Ukraine, amidst a national war for survival against Russia's tender embrace, had time to vote on social media to select a new stamp.
The winning design commemorates the final radio message from Ukrainian border troops on Snake Island upon the opening of hostilities, a phrase that will live down through the ages as the 21st century equivalent of "MOLON LABE". Dulce et decorum est.
This is not a people who will ever be subjugated, whatever the eventual outcome on the battlefield.
I want a sheet of these.
[Pro Tip: If Ukraine made this as a morale patch, they could finance the whole war.]
Not gasoline prices, thank a merciful deity; the outside temperature.
It's 79° outside just now. And a quite comfortable 50s at night. Shorts and t-shirt weather has returned to SoCal. Time to turn the fluorescent-tan fishbelly white legs and arms back to a healthy melatonin glow, but short of skin cancer. Looks like Vitamin D is back on the menu.
This idiot's intelligence peaked at below-average in the prime of life, and now, wracked with the Swiss-cheese memory problems inherent and head-slappingly obvious in acutely advanced Alzheimer's, it's a wonder his underwear isn't worn outside his trousers most days. But it's no wonder at all that his nap time starts at 11AM each day. He's only got so many neurons, and once they fire, he needs 16-20 hours sleep for the next 30 seconds of camera time.
This is crippled FDR, except now with the camera lingering on him as he limps into his wheelchair, and frequently falls onto his face. It's elder abuse, FFS.
He manages to gaffe this once, then doubles down and totally fucks it sideways with the attempted save. He's literally got shit for brains, and nobody in office says anything.
"Um, the Legal Department is calling to speak with 'The World-Class Prize-Winning Idiot Who Came Up With That Jackassical Idea To Get Us Sued For Transmitting Every Communicable Disease Known To Man Including Hepatitis And AIDS', on line 2 sir; and I have 378 county Health Boards holding on the main PBX. Do you want them geographically, alphabetically, or in order of rage?"
Look, I get that restaurants washing out coffee mugs isn't a new thing, but that's actual restaurants. With adult supervision. Expecting minimum-wage twenty-something barristas who can barely get a coffee order right any 3 times out of 10 to run dishwashers is the point where this whole thing jumped the shark.
If they were anything close to smart, they'd just say "Bring your own mug", they'd dump a pre-measured amount of burnt coffee into it, and call it even. But they won't do that, because they don't trust their own idiots not to drop and break the mug. But you're supposed to trust them to clean and sanitize them.
Daylight Savings Time, perhaps a good idea for five minutes when everyone milked cows and worked on a farm 80 years ago, is just insufferable dumb shit today (hence DST:Dumb Shit Time), an insufferable idea whose time has come, and looooong ago gone. The sumbitch who thought of it should get to rot in hell an extra hour every day for eternity.
So, after hearing the will of the people, your elected Grand Nitwits voted unanimously.
Not to end it. F**k no, that would have been too easy.
If Emperor Poopypants had the wit to veto this monstrous bit of shitheadedness, he'd go up 20 points in the polls, getting him almost to 2% approval. (DNC, call your office.) And we could let those @$$holes take a whack at voting us into nationwide STANDARD TIME (hence the name) instead, forever, amen.
But instead, those senatorial halfwits (but I repeat myself) will send this bill over with a case of pudding pops, and Gropey Dopey will be in a sugar coma when Jill, or some personal attendant, autopens it into perpetuity, and we'll never be rid of this God-damned asinine travesty.
And who sponsored this idiocy?
Marco Screwyoubio, of course.
If ever there was a Manchurian Candidate who should have been deported to Cuba, he is surely it. Thanks for nothing, Floridiots. Now we're even for Fineswine.
Government, doing what it does best: Screwing EVERYBODY, FOREVER.
Suck it, losers. Serves you right for drinking the Russians' sh*t striaght from the tap.
Putin's ass is not a soft-serve yogurt machine, as Tucker Carlson found out. Even Fox News won't go near the story any more. The quicker certain other people learn this, the less often we'll have these little chats. Maybe write it on your hand with a Sharpie, lest ye forget.
