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👉 Julia Davis, “Russia to Ukraine: “You want a Ceasefire and I Want You Dead'” at CEPA, May 21, 2025.

The Kremlin’s propagandists are in a joyous mood as they anticipate US disengagement from the Ukraine conflict.

Davis’s insights come from her study and translation of prominent Russian-language talk shows.

As always, the most accurate assessment of the mood in the Kremlin came not from its robotic public statements, but from its highly-paid propagandists in the TV studios. Since they are regularly briefed by the Kremlin’s handlers on what they can and can’t say, their scripted narratives and carefully crafted discussions offer the best window into the regime’s views and aims.

This was also true after the May 19 telephone conversation between Putin and US President Donald J. Trump about a possible peace deal in Ukraine.…

Read the whole piece for her latest snapshot of where Kremlin minds are at.

Check out her YouTube channel, Russian Media Monitor, to experience clips of the scripted talk shows firsthand—with English subtitles.

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I’ve made a good start on letting people on FB Messenger know that I’ll soon be deleting that last Meta holdout on my phone. I’ll take up the challenge again in a day or so.

BTW, if we know each other, and you’d like to reach out yourself, my contact details are on markstoneman.com/about.

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I really enjoyed “Red Desert” (Il deserto rosso), dir. Michelangelo Antonioni (Italy, 1964), starring Monica Vitti and Richard Harris. It was a visual feast with understated drama. The camera moves slowly, inviting viewers to look at and see the industrial and seaside landscapes, the factory technology and domestic interiors, the refuse and pollution, the faces and postures of individuals, the colors.

Giuliana, the protagonist, is a troubled middle-class woman who was once hospitalized after a largely silenced event that still affects her. The film invites us to try and relate the sounds, smells, and textures of the protagonist’s social and physical surroundings to her inner life as the social interactions and dialogs unfold.

A middle-class woman and her son, dressed as if in a nice town or city, but they are in an industrial area, factories on both sides of them, smokestacks and power lines, hazy, presumably polluted. There is a small road, but no sidewalk. They are walking in the dirt and gravel.

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There is a charming road movie on Arte called “The Little Brother” (Tajikistan, 1991), made at a particular moment in history, between the Soviet Union’s dissolution and the Tajik Civil War. It is about a seventeen-year-old who would like to leave home, but can’t because he is responsible for his seven-year-old brother. He wants his father, who lives in the countryside, to take responsibility for the kid once more, but that doesn’t work out.

The black-and-white film centers on a trip to their father’s place. They get there and back on a small freight train, whose driver takes on the occasional passenger and parcel via a barter system. Viewers get to experience the Tajik landscape and moments of rural life from the moving train. Sometimes the train stops, affording encounters with other people. The accompanying soundtrack is fantastic.

The brothers' heads poking out of the locomotive, smiling, as they look down at something from the moving train.
View of the small train from behind on a single-track line through the countryside. Smoke is coming out of it.
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Comedian Josh Johnson’s latest: “RFK Jr: Head of Health and Human Sewage,” youtu.be….

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Kristi Noem does not know what habeas corpus means: youtu.be….

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Henry Winkler’s lovely commencement speech at Georgetown University: youtu.be (11 min.).

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I enjoyed watching the miniseries “Sunny” (AppleTV+, 2024), starring Rashida Jones. Unfortunately, following the same logic as on network television, where every good and quirky thing must meet an untimely death, the show won’t see a second season. But it still holds up well on its own.

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Kristi Noem’s use of the term “due process” is crazy disingenuous.

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The short clips of committee oversight hearings that Forbes posts to YouTube (@ForbesBreakingNews) represent devastating critiques of MAGA–DOGE governance. At the same time, watching Democratic legislators do this work feels kinda good.

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Photograph shows librarians, mostly women, in large room with alphabetized drawers of catalog cards; 1917 Red Cross poster by Hayden Hayden hangs on the wall.

Catalog card processing at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC, ca. 1917–1920.

Via Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2016649543/.

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Black and white photo of a woman at a behind-the-scenes catalog with a library cart with books and other items she's apparently pulled for researchers or for Congressional staff. She is squatted down with an open book, a card she is consulting, and an open card catalog drawer.

Jewel Mazique at a Library of Congress card catalog, Washington, DC, ca. 1942.

Via Library of Congress, Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information photograph collection, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2017828946/.

