When you need the job done right:

Send in the women.

    

What will become of Ukraine?

Baltimore Speakers Series update

 

This was an amazing talk. He is The Real Deal.

 

Recent video interview:

 

 

On the Wiki.

 

See my prior topical posts of UKR-Russia relevance. 

 

Also, see my post on season opener Dr. Anthony Fauci. 

 

ERRATA

 

   
ON DECK:
"NO KINGS DAY, OCT 18TH"

 

17 Baltimore area rally locations

 

 

GOP HOUSE SPEAKER JOHNSON

Scurrilous.

Day 1,096

of Russia’s 3-day conquest of Ukraine.

   

The New Whirled Order

 

 Yeah. Below, a back-to-reality break:

 

The 16th NATO Supreme Allied Commander, James Stavridis attended the US Naval Academy at Annapolis, and spent 37 years in the Navy, rising to the rank of 4-star Admiral. He oversaw NATO operations in Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, the Balkans, and counter piracy off the coast of Africa. He led the US Southern Command in Miami, charged with military operations through Latin America.

He served as senior military assistant to the Secretary of the Navy and the Secretary of Defense. He led the Navy’s premier operational think tank for innovation, Deep Blue, immediately after the 9/11 attacks. He also commanded a Destroyer Squadron and a Carrier Strike Group, both in combat. He was the longest serving Combatant Commander in recent US history.

Highly decorated, his awards include the Battenberg Cup for commanding the top ship in the Atlantic Fleet and the Navy League John Paul Jones Award for Inspirational leadership. Following his military career, he served as Dean of his alma mater The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, where he earned his PhD. In 2016, he was vetted for Vice President by Secretary Hillary Clinton, and subsequently invited to discuss a cabinet position with President Donald Trump.

A best-selling author, Stavridis has published twelve books on leadership, character, risk, the oceans, maritime affairs, and Latin America, and hundreds of articles in leading journals. His most recent books are To Risk It All: Nine Conflicts and The Crucible of Decision, 2034: A Novel of the Next World War, a New York Times bestseller, and 2054: A Novel.

Stavridis is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist and Chief International Security Analyst for NBC News. He is Partner and Vice Chair, Global Affairs of The Carlyle Group and Chair of the Board of Trustees, Rockefeller Foundation.

 Admiral Stavridis spoke to us last night at the latest Baltimore Speakers Series event.. He was fabulous, a real patriot, accomplished military scholar, and brilliant, humorous, self-deprecating mind.

And then there's this ketamine-addled DOGE dipshit, appearing at CPAC.

 

 

He's cutting federal spending, get it?

 

 

ON A DEADLY SERIOUS NOTE

 

In this book, I aim to define freedom. The task begins with rescuing the word from overuse and abuse. I worry that, in my own country, the United States, we speak of freedom without considering what it is. Americans often have in mind the absence of something: occupation, oppression, or even government. An individual is free, we think, when the government is out of the way. Negative freedom is our common sense.

To be sure, it is tempting to think of liberty as us against the world, which the notion of negative freedom allows us to do. If the barriers are the only problem, then all must be right with us. That makes us feel good. We think that we would be free if not for a world outside that does us wrong. But is the removal of something in the world really enough to liberate us? Is it not as important, perhaps even more important, to add things?

If we want to be free, we will have to affirm, not just deny. Sometimes we will have to destroy, but more often we will need to create. Most often we will need to adapt both the world and ourselves, on the basis of what we know and value. We need structures, just the right ones, moral as well as political. Virtue is an inseparable part of freedom.

“Stone Walls do not a Prison make / Nor Iron bars a Cage”—said the poet. Sometimes they do, and sometimes they don’t. Oppression is not just obstruction but the human intention behind it. In Ukraine’s Donetsk, an abandoned factory became an art lab; under Russian occupation, the same building became a torture facility. A school basement, as in Yahidne, can be a concentration camp.

