Dear Readers:
Today’s post is comprised of some bits and pieces of random stories (from the Russian mainstream press) that interested me. To amuse myself, I give each story a tabloid-style headline. I’ll start with this one, because it segues seamlessly from my previous Tajikistan series.
Mom Rats Out Own Son
A resident of Moscow wrote a letter to the police denouncing her own son.
[yalensis: That’s shocking! Nothing can possibly justify…]
The mom found it suspicious that a grown-up 24-year-old man suddenly decided to learn Ukrainian…
[yalensis: I don’t find that suspicious at all. Maybe he is studying Eastern Slavic morphology in school. I too have it on my bucket list to learn Ukrainian some day…]
and at the same time became obsessed with reading the Koran…
[yalensis: er… well, maybe he is thinking of studying Theology for his graduate degree?]
having returned from a lengthy trip to the Far East, then taken up the hobby of building grenades, landmines and drones, while also working out extensively and bulking himself up in the local gym…
[yalensis: Arrest that man immediately! Clearly he has been recruited by some terrorist, jihadi organization!]
Our next story comes from the battlefield…
Russian Sniper Team Kills Innocent Puma
Reporter Denis Telman writes that a Russian sniper brought down an American Puma drone. (More and more we are reading, and learning, that the best way to bring down a low-flying drone is to just stand out there and shoot it down with a rifle! So, more work for the snipers.)
The leader of the sniper team, after shooting down the drone, suddenly found himself under attack, as the 24 Ukrainian drone operators suddenly appeared out of nowhere and descended on him. Their goal was to prevent the Russian team from evacuating the damaged drone, which the Russians wanted for further study.
The Ukrainians managed to injure the sniper badly, but his team fought back and killed all 24 of the attackers. After which the wounded team leader stayed behind to guard the rear while the other Russians withdrew carrying their valuable trophy.
“We shoot down drones fairly often,” he told the TASS reporter, but the Puma I consider to be the ultimate prize, and this is why 24 men attacked me, trying to get it back, but we managed to deal with all of them.”
When asked about his motivation, the heroic sniper replied: “Honestly, the reason I fight is so that ordinary children can go to school, so they don’t have to worry about shells exploding around them, so that they can play in the playground without fear, so that their psyches are not shattered by these explosions… And for that I am willing to fight and die.”
This particular sniper has already received 4 medals for “Courage” and 2 for “Valor”. After this incident he is also slated to receive a substantial monetary reward for bringing down the drone. He added that he plans to return to the front just as soon as they finish patching him up in the hospital.
Grey-Haired Karen Told To Eff Off…
Finally, I have a story featuring the pure, unadulterated chutzpah of the Israeli government. Putin’s Russia has always been friendly to Israel, but the friendship has not been reciprocated. Eventually, even the nicest person in the world, would end up dumping a “friend” who has been consistently rude, abusive, and non-requiting.
The state of Israel is up on its high horse again, this time because of the 185 drones, 36 cruise missiles, and 110 rockets launched at them by Iran, over the weekend.
In the UN General Assembly, their permanent rep, Gilad Erdan, ripped UN chief António Guterres a new one for allegedly not condemning Iran for presenting such a ghastly threat to the entire world. “Where is your voice?” Erdan mocked Guterres. “Where is your condemnation? Wake up!” And this coming from a country that was judged, even by the American-friendly World Court in the Hague to be acting on a genocidal intent and slaughtering Palestinians left and right with no accountability. And then bombing the Iranian Embassy, as icing on the cake.
Not satisfied with roasting Guterres, Israel next went after one of his very few friends left in the whole world: Russia. Israel’s Ambassador to Moscow, Simona Halperin, tried to bully the Russian Foreign Ministry into “condemning Iran’s attack against Israel”. When Moscow remained mute, Halperin blew a gasket filled with gall. And insisted, in a very dominating tone, that Russia must condemn its ally, Iran, for these rocket attacks.
In response, Russia’s “Queen of Diplomacy”, Maria Zakharova, took to her Telegram channel to ask her fellow female diplomat Halperin a rather pertinent question: “When has Israel, even once, ever condemned Ukraine for launching rockets into Russian territory? I myself do not recall even one such occasion. But I recall regular statements coming out of Israel expressing support for Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky.”
In other words, what goes around, comes around…
One of the commenters to this piece gets it exactly right: “These angry Jews are just shameless. They support Russia’s enemies, but from us they demand that we condemn our ally!”
