…worse [DOT 10/3/22]

or at least not better...

…I’d love to tell you things were looking better…hell…just take the NYT’s godfather anniversary quiz & then skip down to the comments…some days

Fitch Ratings downgraded Russia’s credit to “C,” or junk status, cautioning investors on Wednesday that Moscow was careening toward an inability to make good on its debts. Moody’s and S&P Global, the two other dominant international credit agencies, made similar moves in recent days.

The downgrades are signals to investors to steer clear of Russia, lest they get caught up in the expanding sanctions or sink money into assets that are bleeding value by the day. But a default, which analysts are beginning to see as inevitable, could have far more sweeping consequences, sending lenders scurrying for financial high ground and fleeing developing international markets that rely on risk-tolerant investors.
[…]
Now, experts say, Russia is running out of dollars and other standard global currencies with which to pay creditors, and covering debts with rubles could only serve to further devalue the currency because it basically worthless in global markets.
[…]
Inside Russia, a default would mean tremendous economic hardship for ordinary people. A lack of capital could mean massive unemployment, with the government and other major employers unable to raise funds to meet salaries. Consumer credit would evaporate, with Russian banks cut off from international financial systems.
[…]
Russia’s finance ministry on Monday responded defiantly to those concerns, saying Western creditors were less likely to be repaid because of the sanctions.

“The actual possibility of making such payments to non-residents will depend on the limiting measures introduced by foreign states in relation to the Russian Federation,” it said in a statement.

That attitude, though, made many investors more skeptical of Moscow’s willingness to service its debt, and a forthcoming Russian default set off worries that a credit crisis could spread to other emerging markets.

Morgan Stanley’s global head of emerging-market sovereign credit strategy wrote in a research note this week that Russia could default as soon as April 15, when the 30-day grace period on a $107 million bond interest payment expires. Two more bond payments worth $359 million and $2 billion are due March 31 and April 4, respectively, with 30-day extensions, according to Reuters.

Russia’s majority state-owned gas giant Gazprom has a $1.3 billion bond payment due March 7.

A Russian default could shake the economies of developing market countries — favored by some lenders for their high-yield upside — so profoundly that investors could ditch those venues in favor of safer bets, experts say. That would flood Western markets with capital pulled out of China, India, Brazil and eastern European economies, fueling even higher price inflation.
[…]
“The further ratcheting up of sanctions, and proposals that could limit trade in energy,” [Fitch] noted, “increase the probability of a policy response by Russia that includes at least selective nonpayment of its sovereign debt obligations.”
[…]
Even if it could muster the funds to make the payments, sanctions are blocking Russia’s participation from key global financial clearinghouses. It simply does not have the logistical access to transfer capital.
[…]
When you get that many things wrong as a leader, your best option is to lose early and small. In Putin’s case that would mean withdrawing his forces from Ukraine immediately; offering a face-saving lie to justify his “special military operation,” like claiming it successfully protected Russians living in Ukraine; and promising to help Russians’ brethren rebuild. But the inescapable humiliation would surely be intolerable for this man obsessed with restoring the dignity and unity of what he sees as the Russian motherland.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/03/09/fitch-ratings-russia-default-ukraine-sanctions/

…it sounds like it would move the needle

We’re sanctioning Russian oligarchs up the wazoo, hoping it’s a way to get Putin to stop his deadly attack on Ukraine.

But for this tactic to work, two conditions must be met: first, the US and our allies must be able to locate and tie up Russian oligarchic wealth. Second, Russian oligarchs must have enough power to stop Putin.
[…]
But are these sanctions really biting? This is where a comparison of Russian oligarchs with American oligarchs comes in.

While Russian oligarchs (Russia’s richest 0.01%) have hidden an estimated $200bn offshore (over half of their financial wealth), American oligarchs – America’s 765 billionaires – have hidden $1.2tn (about 4% of their wealth), mostly to avoid paying taxes on it.

While American oligarchs park their income and wealth in tax havens such as the Cayman Islands, Russian oligarchs have hidden their most valuable assets in the United States and the European Union. The reason they do so is telling: western democracies follow the rule of law.
[…]
American laws governing taxes, corporations, transportation and banking are wonderfully convenient for the world’s oligarchs. One out of every six aircraft in the United States, for example, is registered through trusts, Delaware corporations and even post office box addresses, making it almost impossible to discover their true owners.
[…]
American oligarchs have enormous political clout. In the 2012 presidential election (the most recent for which we have detailed data on individual contributions), the richest 0.01% of Americans – the richest 1% of the richest 1% – accounted for 40% of all campaign contributions.

What have American oligarchs got out of these campaign contributions? The lowest tax rates on the highest incomes in over a generation – and the lowest among all wealthy nations. They’ve also gotten an IRS so starved of resources it’s barely able to enforce the law.
[…]
In Putin’s Russia, power is exercised by a narrow circle of officials and generals appointed by Putin, whom he has drawn largely from the former KGB. According to several Russian specialists I’ve spoken with over the last few days, this circle has become very small in recent months, now numbering perhaps a half dozen.
[…]
Perhaps we should be more ambitious. My Berkeley colleague Gabriel Zucman recommends that the US and the European Union freeze all offshore holdings of Russian nationals in excess of $10m. This would affect about 10,000 to 20,000 Russians who have benefited the most from Putin’s rule.

But the burden has fallen mostly on ordinary Russians, many of whom have already suffered from Putin’s brutal regime.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/09/russian-oligarchs-sanctions-more-amibtious-approach

…but I guess we’re all asking ourselves which way?

If you’re hoping that the instability that Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine has wreaked on global markets and geopolitics has peaked, your hope is in vain. We haven’t seen anything yet. Wait until Putin fully grasps that his only choices left in Ukraine are how to lose — early and small and a little humiliated or late and big and deeply humiliated.

I can’t even wrap my mind around what kind of financial and political shocks will radiate from Russia — this country that is the world’s third-largest oil producer and possesses some 6,000 nuclear warheads — when it loses a war of choice that was spearheaded by one man, who can never afford to admit defeat.

Why not? Because Putin surely knows that “the Russian national tradition is unforgiving of military setbacks,” observed Leon Aron, a Russia expert at the American Enterprise Institute, who is writing a book about Putin’s road to Ukraine.

In the coming weeks it will become more and more obvious that our biggest problem with Putin in Ukraine is that he will refuse to lose early and small, and the only other outcome is that he will lose big and late.

