War Dancing (Glory To Ukraine I)

As I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I take a look at my life, and realize there's nothin' left 'Cause I've been blastin' and laughin' so long That even my momma thinks that my mind is gone

But I ain't never crossed a man that didn't deserve it. Me be treated like a punk, you know that's unheard of. You better watch how you talkin' and where you walkin' Or you and your homies might be lined in chalk. I really hate to trip, but I gotta loc. As they croak, I see myself in the pistol smoke
Fool, I'm the kinda G the little homies wanna be like. On my knees in the night, sayin' prayers in the streetlight
~Coolio, Gangsta's Paradise

 I first saw this yesterday. Picture of a dead Russian soldier next to a damaged armored vehicle.

And they just left him there. Likewise, in a ghoulish twist, apparently the Russian Army has mobile crematoriums so they don't have to ship dead bodies home. Coming as I do from a country that operates under the credo that we "Leave no man behind" this is anathema to me.

I'm going to be honest, I hope the Ukrainians bury that guy before the ghouls with the truck-mounted furnace find his ass. At least the Ukrainians would probably give him a proper burial, leaving his family with the option of having a grave to visit.

The Russian government is led by fucking Ghouls. I'm glad they're getting their army is getting its ass kicked. Failure on a major scale here will likely lead to regime change, and not least because these fools have made so many enemies, sanctions are piling up, and hell I heard that hotel guests in Russia are being asked to settle their bills early in case the (now official) SWIFT cutoff prevents people's credit cards from working.

Meanwhile, more countries, including Germany, have agreed to supply the Ukrainians with armaments.

I don't think this is working out the way either the Russians or American "Conservatives" thought it was going to. And I'm going to be honest, I can't imagine having imperial ambitions when your army cannot even overcome the country it's already spent 8 years screwing with.

But of course, all Republicans see is the invasion, the indiscriminate targeting of civilians, of hospitals and infrastructure and shit.

Cruelty, death, war, naturally the death cult is all about that type of shit.

Madison Cawthorn wants to have a President that everybody is afraid of. Well, Maddie, how's that working out for Vladimir Putin right about now? If you want to live your life that way, it's a virtual guarantee that eventually you're going to meet somebody far worse than your own most inflated visions of your own toughness eventually.

I'm not sure anybody saw President Zelenskiy as That Guy, but here we are.

There ain't much of a pension plan in the Dictator business, kid.

And Zelenskiy is showing the world what real, lead-from-the-front wartime leadership looks like. If Vladimir Putin, for all his amoral cruelty and deviousness and power, cannot defeat that, you sure as hell ain't gonna be That Guy.

Let me tell you something else. It doesn't matter how brave you are, how tough you are, how good of a shot you are or how well you can fight if you're in the military and you're not instilled with proper discipline, or properly led, or supplied, or trained. 

As the Russians are finding out, to their misfortune, there are some fine lines between a proper Army and a mere mob of armed men and women.

Whole Russian units are breaking down, running out of fuel, and having to forage and steal just to survive because they were sent into the field not only without enough gas, but without anything to eat. I mean, seriously, who in the actual fuck organized this operation, that the Army of a major petrostate cannot get enough fuel from storage facilities (of which they have plenty, trust me) into the field?

I mean, what the hell?

Apparently the Russian Army is a soup sandwich of legendary proportions.

Forget the Ukrainians, hell if I was in Putin's shoes I'd be ordering some major operations to clear out the deadwood in my officer corps and account for and punish theft and generally figure out what the fuck went wrong.

The truth is, in an even marginally competent military, this shouldn't be happening.

And all that is aside from the fact that the Russians walked into the kind of epic beatdown that shouldn't happen to anybody. Or at least, anybody with a brain in their head should have the sense not to fuck with That Guy.

But then, apparently Russian soldiers are trying to get with Ukrainian women on Tinder and then getting cat-fished for intelligence (and probably all type of other shit, too, let's be real) and I'm not sure of the veracity of it, but I saw last night that the Ukrainians were using Tinder and Grindr to track Russian operations.

Apparently, it was accurate, and I've been continuing to see this stuff today.

Dudes, why the fuck are these people even allowed to have their personal cell phones in the field?

It was kind of a big deal a few years ago when the Indian Army banned exactly that, as well as banning use of certain apps in general, but especially now I can see why they did it.

Meanwhile, here in America, Donald Trump is at CPAC advocating that we should invade Canada. I mean...what in the actual fucking fuck?

Over what? COVID-19 restrictions and enforcing their own laws?

I swear these fucking people think that only far-right "Conservatives" should have the benefits of law or society and then they don't even want to follow any of that shit. It's like an entire political philosophy designed by 13 year old boys who never got they ass whupped for being stupid, lying, or talking back to their parents. 

Seriously, somehow these idiots got to thinking they were the end-all, be-all Authority on the Earth.

And quite honestly, I think guys like Putin and Trump are losing whatever grip they had on reality.

And they keep smacking hard into the wall of reality, but their response is simply to back the truck up and hit it again. Well, eventually, the truck is going to break, likely long before the wall does. This is also going to be rather hard on the unfortunate people charged with trying to implement these debased fantasies. 

And that gets even harder when you're dealing with people who will fuck with you just because they can. War is about psychological factors as much as it is anything else. It's about breaking the will of the enemy, as much or more than it is about physically killing them.

That's the whole point of the scary face paint, the Haka, the rebel yell, the war dance, and countless customs practiced by traditional cultures the world over. All that shit is meant to break the will down before the fight even starts.

And in that respect the Russians have clearly failed, I mean, fuck, I just saw that the Russians have failed to even achieve air superiority. And more to the point in a wider sense, I think conservatives read the room wrong, and pushed too hard because they came to believe that their cockamamie political and social theories were reality.

Which is, ironically, the same problem that ultimately doomed Communism.

So keep on these fuckers, and maybe we can party like it's 1989.

Glory To Ukraine!

Last Post

Ka mate, ka mate! ka ora! ka ora! Ka mate! ka mate! ka ora! ka ora! Tēnei te tangata pūhuruhuru Nāna nei i tiki mai whakawhiti te rā Ā, upane! ka upane! Ā, upane, ka upane, whiti te ra! ~Ka Mate, Maori Haka (main body)

...
'Tis Death, 'Tis Death, 'Tis Life, 'Tis Life
'Tis Death, 'Tis Death, 'Tis Life, 'Tis Life
This is the hairy man
Who caused the sun to shine again for me
Up the ladder, up the ladder!
Rise! The Sun shines.
~Ka Mate, English translation.

This most famous, Ka Mate, is the story of a Maori chief named Te Rauparaha who hides in a well, from pursuing enemies of other tribes. He evades his enemies and is rescued by an unnamed man who puts a ladder down the well so he can get out. Made world-famous thanks to its use by the New Zealand All Blacks Rugby team, Ka Mate is a story of the triumph of life over death.

As is the defense of Ukraine.

Glory to the heroes!