Awful Avalanche 
Ripped a new one? I’m sure you don’t realise it but that can only be an idiom implyin anal rape to go alongside the butthurt term. To be avoided as gym talk.
(Personal crusade of mine to remove that kind of imaging from the internet).
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Oh! sorry, Michael. People I know use that term all the time, even in the workplace. Obviously I hang around with a vulgar crew. I’ll try not to use it in the future. I should have said something like, “excoriated Guterres”.
But wait, I just looked up excoriate. I already knew the vague meaning of it, but I didn’t realize it literally means to peel somebody’s skin off. So, I can’t use that either. Being skinned alive is even worse than being anally raped, at least in my opinion.
Any suggestions a better verb I could use?
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Defenestrate.
A subtle choice for a violent online takedown.
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Not bad. But you need a window!
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Haha – defenestrate is actually a good one from JC! Are we not using ‘windows’ (courtesy of old Billy Gates) all the time? (as in ‘open in new window’)
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Well, I had my first decent chuckle in days with that first item: 24 year-old man decides to become Ukrainian, his mother’s “suspicion” and James Cagney’s all-time big movie clip photo. The item just kept getting better and better! Finally I let out a howl of delight because Mum was suspicious due to her son having “taken up the hobby of building grenades, landmines and drones“. We had an old guy like that down the end of our street, liked all the dogs, was pleasant to the neighbourhood sprogs, and was building a portable atomic bomb on his kitchen table! They sent him for a nice rest at the provincial loony bin. Well, no it was a fable but just as off the wall.
That item is wordcrafted extremely well, yalensis, including especially your editorial inserts. Very, very good indeed. And the rest wasn’t too dusty, either — the Aw shucks drone-killer soldier with the down home outlook. And Zakharova’s putdown of the yapping Halperin was dead on point.
“You’ve got talent, my boy,” said Professor Henry Higgins. “Not like this shrieking woman I’m tutoring. What a pain in Spain!”
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Thanks, Beluga! I’m glad I could make you laugh. That first piece, I tried to let readers follow along my exact thought processes as I read the piece. It was almost too perfect a joke, the way it was presented, with the mom being suspicious, first about the language lessons, then the religious lessons, and they left the best part (building bombs) for second-to-last, then ending on the anti-climax with sonny working out at the gym!
Glad you liked the Jimmy Cagney reference. And in turn you gifted me with a Henry Higgins.
“Marry Freddy?! Marry Freddy!?”
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I read Simplicius technical review of Friday’s fireworks show this morning…yes, it has the video proof that Iran accomplished most, if not all, of it’s intentions by overcoming the most highly guarded Israeli military bases that employed the most sophisticated US/Israeli/NATO air defenses.
The Israeli hit on the Iranian Embassy set US-taxpayers back $2-3 billion [maybe more] to cover the cost of Israeli Air Defense [AD] expenditures. I’m thinking it cost Iran $5-10 million for their end of the fireworks. Both sides learned a lot and I am sure Lockheed and Raytheon are thrilled by their newly acquired data sets.
One point that Simplicius brought up is accuracy of the Iranian rounds and terminal guidance inside the re-entry plasma bubble. I would have thought that at a certain point outside guidance takes it’s “last breathe” or, positional update before switching to an un-jammable internal terminal inertia guidance and perhaps, this is the sticky part of the Iranian missile program? The flip-side of that is, Israel shouldn’t plan on hanging it’s hat on that one point because, staking it’s existence on Iran not being able to overcome that aspect is a very bad bet indeed. I am sure they’re Iranian engineering teams working that performance issue as we speak.
And for the record, it appears that all of Iran’s Israeli targets were military bases.
https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/iran-breaches-anglo-zionist-defenses
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The West has not figured out the guidance puzzle for hypersonic communication through the plasma sheath. I knew a guy who worked on the Raytheon hypersonic project, and even a year ago he was scoffing that “Russia doesn’t have hypersonics because *w*e don’t have a solution to the plasma communications puzzle!”
Yes. Really.
I let him roll. It wasn’t worth the effort. In any event, the other neat thing about that plasma shroud is it absorbs radio waves, meaning your mach-9 glide vehicle is also stealthy! This is another reason why “hypersonic maneuverable glide vehicle” constitutes four words to send a Western general into cold sweats: now you have to figure out where it is, and where it could be, while also vectoring in you own super-fast object to smack it.