Incidentally, the way things are going on the ground in Ukraine right now, it is not out of the realm of possibility that Putin could actually lose early and big. I would not bet on it, but with every passing day that more and more Russian soldiers are killed in Ukraine, who knows what happens to the fighting spirit of the conscripts in the Russian Army being asked to fight a deadly urban war against fellow Slavs for a cause that was never really explained to them.
[…]
So either he cuts his losses now and eats crow — and hopefully for him escapes enough sanctions to revive the Russian economy and hold onto power — or faces a forever war against Ukraine and much of the world, which will slowly sap Russia’s strength and collapse its infrastructure.

As he seems hellbent on the latter, I am terrified. Because there is only one thing worse than a strong Russia under Putin — and that’s a weak, humiliated, disorderly Russia that could fracture or be in a prolonged internal leadership turmoil, with different factions wrestling for power and with all of those nuclear warheads, cybercriminals and oil and gas wells lying around.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/08/opinion/putin-ukraine-russia-war.html

President Biden’s commitment to keeping the United States from engaging in direct combat with Russian forces faced an unexpected test this week, when Poland surprised American officials by offering to turn over its collection of aging, Russian-made MIG fighters, for ultimate transfer to Ukraine.

But the offer came with a hitch: Poland refused to give the MIGs directly to Ukraine. The deal would only go forward if the United States, and NATO, did the transferring, and then replaced Poland’s fleet with American-made fighter jets. The United States, blindsided by the demand, began to pick apart what was going on. Polish leaders, fearful of incurring Russia’s wrath, and perhaps an attack on the air base where the MIGs launched from, was handing the problem of becoming a “co-combatant” in the war off to Washington and its other NATO allies.

The Pentagon all but rejected the idea on Tuesday night and said the United States had not been consulted. By late Wednesday, Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III had put a stake through the whole idea, telling his Polish counterpart in a phone call that the proposed MIG transfer was a dead letter, Pentagon officials said.

“The transfer of combat aircraft could be mistaken for an escalatory step,” John F. Kirby, a Pentagon spokesman, told reporters.

Neither Poland nor the United States wants to make itself — or NATO — a target of Russia. And providing MIG fighters might cross over Putin’s invisible line. [NYT]

…a no fly zone is a no-go in a way that’s increasingly sounding like an article 5 echo of pleading the 5th…& the ukrainians are clear that they need planes…& those are the sort of planes they need…& the west said they’d like to give them to them…just so long as someone else does the “giving” part…& I dunno…when they made the offer did they think the ukranian pilots had so much downtime & so few planes that a surplus of them were available to hitch their way to poland & pick those things up to take home?

…& the truth may hurt but the news is definitely more by way of a stabbing pain for me at least

All of this made Putin’s Ukraine gambit seem like a good bet — except for his failure to reckon with the courage of the Ukrainian people, their magnificent president, and his own military’s ineptitude. That courage has given the West time to regroup to help save Ukraine. It should also be an opportunity to rethink the way in which we look at foreign affairs for the next decade. We need new rules for a new world.The Russian president may have had various motives for invading Ukraine. But it would be foolish to suppose that he wasn’t also enticed — by our seeming indifference to Ukraine’s fate; by the willingness of successive American presidents to continue to do business with him even as he invaded neighbors, poisoned dissidents, hacked our networks and meddled in our elections; by Europe’s military weakness and growing reliance on Russian energy; by the coalescing of an Axis of Autocracy bent on overthrowing the American-led liberal order.

What should they be? A few ideas:

New Rules for a New World [NYT]

[…rule #1 really ought to be to quit having the agenda set by the likes of bret “bedbugs” stephens…so I’ll leave that there…you can probably fill in the rest without needing to see it, come to that]

More than 2 million people had fled Ukraine as of Wednesday in what could soon become Europe’s biggest refugee crisis of the 21st century, and the worst since World War II. A spokesperson for UNICEF told NBC News that at least half of them are children, some of whom have been forced to travel on their own.

The U.N.’s refugee agency, UNHCR, welcomed a decision last week by the European Union to offer temporary protection to Ukrainians and third-country nationals who have refugee or permanent residence status in Ukraine, offering them “immediate protection.”
[…]
Already at Ukrainian borders there have been concerns that not all fleeing the country are being treated equally, with African citizens living in Ukraine reporting racist discrimination and abuse while trying to escape, sparking condemnation from a number of countries, as well as from United Nations bodies.

As many as 4 million people could be forced to flee violence in Ukraine, the United Nations refugee agency has said. [NBC]

…though apparently pavlov’s dog was smarter than me since I keep coming back with more questions

As someone who considers himself a realist (to the extent that it makes sense for a newspaper columnist to claim such affinities), I think part of this critique has bite. For instance, my sense is that because today’s realist thinkers mostly operate within the liberal West and define themselves against its pieties — especially the globalist utopianism that had so much purchase in the post-Cold War era — there is a constant temptation to assume that nonliberal regimes must be more rational actors, more realist in their practices and aims, than the naïve idealists in America or Europe. And thus when a crisis comes, it must be the unrealism of the West that’s primarily, even essentially, at fault.

You can see this temptation at work in the interview Mearsheimer gave to Isaac Chotiner of The New Yorker, published soon after the Russian invasion began. On the one hand the interview offers a perspicacious realist critique of how idealism led America astray in the George W. Bush era, via a naïve theory of how aggressive war might democratize in the Middle East.
[…]
After almost two weeks of stalled-out offensives and mounting Russian casualties, that faulty assumption does look a bit like a Risk-board view of the world, where all that matters is positioning and pieces, not patriotism, morale, leadership and luck.

And there are a lot of ways that this kind of Risk-board mentality can deceive. Flash back a few decades, for instance, to the late Cold War, and a crude realist analysis might have insisted that Poland would always be in some kind of deep thrall to Russia — because it had so often been dominated by Moscow, its geography left it so open to invasion from the east, and so on — and that it was strategic folly to imagine otherwise. But Polish leadership and patriotism, Soviet weakness and unexpected historical events all contrived to change that calculus, so that today Poland’s strategic independence and Western alignment, while hardly invulnerable, both look relatively secure.

