Noon Thursday here in California’s Central Valley — another grand day ahead of the heat to soon come scorching this flat, anvil-like area of the state that despite being called the ‘breadbasket of the world,’ gets hotter than shit around these parts in just a way-few short weeks.
How farming thrives in such conditions creates a water drain during an intense drought.
Anyway, Ukraine is still awash in misery and death as it nears 10 PM tonight there. In receiving any kudos to waging war, Vlad Putin has way-failed, and the screw-up has reverberated. CIA director Bill Burns in a briefing today before the Senate intelligence committee today said China’s President Xi Jinping is way-concerned about the Russian invasion, beyond “his own intelligence doesn’t appear to have told him what was going to happen,” but the worldwide blowback (via the Guardian‘s live blog about an hour ago): ‘President Xi is probably a little bit unsettled as he watches the way in which President Putin has driven Americans and Europeans more closely together and strengthened the transatlantic alliance in ways that would have been a little bit hard to imagine before the invasion began.‘
Xi is afraid of the bad reputation the invasion created — the Russkies have incompetently stalled out:
Putin's War – The Ukraine Daily Briefing Map for March 10th. The 2nd map shows the furthest extent of Russian forces into Ukraine.
See the reply to this tweet for a timelapse video of Russian movements over the first 2 weeks of the invasion. pic.twitter.com/LKjzRiiTWi
— Nathan Ruser (@Nrg8000) March 10, 2022
Dumb, inexperienced shit like this:
Very poor tactics displayed by this Russian armored force so close to Kyiv. They're well within range of Ukrainian artillery in Kyiv, they're on an obvious avenue of approach, and they still decided to bunch up like this, leaving them more vulnerable to indirect fire. pic.twitter.com/3ShhyF5OsE
— Rob Lee (@RALee85) March 10, 2022
Another Putin blowback — per TechCrunch this morning:
Google is starting to introduce a rapid Air Raid Alerts system for Android phones in Ukraine, the company announced on Thursday.
The new feature is the tech giant’s latest update on its response to Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine.“Tragically, millions of people in Ukraine now rely on air strike alerts to try to get to safety. At the request, and with the help, of the government of Ukraine, we’ve started rolling out a rapid Air Raid Alerts system for Android phones in Ukraine,” said Kent Walker, the president of global affairs at Google, in a blog post about the announcement.
Xi feels shit in the face.
Yet here we are once again…
(Illustration out front: Salvador Dali’s ‘Soft Watch at the Moment of First Explosion,’ found here).