…so…let me get this straight…because I know I missed a lot…hell, I haven’t even read all the things you lot said last week…so…behind on the homework…& it’s christmas…in case you hadn’t noticed…so…this might be light on the links &/or block quotes in places on account of some of that stuff I’d have to go look up & time is a factor?

A consensus is emerging: Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Where is the action? [Guardian]

…unless you’re in camp it-doesn’t-count-if-israel-does-it-&-if-you-say-it-does-you’re-an-antisemite-never-mind-the-jews-who-are-saying-it-they-don’t-have-the-votes-to-stop-it…I guess…or you need to stay friends with those guys…even the one on trial

As Netanyahu begins 5th day of testimony, prosecutors reassert confidence in charges [Times of Israel]

…but…you know…countries…& really rich people…aren’t friends with people…they have “friends”

Faced with Trump and Farage, Britain’s natural ally is Europe [Guardian]

…still & all…I was gone a week…& a week is famously a long time in politics

Joe Manchin warns Democratic party is ‘toxic’ as he steps down from US Senate [Guardian]

…I know…dude shouldn’t be throwing the term toxic about like an accusation without some sort of crippling level of hypocrisy leaving him paraplegic…but…have I mentioned lately that I’m a fan of irony…or at least that a healthy appreciation of the stuff can be the difference between a wry laugh & a flood of tears & misery…sorry…christmas…they even managed a kickabout in no man’s land…yadda yadda…peace & goodwill & happy thoughts…though…probably not about the goodwill that’s trademarked, I guess

Joe Biden crackdown brings sharp fall in Permian methane pollution [FT]

…huh

Removing Carbon From the Sky Could Be the Next Climate Gold Rush [NYT]

…”could be”

Unilever merges sustainability role after revising environmental goals [FT]

…uh-huh…&…uh…what’s the new guy thinking?

Trump Pitched ‘Massive’ $280 Trillion Price Bitcoin Reserve To Save The Dollar [Forbes.com]

…wait…which “friend” fed that into the hamburger sludge the “rich” guy uses all that hairspray to try to hold in?

…never mind…with friends like these

£100m spent in England on failed efforts to block children’s Send support [Guardian]

…you don’t have to be a child of elon musk it isn’t convenient to use for a photo op to get jealous of oliver twist

Elon Musk’s curious fixation with Britain [BBC]

…&…it’s not like it’s “just” britain…or the english-speaking (& over-exposed-to-the-most-amplified-extremely-online-asshole-on-the-face-of-the-planet) world…I mean…he-gone, husk (& “investors”) drops $44billion he previously raised on a grudge as a way to throw his fiscal weight around…that “back-fired” such that the courts wouldn’t let him back out the deal despite a bunch of squirming when it was time to pay the piper…leaving him plausibly over-extended in a number of senses with sensitive bottom lines& who-knows-what-interests on the other end of those strings holding his equity up

…to a debatable extent but inarguably in a specific…not to mention quite literally deplorable…direction…he fucked up…or fucked off entirely…the things that curbed the shittier & more explicitly bad-faith attempts to gamify the platform into an engine for making people believe utter shite because they see it in enough places to hallucinate their way to thinking it bears a relationship to reality it explicitly doesn’t…& made it a vehicle more or less explicitly for that with some left over bits of the dead thing stuck to it the way people sometimes do in zombie movies to move amongst the horde un-consumed

…then he wholesale throws “mere” millions of “his own” money pulling the trick the useful orange idiot claimed to the first time…or they’ve accused soros of for at least a half-dozen rounds of this game…& “takes on” the establishment on “his own dime”…while ignoring the law in both word & spirit to do things that are outside the lines for good reason…& alongside a slew of other measures from the dubious to the beyond-sketchy…the pinnacle achievement of decades of concerted voter suppression & outright gerrymandering…plus a full court press of elon money & an online juicing…scraped out the 44th (out of, iirc, 51) weakest mandate in the history of presidential electoral wins…from what turned out to be a mere plurality…rather than the popular majority he claims didn’t shrivel up as the tally progressed beyond Nov 6th to the point where all the votes were counted