Putin is KGB to the core. Like all such dung beetles, he lives and breathes nothing but sh*t, and his disinformation is always half-lies, with just enough truth nuggets in it for the gullible to spoon it down.
There's a timeless lesson about those who tell half-lies, from no less an authority than Mr. Dryden, of the Arab Bureau:
And just to pile on, here's some insight on how beaten the Ukrainians are, facing that Russian military juggernaut:
Apparently, in Common Core math, "bio lab" is the same thing as "bio warfare lab".
IRL, not so much.
Hot tip, kids: Just because you found supplies that can be purchased at Hobby Lobby in the science fair aisle, you have not uncovered a WMD development facility.
FTR, there are bio labs in every hospital in this country. Also in every college and university, nearly every high school, and even in most middle schools, FFS. There are 67 bio labs in the county I'm sitting in. Most of them do ordinary lab tests; none of them, AFAIK, are working on making chemical or biological weapons. Don't be a total fucktard and not get that.
And just because someone has a castor bean bush in their back yard, it doesn't mean they're making ricin.
Under this recockulous Theory Of Things, the local hardware store anywhere is a bomb-making factory.
So under the Underpants Gnome Theory of legitimate military targets, the Russians would be justified invading the US to rid us of Home Depot and Ace Hardware stores.
If people are going to keep doing this kind of thing, they should either swallow a periscope, or pull their heads out of their asses.
I can make blog topics from smart comments, or stupid ones. Which one you get depends on which kinds of answers are more entertaining for you, Gentle Readers.
For those halfwits who think I suffer from Putin Derangement Syndrome, and have nothing good to say about the KGB thug and his Russian invader army (nothing could be further from the truth), we offer the following as proof to the contrary:
Apparently, those virtuous and wonderful marauding cutthroats, amidst shelling cities in Ukraine wantonly and profligately, managed to take the time to deliberately whack a NYTimes reporter. Which, just like Hitler's German shepherd Blondi, proves that even genocidal megamurderous maniacs can have a good point or two about them.
If Putin had launched an invasion of Manhattan, and set out to shoot all the reporters at the NYTimes, rather than brutally subjugate Ukraine under his dictatorial thumb, we might revise and amend our opinion of him. He could do no worse as mayor there or governor in that state than the recent selections have done, and as a recovering KGB colonel, he's already from the same party as the one in power there since the 1930s.
We're hoping that media lightweights like Don Lemon, Joe Scarborough and Mika Airhead, Rachel Madcow, and Jim Acosta can manage to get over to Ukraine too, very soon, before the war ends. The closer to Russian troops, the better, AFAIC.
UPDATE: Sounds like the actual story is that it was the Ukes who capped the guy, because press were barred by the military commander of the district from an operational area, because the press fucktards kept revealing names, faces, locations, and TTPs through sheer dumbassery and a dearth of military common sense. Some Uke troops reportedly caught the guy filming (because he thought he had Cinematic Immunity to martial law), assumed he was a Russian spy, and blew his shit away.
Uke response: "FA,FO; play stupid games, win stupid prizes, @$$holes."
Ivan's response: "WTF? Never heard of him."
Presstard's Response: "Holy Shit! The Russians are targeting reporters! OMG!!!"
So yet another reason to love the Ukrainians, and hate Putin.
But if Vlad's thugs ever do start shooting reporters from the NYTimes, we repeat: We will amend our previous comments to the degree such behavior merits.
Their war lasted 1470 days, from the German invasion on 22 June 1941 to VE day when Germany surrendered on 8 May 1945. (The 15 seconds to take their half of Poland, and the week or two between them finally declaring war on Japan, and Japan surrendering, entailed no serious military engagements.)
In that time, they suffered 6.3M KIAs and Died Of Wounds casualties. I'm not looking at other casualty numbers, because KIA/DoW is all we're looking at for Ukraine.
