Music: Hvalfugl — ‘Funklende Blikke’
‘The only resource Russia has is men, and they are not afraid to waste them’
Boris Dralyuk, editor-in-chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books, interviewed by Klaus Stimeder: Mr. Dralyuk, we are going into the tenth month of Russia’s full invasion of Ukraine. What is your take on the situation? I am no military strategist, but my sense is that the Russian Army’s chances of defeating the Ukrainian Army on the battlefield are nil. Thanks to its allies, the Ukrainian Army is better trained, more experienced, and far better supplied. Also, we must remember…
The year of Ukraine and Ukrainians
New Years Greeting of @ZelenskyyUa pic.twitter.com/IA4aknnSBk — Walter Report 🇺🇦 (@walter_report) December 31, 2022 Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s New Year’s greeting.
The war raging in Europe feels familiar
Rolling Stone reports: Dženita Mulabdić hugged the ground, the sound of gunfire fast approaching. The pregnant 20-year-old Bosnian woman and her husband, Muhamed, eyed the locked basement door. Their toddler played close by, unaware of the armed men outside. The commandos from Belgrade, wearing black balaclavas, jumped the fence and entered the house in the ethnically mixed Bosnian city of Bijeljina, a two-hour drive from Serbia’s capital. They trudged downstairs to the basement, encountering a barricade in front of a…
Leaked Jan. 6 committee report exposes Twitter’s post-insurrection chaos
Rolling Stone reports: In the immediate aftermath of the Jan. 6 attack, Twitter employees raged at their own company and its leadership, blaming them for the social media giant’s inept handling of Donald Trump and other top MAGA figures’ incitement to violence. “Do you want to have more blood on your hands?” one staffer asked a top executive, Del Harvey, when she questioned whether Trump could inspire more violence in the insurrection’s aftermath. The exchange, relayed by former Twitter employees…
The year the U.S. became the world’s largest exporter of liquified natural gas
Inside Climate News reports: When environmentalists look back on 2022, they might remember it as the year the United States finally passed a major climate change law. Some advocates worry, however, that this significant victory is being undermined by a long-term trend that accelerated while that law—the Inflation Reduction Act—was being negotiated. In the first half of the year, the United States became the world’s top exporter of liquified natural gas, or LNG. Then, in September, crude oil exports hit…
Ukraine is in the headlines now. But a whole new world of conflict is about to erupt
Simon Tisdall writes: It was a good year to bury bad news – and bad deeds – as a clutch of dictators, assorted killers and repressive or anti-democratic regimes can testify. In Myanmar, Yemen, Mali, Nicaragua, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Somalia and Afghanistan, to name a few crisis zones, egregious abuses and unrelieved misery attracted relatively scant, perfunctory international scrutiny. The main reason for 2022’s blinkered perspectives is, of course, Ukraine, Europe’s biggest conflict since 1945. This is not to say…
Capitalism excels at innovation but is failing at maintenance
Andrew Russell and Lee Vinsel write: Innovation is a dominant ideology of our era, embraced in America by Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and the Washington DC political elite. As the pursuit of innovation has inspired technologists and capitalists, it has also provoked critics who suspect that the peddlers of innovation radically overvalue innovation. What happens after innovation, they argue, is more important. Maintenance and repair, the building of infrastructures, the mundane labour that goes into sustaining functioning and efficient infrastructures,…
Music: Bob James — ‘Westchester Lady’
The price of weapons assistance: Ukraine pays in blood to convince Western allies
Eesti Ekspress reports: In November 2021, a group of EU ambassadors gathered in the government quarter of Kyiv. The US and UK ambassadors took the podium to discuss what their respective country’s intelligence was saying. Most was already public knowledge. A small part wasn’t. The latter was already known to the diplomat who convened the meeting: Head of the Delegation of the EU to Ukraine Matti Maasikas. He was convinced that war would erupt sooner or later. When I ask…
These lies about climate change just wouldn’t die in 2022
USA Today reports: There was a time – a recent time – when concern about the environment was relatively bipartisan, not a cultural flashpoint. A Republican, President Richard Nixon, established the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970. In the 1980s and 1990s, bipartisan majorities voted to strengthen the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, led by a Republican – Rhode Island’s Sen. John Chafee. Those days are gone, and today a wide range of misleading statements and outright lies…
Exiled chief rabbi says Jews should leave Russia while they can
The Guardian reports: Moscow’s exiled chief rabbi says Jews should leave Russia while they still can, before they are made scapegoats for the hardship caused by the war in Ukraine. “When we look back over Russian history, whenever the political system was in danger you saw the government trying to redirect the anger and discontent of the masses towards the Jewish community,” Pinchas Goldschmidt told the Guardian. “We saw this in tsarist times and at the end of the Stalinist…
Corruption: A charity tied to the Supreme Court offers donors access to the justices
The New York Times reports: In some years, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. does the honors. In others, it might be Justice Sonia Sotomayor or Justice Clarence Thomas presenting the squared-off hunks of marble affixed with the Supreme Court’s gilded seal. Hewed from slabs left over from the 1930s construction of the nation’s high court and handed out in its magnificent Great Hall, they are a unique status symbol in a town that craves them. And while the ideological…
Evidence of Trump’s criminal tax evasion offers the best case yet for putting him in prison
David Cay Johnston writes: Don’t let the cynics who know little about our tax system trick you into thinking there was nothing all that new or important in the six years of Donald Trump’s taxes released Friday by the House Ways and Means Committee. In fact, even if some of it was previously teased by the committee, the dump includes a cornucopia of information that affects your wallet—including powerful evidence of criminal tax evasion. Among other things, Trump’s tax returns make a strong…
The ‘red wave’ washout: How skewed polls fed a distorted election narrative
The New York Times reports: Senator Patty Murray, a Democrat, had consistently won re-election by healthy margins in her three decades representing Washington State. This year seemed no different: By midsummer, polls showed her cruising to victory over a Republican newcomer, Tiffany Smiley, by as much as 20 percentage points. So when a survey in late September by the Republican-leaning Trafalgar Group showed Ms. Murray clinging to a lead of just two points, it seemed like an aberration. But in…
The Webb Telescope is just getting started
The New York Times reports: So far it’s been eye candy from heaven: The black vastness of space teeming with enigmatic, unfathomably distant blobs of light. Ghostly portraits of Neptune, Jupiter and other neighbors we thought we knew already. Nebulas and galaxies made visible by the penetrating infrared eyes of the James Webb Space Telescope. The telescope, named for James Webb, the NASA administrator during the buildup to the Apollo moon landings, is a joint project of NASA, the European…