…they called it a landslide…claim the mandate of heaven & apparently the right to commence taking over trade & foreign policy before the last lot have handed in the keys…& then set about getting their fellow travellers…like nigel farage…to say “sure, my boy elon has so much wonga he could lob enough in my direction to buy out the game of politics in the UK on the model of the US”

Trump Previews Second Term in Sprawling Speech to Conservative Conference [NYT]

…then the asshole starts talking up “the solution” for germany now they’ve managed to destabilize that (quote marks because the AFD (elon’s solution) are far enough right that in germany they might not be legally allowed to use the term “solution” on…say…twitter when it got any kind of moderated…which it might if you’re in germany)…but seems to have glossed over the part where one guy who was drinking that kool aid would be the one that drove through the only section of a concrete perimeter around a christmas fair big enough to squeeze a car through…not that I’d swear something of the sort wouldn’t be exactly what he hoped to elicit

After Thierry Breton accuses Musk of foreign interference due to his endorsement of the AfD party, Elon responds: “Bro, American “foreign interference” is the only reason you’re not speaking German or Russian rn lmao” [r/elonmusk]

…while also doing the heavy lifting to get this insane narrative arc kicked off where you nuke a bipartisan bill that doesn’t fuck anything up except it doesn’t give you free rein to spend unlimited money on unfunded tax breaks for dollars with lots of zeroes after them but also to slash vast amounts of spending to “do a twitter” to government…apparently the 4D galaxy brain trust can’t do that unless they can run up an infinite bill they won’t be paying, thank you…while filling their boots

China loves Elon Musk and his hustle — but Trump could complicate that [WaPo]

…& despite the part where it was first cheerleader-ed by musk, then endorsed to the tune of the standard we’ll-primary-your-ass-into-oblivion-with-all-this-money-extremely-online-propaganda-for-pro-blame-others-while-breaking-everything party that boils down to…the same weak-ass self-esteem issues popularly associated with an archetype of a child we call a bully

Trump Threatens to Take Back Panama Canal Over ‘Ridiculous’ Fees [Guardian]

…they preach to a choir that will believe the part that if they can make all that mess before january it’s somehow not their fault but biden’s

Elon Musk Courts Europe’s Surging Far Right [NBC]

…like

How far do Elon Musk and Reform UK share a political vision? [Guardian]

…that’s some bullshit you’d think would be easy enough to call (& show to be) such…but…here we are

Elon Musk among billionaires set to donate to Reform UK, says treasurer [Guardian]

…you can rag on the bilderberg or carlyle type groups trying to rule the world through commerce in the background & how much of that stuff is tied to the unshakeable status of the petrochemical underpinning of the global economy…hell, I’m even at home to a bunch of that…got my limits but it’s not all smoke

Oil and gas firms operating in Colorado falsified environmental impact reports [Guardian]

…that said

New Ethics Inquiry Details More Trips by Clarence Thomas Paid for by Wealthy Benefactors [Guardian]

…when we’re looking at what looks like it’s been bought & paid for

Major Trump donors who complained of immigrant ‘invasion’ used Mexican workers illegally, sources allege [Guardian]

…not always by the same people in few senses

Even Netflix struggles to identify and understand the cost of its AWS estate [The Register]

…milei in argentina

Is chainsaw economics working in Argentina? [BBC Sounds]

…orban in hungary…nige in the UK…wilders in farscy’s neck of the woods…these are all chummy chums chumming waters for all they’re worth…or a cost-effective percentage of somebody’s appreciating net numbers, anyway…possibly someones…possibly in the sort of well-laundered revenue streams that have a high cashflow that finds it convenient to settle behind the opacity of political finances…say…on account of mutual interests in things

…like furthering a project to strip mine now-it’s-private “wealth” out of the public sphere & into individual pockets while tanking the wider service provision of & by the state to keep voters mad at “politicians” (& the ever-reliable “elites”)

…all while they get on with speed running the eco-collapse expansion pack of the vulture capitalism game until everyone knows who died with the most toys

The Guardian view on Elon Musk and UK politics: interference in plain sight [Guardian]

…is it possible that we are as a species in fact so maladapted to the whole mortality thing that most of the population is blinded by the part where they’re stuck in denial

Loans and pawned belongings: abortion patients are increasingly going into debt [Guardian]

…& the shysters skip ahead to a form of bargaining that’s indistinguishable from avaricious grift on a plutocratic scale?

