out) by the totalitarian state (for whatever reason) and become a tool of the system like other noted formerly awesome filmmakers such as Nikita Mikhalkov or Zhang Yimou.

or

– Vlad and his buddies will simply ban such films from being made.

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know what you are getting yourself into when the film’s money shot is a distraught child sitting next to a whale skeleton

Leviathan is set in modern Russia’s north. Not Siberia, but rather the Kola Peninsula. Specifically Murmansk Oblast, home to reindeer, discarded nuclear submarine hulks, fish processing infrastructure, and lots of other cold things. It’s a place that all things being equal, human beings probably have no business living there.

The first few minutes of the movie are nothing but nature shots as Zvyagintsev makes damn sure you realize this place is the end of the planet. Not a word of dialogue occurs until about five or ten minutes in as you the viewer are acclimated to a wasteland of concrete, rock, and snow. This tone remains throughout the entire film.

The protagonist is Kolya, a middle aged car mechanic, drunk, husband, hothead, father, and part time firearms enthusiast who is having his fairly decent sized home unjustly expropriated by the state for a fraction of its total value. He enlists the help of his friend and/or brother who’s a lawyer from Moscow. Also within the mix are Kolya’s second wife and son. Crucially, his son is by his first wife.

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As you can imagine in this kind of movie, everything goes swell. The local mayor is a paragon of decency, the courts do their job well, the cops can be counted upon to keep law and order justly, folks drink only in moderation, the local economy is humming along with glorious abandon, kids get along well with their parents and are otherwise well adjusted, and so on.

Bizarrely this wire brush beating of a flick was actually 1/3 funded by the Russian State, who apparently didn’t bother to read or approve the script. I’m rather shocked they let the film stand as is. I think the reasons are thus:

– Vlad is only pictured in the movie once, as a nondescript portrait in the local mayor’s office. He is otherwise not mentioned or discussed.

– Since all of the film’s arch-villains are all local politicians and authorities, it fits perfectly with the authoritarian propaganda narrative. As in, if folks view the Russian state as predatory and corrupt, it’s because the local authorities are to blame, not national level leadership. After all, it’s your local traffic cop bribing you on a Wednesday afternoon, not the Minister of Forestry. If only Vlad knew the truth, he’d clean up that local filth.

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fuck all four of these parasites

So Zvyagintsev got away with it, somehow. The result is a darkly haunting movie that deals with living under a predatory state that sees its citizens as nothing more than cash machines. But Zvyagintsev takes the story to another level by incorporating the deep flaws of average human beings that struggle because they’ve had all the powers of man and nature pinning their necks against bare rock for almost all their lives.

It this weird, twisted, screwed up world where lunatics are being voted into office by those who rightly feel the modern world has left them behind, it’s worth exploring a character study on how human beings who would otherwise be normal, can be turned into puddles of despair by their surroundings and the events that shape their lives. That is, no matter how squared away your life currently is, if you lived there too, maybe you’d be just like them. It’s a very cynical thought, but worth exploring.

kola.jpg

not the place to live

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on Russians, sharks, bears, swimming, and who to trust

You, the average normal human, require a new hammer. You use it to fix up your house, apartment, hovel, or yurt. You have several options to choose from. But recommendations tell you that you can have the hammer made by a partially competent American maker at a reasonable price, or the cheap one made by a former KGB assassin. Which do you choose?

Well, I suppose if you lived in Russia you would pick the KGB guy. Or be made to pick the KGB guy. But if you’re not Russian why would you, or anybody else, choose the KGB guy? This question has always been on my brain as folks and organizations have chosen Kaspersky Labs to handle their internet security to the tune of half-a-billion active users.

I mean I somewhat get it, Norton, McAfee, and the many other generic Western firms are only above average at best. But what do you expect when the Internets sandbox is an inherently flawed security nightmare. That doesn’t mean you go running for help with Ivan, aka the guys who are directly responsible for much of the security nightmare. Unless you desire to make the counterargument that because Kaspersky is KGB, that it’s good business to ask the devil to guard your church because he knows how to mix it up, barstool style. But I don’t buy that argument. Eventually the devil will rob you and use your pilfered cash to buy cinnamon whiskey, his drink of choice.

Kaspersky is somehow considered respectable, which further proves the marketing goons of the planet can put a shine on anything and twist people’s brains with glorious abandon. Kaspersky advertises on NPR! So he must be legit, right? And since the beginning Kaspersky has tried to always prove they have an independent hand. Their claim is that Russian they are, doesn’t mean you can’t trust them. They’re separate and distinct from the functioning arms of the Russian state, honest. Eh, if they say so.

As far as my take, I think this Washington Post article sums it up pretty nicely. In particular:

“James Lewis, a cybersecurity expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said ‘it’s difficult, if not impossible’ for a company like Kaspersky to be headquartered in Moscow ‘if you don’t cooperate with the government and the intelligence services.’”

