Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Balloon Juice, where there is always someone who will say you’re doing it wrong.

Republicans do not pay their debts.

Nothing worth doing is easy.

Today’s gop: why go just far enough when too far is right there?

Republicans: The threats are dire, but my tickets are non-refundable!

Ron DeSantis, the grand wizard, oops, governor of FL.

The republican caucus is covering themselves with something, and it’s not glory.

Just because you believe it, that doesn’t make it true.

Why is it so hard for them to condemn hate?

You don’t get rid of your umbrella while it’s still raining.

Tide comes in. Tide goes out. You can’t explain that.

They love authoritarianism, but only when they get to be the authoritarians.

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

My right to basic bodily autonomy is not on the table. that’s the new deal.

Everything is totally normal and fine!!!

In short, I come down firmly on all sides of the issue.

It’s a good piece. click on over. but then come back!!

There are more Russians standing up to Putin than Republicans.

The media handbook says “controversial” is the most negative description that can be used for a Republican.

GOP baffled that ‘we don’t care if you die’ is not a winning slogan.

Hot air and ill-informed banter

Compromise? There is no middle ground between a firefighter and an arsonist.

It’s a new day. Light all those Biden polls of young people on fire and throw away the ashes.

Meanwhile over at truth Social, the former president is busy confessing to crimes.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Ukraine (So Far) Winning Open Thread: Vulgar Japes

Ukraine (So Far) Winning Open Thread: Vulgar Japes

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Russian immigrant (refugee):

Remember when (Russia claimed) two Ukrainian helicopters blew up the fuel depot in Belgorad, on April 1st?…


(Source for the meme)

Best joke of all, though:

Reader Interactions

41Comments

  4. 4.

    arrieve

    Thank you for this. I just want to weep every time I think about Ukraine and it’s wonderful to be able to laugh instead. Rooting for a tractor to salvage the Moskva!

  10. 10.

    YY_Sima Qian

    After this war, Russia is likely to become a North Korea on steroids, a recluse w/ thousands of nukes (& extractable resources), spoiler for any kind of international order. Not exactly a comforting prospect, but it’s great power ambition has been exposed as a farce.

    However, the upcoming battle in the east, after the ground firms up, is likely to be a bloody affair, even if the Russian Army continues its lackluster performance to date. There is a lot more deaths & destruction on the horizon.

  12. 12.

    FlyingToaster

    @Dorothy A. Winsor: Weirdly enough, Shoigu was reported to be hospitalized with a heart attack on March 12th.  On March 26th there was a video of the General Staff meeting, but the metadata was scrubbed.  It is entirely possible that he had a minor blockage, a stent installed, and after 10 days was back to work.

    Shoigu’s been taking calls from his counterpart in Turkey, so he was alive and kicking a week ago.

    The Russian rumor mill has it that this second heart attack was too massive to be from natural causes.  Like someone changed out the meds.

  14. 14.

    dmsilev

    If nothing else, losing a ship named “Moscow” has got to be deeply embarrassing to the Russians right about now.

    So sad.

  15. 15.

    zhena gogolia

    @Dorothy A. Winsor: Wow.

    As I said downthread, Putin looked uncharacteristically twitchy in that video that was posted yesterday. He was almost Trumpian in his gestures and his babbling.

  18. 18.

    Ceci n est pas mon nym

    @Dorothy A. Winsor: Russian generals have been arrested in Russia and charged with embezzling up to 10 billion dollars allocated to the war effort in Ukraine.

    Is this business as usual or evidence they were getting ready to leave the country?

    Or is Putin just mad because they didn’t cut him in? Does he have any money that ISN’T embezzled?

  19. 19.

