Pedophile Thanks Supreme Court Nominee Jackson Brown, Missing Nuclear Weapons?, Has Russia Lost More Troops in Ukraine than Afghanistan? (The Five for 03/29/22)
Hey, welcome to The Five.
Let’s dive into the news.
[one]
A month into the Russia/Ukraine war, Russia appears to have lost several top generals.
Ukraine's defence ministry says another Russian general, Lt Gen Yakov Rezantsev, was killed in a strike near the southern city of Kherson.
Rezantsev was the commander of Russia's 49th combined army.
A western official said he was the seventh general to die in Ukraine, and the second lieutenant general - the highest rank officer reportedly killed.
It is thought that low morale among Russian troops has forced senior officers closer to the front line.
In a conversation intercepted by the Ukrainian military, a Russian soldier complained that Rezantsev had claimed the war would be over within hours, just four days after it began.
Ukrainian media reported on Friday that the general was killed at the Chornobaivka airbase near Kherson, which Russia is using as a command post and has been attacked by Ukraine's military several times.
Another lieutenant general, Andrei Mordvichev, was reportedly killed by a Ukrainian strike on the same base.
Losing high ranking officials is just one of the problems plauging Russian military forces that are, according to first hand accounts, poorly equipped and often waiting for fresh supplies of food, fuel and ammo.
If the numbers are to be believed (and I’m not sure they are) Russia has already taken as many combat losses in a month of fighting in Ukraine as in 10 years occupying Afghanistan, according to CNN:
The official Soviet death toll during the Afghan War, which lasted more than nine years, was around 15,000 soldiers. It is therefore quite telling that the Russians may have already lost as many 15,000 soldiers in just one month in Ukraine, according to estimates given to CNN by senior NATO officials.
When the Soviet military departed Afghanistan in 1989, the countries and populations of Eastern Europe – then under varying degrees of the Soviet yoke – took note. If the feared Soviet army couldn’t win a war on its own borders against Afghan guerrilla forces, what did it say about its ability to control the fates of East Germany, Hungary and Poland?
The failure of the Soviet war in Afghanistan hammered a giant nail into the coffin of the Soviet empire. It’s not an accident the Berlin Wall fell just months later, opening up East Germany to the West.
So the question worth asking is…if Russia is defeated by their much smaller neighbor in war, what becomes of Russia?
What becomes of Putin?
[two]
The raw materials for a dirty bomb have gone missing from the Chernobyl site in the chaos of the Russia/Ukraine war, according to Anatolii Nosovskyi, director of the Institute for Safety Problems of Nuclear Power Plants (ISPNPP)
The Daily Wire reports:
In the chaos of the Russian advance, he told Science, looters raided a radiation monitoring lab in Chornobyl village—apparently making off with radioactive isotopes used to calibrate instruments and pieces of radioactive waste that could be mixed with conventional explosives to form a “dirty bomb” that would spread contamination over a wide area. ISPNPP has a separate lab in Chornobyl with even more dangerous materials: “powerful sources of gamma and neutron radiation” used to test devices, Nosovskyi says, as well as intensely radioactive samples of material leftover from the Unit Four meltdown. Nosovskyi has lost contact with the lab, he says, so “the fate of these sources is unknown to us.”
It’s entirely possible that a third party took these materials, to sell on the open market to a terrorist group or hostile nation.
The 2016 documentary Countdown to Zero tells a similar story of the Japanese Yakuza stealing plutonium from Russian military bases as the USSR collapsed, and selling the contraband on the open market.
Considering that Russia already has enough nukes to end life on planet earth…it’s perhaps more probable that a third party is in possession of this incredibly dangerous material.
[three]
In one of the most “I don’t think the effects of this will be what they were hoping for” moments on 2022, Wesley Hawkins, the man who Supreme Court nominee Judge Kentanji Brown Jackson gave a three month sentence to for child pornography charges…has come out and thanked her for his unusually short sentence via an interview with the Washington Post:
Perhaps most surprising, Hawkins said, was that he found himself feeling sympathy for the judge he had once been angry with for sending him to prison.
“I wasn’t very happy that she gave me three months, though after reflection when I was in jail, I was hearing from other people who said it was their first time arrested and they got five years, six years.
“I feel that she chose to take into consideration the fact that I was just getting started [in life] and she knew this was going to hold me back for years to come regardless,” he said, “so she didn’t really want to add on to that.”
Hawkins, a repeat offender, also thanked the Judge for sending him to a halfway house after he showed signs of re-offending:
Hawkins acknowledged that he had been in a “dark” place six years after his release from prison, having lost a job at a retail store. He did not dispute a probation petition — sealed in his case but described to The Post — that in 2019, he had searched for non-pornographic material and images of males 13- to 16-years-old, prompting Jackson to send him to the halfway house.
Judge Brown, who will be appointed (there aren’t enough votes to stop her confirmation) appears to show no remorse for how she handled the Wesley Hawkins sentencing:
[four]
In Kenya, COVID led to a new discovery in the elephant rescue world…baby elephants can thrive off of goat milk, harvested from local livestock.
For years, baby elephants lived off powdered formula — the same used for infant humans — at the Reteti Elephant Sanctuary in northern Kenya.
But when global supply chains were severely disrupted by the coronavirus, the sanctuary had to find a more dependable source of food for its calves, who had been either orphaned or abandoned.
Fortunately, the answer was right in their backyard.
The Reteti sanctuary — the first elephant orphanage in Africa to be owned and run by members of the local community — had already been thinking about using milk from local goats.
The pandemic provided the push it needed to try its experiment.
“It was really just kind of being brave enough to change, to move away from a formula that you've always used,” said Katie Rowe, who co-founded the sanctuary in 2016. “The pandemic did this to people across the world, where you suddenly re-evaluated everything that you do in your home, how you cook, how you buy your groceries and how you should be doing things much more locally. And for us, it was something that we'd always felt was really important: that we shouldn't be importing milk from the other side of the world.”
This is an interesting story…but it’s also a good reminder that most of the world exists outside of the current narrative of COVID, rampant US inflation and the Russia/Ukraine war.
Sure, those are huge stories shaping our world…but they do not shape the whole world.
[five]
And finally, new mayor Eric Adams is dropping the city’s vaccine mandadte…for pro athletes and entertainers (but not normal people).
An adamant Mayor Eric Adams on Thursday formally announced an executive order exempting New York City-based professional athletes and performers from the private sector COVID vaccine mandate while leaving it intact for the vast majority of employees, a highly controversial move he billed as one of economic necessity.
Declaring his a "tough" decision in the best interest of New York's economic recovery from the pandemic, Adams appeared to brace for the controversy that began to brew a day ago, upon news of his intent, and that has mounted since.
"I'm mayor of the city and I’m going to make some tough choices. People are not going to agree with some of them," Adams said. "I was not elected to follow. I was not elected to be fearful but to be fearless. I must move this city forward."
Whatever your opinions on vaccines are…this is absurd. The out-in-the-open policy to treat the elites as…almost a different species than everyday working people is disgusting.
Until the next one,
-sth