Month: March 2022

Wrong Targets

Politics

As Putin’s little adventure continues apace, the retaliation against Russia grows, in various forms, both serious and silly.  The latter is exemplified by stuff like this:

EA is removing all Russia-linked teams from its wildly popular FIFA and NHL video game franchises.

Ouch.  That’ll get the Russkis out of Ukraine toot sweet, you betcha.  As will this:

FIFA and UEFA have suspended Russia’s national teams and clubs from international football until further notice due to the country’s invasion of Ukraine.  The move makes it likely that Russia will be excluded from this year’s World Cup and the women’s Euro 2020 tournament.

That’s going to hurt a little more, because the Russkis are football crazy.  Still, not much in terms of geopolitical leverage.  Then there’s this:

The Haas Formula One team has terminated Russian driver Nikita Mazepin’s contract “with immediate effect” following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.  The decision comes on the back of F1’s decision to terminate its contract with the Russian GP. That contract had been until 2025.  Haas also ended its sponsorship with Russian company Uralkali, owned by Mazepin’s father.

Now that’s interesting because the F1 cognoscenti  will note that the hapless Nikita was easily the worst F1 driver in years, only getting his seat because his Daddy owns Uralkali, Haas’s largest sponsor.

(As such, Haas may have killed two birds with one stone, so to speak.)

But they announced Mazepin’s termination before they pushed Uralkali away — which I have to admit, made me a tad uneasy.  Granted, Mazepin’s father is a crony of Putin, but it seemed a little like overkill to axe the driver — he wasn’t responsible for the Ukranian invasion, and if we’re going to toss every individual Russian out of their field of endeavor just for being Russian, that seems to me to be wrongheaded, as so many of these blanket actions so often are.

Which brings me to this injustice:

Soprano Anna Netrebko withdrew from her future engagements at the Metropolitan Opera rather than repudiate her support for Russian President Vladimir Putin, costing the company one of its top singers and best box-office draws.

Anna who?  This Anna, is who:

But that’s not the relevant part of this.  (As it happens, the 50-year-old Netrebko is not the svelte little thing she was at age 20, but then, who is?)

But all that aside, Anna Netrebko has one of the greatest soprano voices of the past century, and as she’s got older, it has only got better.  Forcing her to quit engagements simply because she “refused to repudiate her support for Russian President Vladimir Putin”  is clearly a bad thing.

Let’s be clear, here, and remember exactly who we’re dealing with:  regardless of her actual sympathies, if she were to come out and say, “This asshole Putin should quit invading Ukraine”, not only would her career end, but there is a good chance that she would be assassinated by the loathsome Unit 29155 for her opinions.

Think I’m exaggerating?  Try this, and this, and this.  Note that none of this took place in Russia:  nowhere in the world is safe when it comes to this criminality.

We should quit being childish about this — it’s not the first time, either;  remember “freedom fries”, FFS? — and while I have no issue with punishing teams or people actually representing Russia, let’s not take out the sins of the country on its innocent citizens, cursed simply by an accident of birth.

Oh hell;  Anna’s also one of the most beautiful women in the world, so why not indulge ourselves?

Dept. Of Righteous Shootings

Righteous Shootings

There are just not enough “alleged”s in this happy story, so I’ve added a few:

An alleged intruder was fatally shot Thursday morning in Houston, Texas, after entering a home and [allegedly] opening a bedroom door.   The [alleged] incident occurred around 1 a.m., ABC 13 reported.

Police indicated the homeowner was sleeping on the second floor when he [allegedly] heard glass break. The alleged intruder then entered the home, came upstairs, opened the bedroom door, and the homeowner shot him in the neck.

The alleged intruder fled the home and went to a neighbor’s house, telling them he had [allegedly] been shot and seeking medical help.

I can already hear your groans, because the paramedics arrived in the nick of time and saved the alleged scrote’s life, right?

Nazzo fast:

However, time ran out while he was at the neighbor’s house and the alleged intruder died.