‘The great capitulation’: why key US figures are seeking Trump’s favor [Guardian]

…because I can’t for the life of me see what it is that makes the complete insanity of helping them do it explicitly against their own interests that’s so god-damned attractive to these fucking people who keep either voting them into positions of power &/or influence that would be putting the brakes on their antics if those institutions had been competently maintained…or just letting the ones who aren’t even elected get away with shit because nobody can out-afford them in a game of paying individual lawyers more than most families earn for year after year

Donald Trump Says He’ll Run America Like His Business [AP via fortune.com – Oct ’16]

…pretty sure the part where everyone knows if you aren’t “a political animal” the status quo will eat you alive & pick your bones clean before you make an impact much less sustain a career long enough to make difference had something to do with it

Trump’s idea to run the government like a business is an old one in American politics [WaPo – Mar ’17]

…but…if making peter mandleson the ambassador (instead of your regular career diplomat) might actually be a good fit for that position in the context of the incoming reboot of the alleged administration…I gotta tell ya…that screams some truly dire shit about the bad joke humanity is about to prank itself with

It’s Impossible to Run the Country as a Business [Time – Nov ’16]

…& vlad’s christmas 4-hour victory lap dunking on the press & proving he can not only use whole sentences but talk for ages…in stark contrast to the soon-to-be-speaking-for-america dribbling mess…might be just as full of shit as the orange version

The U.S. Cannot Be Run Like a Business [Harvard Business Review – Mar ’17]

…but lands different 

Inside ‘Sesame Street’ as it fights to survive [WaPo]

…still plagued by this feeling that it’s all one big reach-around circle-jerk, though

Senior homes refuse to pick up fallen residents, dial 911. ‘Why are they calling us?’ [WaPo]

…& I don’t want to wind up like guy fawkes

How much abuse can a local newspaper reporter take? [WaPo]

…but isn’t there some less literal way that we could see that shit blown up by a credible alternative?

Trump is trying to run the government like his business. That’s why he’s failing. [Vox – May ’17]

…fuck knows it doesn’t look like a high bar to bring a better offer if you gauge by outcome rather than the sort of rhetoric that foams at the mouth

AOC may have shifted to the center, but the Democrats aren’t ready for change [Guardian]

…but…some of these people

‘Food is the most culturally accepted form of genocide’: how an LA district went from a food desert to a vegan oasis [Guardian]

…no…not those people…I already explained why more vegans is good…& it’s not just so I get steak…I mean the crazy fuckers

“Did you see how much God changed everything?” one said.

“God saved us by sending Trump.”

Her colleague told her: “Cydni, don’t pay attention.”

She told herself: “Cydni, don’t say anything.”

But it was becoming harder to stop herself. Kingman was a red town in a red county. That had been true for as long as Cydni, 37, could remember. What bothered her was the polarization she was increasingly encountering, especially in the face of need. “Don’t enable the homeless population,” a woman had written on Facebook just a few days earlier, when someone suggested delivering sandwiches to families on Christmas Eve, and Cydni found herself responding: “So because they’re homeless, they don’t deserve sandwiches? Are you kidding me?”

“Most of the country is sick of the whiny cries and aggression of phony liberals,” the woman had replied, and Cydni wrote back again: “This has nothing to do with liberal or conservative. This is literally American citizens that are struggling, and it’s not whining, and it shows me that you have a lack of compassion and humanity.”