Is it unrealistic for Kyiv to aspire to what Warsaw has gained? Right now I would still say yes. But is it impossible, in the way that some realist thinking tends to suggest — as though some law of physics binds Ukraine to Russia? No: I think anyone watching this war so far, watching both the struggles of the Russian military and the solidifying of a Ukrainian national consciousness, would have to give more credit to long-term Ukrainian ambitions, and a little less to the inevitability of Russian regional dominance.
[…]
But look at the global response to the war in Ukraine — the tacit support for Russia from Beijing, the neutrality of India, the cautious, self-interested reactions of the Gulf States — and you still see the landscape whose emergence probably encouraged Putin to make his gamble: a world where American hegemony is fading, where new great powers and “civilization-states” are bent on pursuing their own interests, and where 1990s-era dreams of moral universalism and liberal consensus are giving way to hard realities of cultural difference, moral relativism and post-liberal political competition.

Indeed, even the rallying of Europe against Russia, the talk of rearmament and energy independence, fits this mold, because it represents a dawning recognition of continental interest as much as a stirring of cosmopolitan idealism. Yes, the inspirational example of Zelensky matters, but the fundamental reality is that under conditions of threat and competition, Europe is cutting short its holiday from history and beginning to behave like a great power in its own right[…]

And if those threatening and competitive conditions are somewhat more favorable to the West than it appeared three weeks ago, they are still fundamentally hostile to the kind of crusading liberalism that was so powerful in the Clinton and Bush presidencies and lingered in the Obama years. What we have gained so far from Russia’s stumbles is the chance at a more favorable balance of power in a multipolar world, and that’s a very good thing. But the war is far from over, and the most plausible “good” outcome is still a realist’s peace, not an idealist’s triumph

They Predicted the Ukraine War. But Did They Still Get It Wrong? [NYT]

…& keep not liking the answers staring back at me…I don’t mean ross I-doubt-that’s “answers”…those I’m broadly guaranteed not to like…that is after all the point of people like him & bret in the first place…but…you know

Krakovska, the head of a delegation of 11 Ukrainian scientists, struggled to help finalize the vast Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report ahead of its release on 28 February even as Russian forces launched their invasion. “I told colleagues that as long as we have the internet and no bombs over our heads we will continue,” she said.
[…]
Both the invasion and IPCC report crystallized for Krakovska the human, economic and geopolitical catastrophe of fossil fuels. About half of the world’s population is now acutely vulnerable to disasters stemming from the burning of fossil fuels, the IPCC report found, while Russia’s military might is underpinned by wealth garnered from the country’s vast oil and gas reserves.

“I started to think about the parallels between climate change and this war and it’s clear that the roots of both these threats to humanity are found in fossil fuels,” said Krakovska.

“Burning oil, gas and coal is causing warming and impacts we need to adapt to. And Russia sells these resources and uses the money to buy weapons. Other countries are dependent upon these fossil fuels, they don’t make themselves free of them. This is a fossil fuel war. It’s clear we cannot continue to live this way, it will destroy our civilization.”
[…]
But in a stark demonstration of how deeply embedded fossil fuels remain in decision making, Biden’s administration has awkwardly attempted to extol its efforts to confront the climate crisis while also boasting that the US is now drilling more oil than even under Donald Trump to show it is cognizant of public anguish over rising gasoline prices, a perennial political headache for presidents.

“We don’t have a strategic interest in reducing the global supply of energy,” Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said last week. “That would raise prices at the gas pump for the American people, around the world, because it would reduce the supply available.”
[…]
“It’s a crude oversimplification to call this a fossil fuel war, that’s a little too glib,” said Jonathan Elkind, an expert in energy policy at Columbia University and a former energy adviser to Barack Obama’s administration. “But it’s an undeniable reality that Russia gets a significant share of its revenues from oil and gas and that America’s gasoline habitat contributes towards the global demand for 100m barrels of oil each day.

“Do we want to find ourselves 10 years from now where we’ve bent the curve on oil consumption and emissions towards decarbonization, or do we want to sit there and think ‘where did the last 10 years go?’ If the US isn’t a part of the solution we will put in peril our influence on the world stage and the fate of everyone, both here and around the globe.”
[…]
The invasion of Ukraine has also triggered a push by the US oil and gas industry and its allies in Congress to loosen regulations to allow more domestic drilling. Manchin, chair of the Senate energy committee, has said that delaying new gas pipelines when “Putin is actively and effectively using energy as an economic and political weapon against our allies is just beyond the pale”. Even Elon Musk, founder of the electric vehicle company Telsa, has said that “we need to increase oil and gas output immediately. Extraordinary times demand extraordinary measures.”

The White House has pointed out that the industry is already sitting on a huge number of idle drilling leases – a total of 9,000 unused permits covering 26m acres of American public land – while environmentalists argue the crisis highlights the dangers of being at the mercy of a volatile global oil price, now near an all-time high, rather than shifting towards solar, wind and other sources of clean energy.

“The fossil fuel industry’s so-called solution to this crisis is nothing more than a recipe to enable fossil-fueled fascists like Vladimir Putin for years to come,” said Jamal Raad, executive director of Evergreen Action. “As long as our economy is dependent on fossil fuels, we will be at the mercy of petro-dictators who wield their influence on global energy prices like a weapon.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/mar/09/ukraine-climate-scientist-russia-invasion-fossil-fuels

…in the wider context

Deforestation in the Amazon can seem like a remote problem over which we have no control — but forest advocates say that’s not true. They argue that smarter choices at the dinner table would go a long way toward safeguarding the world’s largest rainforest.

What they have in mind might become clearer on a flight from Brazil’s capital of Brasilia to Manaus, the largest city in the Amazon. If you look out the window halfway through the flight, you’ll see a checkerboard landscape of farmland interspersed with remnant patches of forest.

This so-called “Arc of Deforestation,” which hugs the eastern and southern margins of Amazonia, is vast. You’ll fly over it for the better part of an hour. It is dominated by industrial-sized soy plantations where the protein-rich legume is being grown for conversion to animal feed for livestock like pigs and chickens. The rest has been transformed into scrubby rangelands for grazing cattle.

What won’t be apparent from the air is that the landscape below is the product of consumer demand that originated far from Brazil, in the United States and in Europe, and among the burgeoning middle class in newly developed nations like China. The world’s rapidly increasing appetite for cheap meat is responsible for the clearing of millions of acres of tropical forest a year.

Some experts say that the best way to end this destruction — in Brazil and beyond — is to persuade consumers to purchase only meat products that have been sustainably produced on non-rainforest cleared land. And that effort is underway.

