Russia Invades Ukraine

[Volkonski]

[Volkonski]

[Volkonski]

[Volkonski]

[Phoenix520]

The inhumanity of this is monstrous.

I almost got rude yesterday at the Huntington Gardens Plant Sale. A large, garishly made up woman, speaking Russian, was blocking the sidewalk as we all made our way through the gardens to the sale. She was gesturing widely and knocked someone in the head with her pocketbook, didn’t even acknowledge it.

A doscent saw this and made her way over. I didn’t hear what she said but she said a lot of things. It got heated, the woman wasn’t happy. I think she left.

I know I shouldn’t but I tar all Russians with the stinking Putin brush. I’ve never my one I personally trusted. Liked, yes.

Off Topic

Two blueberry bushes and three gorgeous dark magenta salvias.

[sugar magnolia]

Assuming the publisher is still in business a year from now.

[Volkonski]

[Volkonski]

Translated from Russian by Google
The Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation announced the plans of Kyiv to stage a staging in Ukraine using weapons of mass destruction

[Volkonski]

[Gregg]

The inhumanity of this is monstrous.

I almost got rude yesterday at the Huntington Gardens Plant Sale. A large, garishly made up woman, speaking Russian, was blocking the sidewalk as we all made our way through the gardens to the sale. She was gesturing widely and knocked someone in the head with her pocketbook, didn’t even acknowledge it.

A doscent saw this and made her way over. I didn’t hear what she said but she said a lot of things. It got heated, the woman wasn’t happy. I think she left.

I know I shouldn’t but I tar all Russians with the stinking Putin brush. I’ve never my one I personally trusted. Liked, yes.

Off Topic

Two blueberry bushes and three gorgeous dark magenta salvias.

Don't let yourself do that. A few years ago, Father Graham, the then President of Xavier University, called and asked me to help a Russian exchange student who had to say the least, oversold her English skills to whomever sent her here to study. He knew that I had taught ESL before and siad he couldn't pay me but I owed Father Hoff a favor. (for reasons still unkown, Father Hoff had taken a thing for me when I was a student and invited me to lunch in his office twice and to a basketball game once)

Wonderful girl, sweetest disposition, eager to learn, promised to pay me back someday by helping someone else who needed it when she could give.

I got a set of tickets in the President's private box to a basketball game, and a note on the table in the suite

"Thanks so much, You're even with Father Hoff.

Enjoy the game. . Now you owe me a favor.

Mike Graham SJ

Jesuits... Ya gotta admit they have skills.

[Notaperson]

Not clear it's been confirmed, but it appears two more Russian generals may have gotten killed today.

[tek]

Ron DeSantis is getting excited about this idea.

[qbawl]

Not clear it's been confirmed, but it appears two more Russian generals may have gotten killed today.

That makes what 10 or 11 killed? Assuming at least some ruski generals were not killed, why are there so damn many of them in theater and so vulnerable? Is it just an extremely efficient method for the ruski high command to accomplish a RIF of redundant command structure?

[tek]

I think someone above posted something about 'that's how the Russian military works"

It is very top-down, so very senior people need to be in-theater because nobody does anything unless they are told to from above.

But I personally have no idea.

[Suranis]

There was a theory going around that the first thing they did was destroy Ukrainian mobile phone towers to block Ukrainian communications. But they they realized they had FUBARED their own comms, as they also used 3&4G communications, so the generals had to move up to the front lines to start issuing orders. Don't know how true that is though.

The truth seems to be that Russian radios are just junk and don't have the range for Generals to sit back and give orders behind the lines.

[Chilidog]

a long tweet thread on artillery

[Suranis]

A Ukrainian left wing commentator has had it with Western Left Wingers supporting Putin or using Russian inspired rhetoric. Thread

[Kriselda Gray]

I almost got rude yesterday at the Huntington Gardens Plant Sale. A large, garishly made up woman, speaking Russian, was blocking the sidewalk as we all made our way through the gardens to the sale. She was gesturing widely and knocked someone in the head with her pocketbook, didn’t even acknowledge it.