Early Nazi concentration camps, for that matter, were in bars, hotels, and castles. The first permanent one, Dachau, was in an abandoned factory. Auschwitz had been a Polish military base meant to defend people from a German attack. Kozelsk, a Soviet POW camp where Polish officers were held before their execution, had been a monastery—the one where Fyodor Dostoevsky, in The Brothers Karamazov, set the dialogue with the famous question: If God is dead, is everything permitted?

No larger force makes us free, nor does the absence of such a larger force. Nature gives us a chance to be free, nothing less, nothing more. We are told that we are “born free”: untrue. We are born squalling, attached to an umbilical cord, covered in a woman’s blood. Whether we become free depends upon the actions of others, upon the structures that enable those actions, upon the values that enliven those structures—and only then upon a flicker of spontaneity and the courage of our own choices.

The structures that hinder or enable are physical and moral. It matters how we speak and think about freedom. Liberty begins with de-occupying our minds from the wrong ideas. And there are right and wrong ideas. In a world of relativism and cowardice, freedom is the absolute among absolutes, the value of values. This is not because freedom is the one good thing to which all others must bow. It is because freedom is the condition in which all the good things can flow within us and among us.

Nor is it because freedom is a vacuum left by a dead God or an empty world. Freedom is not an absence but a presence, a life in which we choose multiple commitments and realize combinations of them in the world. Virtues are real, as real as the starry heavens; when we are free, we learn them, exhibit them, bring them to life. Over time, our choices among virtues define us as people of will and individuality.

When we assume that freedom is negative, the absence of this or that, we presume that removing a barrier is all that we have to do to be free. To this way of thinking, freedom is the default condition of the universe, brought to us by some larger force when we clear the way. This is naïve.

Americans are told that we were given freedom by our Founding Fathers, our national character, or our capitalist economy. None of this is true. Freedom cannot be given. It is not an inheritance. We call America a “free country,” but no country is free. Noting a difference between the rhetoric of the oppressors and the oppressed, the dissident Eritrean poet Y. F. Mebrahtu reports that “they talk about the country, we talk about the people.” Only people can be free. If we believe something else makes us free, we never learn what we must do. The moment you believe that freedom is given, it is gone.

We Americans tend to think that freedom is a matter of things being cleared away, and that capitalism does that work for us. It is a trap to believe in this or any other external source of freedom. If we associate freedom with outside forces, and someone tells us that the outside world delivers a threat, we sacrifice liberty for safety. This makes sense to us, because in our hearts we were already unfree. We believe that we can trade freedom for security. This is a fatal mistake.

Freedom and security work together. The preamble of the Constitution instructs that “the blessings of liberty” are to be pursued alongside “the general welfare” and “the common defense.” We must have liberty and safety. For people to be free, they must feel secure, especially as children. They must have a chance to know one another and the world. Then, as they become free people, they decide what risks to take, and for what reasons.

When Russia invaded Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelens’kyi did not tell his people that they needed to trade liberty for safety. He told them that he was staying in the country. After my visit to Yahidne, I spoke to him in his office in Kyiv, behind the sandbags. He called de-occupation a chance to restore both security and freedom. He said that the “deprivation of freedom was insecurity,” and that “insecurity was the deprivation of freedom.”…

Snyder, Timothy. On Freedom (pp. xii-xv). (Function). Kindle Edition.

I read a ton of Timothy Snyder. Highly recommended.

_________

  

Day 1,000

of Vladimir Putin’s 3-day Conquest of  Ukraine.

 

 Day +14 of Donald Trump's now-"successful" 9 yr effort to conquer the United States.

     

 

UPDATE, NOV 21ST

60 days til Inauguration Day...

No AG for you, son.

