2024
Recommended Insights into the Kursk Incursion
Michael Bohnert, an engineer at Rand Corporation, shares some useful insights about electronic warfare in the August 16, 2024 episode of the podcast Ukraine the Latest. He discusses this topic in connection with Ukraine’s Kursk incursion and describes the difficult choices that Russia’s political and military leadership face in the coming months from the standpoint of electronic warfare.
Also, Anders Puck Nielsen, a military analyst in Denmark, released a helpful 15-minute video on YouTube today about where he thinks Russia’s leadership is in responding to Ukraine’s incursion. Acknowledging complexity, he nonetheless keeps his viewers' eyes on two fundamental issues for Russia, namely, space and manpower, and he underlines the critical domestic political entanglements that the manpower question has.
Both of these contributions offer useful perspectives on Ukraine’s shakeup of a common impression that the conflict was supposedly frozen. Of course, there are many more aspects of this story, but I highlight these contributions because I haven’t seen them in other news stories so far.
Map of the incursion in early August, uploaded to Wikimedia Commons on August 8, 2024 by Ecrusized in varying sizes and languages. License: CC0 (no rights reserved).
Today we have a code orange air quality alert in Mt. Washington Valley due to particulate matter from all the smoke produced by wild fires in Canada.😷
The Centre for Eastern Studies (OSW) in Warsaw has put out two interesting reports on YouTube that analyze Russia’s initially incoherent propaganda response to Ukraine’s Kursk incursion and how this propaganda interacts with ordinary Russians' reactions.
Maybe right-wingers are up in arms about tampons because they saw the IT Crowd episode “Aunt Irma’s Visiting” and didn’t realize it was a comedy. That might also explain their warped reverence for 1950s heteronormative masculinity.
In This is Not Propaganda (end of part 2), Peter Pomerantsev writes of his Russian family, based in Kyiv, becoming stateless in the late 1970s. The KGB had accused his father, Igor, of “circulating defamatory fabrications, regular listening to hostile broadcasts and contacts with foreigners.” They recommended he emigrate.
In many ways Igor was lucky. He had the semblance of choice. The [KGB] major had made it clear that if he stayed, he would have the full seven years in prison and five exiled in the Soviet provinces to face. If he had been a Ukrainian-language poet, [Pomerantsev continues, Igor] would have been locked up immediately. Repression in Ukraine focused on exterminating any signs of independent Ukrainian culture outside the cultural crèche of state-sanctioned Soviet ‘Ukrainianness’. But Igor wrote in Russian, the language of the coloniser.
He turns being artless into an art form; he is a Picasso of pettiness; a Shakespeare of shit. His faults are fractal: even his flaws have flaws, and so on ad infinitum. God knows there have always been stupid people in the world, and plenty of nasty people too. But rarely has stupidity been so nasty, or nastiness so stupid.
Fairness and Dignity
Lawrence O’Donnell had some tough words for his media colleagues yesterday on MSNBC. Journalists pretended to ask questions at a supposed news conference, broadcast live, while Trump pretended he was answering them. Throughout the charade, they gave him and his torrent of semi-coherent lies a pass, like they always do, most fatefully in 2016. Then O’Donnell showed a longer segment by the one candidate who actually had something to say yesterday, but whose talk had not been deemed worthy of a live broadcast on any network: Kamala Harris.
The vice president spoke to the United Auto Workers in Detroit. Her message was not a simple repeat of her Philadelphia speech the day before. In this smaller, more focused setting, she talked about the importance of collective bargaining for achieving a fair result. What’s more, she tied the term “collective” as used in an organized labour context to the community theme that figured so prominently in her Philadelphia speech. She linked the hard work of collective bargaining and of organizing politically to love of country, and she spoke of the dignity of labor.
Fairness and dignity. That’s a message Americans need to hear about. What they got, instead, was an impotent rehash of the same old resentments, lies, and insecurities. I’m not much for television news and opinion, but this 25-minute video (available on YouTube) is important. Broadcast and print media, take note. Your country deserves better.
Negotiating One's Own Murder (Satire)
Here is some satire from Ukraine on a certain 🍊 candidate’s nonsense: “Shot of Peace” (cartoon in Ukrainian with English subtitles by Фріоніс), https://youtu.be/… #СлаваУкраїні #НахуйПутіна #НахуйТрампа
Has 1Password been getting worse over the past year or so? They update regularly, but it feels like I’m encountering unnecessary friction these days, though I haven’t identified any specific patterns.🤔
Just drank a cooled-off pint of the broth left over from cooking a bunch of chard. 😋
There are two documentary films streaming on Paramount+ right now that I find inspiring and motivating: “Superpower” (2023), directed by Sean Penn and Aaron Kaufman; and “Kiss the Future” (2024), directed by Nenad Cicin-Sain. The first centers on Ukraine and Volodymyr Zelinsky in Russia’s current war against Ukraine, and the second goes back to the Siege of Sarajevo (1992–96).
A theme common to each film is ordinary citizens standing up to genocidal aggressors. There is also the relationship between popular culture and politics in war, including the role of international celebrity. In the first movie, an entertainer-turned-president must lead a country in war, supported by a self-mobilizing citizenry. Moreover, one of the directors is himself an entertainer. In the second movie, inhabitants of a city under constant fire find a way to get by and even thrive with punk rock and dance. They are later joined on TV and then in person by the band U2.
We need a president who reads widely, not one as ignorant and crudely cynical as the former president quoted in this piece is. www.politico.com/news/2024…
Microsoft installed Copilot on my mother’s machine earlier this week, and it took multiple rounds of force rebooting before I had control of the computer and could delete the thing. This feels like an aggressive move by a giant corporation against an octogenarian, who already feels like she’s losing her technical skills.😠
Good on Ukraine for using a little leverage against the Putin lackey Viktor Orban. It was high time. Details of the spat are in this short Politico piece: “EU ‘ready’ to negotiate as Hungary-Ukraine oil row boils over”.
Interesting notes on DNC process in the coming weeks: “DNC poised to move forward with virtual roll call after Biden dropout” (Elena Schneider, Politico).
Things are gonna get ugly, of course. Instead of ageism and ableism, we’ll have racism and sexism. And we’ll still have a ridiculously, dangerously bothsidesing press to parrot it all.
I was undecided about whether Biden should step aside, but I trust his judgement on this. He’s a public servant as too few are these days. I am looking forward to Harris’s nomination.
Turned off NPR this afternoon because I am sick to death of the cliched, both-sides genre Let’s Talk to Voters in Swing States. This particular report (on Here and Now) was trying to be original by talking to swing-state voters considering voting differently this year, but it’s still the same old same old. Given the decimation of local news around the country, these national outlets need to do some actual reporting on goings-on outside their usual frames of reference.
The Kremlin switches messages at will to its advantage, climbing inside everything: European right-wing nationalists are seduced with an anti-EU message; the Far Left is co-opted with tales of fighting US hegemony; US religious conservatives are convinced by the Kremlin’s fight against homosexuality. And the result is an array of voices, working away at global audiences from different angles, producing a cumulative echo chamber of Kremlin support, all broadcast on RT.
Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia (New York: PublicAffairs, 2014), act 3, last section.
“Here Come the Russians, Again” by David Corn, Mother Jones, May 24, 2024.
The media has an important role to play. The more attention it can cast upon the Russian efforts, the greater the odds that a slice of the electorate will comprehend the threat and perhaps be inoculated from being unduly influenced by these operations.
Of course, the media is largely failing us on this score.