Yeah, no kidding. So if you or your business has put your trust in Kaspersky, well, you deserve what you get.

Hey speaking of failed trust, apparently a whole bunch of people actually thought Discovery Channel was going to get Michael Phelps to race a shark. Instead they just computer simulated it and Phelps lost. Because Phelps is a human, as in, a creature not meant to inherently swim in the water. Kind of like how a shark is. But I digress.

Did folks actually think they’d put Phelps in the water alongside a shark and race them in lanes? Do folks understand that humans can’t order sharks around like that? Gee I sure hope so. How did people logistically think this would occur? Why are they angry with Discovery Channel? How did they trust that this would actually happen?

The only thing I can think of is they’d capture the shark and chain it up like some kind of angry Star Wars arena beast. They’d have him in a lane in the ocean contained by two sheets of transparent aluminum. And Phelps would be on the other side. Then they’d fire the gun and release the shark. Only, but what if the shark didn’t swim forward and instead tried to turn around and attack the folks behind him? As in, the folks who’d just chained him up. Or what if the shark swam for a bit and then stopped? Or what if the shark busted through the transparent aluminum and swallowed Michael Phelps whole in an orgy of chum related violence? Or what if we get Kaspersky to race a 700 pound grizzly bear? Maybe his KGB training, Russian bear familiarity, and Vlad inspired judo can save him? But I doubt it.

Who not to trust? Well for starters Russians who say they’re here to help. And folks who claim a human can race a shark. Along with all other kinds of lunacy that just don’t seem to make sense. Kind of like most of the nonsense written on this degenerate blog.

You could adopt the tact of: trust no one. But instead, just use your common sense. We’ve all got it. It’s pretty neat. Go with that.

fun time

four creatures enter; one creature leaves

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Putin is not Putin

I get the idea that 73% of the planet now believes Vlad is about seven feet tall, wears a pristine three piece suit, while dual wielding a pair of machine pistols, followed by a troupe of supermodels, and leaves all his enemies dead in his wake.

Yeah, I’m pretty sure none of this is true.  In any aspect, this guy just gets too much credit.  There’s Putin the idea, and Putin the man.  Putin the idea does not actually exist.  The man himself is basically just a gangster dictator.  Putin is not Putin.

Russia is powerful, it influences events worldwide and especially in it’s own backyard.  It has nuclear weapons, and a whole bunch of oil and gas.  But Russia is ultimately a troubled mess.  The economy is in the tank, demographic decline means by 2075 there will be like four Russians left, and generally speaking there’s nobody to carry on the party after Putin goes.

So when folks make Putin or Russia out to be this goliath, it’s not healthy.  It gives credence to a situation that’s not there.  Oh, Russia influenced the United States election?  I’m sure they did.  Did this single act cause Trump to win?  No.  And in any case, is everybody so blind to history?  Soviet Russia has influenced every U.S. election since 1917.  Please kindly go read history.

But when it’s made out that Putin alone has influenced the election, or even changed the outcome?  I’m sorry, but all that does is feed an image that doesn’t reflect reality.  Russia or Putin just simply isn’t that powerful.

You know once upon a time, the idea was that the United States shrugged off the rounding error threats from lesser nations led by gangsters.  But I guess, in today’s social media driven world, that we have to respond with hashtag anger to every petty little slight.  In 1984 or 1996, we’d have just shrugged at this.

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Vlad gives up washing dishes with detergent; uses scotch instead

Once upon a time a former leader of the Soviet Union could bang a shoe and threaten death to all and everybody would believe (falsely, in retrospect) that he meant every word. But now, Russia’s all powerful state is reduced to attacking the free world by, uh, banning dish detergent. Uh…? [cue tumbleweed]

Seriously, this is a thing. Oh no, Vlad. Not our detergent. You inhumane bastard! Shall we surrender the Arc de Triomphe to you now or next week?

Granted, Russia can still actually bring death to all via an accidental nuclear launch or unleashing Vlad’s-Trained-Crane-Assault-Brigade (VTCAB); but seeing as how neither of those options is productive (the cranes stole Vlad’s coke), I guess he’s got nothing left but to reach for the bottom of the base of the barrel.

But even Vlad’s got limits. He can ban detergent and cheese, but he’ll be damned if he’s going to do without scotch and his X-Box. So I guess he’ll wash his dishes with half a bottle of scotch. And then drink the other half while playing X-Box surrounded by his five supermodel-former-figure-skater girlfriends. What a horrible life Vlad must have; who’d want to live like that? [blankly stares around cubicle for a moment]

Anyways, what I find most delicious about the BBC article is the social media trolling of this stupidity by ordinary-average-Russians. This one’s my favorite:

 

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“Psst, kid. Do you want a bit of washing powder?”

Bravo.

 

“I’ve spotted Merkel; she’s next to the bath soap aisle. Fire, my pretties! Fire! VTCAB! ATTACK!”