_________

  

Alexei Navalny

       “Alexey Navalny spent at least a decade standing up to the Kremlin when it seemed impossible. He was jailed and released. He was poisoned, and survived. He was warned to stay away from Russia and didn’t. He was arrested in front of dozens of cameras, with millions of people watching. In prison, he was defiant and consistently funny. For three years, his jailers put him in solitary confinement, cut off his access to and arrested his lawyers, piled on sentence after sentence, sent him all the way across the world’s largest country to serve out his time in the Arctic, and still, when he appeared on video in court, he laughed at his jailers. Year after year, he faced down the might of one of the world’s cruellest states and the vengeance of one of the world’s cruellest men. His promise was that he would outlive them and lead what he called the Beautiful Russia of the Future. On Friday, they killed him. He was forty-seven years old…”—Masha Gessen, The New Yorker

I can’t claim that I’m surprised at his murder.

 

Good luck getting his body back to his family.

 

UPDATE

__________

 

Whither Russia?

Good luck finding accurate information on this past weekend's developments.

  

 

If don't don't have Google Maps, install / launch it, zoom out to the entire globe, spin it around to view the breadth of the Eurasian continent (above).

 

RUSSIA

 

Russia spans 11 time zones, comprising 6.6 million square miles of terrain within its borders, nearly twice that of the United States (@ 3.5 million sq mi). Also, Russia, at 143 million population, is roughly 44% our our 331 million people. It has the most sparse national average population density per sq mi. Nearly 13,000 miles of land border, 24,000 miles of coastline.

 

The Russian GDP is smaller than that of Italy.

And, it is an autocratic / oligarchic / "mafia" state that is Number One in the arsenals of nuclear weapons. It has now spent the weekend parrying an internal armed rebellion in the wake of prolonged difficulties pertaining to its invasion of Ukraine.

Were the Putin government fall to a mutinous civil war / coup, it's anybody's guess at this point who might rise to secure the political and national defense reins.Who would control those nukes? How would they defend their huge landmass national territory and its abundant natural resources?

This stuff is not funny.

 

Wagner Group Mercenaries commander Prigozhin may not be smiling for smartphone selfies for long in the wake of his quickly stillborn turnaround attack on Putin and his Kremlin regime. Late word is that he's exiling to Belarus. Interesting week upcoming.

 

ANNE APPLEBAUM

...Democratic politicians spend a lot of time thinking about how to engage people and persuade them to vote. But a certain kind of autocrat, of whom Putin is the outstanding example, seeks to convince people of the opposite: not to participate, not to care, and not to follow politics at all. The propaganda used in Putin’s Russia has been designed in part for this purpose. The constant provision of absurd, conflicting explanations and ridiculous lies—the famous “firehose of falsehoods”— encourages many people to believe that there is no truth at all. The result is widespread cynicism. If you don’t know what’s true, after all, then there isn’t anything you can do about it. Protest is pointless. Engagement is useless.

But the side effect of apathy was on display yesterday as well. For if no one cares about anything, that means they don’t care about their supreme leader, his ideology, or his war. Russians haven’t flocked to sign up to fight in Ukraine. They haven’t rallied around the troops in Ukraine or held emotive ceremonies marking either their successes or their deaths. Of course they haven’t organized to oppose the war, but they haven’t organized to support it either.

Because they are afraid, or because they don’t know of any alternative, or because they think it’s what they are supposed to say, they tell pollsters that they support Putin. And yet, nobody tried to stop the Wagner Group in Rostov-on-Don, and hardly anybody blocked the Wagner convoy on its way to Moscow. The security services melted away, made no move and no comment...

SPECULATIVE UPDATE

“You come at the king, you best not miss,” said Omar, the legendary outlaw in the equally legendary series The Wire. Maybe Yevgeny Prigozhin didn’t watch The Wire. Maybe he should have.

Like the gangsters Omar made a habit of robbing, Vladimir Putin runs an empire built on fear. The certainty of violent retaliation plays, in systems like Russia, the functional role that law plays in the West. It’s the glue that holds the whole thing together, the basic principle at its core. In autocracy you do what you do because you fear the man above you, who does what he does because he fears the man above him, and on and on in an unbroken chain to Vladimir Putin’s office.

