Russia's new hybrid mechanized warfare. Putin's "Mad Max" Infantry.

SurvivalBlog presents another edition of The Survivalist’s Odds ‘n Sods. This column is a collection of news bits and pieces that are relevant to the modern survivalist and prepper from JWR. Our goal is to educate our readers, to help them to recognize emerging threats, and to be better prepared for both disasters and negative societal trends. You can’t mitigate a risk if you haven’t first identified a risk. In today’s column, we look at Russia’s new hybrid mechanized warfare.

Putin’s “Mad Max” Infantry

In the UK Daily Mail: Putin’s “Mad Max” Infantry. (The screenshot above is courtesy of Kanal 13 Television.) The article begins:

“Haunting footage has emerged showing Russian troops advancing through thick fog in a convoy of wrecked cars, many missing doors and windows, in scenes likened to Mad Max.

The video, shared by the Kyiv Post, shows soldiers clinging to battered vehicles and motorbikes as they roll down a debris-strewn road. A broken drone lies by the roadside as the column disappears into the mist.

The clip surfaced as Moscow’s forces claimed new gains near the Ukrainian city of Kupiansk, where Russian troops say they have seized a string of railway stations and an oil depot on the city’s eastern edge.

A commander using the call sign Hunter said units from the 1486th Motorised Rifle Regiment had pushed deep into the city and taken control of stops along the railway to Kupiansk Vuzlovyi, around four miles south of the centre.”

Manipulated Chatbot Propaganda

From the UK Telegraph website: The cottage industry quietly manipulating chatbots’ replies.

China’s New Unmanned Bomber

Reader H.L. sent us this: Why China’s new unmanned bomber poses threat to U.S. homeland. JWR’s Comment: Gee, I wonder where the plane got that spiffy radar-eluding profile? It looks vaguely familiar.

Fury: An AI-Driven Unmanned Fighter Jet

Video from 60 Minutes on the new YFQ-44A: Anduril’s unmanned jet “Fury” makes first flight.

Arctic Frost Investigation Draws National Attention

The politically-motivated FBI Arctic Frost scandal has been characterized as far greater in scope than Watergate scandal: Grassley Oversight of Arctic Frost Yields Ongoing Results and Draws National Attention.

The Great Feminization

Tom Christianson mentioned an insightful essay by Helen Andrews: The Great Feminization. Here is a fair use quote:

“Cancel culture is simply what women do whenever there are enough of them in a given organization or field. That is the Great Feminization thesis, which the same author later elaborated upon at book length: Everything you think of as “wokeness” is simply an epiphenomenon of demographic feminization.

The explanatory power of this simple thesis was incredible. It really did unlock the secrets of the era we are living in. Wokeness is not a new ideology, an outgrowth of Marxism, or a result of post-Obama disillusionment. It is simply feminine patterns of behavior applied to institutions where women were few in number until recently. How did I not see it before?

Possibly because, like most people, I think of feminization as something that happened in the past before I was born. When we think about women in the legal profession, for example, we think of the first woman to attend law school (1869), the first woman to argue a case before the Supreme Court (1880), or the first female Supreme Court Justice (1981).

A much more important tipping point is when law schools became majority female, which occurred in 2016, or when law firm associates became majority female, which occurred in 2023. When Sandra Day O’Connor was appointed to the high court, only 5 percent of judges were female. Today women are 33 percent of the judges in America and 63 percent of the judges appointed by President Joe Biden.

The same trajectory can be seen in many professions: a pioneering generation of women in the 1960s and ’70s; increasing female representation through the 1980s and ’90s; and gender parity finally arriving, at least in the younger cohorts, in the 2010s or 2020s. In 1974, only 10 percent of New York Times reporters were female. The New York Times staff became majority female in 2018 and today the female share is 55 percent.

Medical schools became majority female in 2019. Women became a majority of the college-educated workforce nationwide in 2019. Women became a majority of college instructors in 2023. Women are not yet a majority of the managers in America but they might be soon, as they are now 46 percent. So the timing fits. Wokeness arose around the same time that many important institutions tipped demographically from majority male to majority female.”