Humans are probably not going to be able to solve the anti-hypersonic object conundrum until there are powerful enough lasers. And those would be *VERY* powerful indeed, to overcome the many issues with such weapons, while also delivering enough punch to an object so fast.
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Iran has as many engineering graduates as the US has. Russia has twice as many. If you take the population into account this means Russia has five times as many engineering graduates per million as the US while Iran has almost four times as many per million.
Perhaps the quality is different. But I’m not sure. Climate and gender engineering seems to be high on the West’s agenda. And most STEM people I know here in Western Europe don’t really work with their specialties anymore. Working with spreadsheets is far more common. There simply isn’t a lot of industrial production left here. And I suspect the US is heading the same way.
Maybe the West should try something new? What about stopping economic and kinetic warfare against the rest of the world?
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“What about stopping economic and kinetic warfare against the rest of the world?”
Well…that’s one giant leap for the demons that haunt the hallways of DC, how about a baby step like…oh I don’t know…keeping an agreement?
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As for engineering, if you don’t get work in your field within a year of graduation you’re probably dead meat in the engineering job market. Job security…ha..ha…too funny..you want to actually work as an engineer? You need to be like the proverbial shark always hunting and…willing to move to a far away patch of ocean.
Or, go into management and spend the rest of your days telling people you’re an engineer when in reality, you’re just sucking up to the Dave Calhouns of this world…
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This post reminds me that personal integrity (or the lack of it) is fundamentally an emotional imperative. In the instance of the mother reporting her wayward son, that took extreme courage and parental love to expose her son’s danger, thereby protecting anyone who may be harmed by him in the future, but also indirectly protecting him from himself. And the sniper demonstrated extreme courage by doing his mission bravely despite huge risks and wounds, but credited his bravery to protecting innocent children who will never know of his courageous act. And the last is the antipode. There is true malice in demanding that Russia knuckle under to threats when the request is being made by a genocidal maniac. Does she not see the blood on her hands as she shakes a fist at Lavrov?
We need more good people and far less bad people.
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When it comes to a mother reporting her own son to the police, there is a kind of Greek tragedy in that: The issue of competing loyalties. Loyalty to family vs loyalty to country.
Now, if it was Taras Bulba, he would not have reported his traitor-son Andrei to the Tsar’s police. Instead, he just killed Andrei himself, and that was his way of solving the contradiction in a mutually satisfying manner.
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To amplify on what Tom said about the mom, give her a cheer if she was motivated to snitch because she wanted to keep her sonny-boy alive. Was he a Sunni boy? Does the article give any clues to his religious background? Or is that just not done, perhaps as a matter of law, in Russian media stories?
Downundahere, there was a stabbing incident Sunday at a Christian church near Sydney in which a 15-year-old boy attacked a bishop as he was giving a sermon. The bishop lived, some parishioners who tried to help him got slashed, violent yoof arrested. A lynch mob quickly gathered outside the church, wanting to stomp the attacker. The police riot squad had to blast people with capsicum spray (Aussie word for “pepper”) to break it up. Teh Authoritahs have officially declared it a terrorist incident.
BUUUUUT! There’s no word in mainstream media on WHY it merited that distinction. Australian media is more restricted in what it’s legally allowed to say than American nooz is. Suspects’ names are usually withheld from stories before they go on trial. In this case, despite the attack getting a lot of coverage — it happened just days after a madman killed 6 people with a knife in a Sydney mall — there’s nothing about the WHY of this bishop-stabbing in the official media. A BIG HOLE IN THE STORY! is what my editors would have said if I had written it up that way in my journo days.
Sadly, I have to turn to Twatter to get even a semblance of “the rest of the story.” (Did you ever listen to Paul Harvey, a folksy syndicated radio broadcaster? That was his catch-phrase for many years on segments he’d do that had an “O. Henry” surprise ending. For that matter, do you know of the American author from the 1800s who had that as his pen name? You probably do, since you’ve read Herman Melville and others from that era. So much of the time, when I mention things, people have no idea what I’m talking about, even though it doesn’t involve matters that are secret. It’s just that anything that happened before the Internet was invented, it might as well have been written in Linear B, for all that people are aware of it.)
