TheOldGuy @TheOldGuy@qoto.org
I am a Democrat who supports Ukraine in their battle against The Russian Z fascist invaders.
I am a 73 year old Covid hermit who
lives on 10 acres in a sparsely populated area of the Ozarks. I heat with wood that is leftover by the lumber industry. When cutting oak for lumber only the trunk is used.
The largest town is population 2992. The county is 13k people scattered over 713 square miles.
Joined Dec 2022
Couple more pictures of the 12 year old who will be running in the Boston Marathon
🇺🇦 President Volodymyr Zelenskyy gave a long interview for the telethon "Edyny Novyni". Briefly about the main thing:
• In the coming weeks, the Council will vote on the bill on mobilization. It will probably happen on April 11.
• Regarding Belarus, we do not yet see any plans, threats or capabilities to attack.
• At the moment, the Ukrainian troops do not have the ammunition to launch counter-offensive actions - they only have enough ammunition for defense.
• Ukraine has a certain stockpile of missiles for air defense, but with a high intensity of shelling, they may not be enough.
• Ukraine needs 25 Patriot systems with 6-8 batteries each for full protection.
• Russia plans to mobilize 300,000 troops by June 1.
• Ukraine must prepare a significant number of personnel and have a reserve among the military in order to thwart the enemy's counteroffensive.
• Currently, Kharkiv is not protected from air attacks, but it is protected by defensive lines: "Kharkiv is protected today. Not from heaven's point of view. As for our defense lines, Kharkiv is not in danger today."
• Ukraine is building three lines of fortifications for future protection against a possible Russian attack. In some areas, 92-98% of the work has been completed.
• Ukraine will receive 10% of the amount of F-16 fighter jets that is needed.
@ukrainejournal
Estonia found an opportunity to purchase another batch of ammunition for the Ukrainian army worth several billion euros.
According to Estonian Defense Minister Hanno Pevkur, Estonia has the opportunity to purchase projectiles and missiles worth two to three billion euros for the Ukrainian army. However, this will be possible if the Allies provide funds.
Taking into account the cost of the projectiles, we can be talking about approximately one million projectiles and "Grad" missiles.
Pevkur said that he had already talked about such a possibility at the meeting of "Ramstein", which took place on March 19. According to him, Estonia could get these ammunition mainly from non-European countries.
"Unfortunately, I cannot clarify. In many cases, the seller himself does not want this to be known. Since the orders include both 155 mm and 152 mm shells, Russia is also actively looking for suppliers worldwide through Belarus. There is kind of a race against time to see who can secure them first," he said.
He also explained that this idea of Estonia is separate from the initiative of the European Union to provide Ukraine with a million shells.
📷Estonian Defense Minister Hanno Pevkur in an interview with Postimes.
One of the best drone pilots of the AFU, who killed 400 occupiers and destroyed more than 60 units of military equipment.
The 25-year-old volunteer Oleksii from Kryvyi Rih, with the call sign "Dvizh," is one of the most effective UAV operators.
The serviceman of the CODE 9.2 unit of the 92nd Assault Brigade worked at a factory as an electric and gas welder before the war and had no experience operating drones. All he knows now is the knowledge and skills that came during the war.
In one day alone, his crew carried out 110 sorties against the enemy. Today, "Dvizh" is already a legend among pilots and promises to teach everyone interested in operator skills.
Glory to Ukrainian Hero!
Gerashchenko.
🇺🇦@ukraine_report 🇺🇦🔱
Joyce Vance should have been a federal judge, not the loose Cannon.
💭🦉 At the beginning of summer, Russia will advance on Donbas, they will move in the direction of Pokrovsk, — Budanov in an interview with ARD
The Russians will also advance in the Chasiv Yar direction
🟠 The head of the MDI also emphasized that Ukraine now needs "additional volumes of artillery systems and ammunition"
💬 Commenting on the joint purchase of 800,000 artillery shells for AFU by EU countries at the initiative of the Czech Republic, he noted that so far he "does not feel" their presence at the front
🟠 The situation at the front is difficult, but controlled;
🟠 Budanov believes that a Ukrainian offensive this year is possible;
🟠 "The Crimean bridge is heavily guarded, but we are working on this topic";
🟠 We support the Pope's initiative to exchange "all for all", but the Russian side shows no interest in exchanging prisoners.
How fascism works
An article about modern day fascism.
Fascism seen as technique, as a method of politics, use of rhetoric, a way of running for power. Of course, that’s connected to fascist ideology, because fascist ideology centers on power. And in this it applies not only on ruZZia, but equally on Trump and MAGA.
The key aspect is that fascist politics is about identifying enemies, appealing to the in-group (usually the majority group), and smashing truth and replacing it with power.
If you think about fascism as a sliding scale, ordinary conservative politics is going to find itself somewhere on that scale — which is not to say that it’s fascist at all, any more than ordinary Democratic politics is communist. But just as extreme versions of communism suppress liberty on behalf of radical equality, so too do extreme versions of right-wing politics, namely fascism, suppress liberty in favor of tradition and dominance and power.
In the past, fascist politics would focus on the dominant cultural group. The goal is to make them feel like victims, to make them feel like they’ve lost something and that the thing they’ve lost has been taken from them by a specific enemy, usually some minority out-group or some opposing nation.
This is why fascism flourishes in moments of great anxiety, because you can connect that anxiety with fake loss. The story is typically that a once-great society has been destroyed by liberalism or feminism or cultural Marxism or whatever, and you make the dominant group feel angry and resentful about the loss of their status and power. Almost every manifestation of fascism mirrors this general narrative.
