Drums of War

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“The engagement took place on 14 December when the drone activity was detected above the Al Tanf Coalition base in Syria,” said the MoD. “RAF Typhoons conducting routine patrols in the area were tasked to investigate.”

[…]

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It was an ISIS drone?

or is the Syrian air force “terrorists” now?

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Yeah, and how did their country end up underneath our airbase, anyway?

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Duh. Ramón Mercader used an ice pick.

(I was looking for something by Trotsky Icepick… and then this showed up in the search results.)

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And almost every Soviet writer and historian now generally accepts the view that it was Stalin himself, not Lavrenti Beria, who ordered Trotsky’s assassination. On Aug. 20, 1940, a Spanish Communist named Ramon Mercader smashed a mountain-climber’s ax into Trotsky’s skull in Coyoacan, a suburb of Mexico City. He died the next day.

It was a pick axe used for climbing glaciers, not an ice pick like that used by Walter Freeman

Sometimes, we must refresh our trivial knowledge.

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How did World War I start again?

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Ruben Gallego is obscure, Franz Ferdinand was not.

Perhaps Franz Ferdinand could be usefully compared to RFK, as both had been considered heir presumptives… But then, we didn’t get a world war out of that,

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Around here that would be Eispickel. Which can mean ‘ice pick’ or ‘ice axe’.
When I feed the Spanish piolet in the translator I use (Linguee) it gives me Eispickel and, as an (alledgedly less common) alternative meaning, Eisaxt.

There’s probably a ‘mangled in translation’ and/or ‘botched in transcription’ issue here, depending on which route the initial reports took from Mexico to the rest of the world. And once it’s reported one way it gets copied that way, and then it’s a fact…

(Not that it made much difference to Trotsky in the end, but to me an ice pick makes more sense as a weapon for an assassination than an ice axe. Easier to conceal, can be used like a stiletto. But then again having Trotsky killed was as much about sending a message as getting rid of him.)

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Great idea… sort of terrible execution… they need better rappers.

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victoria family portrait

Inbreeding.

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There have also been grim signs of things to come from the Russian government. A new national standard for “Urgent burial of corpses in peacetime and wartime” has been introduced by the government in recent months. It will come into force on Feb. 1, 2022, and specifies the burial in mass graves to be dug by bulldozers, disposing of as many as 1,000 bodies in a 24-hour time period. Bodies are to be placed “in four layers, either in bags, wooden coffins or zinc coffins, prepared in advance… and subsequently covered with dirt. Then the mass graves will be compacted with a bulldozer, filled with “a mineral binder” and equipped with “devices for the absorption and neutralization of radioactive, hazardous chemicals and biological agents formed during the decomposition of corpses.”

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Nationalists seeking to break away from a multi-ethnic empire, actually.

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Господин Президент, нельзя допускать разрыва шахты в шахте!

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If I have learned one thing from the Iraq quagmire it’s “When the USA accuses you of having WMDs you better actually have 'em!”

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pose-pray-greaaat

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2022 is full of promises.

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