    Martin

    @Ceci n est pas mon nym: The rumor here (guessing Adam will do a much better job of this in his update) is that Russia’s Fifth service which handles building fifth column groups in neighboring countries kinda didn’t do that. They were supposed to build groups that would arm up and attack Ukraine from within (requires a lot of cash), but the generals and their staff just pocketed the money and told Putin that those groups existed. So part of the invasion strategy was that some of these (nonexistent) groups would help seize Kyiv on the first day, which is why Russia committed in such an odd way. So per the rumor, the Fifth service just fabricated all of this figuring that Russia would never do a full invasion of Ukraine, and when the orders came down to get them ready to act, they just kept pretending they existed because there was no way out.

    I don’t know if I buy it, but it lines up with some other information we’ve heard. What I don’t understand is that once the invasion started, it would have to be obvious that none of these groups existed, so why didn’t these people use their stolen money to flee the country? That’s what I don’t understand. When you run a scam, you don’t hang around until the victim realizes they were scammed, especially if that guy is known for murdering people.

  23. 23.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Dorothy A. Winsor:

    Just in case I don’t see you before you embark, have a glorious and safe trip, take lots of pictures for future OTRs, and gather lots of stories and adventures to inspire a dozen books. Bon voyage!

  25. 25.

    Ishiyama

    @Martin: There were a series of articles purporting to be from an FSB insider several weeks ago which had the story of the embezzled money . This latest word supposedly comes from an exiled oligarch. I wonder if this is just another route for the same black propaganda, or is it confirmation of the earlier source.

  27. 27.

    Hoppie

    Reminded of old 70’s joke:

    Soviet Realism plot:

    Boy meets girl.

    Boy meets tractor.

    Boy runs off with tractor.

    I guess we can update with: Boy and Girl and tractor run off with (fill in Russian military equipment here).

  28. 28.

    dmsilev

    Further adventures in ‘Russia, go fuck yourselves’:

    Russia warns U.S. to stop arming Ukraine

    The formal diplomatic note from Moscow, a copy of which was reviewed by The Washington Post, came as President Biden approved a dramatic expansion in the scope of weapons being provided to the government in Kyiv

    Russia this week sent a formal diplomatic note to the United States warning that U.S. and NATO shipments of the “most sensitive” weapons systems to Ukraine were “adding fuel” to the conflict there and could bring “unpredictable consequences.”

    The diplomatic démarche, a copy of which was reviewed by The Washington Post, came as President Biden approved a dramatic expansion in the scope of weapons being provided to Ukraine, an $800 million package including 155 mm Howitzers — a serious upgrade in long-range artillery to match Russian systems — coastal defense drones and armored vehicles, as well as additional portable anti-air and antitank weapons and millions of rounds of ammunition.

    The United States has also facilitated the shipment to Ukraine of long-range air defense systems, including Slovakia’s shipment of Russian-manufactured Soviet-era S-300 launchers on which Ukrainian forces have already been trained. In exchange, the administration announced last week, the United States is deploying a Patriot missile system to Slovakia and consulting with Slovakia on a long-term replacement.

  29. 29.

    Fake Irishman

    @Dorothy A. Winsor:

    I’d have a bit of caution about the Daily Mail’s reporting….

    still though reminds me of a line from Hunt for Red October when one Soviet character explains to another one that the admiral in charge of the submarine fleet died during his first KGB interrogation of a “cerebral hemorrhage”

    ”I trust it was a nine-millimeter hemorrhage comrade?”

    have a great European cruise!

  32. 32.

    Calouste

    @dmsilev: A lot of what the Russians are saying is bluff. Earlier I read that Russia threatened that if Sweden and Finland joined NATO, they would place nuclear weapons near the Baltic Sea. The reaction of (IIRC) the Lithuanian PM was “yeah, everyone knows they’re there already”.

  33. 33.

    Mike in NC

    We did a Baltic Sea cruise in 2014 that hit Copenhagen, Stockholm, Tallinn, and Helsinki (plus St Petersburg). None of the tour guides we met trusted Putin from attacking them. Sweden and Finland should go into NATO.

  34. 34.