…&…given that honestly I might lean towards chris rock’s take on steak

…I can’t say as I’m enjoying the part where it turns out “red meat’ll kill ya” might not only be true…but wouldn’t just be talking about me if I were to eat all the steak I might have a care to…or much else about the day’s news

As a result of Mighty Earth’s online jaguar campaign, large supermarket chains such as Tesco in Britain and Carrefour in France were inundated with emails from incensed customers demanding that they stop selling chicken and other meat products that were fueling deforestation in Brazil and Argentina.

Both companies pledged to eliminate meat produced with “deforestation” soy from their shelves. Other retailers in the United Kingdom and Australia have recently followed suit. Group LDC, Europe’s largest poultry producer, also announced that it would stop buying soy from producers that destroyed native ecosystems or grabbed land from Indigenous communities.

It’s part of a growing movement in Europe, where surveys show the public overwhelmingly rejects foods that help drive the destruction of the rainforest. Three years ago, France announced its intention to ban all deforestation imports by 2030. Denmark, the U.K. and the European Union itself are considering similar measures.

In arguably the biggest success to date, “the Norwegian salmon industry, which supplies about half of the world’s farmed salmon, has cut all links to deforestation in their soy supply chains,” said Nils Hermann Ranum, whose Rainforest Foundation Norway helped to broker the deal. (Soy is the main component in fish feed.) “We now have an important producer of protein for human consumption that can claim to be fully deforestation free.”

Would American consumers be willing to act to prevent deforestation as Europeans have already begun to do? A report published by Yale University in 2020 called “Climate change and the American diet” found that roughly 1 in 4 Americans said they rewarded food companies that are taking steps to reduce their impact on the environment by buying their products at least once in the past 12 months.
[…]
In October, U.S. Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) together with Reps. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) and Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) introduced legislation to ban commodities originating from illegally deforested land from entering the United States.

“Consumers simply cannot rely on the representations of corporations when they are deciding whether or not to purchase a product,” Schatz said in a phone interview in December. “Our bill will give people the security to be sure that what they’re purchasing is not destroying ecosystems and kicking native people off of their land.”

Environmental groups in the United States are rallying behind the legislation. Some argue that the carbon-intensive meat industry should not just get reformed, but needs to be phased out to make way for more environmentally-friendly food production.
[…]
Some Brazilian beef is making it into U.S. supermarkets. An investigation published in the Guardian in early 2021 reported that food retailers Walmart, Costco and Kroger are selling Brazilian meat products linked to meatpacker JBS, the world’s largest meat-processing company, which has been linked to deforestation.

“We are going to be eating the rainforest in our burgers,” [Holly] Gibbs [a land use scientist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison] said. “This is our moment as Americans to step forward and leverage some pressure to save the world, by helping to save the Amazon, which is critically important for the future of our planet.”
[…]
The irony, [Peter] Elwin [the head of the food and land use program at the nonprofit Planet Tracker] said, is that a number of studies show that clearing new forest for meat production is not just a disaster for the environment, “it is unnecessary for Brazil’s agricultural success. Beef and soy could be produced much more efficiently on land that has already been cleared, but currently underused.”
[…]
“We want to see robust zero deforestation commitments from corporations, especially from the U.S.,” said Nathalie Walker, NWF senior director of tropical forests and agriculture. “It’s not worth it just for a quick profit to destroy something that can never be brought back.”

Another online tool is “Rapid Response,” a database created by Mighty Earth which uses satellite imagery to monitor clear-cutting in Brazil and beyond. The nonprofit also rates companies on how well they have managed to keep deforestation out of their products. American corporations like Cargill and Bunge and the Brazil-based JBS ranked among the worst offenders, Hurowitz said.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2022/03/09/amazon-rainforest-deforestation-beef/

…but then I look around me…&…well

Thousands protest against Brazils death combo of antienvironment bills [Guardian]

…”not worth it just for a quick profit to destroy something that can never be brought back“…it might be true…but it doesn’t seem like it’s standing in the way of those profits in…let’s call it the longer term & try not to feel like that’s overly blithe…to a degree that frankly fucks with my optimism of a morning…it’s maybe what you might call a hidden cost?

More than $1.5 billion has been spent to settle claims of police misconduct involving thousands of officers repeatedly accused of wrongdoing. Taxpayers are often in the dark.

[…] The Post collected data on nearly 40,000 payments at 25 of the nation’s largest police and sheriff’s departments within the past decade, documenting more than $3.2 billion spent to settle claims.
[…]
The investigation for the first time identifies the officers behind the payments. Data were assembled from public records filed with the financial and police departments in each city or county and excluded payments less than $1,000. Court records were gathered for the claims that led to federal or local lawsuits. The total amounts further confirm the broad costs associated with police misconduct, as reported last year by FiveThirtyEight and the Marshall Project.

The Post found that more than 1,200 officers in the departments surveyed had been the subject of at least five payments. More than 200 had 10 or more.

The repetition is the hidden cost of alleged misconduct: Officers whose conduct was at issue in more than one payment accounted for more than $1.5 billion, or nearly half of the money spent by the departments to resolve allegations, The Post found. In some cities, officers repeatedly named in misconduct claims accounted for an even larger share. For example, in Chicago, officers who were subject to more than one paid claim accounted for more than $380 million of the nearly $528 million in payments.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/interactive/2022/police-misconduct-repeated-settlements/

[…hopefully that link works because there’s a lot of data & even a tool that lets you look at different departments & filter by payments or officers…& that’s just one “illustration”?]

Heartbroken over what the Russian regime is currently doing to the nation of Ukraine, I can’t help finding myself thinking also of ways we’re taught to think about ourselves as a nation. Perhaps strangely, while I find myself sifting through the grim news of recent days, looking for signs of hope for Ukraine’s future, I also think of hope as it applies to matters here at home.
[…]
But today, in addition to the immediate horrors — the death and destruction — of Russia’s offensive, we’re confronted by the notion that war, the violent incursion into and potential occupation of a neighboring nation, is perhaps still seen by President Vladimir Putin of Russia as something unexceptional, a normal state, just one among many tools of statecraft to be, foreseeably, employed. He gives no indication that he considers what he is doing to be a reluctant last-ditch strategy upending the natural status quo ante. To him, rather, it is naked aggression, barely requiring justification and seemingly meant to satisfy his lust for territory and to redress what he senses as geopolitical humiliation after the end of the Cold War.
[…]
As such, an eye-opening thought one might have in watching events unfold in Ukraine is that this story puts a check on an American tendency to overdo the self-criticism inherent to our experiment. We hear from some who teach that the entire business has gone off the rails, or that the effort was perhaps even mistaken at its beginnings. This perspective extends from the acid (and influential) condemnation of America’s trajectory in the work of the historian Howard Zinn, who wrote, in his book “A People’s History of the United States,” that “there is not a country in world history in which racism has been more important, for so long a time, as the United States,” to those, more recently, who seem to say that the very essence of America has been its enslavement and abuse of Black people: Last week on “The View,” The Nation’s Elie Mystal pronounced that our Constitution is “kind of trash,” written by “white people who were willing to make deals with slavers and colonists.” Few can miss a guiding sense among many of our writerly class that any intelligent take on America will come with a gloomy, disenchanted, condemnatory shake of the head.