Stop ranting, Bukko you outdated putz! Back to what I was meaning to communicate:
Anyway, thank doGness that Twaater does not have the same restrictions as mainstream media does. And people who Twaat like to tell the whole truth.* @ Lord Bebo re-Twaated photos of the stab-boy after he was subdued. He looked Middle Eastern. Bishop was burly and beardy, like Eastern Orthodox. The boy was quoted as shouting something about how the Bishop had insulted his prophet (“rasul”). There was also a photo of the boy with one hand wrapped in a bandage, with an explanation that parishioners had cut some of his fingers off. Guided by the example of ear-choppers after the Crocus attack, I betcha!
Will any of those details come out in official media? This is something that’s gotten lots of air time and word-space all day, but so much is missing. Lots of people, including my own daughter, are so overwhelmed by the news that they have decided to tune out. But for the ones who DO pay attention to what’s happening, they’re not much better informed about the totality of events than the ones who choose to be unconscious. News freaks like me have to rely on dodgy sources like Apartheid-boy’s company to see what’s real.*(re-asterisking) The Truth Is Out There, but you gotta hunt hard for it. I’m glad the Nitter work-around exists, since I’m not signed up to be part of (f)Elon’s user base. It allows me to learn more about the reality of events. Reality DOES exist! Even in this “choose your own reality” world we’re living in. Only, if you rely on standard media sources, you’re like one of the blind men in the fable who touched different parts of the elephant and thought they were able to describe the entire animal.
Edited to add: Good on the Guardian (which has an Australian edition online) Today (Wednesday here) they had more details, whereas the formerly left-leaning local paper (The Age) has bupkis. It takes a British-based publication to tell Aussies what’s really going on. (In spite of the Grauniad usually being a suck-up to power) The boy IS Muslim. The bishop (Armenian Orthodox) is politically outspoken, recently visited NazIsrael and does not like Muzzies. He livestreams his sermons, so the stabbing went across the “netwaves” as it happened. There has been a lot of tension between Christians and Muslims in the suburb where this happened, so people were primed to riot. It’s like what you hear about in Third World countries with segregated ethnic enclaves, except Sydney is (supposedly) First Worldy.
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Russian media can be very cagey too, at times (so as not to incite the plebs), like holding back crucial demographic information (race, gender, ethnicity, religion, language, etc.) about a perp. People need to know, however, because knowing these facts often explains perfectly clearly what would otherwise be a mystery. Like why Person A attacked Person B.
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Since I’ve been whingeing about the nooz here, and none of my politically minded friends in real life would even care, let me continue to grizzle about the woeful UNDER-reporting of the truth about the Sydney bishop-stabbing. When something is bugging me; I often set it down in words and “throw it to the universe” (title of an album by one of my favourite Swedish rock bands, The Soundtrack Of Our Lives) Then it stops gnawing at me so much. The act of writing eases the aggravation.
I thought the matter would fade into obscurity, but it got a mention again in the 0700 ABC radio news bulletin today. The “peg” was that the stabber boy was formally charged with terrorism during an official proceeding held at the side of the bed where he’s being held in hospital. Only, again, this news programme DID NOT SAY WHY IT WAS TERRORISM! How does a news organisation decide “we will air an item about terrorism, with no explanation of what the basis was for using that word”? Do they question their own selves — “why are we leaving a large gap in the meaning of what we are reporting on?” Do they assume that anyone who cares about the issue will have gone to other news sources to find out the WHOLE truth? (In which case, they’d be admitting that they were only providing a half-arse service. And they can live with themselves being knowingly slack?) Or do they blindly follow official directives — “this is what you are allowed to say.” OK bosses, fine with us!
No mention that the boy was Muslim and the bishop used his sermons to excoriate Islam. That’s why it was terrorism — Muslim attacks Christian because of his religiously biased preaching. What is the media trying to protect? (I’ve seen — actually, “NOT” seen — similar absences in other news outlets I’ve squizzed about this. The people in that part of Sydney know what’s what. There has apparently been ruckus between Muslims and Christians in that zone for a long time, so the locals are clued in. Does the media think that Australia is going to lurch into religious warfare across the continent if they say “the terrorism charge was laid because it was a Muslim boy who attacked a Christian”? No — in another source I read today, it had extensive quotes from government officials warning against going to unauthorised news providers which might purvey “malinformation” but NOTHING ABOUT THE REAL INFORMATION!