Those were the qualities Cydni valued most in herself: compassion and humanity. In the days since the election, at a time when anger and resentment seemed to be settling into everyday American life, she had refused to let her idea of herself become “clouded,” as she put it, and she was not going to let it slip here, on the kind of day she loved most. But now she heard the people from the church talking about how much of the country had voted for Donald Trump.
[…]
She looked more closely at their table.

On it, she saw a display of Bibles, including a Bible she recognized from social media as the only Bible “endorsed” by Trump. The Bibles were bound in brown leather, with an American flag on the cover beneath the words, “GOD BLESS THE USA.”

“They are not offering Trump Bibles,” Cydni said.

“Sure looks like they are,” her colleague said.

She made a mental list of everything that she thought would be more helpful than what she was seeing and hearing. They could be offering food or parenting classes or clothing or diapers or child care.

She wanted to walk over and tell them, but instead she went over her list again, getting hotter in the face until she felt so clouded by her own anger and disappointment that the thought came into her head before she could stop it.

The thought she had was this: If she ever saw those people next to her on the ground, struggling or hurting, she wouldn’t stop to help them.

Even as the thought formed, Cydni told herself it wasn’t true. But the fact of it was enough. She had never had a thought quite like that. Now she had. It was a problem.

The person Cydni had always imagined herself to be had been present just eight days before, on the morning before the election, as she approached a house and rang the doorbell. On the doorknob, someone had left a flier that read, “Arizona can bring back the American Dream with Trump!”

“Cydni?” a woman’s voice came through the doorbell intercom. “Hi. You can just come in.”

Inside, a young woman sat on a couch with her baby.

Sometimes, Cydni learned of people who needed help through the program she worked for, other times by messages she saw posted on Facebook. In Mohave County, where 17 percent of people lived below the poverty line and more than half of young children qualified for safety-net benefits such as reduced-price school meals, there was no shortage of people in need, including the woman who said she lived on her own and could use some extra clothes and help with her utility bills.

Cydni sat on the edge of the couch. “So,” she said, beginning to ask the questions she often liked to ask, “what are three things that make you feel good about yourself?”

The woman looked down at her baby, who was drinking from a bottle. “One is I’ve got this beautiful baby. I didn’t think I was going to be able to do it.” The baby spit up some of his milk. “Silly,” she said to him and looked back up at Cydni. “And then, I don’t know, just my nature.”

“Your nature?” Cydni said. “Like, you’ve got a kind heart?”

“Yeah,” she said, “and I still push to have a happy life.”

“You’re resilient. That’s a good one.”

“I found my inner peace,” the woman said. “My center ground. And that’s hard to come by, you know?”

Cydni nodded. “It’s hard to find that.”

“I’m only 23,” the woman said.

“I’m 37, girl,” she told the woman in front of her. “It took me that long to get there. So you being there already — it’s a big thing.”

Cydni stood up to leave. She promised to bring over some clothes and point the woman toward a utility assistance program. “If you ever need to be like, ‘Hey, I’m having a hard day, can you come over?’ I will come over,” she said. “Just reach out.”
[…]
She left the house and drove along the streets of Kingman, a place she loved, despite the reputation she knew it had as a coarse and angry town. As a young girl, she grew up hearing stories about a man named Timothy McVeigh, who had lived in Kingman as he planned his attack on a federal building in Oklahoma City, leading to the deaths of 168 people. She recalled a sign in town warning Black people that it wasn’t safe after sundown. She passed the park where she had seen someone spit on her Black friend at a rally she’d attended after the police killing of George Floyd, and the Walmart where she’d once heard a man tell someone speaking Hualapai to “go back to your own country.” She often felt a tension hanging over the city, like something was about to happen, and now, her worry on this November day, on the afternoon before the election, was what could unfold in the morning, especially if Trump lost.