That puts all Russian military losses in WWII at an average of about 4,285/day, 24/7/365.
(Joe comes up with a higher number, but it isn't going to matter much in the grand scheme, as we'll show presently.)
First of all, consider a wee historical tidbit: the Soviet Army suffered those losses fighting150 divisions of the Wermacht, including 15 armored divisions. (For comparison, right now, the entire US land forces, Army and Marines combined total, is 13 active divisions total (10+3), and 9 reserve divisions (8+1), including a total of one armored division.)
Secondly, the Russian Army now is only about 500K men, and the size of the force that invaded Ukraine is generally acknowledged to be about half that size, i.e. 250K troops, all in.
The Soviet Army of WWII was therefore 46 times bigger than the Russian invasion force (well, until they started making contact with Ukrainian forces) that entered Ukraine.
So for a comparison that's apples to apples, instead of apples to pineapples, that 4285/day casualty rate, divided by a force 1/46th the size, drops to 93/day, for any 250K troops.
But of the 250K troops who invaded, the casualty number after 14 days of conflict is 6000 men.
As Joe correctly noted, barely a bad day for WWII. For that matter, barely a bad afternoon at Antietam or Gettysburg in the US Civil War, and hardly more than one stupid attack across No Man's Land any day at Ypres in WWI. But this wasn't our Civil War, or WWI, or WWII.
And the Army in question isn't the behemoth juggernaut 46 times bigger than the present one, nor engaged in combat with the most ferocious army in world history through 1942.
It's a campaign with literally half the current Russian Army, and experiencing a casualty rate not the 93/day (per 250K troops) from WWII, but rather a death rate of 428/day, which is only 4.6 times worse than Russia experienced at the height of WWII, against most of the German Army.
Inflicted on them by a ragamuffin militia that wouldn't even qualify for the U.S. Notional Guard, except they have Javelin anti-tank missiles, Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, and the usual Russian hand-me-down small arms.
And they're fighting the "mighty" Russian Army clown posse to a standstill.
In short:
By any objective standard, the Russians have been getting the ever-loving shit kicked out of them, six times a week and twice on Sundays.
This is why the Russians are now attacking passively, by holding up short, and shelling cities full of civilians from 15 miles outside of town: because when they go toe to toe with the Ukrainian ragamuffins, they get their asses handed to them, shit their pants, and retreat.
At the height of the Vietnam War, we had about 500K troops in-country.
On the absolute worst day of the Vietnam War, the day after the 1968 Tet offensive, when battles broke out in 100 cities and hamlets nationwide, what happened?
If every day in Vietnam had been that bad, the entire war would have lasted just 8 months, to get to the number of deaths (over 58,000) it took 10 solid years to accomplish.
The Russian forces in Ukraine - half the size of the US Army in Vietnam - are dying at nearly twice that number, every single day for two solid weeks. They'll have suffered a Vietnam in just 4 months, at the current rate.
If any American commander since 1960 had suffered 10% KIA and 25% casualties and equipment losses for anything short of nuclear warfare, they'd have been relieved and court-martialed.
The Russians are and have been suffering Kasserine Pass levels of ass-whupping, every week they keep this up. And every day, they get weaker, while the Ukrainian forces get stronger.
If you can't conceive what a dick-punching is being delivered on Putin's invaders, you simply can't count. It's worse that WWII, and it's worse than Vietnam on its worst day. TheRussians are not getting better at it over time, and they're burning up war stocks of material and ammunition of which they only have a finite supply.
[BTW: Russian doctrine when they're getting rolled, since the 1950s, stipulates that Plan B is to drop chemical or tactical nuclear weapons, to rock the enemy and gain offensive momentum. How curious that they just magically "discovered" 'bio-warfare labs' in Ukraine, just as their invasion fleet runs aground on the rocks of Reality, and just after they shipped in a good supply of chemical warfare suits for their troops in Ukraine. Just a serendipitous coincidence, I'm sure.]