This form of personalism is the one element of continuity in Russia’s history, dating back to the days of the tsars. In a country that never quite got the knack for the rule of law, the top spot in the chain of terror passed seamlessly from tsar to general secretary to president without ever being quite reformed. Laws exist, to be sure, in a system like this, but their role is ornamental at best, instrumental at worst. As one Latin American caudillo put it to describe very much the same system of government: “to my friends: everything! to my enemies: the law!”

This is how things in Russia work—or, well, “work.” Things remain together, just, but only so long as everyone fears Putin most. And that’s why last weekend’s bizarre mini-crisis in Russia has destabilized the Putin system as consequentially as it has.

For one fleeting moment, just one mad-cap afternoon, Vladimir Putin was not the man Russians feared most. On Friday, following months of tensions among the Russian military leadership, Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner mercenary group fighting in Ukraine, announced an audacious march on Moscow. The next day his forces filed through the southern city of Rostov-on-Don and allegedly made it within 120 miles of the capital.

The aura of menace built so carefully over so long crumbled in plain view of the entire world as rumors swirled of a panicked Putin hopping on a plane leaving Moscow. In a system built on fear, that right there is the very definition of a constitutional crisis. 

But Prigozhin went for the king, and he missed. Worse, he never took a shot at all. In a matter of hours, the Wagner Group had withdrawn amid reports of a deal being brokered allowing Prigozhin to flee to Belarus.

Where does that leave Russia? Well, in the primate dominance dance that passes for elite politics in Russia, it leaves the entire power structure destabilized. In a state that relies on the leader’s menace for its stability, rebuilding stability means rebuilding that sense of menace…

 _________ 

One year on:

Russia's 3-day conquest of Ukraine.

 

It was gonna be a cakewalk, with Zelenskyy quickly arrested, exiled, or dead, Putin's tank columns rolling boldly through KyIv in no time, euphoric Ukrainians lining the streets to throw flowers at their liberators.

 

As noted foreign policy analyst Mike Tyson observes:

"Ev'rybody got a plan, 'til he get hit."

NY TIMES UPDATE

“A walk in the park.”

That was the assurance skeptical members of the Russian military said they were given by superiors as it appeared increasingly clear that President Vladimir V. Putin truly did mean to wage an unprovoked war on neighboring Ukraine.

And it seemed to make sense.

Ukraine was a vastly outgunned nation led by the unlikeliest of presidents, a former comedian elected just a few years before. Russia was a major military power, if not the global force it was in the days of the Soviet Union.

And so when the first planes raced across the border followed by ground troops, it was widely assumed that it would be mere days before the Russian tricolor was hoisted over Kyiv, the capital.

That was a year ago. Now, no one is talking about a walk in the park. They speak of slogs and slaughter. Of a Kremlin “special military operation” that metastasized into the biggest ground war in Europe since World War II. Of Russian casualties of around 200,000 killed or wounded, by some Western estimates."...

Been a very sad year.

How and When the War in Ukraine Will End
Forecasting a conclusion to an unpredictable conflict
By Uri Friedman

Sometimes the best way to understand what’s possible is to ask impossible questions.

One year ago, Russia launched a war that many never expected it to wage and assumed it would quickly win against a cowed Ukraine and its allies. How and when will the conflict end? For a war that has defied expectations, those questions might seem impossible to answer. Yet I recently posed them to several top historians, political scientists, geopolitical forecasters, and former officials—because only in imagining potential futures can we understand the rough bounds of the possible, and our own agency in influencing the outcome we want.