Twice now, Trump had won Mohave County by the biggest margin of any county in Arizona, with about 75 percent of the vote.
[…]
[short story about getting heckled putting up pro-harris stuff during campaign season]
[…]
For days now, she’d been carrying a handgun in a pink holster, and when she got home and told her husband what had happened, they decided they should spend some time at a gun range to practice their shooting. But when they stopped by an ammo shop nearby, the bullets they were looking for were out of stock. They tried a second shop, then a third. Out of stock. “That tells me something is wrong,” Cydni said.

She posted on TikTok again, this time to tell her liberal friends to buy a gun and take down the Harris signs from their yards. “Protect yourself,” she said. “It sucks, but this is how our world is right now.”

[…] He was a Republican, and though he and Cydni both disliked Trump, he often worried about how outspoken Cydni could be.

He showed Cydni a new post he’d written on Facebook about the election the next day: “What’s everyone wearing to the civil war?” He scrolled through more posts and put his phone down. “I can’t stand the fact that whenever I get on social media, whenever I get on the TV, whenever I get on the freakin’ radio, everything is political, and I’m just like, dude, I can’t wait for this to be over.”

“It’s not going to be,” Cydni said.

Now her phone rang. A friend was calling to say she was downtown and thought she could see a woman trying to take down Harris signs. “You need to call the cops,” Cydni said. “Send me pictures.” She hung up and repeated the story for Jon.

“I would be over there reporting her. I’m not even lying,” she told him.

Jon shook his head. “I don’t like the fact that you would put yourself in harm’s way like that, though.”
[…]
“I know for a fact that I could get to you before your gun goes. Before you even have the gun in your hand,” Jon said.

“Okay,” she said. “But I would still confront her. That’s just me.”

On the morning after the election, Cydni told herself that she would accept what had happened. “He won,” she said. “That’s how it is.”

All of Kingman seemed to be quiet.

“At least I don’t have to outwardly carry today,” she said.
[…]
And then she was back at the house, on her phone, looking at a series of maps. The first was a map of the results, where she could see Kingman colored in red. Trump had won Mohave County once again by more than any other county in Arizona, this time by an even bigger margin: 78 percent. The second was a different map of Kingman, on a real estate app. She began zooming out, away from her trailer, away from her neighborhood, away from Arizona, east to West Virginia, where she knew of some relatives who had been able to buy acres of land. Then she moved south. She zoomed in on Biloxi, on the coast of Mississippi, where she knew a friend who was making more than $20 an hour at a casino nearby, more than Cydni made in Kingman.
[…]
Two nights later, she found herself at a store downtown, owned by two friends who were hosting a post-election support group. At the entrance, a man named Ray stood with his arms crossed, wearing a nine-millimeter gun, a knife, nonlethal pepper gel, a stun gun and handcuffs on his belt. He was a friend of one of the owners and had offered himself up as protection during the event.

Cydni eyed the gear. “I’m carrying mine, too,” she said.

Now two people Cydni didn’t recognize walked into the store. Aaron and Jeanette had just moved to town from Florida to escape “all the negativity,” Jeanette said. Aaron was Black, and Jeanette was White. They hadn’t known much about Kingman before they arrived, but had been noticing how many people wore hats that said things like, “God, Guns and Trump,” more even than they had been used to seeing in Florida.

“Are people being nice to you here?” Cydni asked them.

“Yeah. I think so?” Jeanette said.

Cydni looked at Aaron, who didn’t say anything.

From the doorway, Ray turned to Cydni. “How long you been in Kingman?”

“My whole life,” she said.

“Okay. So you remember the —”

“The billboard? Yes.”

“What’d it say?” Aaron asked, and took a guess. “‘Make sure your ass is out of town before the sun goes down’ or something?”

“Pretty much,” said Cydni.

Two more people arrived: a man and his grandmother, who told them that she used to be a Democrat, until “I saw how much they whine.” She held up her hands. “Don’t bite my head off.”

Cydni leaned against the back wall and listened as the woman began to argue about Harris and Trump, and the way they had spoken to each other during the election. “You know what?” Cydni said, trying to cut in, but the argument went on: Trump didn’t like Harris. Harris didn’t like Trump. “Do you actually want to go out and talk to somebody that you do not like?” the woman asked.