It requires the destruction of truth. Truth is required to act freely. Freedom requires knowledge, and in order to act freely in the world, you need to know what the world is and know what you’re doing. You only know what you’re doing if you have access to the truth. So freedom requires truth, and so to smash freedom you must smash truth. Nobody thinks of the citizens of North Korea as free, because their actions are controlled by lies.
Fascists are never content to merely lie; they must transform their lie into a new reality, and they must persuade people to believe in the unreality they’ve created, to disassociate them from reality.
You get them to sign on to this fantasy version of reality, usually a nationalist narrative about the decline of the country and the need for a strong leader to return it to greatness, and from then on their anchor isn’t the world around them — it’s the leader.
Propaganda and mass media are therefore essential. Fascists are always telling a story about a glorious past that’s been lost, and they tap into this nostalgia of the people. So when you fight back against fascism, you’ve got one hand tied behind your back, because the truth is messy and complex and the mythical story is always clear and compelling and entertaining. It’s hard to undercut that with facts.
This applies to Putin in Russia, Erdoğan in Turkey, Orbán in Hungary, and also Trump in USA. There the blame is as much on the Republican Party as it is on Trump. So far, they’ve chosen loyalty to Trump over loyalty to rule of law.
Read the full article
@freerussia_report
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky gave a new interview to Ukrainian media.
Kyiv Post compiled the main statements of the Ukrainian leader:
▪️Kharkiv is currently well protected from a Russian ground invasion, and talks of Russia's plans to capture the city are deliberate misinformation.
▪️Russia intends to mobilise 300,000 people by June 1, but may not be able to do so in time. Zelensky also did not rule out that Russia would mobilise even more people later.
▪️The Ukrainian Parliament will vote on a mobilization law in the coming weeks.
▪️This year, Ukraine will receive only 10% of the F-16s promised by its partners.
▪️Ukraine is willing to accept assistance from the United States on credit.
▪️At present, there are no threats from Belarus, but resistance will be provided in any case.
▪️Currently, Ukraine has a stockpile of air defense systems, but in a month, there may not be enough if the intensity of shelling is high.
▪️Ukraine is developing its own weapons against guided aerial bombs.
▪️Ukraine has ammunition for defense, but there is not enough for a counterattack.
▪️Ukraine has built several routes to bypass the blockade on the border with Poland.
📷: President’s Office
Russian dam bursts forcing thousands to evacuate in flood-hit southern region.
As of Saturday morning, the level of the Ural river was nearly double the level the dam was designed to handle, according to regional authorities.
The dam failure occurred because the hydraulic structure was not properly maintained, and a criminal investigation has been opened, the regional prosecutor’s office said.
Earlier, an emergency was declared across the entire Orenburg region after levels in the Ural River rose dangerously because of melting ice.
The dam was protecting the city from the waters of the Ural river. By Saturday morning, the water had reached several districts of the city, flooding nearly 2,400 residential buildings, TASS reported.
“A state of emergency is in effect in Orenburg,” the head of the Orenburg region Sergey Salmin said in a Telegram post Saturday.
“This situation leaves us no choice; overnight the [river] level may reach a critical level. I demand that everyone immediately leave their houses in the flood zone.”
Those who refuse to leave the danger zone voluntarily will be evacuated forcibly, with the participation of police officers,” he added.
Orsk, a city of 230,000, lies near Russia’s border with Kazakhstan.
Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev described the flooding as one of Kazakhstan’s largest natural disasters in 80 years, according to Reuters.
🇺🇦@ukraine_report 🇺🇦🔱 Liz
"A tank on battlefield means everything will hit it." Hero of Ukraine Yevhen Palchenko - hromadske
"The first shot – and you exhale, fear disappears, emotions disappear, thoughts on the battlefield are turned off, adrenaline appears. You see the enemy, the target, where you need to open fire. I say: "Sheva, shoot!", – Yevhen Palchenko, a tanker from the 59th brigade named after Yakov Handziuk, tells about his first feelings on the battlefield.
Yevgeny is 25. At the age of 23, he was awarded the Hero of Ukraine for the fact that at the beginning of a full-scale invasion, he led a brigade out of the encirclement near Oleshky in the Kherson region.
"When I first sat in a tank – this power, these horsepower, when it all growls, this noise, and these shots, – Yevhen rolls his eyes, talking about working on a tank. — A tank on the battlefield means that everything will try to hit it: from small arms to the largest caliber. If we fought near the sea, too, so the ship's guns would hit us too."
Yevhen's story is in the hromadske video.
Tonight, Russian enemy aircraft dropped a guided aerial bomb on a residential area of Kupyansk.
As a result of the impact, the 4-story residential building was destroyed. A woman died under the rubble in an apartment on the fourth floor of a high-rise building.
In order to remove the body of the deceased, units of the State Emergency Service consisting of two departments and 10 rescuers, as well as a crane of a local utility company, were involved.
At 03:30 emergency and rescue operations were completed.
There is a good chance he made it up to top Joe Biden.
Good morning Resisters everywhere. It's 59⁰, but rain clouds overhead.
I am a Democrat who supports Ukraine in their battle against The Russian Z fascist invaders.
I am a 73 year old Covid hermit who
lives on 10 acres in a sparsely populated area of the Ozarks. I heat with wood that is leftover by the lumber industry. When cutting oak for lumber only the trunk is used.
The largest town is population 2992. The county is 13k people scattered over 713 square miles.
Joined Dec 2022
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