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My three-year-old grandchild was getting a little distracted and started talking with her father while I was reading to her via video chat. Then she noticed I wasn’t reading and asked her father—with a straight face—to quit talking so we could continue with the book. 😀

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Older apartment buildings of six and more floors with balconies. Newer, tall buildings in the background. Small cars on the street, some parked. Street food vendors with red tarps against the sun. An assortment of wires running from a single pole to the older apartment buildings on each side of the street.

An impressive assortment of wires above a street in Guiyang, China, on July 13, 2015

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I’ve been streaming the Franco-Belgian detective series “Astrid et Raphaëlle” (aka “Astrid” and “Bright Minds”) on PBS, and I’m really enjoying it. The autistic Astrid is a compelling character, and Sara Mortensen plays her with love and respect. Granted, I know too little about autism, but I find the show’s effort to integrate other members of Astrid’s evening autistic discussion group helps to round out her character. Then we get to see people with diverse jobs, not to mention varying experiences and abilities vis-à-vis interactions with the neurotypical. Occasional flashbacks to her childhood and youth help too. In the end, though, the series is still a detective show. The police archivist Astrid, solves crimes with a detective who is unafraid to follow leads uncovered by Astrid that her male colleagues would prefer to ignore: Raphaëlle (Comandante Coste), played by Lola Dewaere.

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I watched a film about Nicholas Winton, who helped rescue 669 children from Prague before the Wehrmacht occupied the city. I’m usually not attracted to this subject on screen, but I found “One Life,” dir. James Hawes (Bleeker Street, 2024), both absorbing and affecting. Much of its poignance comes from its shifts between an old man in the late 1980s and his memories of the late 1930s. Anthony Hopkins, who must have been 85 or 86 when he played the lead, is brilliant.

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I thought the Library of Congress was Congress’s, not a plaything of the executive.

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Toward a Mixed Parliamentary–Presidential System in the U.S.?

A strange thought has been bouncing around in my head lately. If the current administration gets its way regarding how the various departments and agencies are run, even whether or not money appropriated by Congress for them is spent in the first place, that could do more than simply create a governance and democracy problem for the country. Presidential overreach and malfeasance could force Congress to adopt radically different solutions to the national problems we want and need it to address.

Most dramatically, it could consider establishing administrative bodies responsible directly to it, not to the executive branch. Assuming the United States survived whatever the interim brought, the Trump–MAGA–DOGE approach to politics and rule could eventually lead the way to a more parliamentary form of government that limited the president’s role to the things specifically enumerated in the Constitution. The Necessary and Proper Clause speaks to Congress, after all, not the executive.

This idea still sounds outlandish to me, mainly because I don’t see the administration getting away with its unitary executive theory. If it does, however, then Congress would have to start thinking hard about what is necessary and proper, even removing agencies and departments from the executive branch. Or it could starve these institutions of funds and set up its own. Trump and DOGE have already done a lot of work to make this last option possible.

The president would still have his plenary powers to appoint major officials with the consent of the Senate, but Congress would be under no obligation to fund this cabinet beyond whatever it deemed prudent. Over time, Congress might find it necessary and appropriate to appoint officials from within its own ranks with duties that resemble those of a prime minister and that legislator’s cabinet. If the U.S. president has too much power and can’t be trusted to exercise it with prudent restraint, why shouldn’t Congress begin governing in a way that might lead in this direction?

Parliamentary government might not be the specific goal, but reining in an out-of-control executive certainly needs to be. The result could then well turn out to be a place not unlike where monarchical misrule led in Britain. If the Supreme Court oversteps in order to defend an authoritarian executive, Congress could seek a remedy there as well, changing its size and structure, for example. In short, the extreme degree of power that the Trump administration is trying to assert need not end in the direction they seek or in the pre-MAGA status quo either.

Of course, the nation itself is currently too divided for such sweeping legislation, which would require veto-proof majorities, at least initially. Nonetheless, state initiatives to require run-off elections or weighted voting could yield legislators with more nuanced views and the desire and ability to work for their constituents instead of for a tyrant.