Also, there was a short mention in that news item about how the boy suffered “a self-inflicted hand injury during the assault.” That fits in with the rumour on Twaater — complete with photos from the scene showing the kid with a bandaged hand — that his fingers got chopped off. Perhaps he clenched his fist around the knife when parishioners bum-rushed him and he got a “traumatic avulsion” that way. (“Avulsion” is an obscure medical word for something that’s horrifying — a body part getting violently torn off. I first learned it when a patient in a nursing home where I worked fell out of bed and got one of her fingers caught in the side rail. The finger was literally ripped off her hand when she tumbled to the floor. They didn’t teach that word in nursing school, so I had to look it up to see “what does this mean?” when I was reading the medical chart about the event.)
You know where I had to go to learn the fuller truth about this bishop-stabbing incident, which is national news, not just some obscure event? To a scurrilous source who calls himself “The Aussie Cossack.” You might find this guy entertaining, Yalensis.
As per his nym, he’s an Australian, but he has family roots in the Cossack region of Russia. I realise they were spread over a lot of old Russia, and I haven’t been interested enough in him to research the basis for his Cossacidentity. He looks like a Cossack in his Twaater profile pic — burly, swarthy Turk-like facial features, balding on top, no khokhol though. He has been holed up inside the Russian embassy in Canberra for more than 400 days, similar to how Julian Assange sought refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. He Twaats a lot about the war in Ukraine and is sometimes on TV shows (via video link) when discussion panels want to have somebody freakish to ridicule for representing the Rooskie side of things. The Russians are OK with sheltering him. The Cossack is a good gadfly with which to troll the Amerikan lackeys in Oz’s comprador government.
The AusCos says he wants to emigrate to Russia, but the Australian border authorities won’t let him leave the country. Seems they have some questions they want him to answer. So many controversial figures have dodgy things in their past… Are you familiar with Tommy Robinson, the British guy who has been in a lot of legal trouble for violating a court gag order when a bunch of Muslim men from northern England were on trial for sexually molesting teenage girls? “Robinson” (not his real name; a nom de guerre he adopted) is a scuzzy racist who hates Muslims. Unfortunately, people who want to know the entirety of reality have to depend on a dirtbag like him to find out ALL of what’s going on.
So the Aussie Cossack has been Twaating all sorts of stuff that the official media is hiding. Photos taken by people who were at the church when the stabbing happened, descriptions of how big the riot was when Christians came to lynch the little bastard, background on past religious battles in that part of Sydney… He’s not putting anything out there that’s secret. He’s merely describing events that have taken place in public. But if I did not search him out, having to resort to the Nitter work-around, I would not know any of this.
Ah well, Yalensis, thank you for letting me get this off my mind. I have sputtered; now I can be content. And thanks also for providing information that I do not see elsewhere. Not that I depend on you for the full picture. The truth is a mosaic. We see it via the combination of many small pieces. That, or we have to view the truth through a fly’s eyes. You know how they have so many facets in them through which they receive visual information. A mosaic makes for a more appetising metaphor than a fly’s eye, though.
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It’s okay, Bukko, you’re not just getting stuff off your chest, but making a lot of very valid points about the way news is delivered. It’s sad that people have to go to racist sites to find out what is really going on. It should be standard practice for reporters to deliver the actual facts, including the one thing that people most want to know: Why did he do it? The motive of the criminal, in other words.
They do the same thing in American news, if a black guy commits a crime they might try to conceal his ethnicity, which is okay if it isn’t pertinent to the crime; but if it IS pertinent they should mention it. Their reason is to not hype up the racists. It’s an over-correction to decades (and centuries) of jacking up lynch mobs against blacks by accusing the entire community of being a bunch of criminals. Politicians did it all the time, it was called “playing the n-word card.”
For example both Reagan and Bush Sr. ran on platforms that featured black criminals. Well, in Reagan’s case, not even a criminal, his poster child was the “Cadillac Welfare Queen”. And he promised to crack down on black welfare cheats who were taking money away from god-feating white taxpayers. In Bush’s case, he literally ran on a mugshot of a very disreputable-looking black criminal, whose name i forget. The message being to the voters: ”I crack down on black crime.” And middle-class voters responded to these dog whistles, like they always do.
In more recent times people started bending over backwards the other way, now they report crimes as abstract things that are just a mystery who dunnit and why.
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