There is a histrionic element to that view, and few things point it up more than watching what can happen under other conditions, to people who experience life just as vividly as we do and yet must undergo the depredations of a society that truly has fallen to pieces. […]

[…] it’s easy to bemoan the eclipse of free speech in America,[…]One might even refer to these things rhetorically, and more expressively, as “defenestrations.” And while I would certainly defend this rhetorical language, let’s face it: In Russia, the very concept of free speech is, at least in practice, an abstraction, bitterly argued for by dissidents as a necessary innovation, not referred to as a reminder of an established value (enshrined, by the way, in the aforementioned “trash” Constitution). Figures such as Aleksei Navalny and Alexander Litvinenko have understood the perils in doing so. As far as defenestration, it is not even unheard-of in Russia for dissident journalists and lawyers to be reported, quite improbably, to have fallen from windows to their deaths.
[…]
This shambling behemoth of a national experiment called America slowly, and in spite of itself, learns. We’ve come to understand our own, at times, hubris. We’ve learned that who’s in charge makes a difference. We will continue to make mistakes: […]America is an experiment ever in rehearsal. Maybe now, with what we’re witnessing, we’ll learn to put our own domestic woes into perspective — the problems that seem to consume us might seem less onerous in comparison to Ukrainians living in makeshift bomb shelters and civilians picking up rifles to defend against a hostile neighbor.

Our main concern right now must, of course, be for the Ukrainians suffering the destruction of their nation. However, this tragedy also gives Americans a reminder of how easily the critic becomes the Cassandra. America may be a mess in many ways, but a look at the headlines lately shows us what a mess really can be. Some might decide that for all our missteps and, yes, even catastrophes, our rehearsal is going, at least, fairly well.

The War in Ukraine Puts America’s Problems in Perspective

…& I guess the other question that keeps coming up is

From Mykolaiv along the coast via the already captured city of Kherson to the besieged city of Mariupol, the Russian advances in the south of Ukraine have contrasted with the difficulties Moscow has experienced in the north and north-east – in particular in the efforts to encircle the capital, Kyiv.

The contrasts between the southern and northern fronts are likely to have profound consequences, weighing heavily on any future peace negotiations, with likely effects that are economic, diplomatic and political as well as military.

[…]The attempt to skirt Mykolaiv and move on to link up a land bridge with Russian “peacekeeping” forces in the breakaway Transnistria region of Moldova would cut off Ukraine’s most important port, Odesa, by both land and sea.

An update from the Institute for the Study of War paints the most recent picture of Russia’s ambitions in the south. “Russian troops are likely attempting to bypass Mykolaiv and cross the Southern Bug upriver of that city to permit an advance on Odesa that will combine with an impending amphibious operation against that city … and are driving north from Crimea toward the city of Zaporizhzhia.”

“Why have the Russians in the south generally been more successful than those in the north-east and north?” wrote Ryan. “The defence of Kyiv is the strategic main effort for Ukraine. It is their capital, and has significant political, logistic, and cultural value.”

“Finally,” he added, “and this is purely speculation, the leadership and campaign planning in the south appears to be superior to the north. While often advancing on diverging axes, the southern theatre has largely continued without the long pauses seen in the north and north-east.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/08/kyiv-deadlock-contrasts-russia-worrying-south-ukraine-war-progress

…at what point does something cross a line that requires it be answered…well…forcefully…or at least unmistakably…& ideally incontrovertibly

Tucker Carlson’s remarkably Putin-sympathetic view of the war in Ukraine has yet to catch on with large swaths of the conservative movement. But if it doesn’t, it apparently won’t be for lack of trying.

Carlson lately has tempered his unfortunately timed suggestion that perhaps Vladimir Putin isn’t that bad a guy. But with that point largely conceded, he now has shifted to assuring that Putin is not the only bad guy. Carlson on Monday drove home an argument that has lingered on the fringes of the conservative movement for some time — that the United States and the West invited this war with their support for admitting Ukraine into NATO, a step that Russia finds unacceptable.

To be clear, the idea that NATO expansion into countries such as Ukraine is provocative and might even be a bad idea is not a fringe position; it has long been espoused, dating to prominent, establishment foreign policy voices in the 1990s. But Carlson took things a good few conspiratorial steps further, arguing that the push for NATO was deliberately intended to provoke this war.
[…]
“‘Up yours, Vladimir Putin,’” Carlson summarized. “‘Go ahead and invade Ukraine.’ And of course Vladimir Putin did that just days later. So the invasion was no surprise to the Biden administration. They knew that would happen. That was the point of the exercise.”

Carlson then turned to his favored rhetorical trick of treating his conspiratorial supposition — that the United States wanted this war — as established fact as he pivoted to related questions: “Why in the world would the United States intentionally seek war with Russia? How could we possibly benefit from that war?”
[…]
But there are a few problems with the attempt to shoehorn this valid concern into the idea that the Biden administration is to blame — or even deliberately fomented war.

One is that Putin has made it pretty clear that this isn’t just — or even necessarily primarily — about NATO. Supporters of this view often point to Putin’s Feb. 21 speech laying out his justifications, which included NATO. But in that speech, Putin labeled Ukraine an illegitimate country on land that he views as rightfully Russian territory. He echoed that in 2008 talks with President George W. Bush. Putin’s aggression in Georgia in 2008 and Crimea in 2014 coincided with moves to bring Georgia and Ukraine into the Western fold, but there’s much more that undergirds his case for war.