He didn’t die, he just ran out of blood.

Needless to say, even though this allegedly happened in Houston, Our Hero is not facing any charges.

And had this happened anywhere else in Texas, there’s a good chance the neighbor would also have shot the bastard, dripping blood all over the Persian like that.

News Roundup

Bad News

…is brought to you by:


…and by golly, you’re going to wish you had a pipe going by the time this is all over.


…bringing to us a new (and foul) term:  Christian Woke.


…actually, we’re pissed off at the government’s response to Covid-19.


…warning:  that’s going to be a long read.


…which is a lot better than me — I ignored it completely.


…okay, so it’s not all bad news, especially if you follow the link to see the reaction.


…and the good news keeps on coming.  Still in Georgia:


…aw Hersh, not you too.


…people are still getting arrested for this?


…undoubtedly a Bad Thing:  unless it takes out Portland, of course, and then we can call it a tie.


…key word:  Wisconsin.  Trying to beat Ed Gein to the title, she was.  Damn.

And now:  INSIGNIFICA.

     

And speaking of Da Nooz, here’s the BBC’s own Katie Derham, who it must be said looks quite delectable for a chick broad woman in her early 50s:

 

…and that, as they say, is the news for today.

Counting Blessings

Mocking Furriners

The other day I was in the car and, tiring of my own thoughts, turned on the radio — a BIG mistake if ever there was one.  What a load of shit, never mind the channel, and for the umpteenth time I mourned the passing of Rush Limbaugh.

Still, could have been worse:  I could live in the Orkney Islands.  Courtesy of Mr. Ishmael comes this little diatribe:

The local, PBC Radio Morning Abo, it is unimaginably hateful to me – cod accents, stagey linguistic anachronism and that hissing, Presbyterian bigotry and racism, the moral compassing of the amoral Gordon Snot, that sort of snooty, son of the Manse preachiness – and the English on that show are even worse, they all sound like David and Ruth Archer, relentless, sinister bullies, determinedly earnest and sanctimonious, people Living the Quality of Life Dream, living in a hovel, with a rusty Land-Rover, vile children and a couple of sickly goats which they should be banned from keeping. They all go back South, these people, lacking the inner resources required for island life, vulnerable beyond the fortifications of the M25 and the M42. The Radio Orkney news is generally along the lines of There’s a big puddle on the road to Stromness; sheep are fetching X poonds at the mart; for the fourteenth year in succession, Mrs Annie Scragg has won the neeps’n’tatties pie-making competition at the Mucksville Women’s Guild; fairmers have expressed concern aboot the geese annoying the coos and eatin’ the seed and the weather is set to be sunny, windy, wintry, fine, warm, very cold with sleet and snow, calm with gale force winds.

I have felt and seen hypodermic needles injecting anaesthetic into my eyeballs and so I know of what I speak when I say I would rather stick pins in my eyes than listen to Radio Orkney.

The evening show is worse; they have music on it, local music. I saw it once, in a community hall, that Jimmy Shand Polka music; I thought, not for the first time, that I had wandered into a horror film; there was a skeletal old woman, must’ve been eighty, thumbing away, deftly, at a huge Fender Precision bass guitar, a wee fat man wrestling with one of those fucking awful Hohner piano-keyed accordions, not a concertina, a big, shiny fuck-off thing, the only appropriate setting for which is in an Austrian Nazi oom-pah band – quite how that is traditional to the Northern Isles I’m buggered if I know – and there was a weedy teenager, snapping a Polka beat from a tiny wee snare drum. It is a matter of taste, of course but I enjoy many, many types of music, from all over the world and have even heard some amazing world music right here and yet I couldn’t find a space in my mind for this stuff. I couldn’t move, I felt as though I had been turned to lead.

Good grief;  Jimmy Shand?  [no link, for humanitarian reasons]

Not even Mark Levin or Sean Whatsisname can cause such anguish.