Dear Readers:
The Russian authorities have decided to evacuate the children of the Belgorod region. Belgorod being so close to the Ukrainian border and having become a front-line city in this war. Several children have already been killed or injured by Ukrainian/NATO drones. According to Belgorod Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov, the plan is to evacuate around 9,000 children: “We are evacuating people from a great number of villages, we plan to move around 9,000 children out of the city of Belgorod, as well as the Belgorod Region, the Shebekinsky Okrug, and the Grayvoronsky region.”
This coming Friday, the first 1,200 children will leave for Penza, Tambov, Kaluga, and Stavropol. “We have a system in place,” Gladkov reassured the public.
Belgorod has been under attack for some time, but this past week the attacks intensified: Hardly a day goes by without massive Ukrainian/NATO strikes against the residential districts. Already 16 people have died, and another 98 injured. Around 40 people, some of them children, are in the hospital. This region has a common border with Ukraine, stretching for 350 kilometers.
Awful Avalanche 
Well..I guess this is like that awkward moment that happens amongst friends when a conversation finally runs dry and angst…oh dear…shuffling to my feet to offer a toast …”let me rise and offer my best to Y and all the other beatnik/bohemian writers who regularly make an honest effort contribute here…making A-A a great space to express views that are their own and not “state-sponsored” rubbish” 🙂
*https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fi.pinimg.com%2Foriginals%2Fa4%2Fea%2F86%2Fa4ea86f1cadc8b44a2b1190b5fe539bf.jpg
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should of been…
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What?! does that mean you are leaving? why awkward silence, I don’t get it…
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Nope, just filing a comment on a previously unremarked post.
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Oh, I get it! That’s okay, people don’t need to feel an obligation to comment, although I do very much like to read comments!
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S. Brennan, I love this photo but don’t really know why. Is that Christie Shrimpton in the foreground? All my memories of the 60s are in black and white. Before psychedelia. And when photographers had their own darkroom.
And I’m discounting any notion of a valediction in your comment.
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Dunno AL but, I liked the non-conformist-Bohemian vibe…
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So Putin’s out kidnapping kids again. Someone tell the ICC!
In other news, Dmitry Medvedev (Russian Minister of Poetry and Sports) recites Pushkin in anticipation of the upcoming match between Russia and France in this summer’s Ukraine Olympics:
Then send your numbers without number,
Your maddened sons, your goaded slaves,
In Russia’s plains there’s room to slumber,
And well they’ll know their brethren’s graves
It is expected that Russia will honor the French by singing and acting out the chorus of La Marseillaise:
Aux armes, citoyens,
Formez vos bataillons,
Marchons, marchons!
Qu’un sang impur
Abreuve nos sillons (let their dirty blood water our fields)
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That’s a brilliant idea! A poetry slam to solve this long-simmering feud between Russia and France.
In addition to sports and poetry, the field of battle should include BALLET. After an original (Petipa) staging of The Nutcracker, including a wild dance of the Carmagnole, and with a drunken, sloppy Medvedev waxing on about how it was FRANCE who taught classical ballet to Russia, the two old frienemies will realize how much their cultures owe to each other, and fall into each others arms, sobbing.
Peace in Europe will soon follow, and everybody drink a toast.
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🙂
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These two glorious nations could seal their eternal blood brotherhood by offing a few royals, just like in the good old days. Maybe send an invitation to Buckingham?
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Super-great idea, set up a guillotine on the soccer field.
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But the ICC has chosen its new Japanese leader using a Chinese(?] slogan – “Heaven’s vengeance is slow but sure” and I quote from Kyodo news ‘to ensure that Putin will eventually get what he deserves‘.
These people, all of them, are obsessed with Putin and Russia! It’s beyond hatred,,,
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It’s personal because Putin personally galvanized the effort to disassemble the oligarchs and then squelch the thievery of Russia. And then had the gall to tell the West’s elites they had to share.
They’ll make an example of him, yet!
It was not, of course, just Putin, but Russia does march to the beat of its Czar, or sometimes the fish rots from the head, depending.
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Does a fish actually rot from the head? Or is that just a meme? Don’t mind me, I’m just an ordinary person, asking skeptical questions …. lol!
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No, it doesn’t (apparently), but the metaphor is popular in Russia even though light Googling suggests it may be of Persian or Turkish origins and written down as early as the 13th century.
Whence it was understood to apply to leadership structures, as it is so today.
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I was going to write a snarky comment to this post about how now Putin will be facing even MORE kidnapping charges for moving kids around in his own country when their part of the country was coming under violent attack. I also rattled off a facetious question re: Brennan’s photo asking “Why are those women biting their fingernails?!?” What’s the point, though? Japes are just jerking off. They amuse my brain when I think them up, but are ultimately meaningless chatter.
I do have a more serious series of thoughts related to the Belgorod attacks, motivated by seeing some Twaats (on the Nitter work-around I use) of scattered, shattered bodies and military equipment there. What I wonder is “Why?” Those guys in the uniforms, now sprawled dead in the mud — what were they thinking when they suited up in camo, strapped on body armour, picked up various deadly devices like grenades, and hopped onto rumbling machines that would take them to where the fighting would start?