The main takeaways from the responses I received? Prepare for the possibility of a long, shape-shifting conflict, perhaps lasting years, even a decade or more. Watch how the rest of the world regards the Kremlin’s imperial ambitions. Expect any negotiated settlement to be fragile and reliant on third-party intervention. And don’t anticipate a dramatic finish, such as a Russian nuclear detonation in Ukraine or the overthrow of Vladimir Putin in Russia. Notably, in a reversal of perceptions a year ago, some experts could envision a decisive Ukrainian victory against Russia, but none forecast a decisive Russian win against Ukraine…

 

"The war in Ukraine is the final shovel of dirt on the grave of any optimism about the world order that was born with the fall of Soviet Communism. Now we are faced with the long grind of defeating Moscow’s armies and eventually rebuilding a better world." —Tom Nichols

__________

 

Presidents' Day 2023

February 20th, 2023. Kyiv, Ukraine

__________

 

"RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA..." Interesting Twitter thread

Click

1. The person who led the relevant section, Charles McGonigal, has just been charged with taking money from the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. Follow this thread to see just how this connects to the victory of Trump, the Russian war in Ukraine, and U.S. national security. 1/20
   
   
2. The reason I was thinking about Trump & Putin in 2016 was a pattern. Russia had sought to control Ukraine, using social media, money, & a pliable head of state. Russia backed Trump the way that it had backed Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, in the hopes of soft control 2/20
   
   
3. Trump & Yanukovych were similar figures: interested in money, & in power to make or shield money. And therefore vulnerable partners for Putin. They also shared a political advisor: Paul Manafort. He worked for Yanukovych from 2005-2015, taking over Trump's campaign in 2016. 3/20
   
   
4. You might remember Manafort's ties to Russia from 2016. He (and Jared Kushner, and Donald Trump, Jr.) met with Russians in June 2016 in Trump Tower as part of, as the broker of the meeting called it, "the Russian government's support for Trump" (#RoadToUnfreedom, p. 237). 4/20
   
   
5.  Manafort had to resign as Trump's campaign manager in August 2016 when news broke that he had received $12.7 million in cash from Yanukovych. But these details are just minor elements of Manafort's dependence on Russia. (#RoadToUnfreedom, p. 235). 5/20
   
   
6. Manafort worked for Deripaska, the same Russian oligarch to whom McGonigal is linked, between 2006 and 2009. Manafort's assignment was to soften up the U.S for Russian influence. He promised "a model that can greatly benefit the Putin government." (#RoadToUnfreedom, p. 234). 6/20
   
   
7. While Manafort worked for Trump in 2016, though, Manafort's dependence on Russia was deeper. He owed Deripaska money, not a position one would want to be in. Manafort offered Deripaska "private briefings" on the campaign. He was hoping "to get whole." (#RoadToUnfreedom, 234) 7/20
   
   
8. Reconsider how the FBI treated the Trump-Putin connection in 2016. Trump and other Republicans screamed that the FBI had overreached. In retrospect, it seems the exact opposite took place. The issue of Russian influence was framed in a way convenient for Russia and Trump. 8/20
   
   
9. The FBI investigation, Crossfire Hurricane, focused on the narrow issue of personal connections between the Trump campaign and Russians. It missed Russia's cyber attacks and the social media campaign, which, according to Kathleen Hall Jamieson, won the election for Trump. 9/20
   
   
10. Once the issue of Russian soft control was framed narrowly as personal contact, Obama missed the big picture, and Trump had an easy defense. Trump knew that Russia was working for him, but the standard of guilt was placed so high that he could defend himself. 10/20
    
    
11. It is entirely inconceivable that McGonigal was unaware of Russia's 2016 cyber influence campaign on behalf of Trump. Even I was aware of it, and I had no expertise. It became one of the subjects of my book #RoadtoUnfreedom. 11/20
    
    
12. The FBI did investigate cyber later, and came to some correct conclusions. But this was after the election, and missed the Russian influence operations entirely. That was an obvious counterintelligence issue. Why did the FBI take so long, and miss the point? 12/20
    
    
13. I had no personal connection to this, but will just repeat what informed people said at the time: this sort of thing was supposed to go through the FBI counter-intelligence section in New York, where tips went to die. That is where McGonigal was in charge. 13/20
    