The other is that supporting Ukraine’s right to pursue membership in NATO has consistently been U.S. policy. Carlson isolated Harris’s visit to the Munich Security Conference, but this has been a position across multiple administrations of both parties. However well advised that policy was, it was the long-standing policy. And to shelve it in the face of Russian aggression would be, in the truest sense, capitulation.
[…]
And beyond that, there’s the fact that this isn’t just U.S. policy; Ukrainians now support their country’s membership in NATO by a significant margin. If anyone is big on self-determination, it would seem to be Carlson. And yet that’s curiously missing from his argument.

(Carlson, for what it’s worth, oversimplified Harris’s statement as having “encouraged Ukraine to become a member of NATO.” As with past administrations, she described U.S. policy as supporting Ukraine’s desire to join NATO — a key nuance, diplomatically.)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/03/08/tucker-carlson-goes-full-blame-america-russias-ukraine-invasion/

…& I get that the fact that people like tucker carlson not only exist but are actually allowed to get away with trotting out that kind of horseshit to a huge audience that is pretty much content to join in by jumping on any bandwagon that comes with a free pass to badmouth democrats in general & biden in particular…though that undoubtedly sucks in a great many ways

…pretty much stands a demonstration that for some free speech is alive & well

…which perversely enough is something to be grateful for if you compare it to life under putin…but on the other hand…”it was the style at the time” doesn’t look so good in the glare of historical hindsight…& while some lines perhaps shouldn’t be crossed…others shouldn’t be drawn

How US redlining led to an air pollution crisis 100 years later [Guardian]

Decades of federal housing discrimination did not only depress home values, lower job opportunities and spur poverty in communities deemed undesirable because of race. It’s why 45 million Americans are breathing dirtier air today, according to a landmark study released Wednesday.
[…]
The analysis, published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology Letters, found that, compared with White people, Black and Latino Americans live with more smog and fine particulate matter from cars, trucks, buses, coal plants and other nearby industrial sources in areas that were redlined. Those pollutants inflame human airways, reduce lung function, trigger asthma attacks and can damage the heart and cause strokes.

“Of course, we’ve known about redlining and its other unequal impacts, but air pollution is one of the most important environmental health issues in the U.S.,” said Joshua Apte, a co-author of the study and an assistant professor in the School of Public Health at the University of California at Berkeley.

“If you just look at the number of people that get killed by air pollution, it’s arguably the most important environmental health issue in the country,” Apte said.

The federal Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) marked areas across the United States as unworthy of loans because of an “infiltration of foreign-born, Negro, or lower grade population,” and shaded them in red starting in the 1930s. This made it harder for home buyers of color to get mortgages; the corporation awarded A grades for solidly White areas and D’s for largely non-White areas that lenders were advised to shun.

Throughout redlining’s history, local zoning officials worked with businesses to place polluting operations such as industrial plants, major roadways and shipping ports in and around neighborhoods that the federal government marginalized.
[…]
With nitrogen dioxide, pollution levels were higher in 80 percent of communities given D grades and lower in 84 percent of communities given A grades. That trend held regardless of whether a city was as large as Los Angeles or Chicago, or as small as Macon, Ga., or Albany.
[…]
A large body of research has already shown that redlined communities experience other environmental challenges, including excessive urban heat, sparse tree canopy and few green spaces. The new analysis, according to the authors, is the first look nationwide at how redlining leads to disparities within different cities.

“This groundbreaking study builds on the solid empirical evidence that systemic racism is killing and making people of color sick, it’s just that simple,” said Robert D. Bullard, a distinguished professor of urban planning and environmental policy at Texas Southern University and the author of “Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class and Environmental Quality.”
[…]
Racial inequality is so baked into redlined communities that even when it shouldn’t matter, it did, the study said. Black and Latino Americans who live within the very same HOLC grade as White people still breathe dirtier air because of their closer proximity to pollution.

“This point is really key,” said Lane, the lead author. “People of color can be living in the same cities, and even in neighborhoods with the same redlining grade as nearby White residents, and they will still tend to experience worse pollution on average.”

The finding suggests that redlining added to inequities that developed from long-standing racial discrimination, Lane said. “Racist segregation was always essential to redlining, but there is a long history and a wide range of factors contributing to the disparities we see today. We can’t point to any single decision or program which brought about current conditions because the problem is systemic.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/03/09/redlining-pollution-environmental-justice/

…all the same, though…the fox-sponsored white-grievance show that tucker carlson is the hype man for…or the staggering undead corpse of whatever may be old but has been neither grand nor really a political party in quite some time…if I had to point to a single program right now…I’m pretty sure I’d be looking in that direction…& on the balance of probabilities…I might even be right

There are at most two degrees of separation between former president Donald Trump and the leaders of far-right extremist groups that were involved in the pro-Trump riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Between both Trump and the heads of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers sits only Trump’s longtime adviser Roger Stone.

On Tuesday, the federal government indicted Enrique Tarrio, the head of the Proud Boys, on eight criminal counts including conspiracy, obstructing law enforcement and obstruction of an official proceeding. Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes was arrested in January for allegedly similarly engaging in an effort to block the counting of electoral votes on that day; he faces charges including seditious conspiracy. Last week, one of those included in the conspiracy charge, Joshua James, pleaded guilty.
[…]
“Stone’s connections to both the President and these groups in the days leading up to January 6th is a well-pleaded fact,” Mehta wrote. “Discovery might prove that connection to be an important one.”

That assessment was in service to his determination that Trump and the extremist groups were conceivably working in concert as part of a “civil conspiracy.”

Given that, it’s worth articulating Stone’s relationships with all three: the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers and Trump.
[…]
The earliest indications of how Stone and the Proud Boys overlapped came, strangely, from activity posted by fake accounts on Facebook. A network of fake accounts and pages shared information about politics and about Stone during a period ranging from 2015 to 2017. When it shuttered the network in 2020, Facebook wrote that it “first started looking into this network as part of our investigation into the Proud Boys’ attempts to return to Facebook after we had designated and banned them from the platform” in 2018. “… Our investigation linked this network to Roger Stone and his associates.”

By May 2017, with Trump in the White House, Stone posted a video that the Daily Beast’s Will Sommer described as his taking “the Proud Boy initiation.” It is not clear if it’s the same video as one posted in February 2018, still visible on the Daily Beast’s website. In it, Stone declares himself to be “a Western chauvinist,” one of the tenets of the Proud Boys’s neo-fascist ideology.
[…]
“Keep the faith,” Stone told viewers. “Don’t let them wear you down, the globalists, the two-party duopoly, Robert Mueller, the deep state, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, The Washington Post. They want to wear us down. Never give up the fight.”

