@randtntx
We don't have them up here, but my parents grew up, and my grandparents lived, where red ants were common. I remember vividly my first encounter with them, just playing on the back streets in Baldwin Park, down in Los Angeles and suddenly this line of ants ran up my arm and began their attack. Gads!

Be careful about planting that tree

I'm planting a Mexican Buckeye tree this morning. The pot is infested with fire ants so it will be a little touch and go. Very little touch and lots of go.

Thanks for the OT Sima. I leave all the depressing reading to the evening, so will check back then. I do try and stay informed no matter how pissy it makes me.

@NYCVG
all the news and false news and one sided and no recognition of what happened in Ukraine in the 2010's and no understanding of the history of that area at all and the complete blindness to Nazism and... bleh. Drives me nuts and makes me so sad.

Thanks for these two snippets of information from 'the other side'. We need this. A lot.

That's how first-class journalism works. https://t.co/vKhRYlFxqb

— Pepe Escobar (@RealPepeEscobar) March 17, 2022

Reason Number seven, eight 99? on why Russia had to act. No water in Crimea.

__________________________________________________________________

"We hate #Ukraine! Thanks a lot to the Russian army" - refugees from #Mariupol tell how Ukrainian army refused to open green corridors from the city and shot at civilians.
Eye-opening news report. pic.twitter.com/xCTrBFWgxG

— White Swan (@SDyorin) March 17, 2022

Ukrainian Army lost this war weeks ago. They are burning down as much as they can as they are forced out. The hospital massacre in Mariupol? Ukrainians herded civilians into this hospital to be massacred. Remind you of anything from WWII?

@snoopydawg
As usual, you are right on point. Right before he died, my grandfather, the one on the supply ship outside Okinawa, tried to explain a bit of what he saw and did. He didn't see a lot of people die, he wasn't in combat. He and his fellow shipmates had to fight against kamikazis, and watch ships nearby go down, and help rescue the dying, the drowning. He got about 10 words into it, his old tired eyes filled with tears, he choked and stopped talking. 60 years later, and he couldn't talk about it.

“For about twenty years after the war, I couldn’t look at any film on World War Two. It brought back memories that I didn’t want to keep around. I hated to see how they glorified war. In all those films, people get blown up with their clothes and fall gracefully to the ground. You don’t see anybody being blown apart. You don’t see arms and legs and mutilated bodies. You see only an antiseptic, clean, neat way to die gloriously. I hate it when they say ‘He gave his life for his country.’ Nobody gives their lives for anything. We steal the lives of these kids. We take it away from them. They don’t die for the honor and glory of their country. We kill them.”

The closest Americans got to seeing the true horrors of war was during the opening scenes of Saving Private Ryan. Lots of American veterans walked out of theaters everywhere because it was too realistic. Many people said that it was hard to watch too. Before then we had John Wayne being the hero that saved one battle after another along with his other cinema sidekicks in scenes that had been sanitized from too much gore. Plus Americans were taught that it was they who saved the world in the Great War and not Russia. But the one thing that we didn’t learn is that without our help Hitler would probably not have been able to do what he did. It was American companies that supplied his hardware for the war and gave him so much other assistance. And once again we have America pushing another Great War and there is no doubt about it that we are in one.

The closest Americans got to seeing the gory of war was during the years of M.A.S.H where Hawkeye bitched daily about how asinine it was for him to work so hard saving soldier’s lives only to send them back into battle.

NATO's mouthpiece had the balls to say this:

Stoltenberg targeted China on Tuesday ahead of a NATO defense ministers’ emergency meeting. He suggested Beijing should “join the rest of the world in condemning strongly the brutal invasion of Ukraine by Russia” and said that any kind of support for Moscow now would help it “to continue to wage war which is causing death, suffering and an enormous amount of destruction.”

“China has an obligation as a member of the UN Security Council to actually support and uphold international law,” he added.

China responded with this message:

China has dismissed calls from NATO for it not to support Russia in any way on Thursday, reminding the bloc it was its US-led forces which bombed its embassy in Belgrade during the 1999 attack on Yugoslavia.

“Chinese people can fully relate to the pains and sufferings of other countries because we will never forget who had bombed our embassy in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. We need no lecture on justice from the abuser of international law,” a spokesman for the Beijing’s diplomatic mission to the EU said, responding to remarks made by NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.

Branding NATO a “Cold War remnant,” the diplomat suggested the organization needed to do some self-reflection to examine if it was contributing to world peace and stability, with its expansion and military operations.

It hasn’t been China that has been flooding Ukraine with weapons and sending people over there to train Ukrainians how to use them. No that would be NATO pushed by America doing that.

Yesterday I read that Biden is going to send drones to Ukraine. They are named Switchblade drones and I see that shitlibs are fully behind Biden doing it. They have gone from being anti war to being bloodthirsty &$#@*$.

The 2nd part of the opening of the linked article:

“Optimistic publicity and euphemism had rendered their experience so falsely that it would never be readily communicable. They knew that in its representation to the laity what was happening to them was systematically sanitized and Norman Rockwellized, not to mention Disneyfied. … The real war was tragic and ironic. … America has not yet understood what the Second World War was like and thus has been unable to use such understanding to reinterpret and re-define the national reality and to arrive at something like public maturity.”

I think that there is a good chance that this time Americans might just get to see how utterly horrible war is when it finally comes to America. Most Americans have no idea how ghastly war really is, but most Russians do because they have never glorified it. They are taught its true history and this time Russia decided to fight them over there so they don’t have to fight them here.

@CB @CB
Volunteer to be a test subject in a cage with a little nuke that goes off near him/her? So science can learn, again, what happens during a nuke bomb?

'deterrent' simultaneously against both China and Russia to stop their rise and putting an end to American global hegemony.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FOa90vNqKs]

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIpTE-aHEZ0]