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Timothy Snyder summing up Russia’s relationship to NATO from 1999 to 2010:

The eastward enlargement of NATO in 1999 was not presented by Putin as a threat. Instead, he tried to recruit the United States or NATO to cooperate with Russia to address what he saw as common security problems. After the United States was attacked by Islamist terrorists in 2001, Putin offered to cooperate with NATO in territories that bordered Russia. Putin did not present the EU enlargement of 2004 as a threat. On the contrary, he spoke favorably that year of future EU membership for Ukraine. In 2008, Putin attended the NATO summit in Bucharest. In 2009, Medvedev allowed American aircraft to fly over Russia to supply troops in Afghanistan. In 2010, Russia’s ambassador to NATO, the radical nationalist Dmitry Rogozin, expressed his concern that NATO would leave Afghanistan. Rogozin complained of NATO’s lack of fighting spirit, its “mood of capitulation.” He wanted NATO troops at Russia’s border.

Source: Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America (Tim Duggan Books, 2018), chap. 3.

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'Nothing but the Truth' (Sony Pictures, 2008)

I recently watched “Nothing but the Truth” and found it to be engaging because of how rooted it is in its time, even as the issues it treats are much more broadly relevant. At its heart is the freedom of the press versus the federal government’s powers of coercion in ostensible national security matters. Womanhood and especially motherhood are also important to the story, with mainstream gender norms employed to help viewers relate to (or feel no sympathy for) the woman who the government attempts to coerce. The film is a work of fiction, but its author, Rod Lurie, draws on real events for its initial premise.

During the movie’s first ten or twenty minutes, I got nostalgic vibes because there is a news-making national newspaper in DC that hasn’t been corrupted by a billionaire, a newspaper whose print distribution still matters. There is an FBI that follows the law, and reporters who think that officials lying is newsworthy, even if short attention spans run counter to this belief. The DC location, regardless of where it was actually filmed, was also familiar because of the occasional overlap between work life and home life, even if the filmmakers restricted that overlap to the two main women characters, a journalist and an outed spy.

As the film went on, I was reminded of how out-of-control the federal government can get when pursuing an administration’s aims because the judiciary typically defers to the executive branch on national security matters. The movie shows the U.S. government trying to coerce a reporter to give up her source: it jails her for contempt during a grand jury investigation. Her loss of liberty lasts for nearly a year before there is even a court decision on the specific issues involved. Images of the reporter being transported in leg chains still resonate today. The CIA adds a further low by threatening its own outed agent, reminding her about her upcoming custody hearing.

Since the journalist and the outed spy are both moms, the film connects the two on a personal level by situating their daughters in the same school. The women both volunteer in the school, but don’t know each other personally in the beginning, although the journalist knows the other woman’s child because of her particular volunteer duties. (If any fathers volunteer, it doesn’t come up.) Why is motherhood relevant to the plot? The jailed and then imprisoned journalist pays a high personal cost, being unable to see her young son and probably losing her husband. At the same time, this personal cost can be interpreted by some viewers as her putting a principle ahead of her duty as a mother.

At the very end of the movie, we see that the journalist’s initial unintentional source (before she began her actual reporting) had been her son’s classmate, the daughter of the outed CIA agent. This makes her principled stand for freedom of the press also about protecting a child. Perhaps, for some people, this lets her off the hook for leaving her own son without a mother for so long. Unfortunately, it also almost overshadows the constitutional issues behind her refusal to be coerced by the U.S. government. Or is that the point? Is this another example of the personal manifesting as political?

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Yesterday I received my first ever skeptical question about my wearing a mask in the grocery store. I doubt she was from around here because we are pretty much live-and-let-live in NH, which is not unlike DC in this respect. 😷

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I am a sucker for a good Jean Arthur movie, so I was happy to run across “Only Angels Have Wings” (Columbia Pictures, 1939), in which she plays opposite Cary Grant. I remember enjoying it once or twice before, and I wasn’t disappointed this time either. The movie offers good actors, believable and often likable characters, and a gripping tale centered around a dangerous air mail and air freight business connecting a small South American port to remote areas in the mountains with small aircraft and harrowing flight conditions.

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Newspaper ad featuring Stanwyck's legs and shoulders. The teaser asks, 'How would you lead your life—if you weren't afraid of being talked about?'

I enjoyed the pre-Code film "Ladies They Talk About" (Warner Bros., 1933), starring Barbara Stanwyck. This fast-paced drama features a bank robbery, a revivalist with a radio program, and an interesting portrayal of inmates in a women's ward at San Quentin State Prison. The film also offers sex appeal and comic relief.

Image: Ad clipped from the studio's pressbook ("merchandising plan") at the Internet Archive, archive.org….

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In the beginning was the word, and shit got weird…

“People Are Losing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies” www.rollingstone.com…