Putin has pulled his own pants down, and the Ukrainians are smacking his sky-clad cheeks with a board. Every other nation that doesn't like Russia can see that, and that only destabilizes the entire world, and makes future pushback against Russia not just likely, but inevitable.
1) Poopypants and his minions have been teeing up the Russian invasion for months. OKAY.
2) Poopypants and his minions knew a Russian invasion was coming. They knew the Russian plan and order of battle weeks in advance, and even tried to get China to tell Russia we knew it, and that they shouldn't do it. OKAY.
3) Poopypants and his minions offered no concrete military aid that would make this invasion less likely, nor more difficult, knowing full well it was all but inevitable. OKAY.
4) Poopypants and his minions expected that the Russians would be all the way to the Polish border within 48 hours after it kicked off, and even offered Zelensky a ride out of Dodge. OKAY.
5) Nobody, not us, not Russia, and not even the Ukrainians, ever expected they'd fight the Russian army to a near standstill for two weeks. OKAY.
6) But now, Russia, the guys who invaded, the ones shelling cities for a week since their attempts at a military victory went all to shit, has suddenly discovered "secret biowarfare labs" in Ukraine, within the measly few miles they've managed to conquer after half a month. WAIT, WHAT?
Okay, Slick, so I'm supposed to believe that Poopypants and his minions did nothing to dismantle those labs and hide any evidence of their existence, despite knowing they would be overrun in a New York Minute by the entire Russian Army. Because...no f**king idea why they'd do that. WOOP!WOOP!WOOP! MAJOR BULLSHIT WARNING!
Okay, sure.
Just explain to the class how and why, exactly, somebody would shoot themselves in both feet, with a shotgun, seventeen times, and then start RELOADING to do it again.
Because that nonsense is more plausible than this "Hey! Look! I just found biowarfare labs right next to Russia!"
I'll just wait over here while you get your slides and charts together to explain something so fucking jackassical, it would have to come from literally Gilligan, or from Lloyd and Harry in Dumb and Dumber.
Can't do that without shooting a moon rocket past the lowest depths of recorded human intelligence? And then saying
?
Gooooooooooooooooood luck selling that.
Waitaminute, the referee is running over and
"Total unbelievable bullshit! 50-yard penalty!"
Let's check the tape...
Oh, geez, no wonder there's a flag! Look at that guy in the backfield:
Another week of being bogged down in Ukrainian swamps and getting their asses kicked by partisans with Javelin missiles 24/7, and the Russians will find the guy from the Grassy Knoll in Dallas, Jimmy Hoffa's body, Jack the Ripper, and the Black Dahlia murderer. And 20 suitcases of missing Trump absentee votes from Atlanta, Detroit, Philadelphia, Phoenix, and Madison. And the one-armed man. And the elephant graveyard. And Nicole Simspson Brown's actual killer. And the Underpants Gnome. And the network exec who cancelled Firefly.
It's more likely that Rosie O'Donnell becomes Miss America the same year Stevie Wonder wins the Indy 500 than it is that this story is anything but pure diaper spackle.
FFS, this is about as plausible as Saddam's chemical warfare production facility having a Sharpie-lettered cardboard sign out front that said, in English, "Baby Milk Factory".
BTW: Best estimates are that Putin has lost more troops in two weeks in Ukraine than the Soviet Union lost in 5 years (out of 10 total) in Afghanistan. The Russians haven't been dunked on that hard since men's basketball at the '92 Olympics.
Not counting the news outlets or websites along the full range of accuracy and veracity, I follow multiple actual individuals' handwritten blogs. (Bot news aggregators don't thrill me.) Looking them over, many are current serving or former military and a couple are some variation of high-speed low-drag elite forces ninjas. Or just funny as all. Because life without humor is just despair. So in other words, the same folks I trusted in the military not to wet the bed, sh*t themselves, or otherwise run around like headless Nancys, are the same folks I trust on the interwebz, for demonstrating pretty much the same trustworthiness and circumspectly responsible behavior. Color me shocked.
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