“You know what?” Cydni said again, louder now. “I don’t like Trump, but if he were laying in the street right now bleeding, I would pick him up. That’s giving someone human respect. I don’t care what kind of race you are, what ethnicity you are, what culture you are, what side of the party you are, man or woman. Human respect used to be a thing in America.”

…&…you know…if all the good folks flee it really locks in that neck of the woods as far as taking the electoral college advantage out of contention…which plays to the whole entrenched minority rule thing they got running…if a flaming dumpster fire on wheels rolling downhill while dipshits & dudebros chase it to hose it down with gasoline…or home-made napalm or whatever may-it-blow-up-in-their-face flavor of y’all-quaeda hillbilly-taliban-anarchist-cookbook kind of fly-by-night bullshit they think they’re smart enough to cook up & “deploy”…often metaphorically…without leaving their chairs…or keyboards…is really a thing where “running” has any business making an appearance

She took a breath. “I work in the community,” she said. “I service a lot of Trump supporters. Do I like what they support? No. Do I see them as a human being? Yes. And if I let that cloud my vision, I’m not gonna help them the way I should.”

At the end of the night, she said goodbye to her friends, to the new couple in town, to the man and his grandmother, and to Ray, still at the door with the gun he hadn’t needed to use, and she drove home.

She was beginning to see the election results as an endorsement of all the emotions she was trying to push down, and a few days later, she received a call from a woman she had helped the year before. The woman had come from Mexico and, with Cydni’s assistance, had become a naturalized citizen. She told Cydni she was scared that in addition to mass deportations, Trump might try to denaturalize people like her. Cydni found that for once, she didn’t know what to say. Instead, she messaged a group of her friends later that afternoon. “I’ve found myself crying on and off today,” she wrote. “I’m f—ing floored and worried.”

The next day: the resource fair she had been looking forward to all month, the table with the Trump Bibles, the conversation she overheard and then the thought she had about not helping someone who needed it. When she got home, she wanted to cry. Jon asked her what was wrong. “So you’ve been carrying all this for the last few days?” he said when she told him, and Cydni said yes. He suggested she take some time off. Cydni said she’d already called her boss.

She had two days of mental health leave, plus the weekend. Four days.
[…]
On Monday, she was back out in Kingman, where she heard from a friend, on the verge of homelessness, who needed a place to park her RV, and Cydni started making calls.

Here she was, back to the best version of herself. She looked up the number for the local housing authority and spoke to a woman at the front desk. Who transferred her to a man in the housing department. Who told her that they didn’t have vouchers for RV parks, but that she should try a rapid rehousing program in a different city. She looked up the phone number for the program, called the number, got a fax-machine dial tone, tried another number, and spoke to someone who gave her the cellphone number for one of their housing case managers. She called the case manager and got a voicemail. “Good morning!” the voicemail message began. “Please understand that right now we are having a high volume of calls so expect at least four days from the date of your call, not including weekends, for a response.”

Cydni left a message and hung up.

“Four f—ing days,” she said.

She put her head in her hands, felt anger come on, and then chose to push it away, something she had taught herself to do, because she knew firsthand how corrosive anger could be.
[…]
Jon knew anger from his upbringing, too.

Foster care. Group homes. Feelings of abandonment that led him to turn away from people, making himself more and more hardened, “like a solid rock,” he said. “Emotionless.” Then came an arrest for domestic violence, and Cydni, whom he had met by then, telling him he needed to change. After that: years of counseling, and now this life with Cydni.

“There is very little good left in the world,” he said. “She is a genuinely good person.”
[…]
One thing about their relationship: They could talk about anything, including about what was happening in the country, and in Kingman, and what they were trying to keep out of their house.

“Being angry makes you sick,” Cydni said one day, and Jon responded, “It will kill you.”

“I know from personal experience,” he said. “It kills you slowly.”

Cydni looked at her husband.