    
14. The cyber element is what McGonigal should have been making everyone aware of in 2016. In 2016, McGonigal was chief of the FBI's Cyber-Counterintelligence Coordination Section. That October, he was put in charge of the Counterintelligence Division of the FBI's NY office. 14/20
    
    
15. We need to understand why the FBI failed in 2016 to address the essence of an ongoing Russian influence operation. The character of that operation suggests that it would have been the responsibility of an FBI section whose head is now accused of taking Russian money. 15/20
    
    
16. Right after the McGonigal story broke, Kevin McCarthy ejected Adam Schiff from the House intelligence committee. Schiff is expert on Russian influence operations. It exhibits carelessness about national security to exclude him. It is downright suspicious to exclude him now. 16/20
    
    
17. Back in June 2016, Kevin McCarthy expressed his suspicion that Donald Trump was under Putin's influence. He and other Republican members concluded that the risk of an embarrassment to their party was more important than American security. #RoadToUnfreedom, p. 255. 17/20
    
    
18. The Russian influence operation to get Trump elected was real. It serves no one to pretend otherwise. We are still learning about it. Denying that it happened makes the United States vulnerable to ongoing Russian operations. 18/20
    
    
19. I remember a certain frivolity from 2016. Trump was a curiosity. Russia was irrelevant. Nothing to take seriously. Then Trump was elected, blocked weapon sales to Ukraine, and tried to stage a coup. Now Ukrainians are dying every day in the defining conflict of our time. 19/20
    
    
20. The McGonigal question goes even beyond these issues. He had authority in the most sensitive possible investigations within U.S. intelligence. Sorting this out will require a concern for the United States that goes beyond party loyalty. 20/20.

I've read two of his books.

 

Serious scholar. 

 

Below, I just downloaded another of his books and have begun reading.

 

The year 2010 was a time of reflection. A financial crisis two years before had eliminated much of the world’s wealth, and a halting recovery was favoring the rich. An African American was president of the United States. The great adventure of Europe in the 2000s, the enlargement of the European Union to the east, seemed complete. A decade into the twenty-first century, two decades away from the end of communism in Europe, seven decades after the beginning of the Second World War, 2010 seemed like a year for reckonings.

I was working on one that year with a historian in his time of dying. I admired Tony Judt most for his history of Europe, Postwar, published in 2005. It recounted the improbable success of the European Union in assembling imperial fragments into the world’s largest economy and most important zone of democracy. The book had concluded with a meditation on the memory of the Holocaust of the Jews of Europe. In the twenty-first century, he suggested, procedures and money would not be enough: political decency would require a history of horror.

In 2008, Tony had fallen ill with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a degenerative neurological disorder. He was certain to die, trapped in a body that would not serve his mind. After Tony lost the use of his hands, we began recording conversations on themes from the twentieth century. We were both worried, as we spoke in 2009, by the American assumptions that capitalism was unalterable and democracy inevitable. Tony had written of the irresponsible intellectuals who aided totalitarianism in the twentieth century. He was now concerned about a new irresponsibility in the twenty-first: a total rejection of ideas that flattened discussion, disabled policy, and normalized inequality…

Snyder, Timothy. The Road to Unfreedom (p. 2). Crown. Kindle Edition.

UPDATE

 

Read his Substack piece.

 

We are on the edge of a spy scandal with major implications for how we understand the Trump administration, our national security, and ourselves.

On 23 January, we learned that a former FBI special agent, Charles McGonigal, was arrested on charges involving taking money to serve foreign interests.  One accusation is that in 2017 he took $225,000 from a foreign actor while in charge of counterintelligence at the FBI's New York office.  Another charge is that McGonigal took money from Oleg Deripaska, a sanctioned Russian oligarch, after McGonigal’s 2018 retirement from the FBI.  Deripaska, a hugely wealthy metals tycoon close to the Kremlin, "Putin's favorite industrialist," was a figure in a Russian influence operation that McGonigal had investigated in 2016.  Deripaska has been under American sanctions since 2018.  Deripaska is also the former employer, and the creditor, of Trump's 2016 campaign manager, Paul Manafort.

