Yet he still sees only what he wants to see.
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Happened hours ago…I hope the people were in shelters
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Because military leaders do not like telling truth to megalomaniac power. He asked if it was all ok and they said yes, because to tell him the truth would have risked a career, a life, a family.
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This was also what happened with Nicholas II during WWI. That dim-witted rube took the yes-men so seriously that he took command of the entire military for a while. No-one who wants to keep their head tells the autocrat anything else except what he wants to hear.
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Terrified to say no men.
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Need a bitten tongue emoji… as in… going to need stitches…
It’s not so much the “on/off” switch as having lines of credit available and backers for the credit (inevitably the government) for those to mitigate the damage. That’s a lot of work… hard to get done on “banker’s hours” if you get my meaning.
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That’s true. Disabling SWIFT codes also implies preparations by individual member banks for the consequences of significant transactions to and from those banks being indefinitely delayed or frozen. But again, this has been discussed for weeks if not months, so no sympathy for the “who could have predicted this?” banking geniuses.
In any case (crossposting):
On the political front, I should add that even a scumbag like Orban has chosen to side against his fellow fascist Putin.
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I’m trying to find the BoingBoing post, but IIRC, the guy did a pretty good job of making his own super laser, and it was fairly stable. But yeah, the government would find a way to rack up the costs.
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Could you tone down the war fanboy LARPing a little, please? Every post of yours in this thread has been a just-shy-of-gleeful tactical analysis or nerding out on the hardware of death machines.
This is thousands of peoples’ lives ending. Mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, best friends, all ended because of one megalomaniac who would be dead already if there was a god.
This is not a rousing session of Squad Leader or Call of Duty.
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@smulder is pretty spot on about the size and thermal requirements. The trick is getting enough energy at an absorbable wavelength for a long enough time to destroy the missile casing. This doesn’t even get into the difficulty of detecting the missile, tracking, aiming, and beam pre-distortion.
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It seems less like it’s un-spinnable than un-controllable. Ukraine is too close to home. Many Russian nationals reside in Ukraine, many Ukrainians reside in Russia. The Russian people seem to view Ukraine as friends and neighbors.
Ukrainian residents, including Russian nationals are apparently sending accurate information and video pretty constantly to Russians via Telegram and other messaging aps. That same stuff is being fed right to international media, and out onto social media.
The international community was never going to buy the excuse or the propaganda. It might have provided a fig leaf for Russia’s allies, but the overall response has made that untenable.
That’s sort of the aspect that’s un-spinnable. Fundamentally he invaded a NATO and EU applicant, fundamentally there’s still heavy Russian military action on NATO’s border. Fundamentally he ignored and violated a peace deal he and Russia signed up for.
Much of the rest of the world were always going to react this way, especially NATO. And his chosen justifications are so divorced from reality even China has found it hard to maintain the fig leaf.
I believe the mayor also said a bit later the building was empty/evacuated and no one was hurt.
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Poor Tucker has lost his hero.
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If Putin loses power over this invasion it would only be just for his most prominent arse-licker in the U.S. media to get taken down with him.
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More Russians bravely protesting the autocrat’s war of choice, including celebrities and the children of some oligarchs.
All this indicates that his true public support is limited to Russia’s Know-Nothing 27% (as is usually the case for any fascist regime).
If, as we all hope, Ukraine survives this it’s going to join both the EU and NATO immediately. That in turn will mean the end of Putin, should he somehow survive the military debacle.
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