    Kattails

    Beau of the Fifth Column just did a nice little youtube bit on this. “…built in 1979, commissioned in 1983 as the Slava, in 2000 refitted and renamed the Moskva, and then in 2022 it was again renamed The Snake Island Memorial Reef”…

    Possibly the first time in modern history that a flagship sunk by a country without an operational navy. Below the video a comment by a fellow named Ed Bangor, a former surface warfare officer in the US Navy, contains a very interesting set of back and forth replies.  He says that for a fire to take out a ship like that, the RN is so grossly incompetent that “they’re not a Navy, they’re a bunch of drunk morons on a fishing boat they rented for the weekend”.  Phew.

  35. 35.

    Another Scott

    ObOpenThread – we were recently talking about restarting Germany’s nuclear plants, problems with French nuclear plants being offline.

    Interesting graph. I wasn’t able to find the original at OurWorldInData:

    I'm not knee-jerk anti nuclear. But it's too slow to be deployed, not cost competitive with renewables, and it shows no sign of getting cheaper the more we build. pic.twitter.com/MhR6riWTS0

    — ? (@LoungeIguana) April 14, 2022

    (via dsquareddigest)

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  36. 36.

    terry chay

    @Another Scott: That graph is bullshit. Their data is price of MWh/time and acting like this is price of MWh with capacity. Also it’s acting like it is linear.

    That’s not to say the price of restarting a nuclear power plant is non-trivial. The solution is to not shut them down. Nuclear plants are actually cheap over time, but you can’t turn them off and on. They provide very cheap, consistent baseline energy, not more or less, nor variable with wind or sun, but still irrespective of demand. It’s been that way for half a century. If people understood that instead of politicized it, they would understand nuclear’s place in the energy equation and maybe we’d have had more than two nuclear power plant designs (well three, but General Atomic’s design never went into large scale production because exactly that. Westinghouse’s got sold to the French in the 90’s and GE’s pretty much ended with Three Mile Island (oh and the Soviet copy of GE’s caused Chernobyl)).

    The reason why their costs have increased with time is because people have been fear mongering and shitting on nuclear which has stalled out their production. This has made it more expensive/MWH. If you are producing less solar cells every year, they would have gotten more expensive also. The reality is, the world keeps spending more so the returns to scale and innovation are there. They will not be linear like that. Not everything magically gets better forever. That’s why we still quote things like Moore’s Law—because it’s so odd.

  37. 37.

    Ruckus ??

    @Kattails:

    It also depends on where and how the ship was hit as that might very well screw up any firefighting efforts. Any warship that takes a very bad hit can go from just fine to absolute disaster in a second. I served on a USN guided missile destroyer with a lot of weaponry and firepower. A hit in the right place would have done a dramatic amount of damage and one of those missiles does a lot of damage. It’s why current day versions of the ship I was on has that machine gun that shoots 3000 rounds a minute, it puts up a curtain of fire between the ship and a missile, hopefully blowing up the missile before it hits.

  38. 38.

    otmar

    I tried to adapt the Winds of Change lyrics…

    Follow the Moskva
    down beneath the waves
    listening to the songs of whales

    An early april night
    soldiers drowning, too
    listening to the songs of whales

    The world is closing in
    Did you ever think
    That Putin can be that stupid?

    (improvements are welcome)

  39. 39.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Ceci n est pas mon nym: Or is Putin just mad because they didn’t cut him in? Does he have any money that ISN’T embezzled?

    “If anyone’s caught taking graft and I don’t get my share, we line him up against a wall and Pop! goes the weasel.”

    -Rufus T. Firefly, President of Freedonia

  40. 40.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @dmsilev: If nothing else, losing a ship named “Moscow” has got to be deeply embarrassing to the Russians right about now.

    As I noted in a thread above, even Hitler (not known for his naval acumen) was smart enough to rename the heavy cruiser Deutschland (to Lützow) rather than risk the PR embarrassment of having it go down with its original name. Bова – дурак!

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