Category: In The News

The Brutal Unspoken Mafia Prison Rules that Russia Lives By

https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/05/16/russia-prisons-wagner-group-ukraine-crime-culture/

The criminals that ran the black market during the Communist days, came to power during the chaos of the 1900s, during the collapse of the Soviet Union. 

In November 1996, to consolidate his power, Putin and his friends founded the Ozero Cooperative, which bonded together oligarchs and the  mafia families. Over the many years of the state within the state that was the gulag system, a bizarre caste system arose in the prisons. At the bottom of the cast where the so-called Roosters. Recruiting these Untouchables into the Ukraine “Special Operation” has upset this brutal hierarchy and troop morale.

The lowest caste, and the one that every prisoner fears degradation to, are the roosters, also known as the “offended,” the “pederasts,” or the “downcast.” That is a position to which it is extremely easy to fall down to, but one that you can never climb up from. They’re forced to do all the worst jobs—such as cleaning the cell’s latrine, washing everyone’s underwear—because no, your average Russian prison does not have any washing machines—and often serving as sexual slaves. They also get the worst sleeping spots in the cell, usually next to the latrine.

A rooster  is untouchable outside of sex. One is not allowed to share anything with a rooster except as a payment for services—not only is it taboo to touch them, but also anything that they have touched, as that instantly moves one to their caste. Their kitchenware is explicitly marked as such, for one, and whenever transferring cells, they’re supposed to publicly announce their suit status and move in with “their own” accordingly.

. Gay and transgender prisoners are automatically placed among the roosters, but so are those who foolishly admit to having given oral sex to a woman—an act that, as among the ancient Romans or the modern Italian mafia, is seen as fundamentally impure.

A rooster’s status is truly miserable. It’s driven many people to suicide and made people so miserable that they used to rebel and intentionally touch blatniye inmates as a last attempt of revenge—sure, they would be instantly killed by other inmates, but the prisoner who previously belonged to the higher caste would instantly be a rooster inside the prison system and out, and would never be able to move upwards in the hierarchy

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Russia’s Nukes Probably Don’t Work — Here’s Why

https://wesodonnell.medium.com/russias-nukes-probably-don-t-work-here-s-why-bd686dec8b6

Lack of Maintenance Like the Rest of their Equipment

6 min read

An unarmed Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile launches during an operational test at 1:13 a.m. Pacific Time, Oct. 2, 2019, at Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif. The test demonstrates the United States’ nuclear deterrent is robust, flexible, ready, and approximately tailored to deter twenty-first century threats and reassure our allies. (U.S. Air Force Photo by Staff Sgt. J.T. Armstrong) Public domain

When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, a curious thing happened: Putin’s modern, lethal fighting force turned out to be a broken-down, two-bit shadow of its former self.

There are many reasons for this, but the biggest seems to be unbridled corruption at a level that shook even the most hardened analysts in Western defense intelligence.

Particularly egregious was the poor maintenance on display with most, if not all, of Russia’s war machines.

Looking back now, with the benefit of time (and watching Russia flounder around in Eastern Ukraine for over a year), it’s easy to see how funds intended for operations and maintenance might have been diverted.

Hell, this story of a Russian army commander stealing engines from Putin’s prized T-90 tanks is a perfect example.

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Today’s Jury will vote to Convict

Across multiple national surveys sampling more than 12,000 people, we have found that a majority of Americans, more than 60 percent, consider false acquittals and false convictions to be equally bad outcomes. Most people are not Blackstonians. They are unwilling to err on the side of letting the guilty go free to avoid convicting the innocent. Indeed, a sizeable minority viewed false acquittals as worse than false convictions; this group is willing to convict multiple innocent persons to avoid letting one guilty person go free. You would not want those people on your jury if you were charged with a crime.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/05/american-juries-fail-blackstone-maxim.html?via=rss_socialflow_twitter

Who’s been showing up at our Southern border?

With title 52 expiring, and a flood of immigrants expected at the U.S. Southern border, it is interesting to see the composition of where they have been coming from. Most recently the big increase has been Venezuelans fleeing Maduro’s “workers Paradise”. That is why there is some talk of trying to have some kind of detente with him to try and slow the exodus.

Chinese Urban Renewal

Watch these buildings being blown up. Overbuilding and corruption brought them down during the orgy of construction before COVID hit. These buildings were destroyed because they were deemed unsafe for habitation, due to corners that were cut during construction. China is littered now with ghost cities. Instead of “build it and they will come”, this looks more like “build it to keep people employed” for “social harmony”. Now the real estate boom is turned into a bust, with the government having to take over failed construction companies.

Musk’s Missile Mistake

Everyone was cheering the Space X launch after it cleared the tower, because there hadn’t been an explosion thereby damaging the launch pad and delaying the next mission. Musk believes in move fast and learn from your failures.

His engineers wanted to install blast shields. He overruled them. This was the result

Even though there are Space X rockets waiting in the wings, they first have to rebuild the Launchpad, which is not a quick task. The power of those engines may have also thrown up debris into them from the disintegrating launch pad. You can see in this picture 8 of the engines not firing. This probably caused the tumbling when they tried to separate the first and second stage. At which point there was no choice but to blow up the mission- literally.

And now the FAA has put an indefinite hold on any more launches.

Plans are afoot to reinforce the launch pad with steel. Musk also agrees with a Chinses assessment that even with the failed engines, the rocket wouldn’t have lost control if the onboard software, which was supposed to use steering engines to compensate for the malfunctioning rockets hadn’t also failed. Read about it on the South China Post, which is owned by Jack Ma’s company.

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