The reporting on this so far seems to miss the larger implications. One of them is that Trump’s historical position looks far cloudier. In 2016, Trump's campaign manager (Manafort) was a former employee of a Russian oligarch (Deripaska), and owed money to that same Russian oligarch.  And the FBI special agent (McGonigal) who was charged with investigating the Trump campaign's Russian connections then went to work (according to the indictment) for that very same Russian oligarch (Deripaska).  This is obviously very bad for Trump personally.  But it is also very bad for FBI New York, for the FBI generally, and for the United States of America…

This bears ongoing close scrutiny.

 

JOE CONASON

…Before he moved on to other positions at FBI headquarters, McGonigal's career had begun in New York, where he worked closely with James Kallstrom — the right-wing ideologue who headed the New York office for decades. A bosom buddy of Giuliani and Trump, Kallstrom is suspected of leading the pressure campaign that induced Comey to reopen the Clinton investigation. The explicit threat of leaks by agents and former agents like Kallstrom, who reportedly hated Clinton, spurred Comey's disastrous decision and his public announcement, which again violated department policy against election interference.


Damning as those facts may seem, they only get us so far. There is much more to learn before we can understand the full story of 2016. The scrupulously nonpartisan presidential historian Michael Beschloss asked this week whether McGonigal's indictment will lead us closer to the truth. Will the prosecution of McGonigal reveal the details of his relationship with Deripaska, whom he had once investigated before becoming his corrupt stooge? Will Comey provide a full and honest accounting of what happened in the New York FBI office before the election? Will the New York Times examine — and disclose — how that misleading story about Trump and Russia appeared on its front page? Who briefed the Times for that bogus story?


With Trump seeking to return to the White House, the answers to those questions do not merely reckon with the past but are critical to democracy's future. The malign conspirators who first brought that would-be tyrant to power, both foreign and domestic, are still at large

HORRIFIC OFF-TOPIC ERRATUM

 

Speechless.

From The Atlantic:

The first video only begins as an officer pulls up behind Nichols’s car and he and other officers demand, with weapons drawn, that Nichols get out of the car. “Damn, I didn’t do anything,” Nichols says as they drag him from the car and pepper-spray him. But in the scrum, the officers also spray themselves, and Nichols somehow breaks free and runs away on foot. After giving chase, two officers mill around, pouring water in their eyes and catching their breath. The radio barks that an officer has found Nichols some distance away. “I hope they stomp his ass,” one cop says.

He got his wish. The next three videos, two from body cams and one from SkyCop, don’t capture the moment when officers catch up with Nichols, but the surveillance camera shows several officers beating him on a suburban corner. He doesn’t appear to be resisting them, or even physically able to do so; he looks like a rag doll. They shout for him to do this and that, but Nichols, being yanked in every direction by the officers, could hardly have complied if he wanted to. They stomp and kick him as he repeatedly calls for his mother…

Will this stuff ever end?

 __________

 

Day 295

of Putin's 3-day invasion and conquest of Ukraine

I watched this in its entirety last night on Netflix. Please do likewise.

When Putin invaded on Feb 24th, I was sure President Zelenskyy

would be exiled, captured, or killed right away. 295 days later, he survives.

I am glad to be wrong, every day that goes by.

One brave man, leading a fearless nation in their fight against barbarity.

__________

 

Is Putin gonna go there?

 And, if he does, what happens then?
 

__________

 

3 months of war,

with no clear end in sight.

 

Like so many people, I assumed and feared that Ukraine would be overrun by Putin's military in a matter of days, with President Zelenskyy quickly exiled, captured, or killed. Boy, were we all wrong. "Cometh the hour, cometh the man" indeed.