She was still thinking about the thought she had had, that if the people she saw at the resource fair had been out on the street, she wouldn’t have helped them.

It had been an uncharitable thought, and more than that, an angry one.

“I lost my humanity for a minute,” she said. “I really did.”

How many times had she told herself that if Trump were hurt, she would pick him up and help him? She’d said it to herself, to her friends, to the people she had met at the post-election support group, and most of all, she’d said it to Jon.

Now she said it again.

“I would help him up,” she said.

“I wouldn’t,” Jon said.

Cydni looked at her husband again.

“You would,” she said.

Clinging to compassion [WaPo]

…the other crazy fuckers dotted hither & yon

Menaced by foreign foes, facing mutiny at home: how long before Iran goes nuclear? [Guardian]

…& the one crazy fucker…or possibly crazy-fucker…in particular

Elon Musk is the ultimate chaos agent [Guardian]

…seriously…dude is not ok…& it’s fucking with shit that one person shouldn’t be in a position to fuck with all at once

Elon Musk is becoming a one-man rogue state – it’s time we reined him in [Guardian]

…relying on a mentally deficient narcissistic man-child pushing 80 to be the one to do it seems…sub-optimal

US long-term bond yields rise to highest level in six months [FT]

…but

Four Scenarios for Ukraine’s Endgame [NYT]

…I guess it can always be worse

Things Are Terrible in Europe, and They’re Only Going to Get Worse [NYT]

…I mean…you could be one of the world’s biggest assholes

What is Trump to Putin? [NYT]

…or just some joe

Putin Is Doing Something Almost Nobody Is Noticing [NYT]

…spoiler alert…it’s having people murdered in places that aren’t russia…you hear about the flashy ones with the glow-in-the-dark radioactive trail right to his desk & such…but these ones…not so much…bunch of ’em, though…anyway…like I said…could be worse…the people that write the columns could be in charge?

As Bashar al-Assad fell, Russian nationalist military bloggers turned on the Kremlin. “Ten years of our presence,” fumed the “Two Majors” Telegram channel to its more than one million subscribers, “dead Russian soldiers, billions of spent roubles and thousands of tonnes of ammunition, they must be compensated somehow.” Some didn’t shy away from lambasting Vladimir Putin. “The adventure in Syria, initiated by Putin personally, seems to be coming to an end. And it ends ignominiously, like all other ‘geopolitical’ endeavours of the Kremlin strategist.” These weren’t isolated incidents. Filter Labs, a data analytics company I collaborate with, saw social media sentiment on Syria dip steeply as Assad fell.

It was in stark contrast to Putin’s silly claim at his annual news conference last week that Russia had suffered no defeat in Syria. Unlike social media, legacy media tried to walk the Kremlin line, but even here there were splits. “You can bluff on the international arena for a while – but make sure you don’t fall for your own deceptions”, ran an op-ed in the broadsheet Kommersant, penned by a retired colonel close to the military leadership. He then used Syria as an example of how “in today’s world, victory is only possible in a quick and fleeting war. If you effectively win in a matter of days and weeks, but cannot quickly consolidate your success in military and political terms, you will eventually lose no matter what you do.” Vasily Gatov, a media analyst at the University of Southern California, told me he thought it was a message from the general staff to the Kremlin: be realistic about what we can achieve in Ukraine, too.

Assad’s fall is not just a blow to Russia’s interests in the Middle East but to the essence of Putin’s power, which has always been about perception management. His early spin doctor Gleb Pavlovsky once explained to me how, when the Kremlin was weak domestically in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Russian leaders learned to dominate TV to create ersatz grandeur. The Kremlin couldn’t really control the regional governors at that point, but it could give the sense that the president ruled everything by being omnipresent in the media. Since then, Putin has taken perception management to the international stage, trying to tell a story that he is leading a new generation of authoritarian regimes destined to inherit the earth. But that image suddenly looks shaky. Now is the time to apply more pressure before he can patch things up and project his superpower movie once again.