As you would have observed by now, I spend a lot of time trying to get inside peoples’ heads. It’s a hobby. I enjoy it. Like working on a puzzle. I even do that with animals. When I’m riding my bike and I see a dog on a leash, straining to get at something, I’m thinking “what is that dog sensing that would make it tug so hard? What’s the field of vision from where it stands, so low to the ground. What is the ‘smellscape’ coming into its nose, because dogs are motivated by odours we humans cannot sense. Does it feel frustration about ‘why do I have to strain so hard to get where I want to go? It’s not right!’ ” Probably not. Dogs just act. They do not analyse.
I even do that with flocks of seagulls that I see when sitting on my balcony. Some evenings, there will be scores of them flying in patterns over the riverside park behind my building, circling, weaving amongst each other, dropping down to go between the treetops… I’m high up enough that I can look DOWN on flying birds. I’ll try to follow a particular gull with my eyes sometimes. Is there a pattern to what it’s doing? Is it chasing another gull? Does it have a wingman and they’re cruising together? Why is it changing elevation, and why does it reverse the circular direction in which it’s flying? I’ve never been able to discern any logic with the seagulls, which is understandable, because their dinosaur-descended brains work so differently from my monkeymind. They are flock animals, and the gestalt of interacting in motion with others of their kind MUST have some important survival function for the species, because I’ve been looking at them doing it for years.
It’s almost as hard for me to understand the motivation of a doomed mercenary as it is to figure out a birdbrain. These guys are throwing themselves at the territory of an opponent who’s got a lot of bad stuff to shoot at them. Are they SO gung-ho’ed by the propaganda that they think it will be a low-risk adventure; that they’ll get to blast their bang-toys and there won’t be flying metal coming back at them? In the third year of this war, do they still think that the Russians are drunken cowards who will flee instead of fighting on the territory of their own nation? How can they be skilled enough to master complex combat tactics, but at the same time delusional enough to dance with death?
For the mercs from France, Poland and elsewhere, it’s not like they’re sitting in their houses back home and Russian invaders have rolled up to trash the place. Yeah, THAT would demand some fight-back. But these guys have had to leave their low-key home-country orbit and go a long way to face off against something that’s more dangerous than a bear or a snake. Wives have to nag their guys to drag the rubbish bins to the kerb when the garbage truck is coming around the next morning. Yet they’ll travel thousands of kilometers to schlep overweight backpacks, no nagging needed?
For a mercenary, it’s a paying gig, of course. But what’s the mental calculus of “I’m going to make XXX amount of money this month, which is five times what I’d get at my side hustle. And I have a __% chance of X amount of pain.” Do they just ignore the second part about the pain, and only focus on the salary? Are peoples’ minds so compartmentalised that they blank out risks? I’m still astounded that almost no one takes Covid seriously, but that’s a virus that’s not visible to the naked eye, doesn’t kill EVERYONE (at least not the first half-dozen times they catch it) and it unfolds slowly. Can mercs shut their eyes to the probability of very real instantaneous supersonic slaughteration?
I couldn’t. I like my life. I’ve got as much money as I need, I can do whatever I feel like (within reason — no banging that hot Asian chick I saw waiting for the lift, sigh…) and I look forward to what’s coming tomorrow. I feel healthy. No pain in my body or my brain. Am I the anomaly? (Play on words with the recurrent Reddit discussions of “Am I the asshole?”)
Perhaps the mercs, and Ukronazis in general, see life differently to me. Maybe their non-combat milieu is miserable. Crappy living quarters, not enough money to do what they want, hounded by family, debt collectors, police… Their self-concept might be tied up with ideas of manliness. “If I don’t fight those evil Russians, I’m a cuck, and I won’t be able to live with myself.”
There was a scene in the 1970s Clint Eastwood movie “The Outlaw Josey Wales” relating to that. (“Josey Wales” isn’t as wale-known [sic] as Clint’s other flicks, but it had a massive influence on my mindset, for lotsa reasons besides the vignette I’m about to recount.) Eastwood’s character, who fought for the South in the American Civil War, was on the run across the Texas badlands after he had shot scads of Union soldiers who were gunning for him. A couple of bounty hunters recognised him in a half-deserted saloon. One drew on him, but Eastwood’s gun hand was faster and he blew that hombre away. The other ran out to the street. Eastwood waited a bit, and the second bounty-hunter returned through the swinging doors. They eyeballed each other for a second and the gunsel said “I had to come back.” Eastwood said, resignedly, “I know.” They simultaneously pulled pistols, and of course Clint’s character was quicker.
That’s a cowboy movie, not reality. But how many men, in this real world of ours, are operating on the principle that drove the second bounty hunter? “I had to.” Oh well, fellas — that will be the last thing you had to do…
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These are all worthy questions, but I honestly have no answers. I only know (from watching movies) that some people (mostly men but also a few women here and there) simply become addicted to war. Like more “normal” people become addicted to sports. I reckon it’s the physicality of it and the sense of accomplishment. They might also just love the opportunity to kill other people. I don’t know.
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