The reference to Robert S. Mueller III, then serving as special counsel investigating Russia’s effort to interfere in the 2016 campaign, was pointed. In January 2019, Mueller successfully sought an indictment of Stone on a number of charges, including lying to law enforcement, obstruction and witness tampering. Among those quickest to rise to Stone’s defense: Tarrio, who attended a news conference wearing a “Roger Stone Did Nothing Wrong” T-shirt. He wore it to a Trump rally the next month.

…if you’re confident that your blood pressure can take it…& haven’t already seen it…I think there may be nothing that more clearly demonstrates the extent to which it’s been plenty clear for a long time that some of these folks…& perhaps roger stone in particular…literally boast of a lifetime of self-incrimination

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Get_Me_Roger_Stone

…but I did not know the oxford union had the man to speak in 2018…not sure how I feel about that & he went about an hour so I don’t know as I’ll find the time to watch it & decide if I ought to be horrified or at least a bit proud of the reception the students gave him?

…point being…the “quiet part”…never really been all that quiet…more of a stage whisper than a dog-whistle, even

During a presidential debate in September 2020, Trump was asked to denounce right-wing extremism and to tell groups to stand down. Trump instead told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” — possibly simply jumbling the moderator’s request but nonetheless making a comment that the Proud Boys quickly embraced as an endorsement. This increased attention being paid to the group and to Stone’s relationship with them. In a conversation with a reporter published a few days later, Stone denied having an affiliation with the group.

Then Trump lost his reelection bid. The indictment of Tarrio and other members of the Proud Boys (including Ethan Nordean) articulates how the group reacted: immediate calls for action and declaring the effort to derail Joe Biden’s presidency a war. On Parler, Tarrio wrote, “We’re rolling out. Standby order has been rescinded.” Stone quickly geared up an effort to cast doubts on the election results called “Stop the Steal.”

On Dec. 11, he joined Tarrio and Nordean at a rally in D.C. centered on claims that the election had been stolen. The next morning, before another pro-Trump rally in the city, Tarrio and others got a tour of the White House.
[…]
On Jan. 5, 2021, Rhodes and Tarrio were part of a small group that met in a parking garage in D.C. Tarrio had just been arrested for having stolen and destroyed a Black Lives Matter banner from outside a church during the unrest in December and had been ordered to leave D.C. He told Reuters that the meeting was a chance encounter; an attorney for the Oath Keepers told Reuters that the meeting was planned and centered on discussing defense attorneys.

By this point, Stone was already in D.C. and once again using extremists as his personal security contingent — but, this time, the Oath Keepers. In an interview with fringe media personality and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones last year, Stone discussed the presence of the extremists.
[…]
On both Jan. 5 and Jan. 6, the Oath Keepers were Stone’s perpetual companions. They accompanied him to a rally outside the Supreme Court on Jan. 5, sporting badges that read “all access.” When Stone spoke at a rally that evening, they were there with him backstage (as in the photo at the top of this article, again with the same pass). And on the day of the riot itself, they served as his escorts.

[…] Stone was at the center of questions about the Trump campaign’s awareness of efforts by Russian actors to influence the election results by leaking stolen material through WikiLeaks. Stone claimed to have a relationship with WikiLeaks and unique insights into what the group was going to release, a relationship that led a “senior” campaign official to ask Stone to reach out to the group (which he then did through backchannels). It’s worth noting that this overlapped with the period in which those fake accounts that eventually somehow linked to the Proud Boys were active on Facebook.

[…] In late December, Stone received a full pardon from Trump, lifting the cloud of the Mueller indictment. A few days later, he joined the president for dinner at Mar-a-Lago.

The effort to undercut Biden’s presidency was moving down two tracks: one tightly linked to Trump and his legal team and the other loosely organized by outside opportunists such as Alexander and Jones. Both tracks were aiming for events in Washington on Jan. 6, forcing a negotiated agreement on who would be doing what, when.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/03/09/question-roger-stones-ties-extremist-groups-grows-more-salient/

…still…illegitimi no carborundum…& all that…

…mind you…that’s the thing about endurance

Lost and found: the extraordinary story of Shackleton’s Endurance epic [Guardian]

…it might not be obvious for a long while…but you can wind up being surprised by what withstands the tests of time?

“The preservation is beyond imagination,” Mensun Bound, the director of exploration at the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust, said. [NBC]

…currently the tunes I meant to put here are also beyond imagination in a rather less picturesque fashion…but I’ll try to get that part figured out if I manage to mainline enough coffee to put my day at least vaguely on track?

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31 Comments

  1. Per Heather Cox Richardson:

    Trump advisor Stephen Miller today sued to block the January 6th committee’s November subpoena for his phone records. Miller is on a cell phone plan with his parents and says that the subpoena might pick up the other numbers on the account. He also says it violates his privacy rights because there are personal communications about his wife and newborn daughter.

    JFC, Avon Barksdale’s crew had their shit together better than the thugs who were running the country.

    • Per the same essay:

      In a dissent this week, four right-wing Supreme Court justices indicated they support a further step in that concentration, backing a legal argument that state legislatures have ultimate power to determine their own voting procedures, including the selection of presidential electors, regardless of what a majority of voters want.

      Expand the court.

      • …sorry @lemmykilmister …I didn’t realize you’d replied when I tried to remove my comment to put it where it should have been?

        …& can’t figure out how to move yours to here…so:

        I mean, he just inadvertently argued that they wouldn’t be able to subpoena Hillary’s emails because they were on a personal server, right?

  2. I hadn’t realized the Times had sunk to publishing Intellectual Dark Web dude John McWhorter, but considering the way they ran Bari Weiss’s propaganda piece backing them a few years ago I shouldn’t be surprised. The context for his tedious framing that liberals should stop complaining about what happens to civil liberties in the US because of what things are like in Russia is taking a page straight from right wing propaganda about antiwar protesters and the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

    Two quick points. Of course McWhorter singles out liberals who rely on honest evidence as the complainers instead of people like his freakish compatriots who are pulling out calipers to measure brain pans to talk about the mongrelization of pure bloodlines. That’s the extent of his schtick.

    But he’s also leaving out how his beloved right wing has been doing all it can to enable Putin in a sick bargain of autocrats.