…sure, pete…I’ll bite…now you de-fanged him by calling him…checks notes…”silly”…how do you stich vlad up like a kipper, then?

Start in Georgia, where protesters have been making a brave stand against the pro-Russian government’s decision to cease integration with the EU. At stake is Georgia being swallowed up in Moscow’s neocolonial sphere. Greater Russian ascendancy allows Moscow to put a stranglehold over gas transit pipelines to Europe and to manipulate access to Central Asia. The aim of the protesters is to get enough people in the system to abandon the ruling party and their de facto ruler, the oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili. The protests are starting to bear fruit. Some diplomats and officials are defecting. The west can make it clear that the Georgian leaders are pariahs by sanctioning the politicians, businesses and security officials involved in the crackdowns.

…oh, yeah…that’ll be a cakewalk…taking candy from a baby, I expect…getting the man who wants to make the USSR great again to wave goodbye to a soviet hold over the birthplace of stalin…you just need to make tactical & strategic advances across the political sphere in a context that makes the moldova election look left well enough alone…all of which doubtless pete has a full-proof contingency plan to handle while he’s snapping his fingers & changing the “zones of influence” map

And though the Kremlin maintains Russia and China are an alliance made in economic heaven, the reality is more tenuous. Russian businesses are saying that Chinese banks will no longer work with them now that Russian institutions have been blacklisted by the US. Instead, they worry that the Chinese are offering them “deeply suspicious” ways to move money – yet they have no choice but to play along.

…oh, & don’t mind the ongoing effort to make a global economy outwith the western global banking system…or how that benefits china…& helps russia pretend it isn’t circling the drain of whatever states do when a business would go bankrupt…no choice…pete says so…& he talks to serious men with thick accents…QED…so…stopped clock or not

The Kremlin will be more than aware of these complaints throughout society, from military bloggers to business people. There are no signs of democratic uprisings. Putin fears no elections. But it worries when people don’t do as it commands. The Russian president often recalculates when he sees that he can’t control perceptions and behaviours – thus, he abandoned mobilisation efforts after the last attempts saw up to a million young Russians flee the country.

As the west increases pressure points on Russia, the aim is not some magical regime change. The point is to make the leadership feel so unsure it rethinks what it can get away with. For that, the pressure on Putin has to come thick and fast, with one blow coming after another in unexpected succession, unravelling the stories of international influence he has spun. Ukraine is taking direct action: with drone strikes at military production sites ever deeper within Russia and the spectacular assassination of a Russian general in the heart of Moscow. But its democratic allies can do much more by relearning the art of economic and political warfare.

…how many people does that act really have to fool before it’s true enough for government work?

Joe Biden’s flawed approach was always to wait until after a Russian crisis, and then let Putin recover and regroup. Can Donald Trump try something more dynamic? Or will he believe Putin’s bluster even more than Biden? The paradox would then be that the US believed in Putin’s myth of imperviousness more than many Russians. The most important “perception management” Vladimir Putin is banking on is the one aimed at the White House itself.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/dec/22/with-assads-fall-putins-dream-of-world-domination-is-turning-into-a-nightmare

…to be perfectly honest…I don’t really want to know…but I expect we’re all going to find out, anyway…still…before then there may be drinking…& large quantities of turkey…& trimmings…& presents…if you’ve been good…oh…& I’ll try to scare up some tunes…in the meantime…how about richard e grant reads the wombles (also BBC Sounds/BBC podcasts/whatever)…or if you feel like you’re made of sterner stuff…this year’s reith lectures are…4 hours of discussion on the topic of violence…not least where it overlaps with prison & rehabilitation

Gwen Adshead – Four Questions about Violence [BBC Sounds]

…or the royal institution’s christmas lectures…this year’s are about food…but…I wouldn’t watch those before you’ve had that christmas dinner…the guy giving them is half a set of twins who are doctors but have turned out less identical in their relationship with food & is one of the reasons you may have been hearing the term “ultra-processed” more than it feels like you used to

…anyway…about those tunes