The Legend of the Forty-Mile Convoy

40 mile convoy of what?
40 miles of supplies?
40 miles of armored vehicles and armored personnel carriers full of Chechen assassins?
Or is it just a traffic jam from hell that could be made worse if Ukrainian Migs dropped cluster munitions at the head and rear of the convoy?
Not sure.

The idea behind the threat of the 40 mile convoy was that Putin’s generals sent in the B-Team first to probe the Ukrainian defenses and was now bringing up his A Team t0 drop the armored hammer/sickle on the Ukrainians instead of the muddled clusterfuck that is going on right now.

@ManchuCandidate: I saw one suggestion that it was really a bunch of smaller convoys huddled together for warmth, which I haven’t seen confirmed, but fits my understanding of the situation.

Wasn’t there a “40 mile convoy” in Kuwait?

@jaycubed: Sounds vaguely familiar, but all I can find are many Kuwait convoy stories over twenty years, so who knows which one I’m fleetingly reminded of.

I stopped watching any cable news about 3 years ago for this very reason: most days, five minutes of news; 24 hours of endless yap. I don’t care if he is one of my people, Steve Kornaki needs to STFU. As do they all.

If you have a working computer you pretty much can’t escape what’s going on. Unfortunately. To my great surprise, I’ve recently discovered the reason for twitter to exist and have been following Josh Marshall’s excellent Ukraine feed.

I’m now reading the Stoics. It seems the time is right. Having found Seneca stimulating I’m about to crack Epictetus’ opus, Suck it up, Buttercup. Likely followed by his Get a Life, Princess! I also have Cicero’s essential How to Geezer in my queue. And also too, I don’t do motherfucking Netflix. So don’t ask me if I watch The Crown or I will get LIKE THAT. Pro tip: if you haven’t seen it do watch Diana. I had to watch (some of ) it because of a friend. It is the unintentionally funniest thing I’ve seen since Staying Alive.

@nojo:
I was referring to the convoy of Iraqi vehicles incinerated while abandoning Kuwait City loaded with loot.

@jaycubed: Ah. Much of my memories of those long years are a blur, starting with Scud Studs.

And, the cable-news convoy is no more.

“We believed there’d never be any consequences for buying all of these gas guzzlin’ SUVs!!!”

Oh gosh, it sure would be terrible if Pooty decided to release all the kompromat he has on Ex-Prezinazi AntiChrist and Congressional GOPnazis.

JK, they’re all crazy lying traitors, no kompromat required.

This satisfies my fascination with the American fascination. Not just the nature of the convoy — Surprise! Supplies! — but the consequences of it not reaching its destination. Those troops on the ground aren’t exactly stocked for a long haul.

https://twitter.com/tomiahonen/status/1502588098777079808?s=21

@Benedick: Same but my streak of non-visual news might go back as far as the last years of Hopey. Except for Al Jizz English when I was over in Kabulistan.

For years I’ve gotten by with listening to the prior evening’s News Hour but on podcast, and usually while I’m using a razor on my head and face. When I adopted Twitter back in the early 00’s I had great hopes for it as an aggregator for news on Sport, current events and pop music. It’s only sometime that for me, and I’m once again weaning myself off FB because, well, without FarmVille what’s the point?

Haven’t watched television news with any devotion since, well, John Chancellor, and I could barely look at even a front page for six months after quitting reporting. Sure, CNN for breaking stuff, but after I cut cable eight or ten years back, that went away.

I actually still like Twitter as a kind of digest, but that depends on whom you follow and what gets passed along. (And right now, following the Kyiv Independent and its defense reporter is invaluable to my understanding.)

And Facebook? For amusement only. I really don’t have anything to “share”, but I have fun there.