I don't know what languages you speak, so pardon me if this is out of line, but are you sure she was Russian? Many of the Slavic languages look and sound similar to Russian but are different, including Ukrainian and, I believe, Belorussian, among others.


Enjoy your new plants!!

[Gregg]

Not clear it's been confirmed, but it appears two more Russian generals may have gotten killed today.

That makes what 10 or 11 killed? Assuming at least some ruski generals were not killed, why are there so damn many of them in theater and so vulnerable? Is it just an extremely efficient method for the ruski high command to accomplish a RIF of redundant command structure?

Their command structure is very weak and requires much more hands on leadership. Even so, they're not putting enough leadership close enough and the fact that they're getting killed faster than black teenagers with expired tags in Texas is evidence of it. Kind of a chicken-egg problem that will take a generation to really fix.

[Phoenix520]

I don't know what languages you speak, so pardon me if this is out of line, but are you sure she was Russian? Many of the Slavic languages look and sound similar to Russian but are different, including Ukrainian and, I believe, Belorussian, among others.


Enjoy your new plants!!

Kris, I speak a few Romance languages but not Russian or Slavic. You’ve got me dead to rights, I made an assumption based on my prejudice.

It’s a long-held, deep-seated prejudice going back decades, and is from personal experience with a few families.

[MN-Skeptic]

https://www.russiantutoring.com/post/wh ... ow-russian

Russian belongs to the East Slavic branch of the Slavic subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages. If you speak Russian, it will be easier for you to understand other Slavic languages, which include Ukrainian, Belorussian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Bulgarian, Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, and Slovene.

Ukrainian and Belarusian are the closest languages, as together with Russian they form the East Slavic group of languages. These three languages have an 86% lexical similarity; that is, they share 86% of the same words.

If you can speak Russian fluently, you will be able to understand 77% of Polish words, while Czech, Slovak, Bulgarian, and Slovene have a 74% similarity to Russian in terms of vocabulary, which decreases to 71% for Serbian.

My husband grew up speaking Czech in a small town in Iowa. He once told me that Russian was pretty similar to Czech. My dad, a small town doctor in the '50s and '60s, made house calls in rural Wisconsin and learned certain Polish terms in order to communicate with the outlying farmers. He shared those words with my sweetie who could understand them. The word for pain, for example, was almost identical in Czech and Polish.

Edited to add - It looks like the Russian word for pain is similar. In Czech, it sounds like bolie.

[pipistrelle]

If you can read French, you can almost parse Spanish and Italian somewhat passably.

[jcolvin2]

https://www.russiantutoring.com/post/wh ... ow-russian

My husband grew up speaking Czech in a small town in Iowa. He once told me that Russian was pretty similar to Czech. My dad, a small town doctor in the '50s and '60s, made house calls in rural Wisconsin and learned certain Polish terms in order to communicate with the outlying farmers. He shared those words with my sweetie who could understand them. The word for pain, for example, was almost identical in Czech and Polish.

Edited to add - It looks like the Russian word for pain is similar. In Czech, it sounds like bolie.

Czech, Slovak and Polish are part of the Western Slavic language group. My wife lived in Slovakia for a year or two, and went to Poland at one point to see a U2 show. She says that conventional wisdom there was that Czechs and Slovaks did a passable job understanding Polish, but the Poles seemed to have more trouble understanding Czech or Slovak. I'm not sure if this was a Polish joke or whether there might be other explanations (e.g. Czechia and Slovakia being much smaller countries population-wise and having to interact somewhat more with people who do not speak their language).

[MN-Skeptic]

I figure if you hear an east European language being spoken here in the U.S., look first to see which group settled in that area. In the area in Wisconsin where I grew up there were Norwegians, Germans, and Polish folks. Where my husband grew up in NE Iowa, there were many people with Czech ancestors along with a minority of Germans.

[AndyinPA]

Off Topic

And then there's Hungarian, which sits off on its own branch. (Closest to Finnish.)