 

Month four of war now commences. The multiplicative adverse effects increasingly reverberate around the world.

"From a purely geopolitical point of view, this war matters enormously. Should Vladimir Putin pull victory from his initial catastrophes, we can expect a riven Europe, which would disable the uneasy alliance that won the Cold War and gave the world more than half a century of prosperity after World War II. A Russian victory would encourage China to eye the possibility of conquering Taiwan and imposing its hegemony in East Asia. And it would lead countries around the world to arm themselves with nuclear weapons, because they would know that, in the final analysis, they are alone. And lonely, fearful countries with nuclear weapons may very well use them."—Eliot A. Cohen

per CNN:

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine may have marked the start of “a third world war,” and Russian President Vladimir Putin must be defeated “as soon as possible” if the world wants to preserve civilization.

That was the stark message that Hungarian-born billionaire and philanthropist George Soros delivered on Tuesday to attendees at the 2022 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

“Even when the fighting stops, as it eventually must, the situation will never revert” to where it was before, warned the 91-year-old Soros.

“Other issues that concern all of humanity – fighting pandemics and climate change, avoiding nuclear war, maintaining global institutions – have had to take a back seat to that struggle. That’s why I say civilization may not survive.”

Meanwhile, in my country, our maudlin, n-dimensionally fractious domestic political shitshow lurches on incoherently—likewise with no clear resolution(s) in sight.

 

Arizona GOP "Stop-The-Steal" gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake shows off the portrait she says will hang over her desk once she's elected.

 

Is it too early to start drinking yet? 

 

EXIGENT PRIORITIES?

 

Not making much progress sorting through this stuff of late. The Parkinson's ain't helpin' matters.

 

ERRATUM: FILE UNDER "MALIGN TECHNOLOGIES"

 

 

I have never understood this infatuation. to wit:

Highly recommend the videos of "CoffeeZilla."

 

BREAKING

Speechless.

UPDATE: The death toll has now risen to 21.

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LET US PREY

…Mitch McConnell, the Senate Minority Leader—who once said, following a school shooting in his home state of Kentucky, “I don’t think at the federal level there’s much that we can do other than appropriate funds” for school safety officers and counselling—tweeted that he was “horrified and heartbroken” by the tragedy at Robb Elementary School. Ted Cruz, the junior senator for Texas—who once ran a campaign ad that boasted, “After Sandy Hook, Ted Cruz stopped Obama’s push for new gun-control laws”—tweeted that he and his wife were “fervently lifting up in prayer the children and families in the horrific shooting.” Governor Greg Abbott—who last year signed seven pieces of gun-rights legislation into law, including one that permitted Texans to carry handguns without a license and another exempting the state from future federal gun restrictions—said that he and his wife “mourn this horrific loss and we urge all Texans to come together to show our unwavering support to all who are suffering.”

Politicians like these are routinely criticized for their hypocrisy and empty gestures—their “thoughts and prayers.” But, if only for the sake of rhetorical hygiene, we should go a step further. Republicans, as we know, get what they want. It is their best feature. They have vacuumed up the state legislatures, gerrymandered much of the country, stacked the Supreme Court and the federal judgeships, turned back the clock on L.G.B.T.Q. rights, paralyzed entire school districts with engineered panics over critical race theory and “grooming,” ended (or so it seems) reproductive rights as a constitutionally guaranteed freedom, and blocked all attempts at gun-control legislation. If the leaders of this political movement, which in Texas managed to ban most abortions and criminalize health care for trans kids in the space of a school year, took real offense to murdered children, they would never simply accept their deaths as the unfortunate cost of honoring the Founding Fathers’ right to take up muskets against hypothetical government tyranny. They would act. If America were not afraid to know itself, we could more readily accept that gun-rights advocates are enthralled with violent sorrow. This is the America they envisaged. It is what they worked so hard for. Their thoughts and prayers have been answered.—Jessica Winter

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