    McWhorter is going to McWhorter. He’s always going to be venal and dumb. But the Times platforming him is the broader phenomenon of rot that is really troubling. It’s only a matter of time before their official platform is the only thing wtong with Tom Cotton’s column about duplicating Putin’s move on Kiev with the 101st Airborne and St. Louis is that Cotton should have called for more troops.

    • …I haven’t read the whole IDW bit skeptic.com put together

      https://www.skeptic.com/reading_room/preliminary-empirical-study-shedding-light-on-intellectual-dark-web/

      …but I did skim through some of this…& all in all I kind of think that Intellectual Dark Web as a concept sort of seems to (very possibly deliberately) misconstrue all three of the terms it’s composed of the way that it’s generally employed…which, if jay jeffers is right about where the terminology originated, would hardly be surprising?

      The term Intellectual Dark Web was coined by Bret Weinstein’s brother Eric Weinstein, a mathematician and managing director of Peter Theil’s investment firm. The IDW partially originated from social media, where most contemporary political heresies are shut down, or more literally, shamed. In real life, the Dark Web is a seedy online resource for illegal transactions such as buying drugs and weapons. The IDW then is a metaphor for a kind of rebel outlier. The irony is that what makes the IDW rebellious is a simple refusal to kowtow to the culture’s newly hypersensitive demands, making everyday sensibility controversial, which the name suggests.

      …either way…given some descriptions of it

      The term was coined, half-jokingly, by mathematician Eric Weinstein and gained prominence after Bari Weiss, staff editor, and writer at the New York Times, wrote an op-ed profiling the movement. It refers to a burgeoning group of thinkers looking to create a space where cultural discourse is both civil and fact-based. At least, that’s how its supporters see it. Others have argued the IDW is nothing special, just a new to sell dated and bad ideas.
      […]
      As Weiss’s op-ed points out, the IDW is not a structured organization with group meetings, membership lists, or a policy manifesto. As such, who or what ideas belong remain, whether by design or its nascent status, nebulous.
      [https://bigthink.com/technology-innovation/what-is-the-so-called-intellectual-dark-web/]

      …I don’t know that I’d exactly relish the prospect of a discourse from which things being “both civil and fact-based” winds up being the baby being thrown out with whatever bathwater you think mcwhorter might be pitching?

      …which isn’t to say I greet with any cheer what the folks at rationalwiki.org peg as “a gateway to right-wing radicalization” their take was also that “The term itself functions as a general meme. There is no actual organization, or movement which it represents. In other words, anyone can say they are a member, and no one has the authority to deny it.”…so presumably by the same token it’d be equally true that I (for example) wouldn’t be in a position to categorically deny being a member…despite only having thought about the term consciously since I saw your comment…& that makes me think it’s not an identifier that lends itself to good-faith use nearly as well as the other sort?

      …the thinking about it part makes me think that, that is…not looking to say your comment was in anything other than good faith…cheers for the brief foray into yet another rabbit-hole, anyway

      • Weiss in characteristically self-sabotaging way, made the mistake of championing them too openly and led the ones aspiring to respectability like McWhorter to try to dodge her framing that put them in the same camp as open loons like Jordan Peterson.

        He’s open, at rate, about his place at the Manhattan institute, which is a cesspool of horrible right wing ideas.  And I think these pieces by Jeet Heer and Elie Mystal do a good job of unpacking McWhorter’s MO. He does just enough salting of his work with truthful nuggets that less than careful readers miss the blatant propaganda he’s pushing.

        https://jeetheer.substack.com/p/a-holistic-history

        https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/at-war-with-the-woke-a-fresh-perspective-makes-the-same-tired-arguments/2021/11/24/7dcd37d8-38e7-11ec-91dc-551d4473

        The attack McWhorter made in his Times piece on Mystal for not being quiet about right wing authoritarianism in the US because of Ukraine is definitely interesting in this context. Mystal is a brilliant guy and actually bases his ideas in facts, which Heer notes are something McWhorter avoids like a vampire fears sunlight. It’s very possible McWhorter still feels the sting.

        But the bigger issue is that in a world filled with smart, independent and honest writers, the Times has chosen to platform so many hacks. Once in a blue moon Mystal gets a review in the Washington Post. The Times gives McWhorter regular distribution? Affirmative action programs for the purpose of promoting the views of right wing hacks ought to end, but they’re at the heart of the Times brand.

        • …yeah, I’m something of a fan of elie mystal…& in my experience if you’re setting yourself up in opposition to something he said…you’re most likely missing his point…be it from stupidity or something more “reasoned”

    • I think it’s telling that one of RFK JR.’s side hustles has been campaigning against wind power with dumb claims that fall right in line with Trump’s.

      Unlike the antivax parallel with Trump, there has never been any popular traction for anti wind power. It’s always been a Koch crew lobbying effort focused on elites. Watching how RFK Jr. got bought on this issue is a clear sign of how much overlap there is between Koch and company influence buying on their fossil fuels side and the influence buying going on with other right wing extremist campaigns.

  3. The memes made by students all made me laugh. Sometimes I think the kids are alright. Especially the ones who poured out of schools in Florida to scream WE SAY GAY in parking lots to protest that bullshit bill (which passed).

     

    I may have mentioned this previously, but OzzyMan (funny person on YT) interviewed some Ukrainians on zoom. He has since done so with some Russian citizens. If you have 30-60 min to spare, it is an interesting look into their lives. One of the Russians basically admits nothing will change in her country until Putin is dead, which (true) I thought was pretty brave to just, like, SAY. Anyway, interesting take from a guy who normally narrates videos of people falling off boats n stuff…

    https://www.youtube.com/user/ozzymanreviews/videos

  4. Whatever right wing propaganda my parents watch told them that in 2012 the US set up biological warfare facilities in Ukraine which were making covid-19 and anthrax and of course nothing was evacuated before the Russians took it.

    • …it seems like that take on it has spread from the Qanon direction & contaminated a pretty broad swathe of the stuff being pushed on the fox news side of the media spectrum…I think (haven’t got the link to hand to check) that about the only part of it that’s accurate is that there are/were some labs that did produce some nasty shit…but the entire purpose of what’s been being done since somewhere around that timeframe is to safely decommission previously existing hazardous materials…needless to say covid has no spot on that list but the suggestion I read was that the vast majority of the stuff had been destroyed & most if not all of the places were being wound down…I’ll have to see if I can figure out where I saw that…but it seems like your folks might have something in common with a bunch of people in china (& russia) in terms of what they’re seeing on the news?

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