Headline: Mark Zuckerberg says extent of opioid crisis was biggest surprise of US tour
Sub-headline: Speaking about his 30-state tour that sparked rumors of a presidential run, the Facebook CEO added: ‘We have a responsibility to remain optimistic’
Headline: Facebook is the world’s most powerful adolescent
Sub-headline: And like many teenagers, it needs to be set some rules
Mr. Rachman’s accusation:
Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg was once reluctant to acknowledge the company’s political power — initially rejecting the idea that fake news on Facebook influenced the 2016 election as “crazy”. This attitude may have been naive or disingenuous, but it was certainly not sustainable.
‘The Rebellion Against The Elites’ continues? Macron/Sarkozy will share the same Political Fait? The Financial Times as the Advocate/Apologist for a Political/Moral Colonialism, within the State that practiced these Crimes, against Self Determination of the refugees that held aloft France as the junior partner of The British Empire… This Writer has not the canvas to properly draw a complete illustration of ‘Western Mendacity’ , in the face of this ‘Rebellion From Within’ …
StephenKMackSD
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Reply to:
Thank you! You have 9 recommendations at 11: 43 AM PDT. The utter political fragility of Macron, post his ‘Pension Reform’ debacle, or call it a betrayal of Democracy… Like Sarkozy, he is not just ‘tone deaf’ , but blissfully unaware of the ‘Have Not’s’ : gilets jaunes , gilets noir, Algerians and others. No surprise that ‘you’ fail to grasp a possible explanation, for what might be a deep discontent of the ‘Lower Order’ of French Citizenry? Look to the life experience of Macron and yourself for a possible explanatory frame?
Regards,
StephenKMackSD
…
Macron’s Swift Justice: After Protests, France Holds Hasty Trials for Hundreds
The streets are calmer, after days of unrest over the police shooting of a teenager, but the courts are going into overdrive. Lawyers for those arrested often have just 30 minutes to prepare.
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Some 3,400 people were arrested as a massive police presence set out to restore order. The justice system is running almost around the clock to process them. Many are being funneled through hasty trials, known as comparutions immédiates, where prosecutors and court-appointed lawyers traditionally churn through simple crimes like traffic violations, theft or assault, often when the accused is caught in the act. After flooding the streets with 45,000 officers night after night, the French state is looking to send a second harsh message. Justice Minister Éric Dupond-Moretti advised prosecutors to systematically seek prison sentences for people charged with physical assault or serious vandalism. “Very clearly, I want a firm hand,” Mr. Dupond-Moretti told France Inter radio on Monday. …
Its called Fascisms for a reason: half an hour to prepare a plea !
Headline: The Con Artists Who Blame Ukraine Aid for America’s Social Problems
Sub-headline: RFK Jr., Glenn Greenwald, and other Putin apologists are making disingenuous, pseudo-populist arguments against U.S. support for Ukraine.
The Reader has to be patient with Alaric DeArment’s first two paragraphs of his ‘essay’ that are mere preamble:
A scene of squalor unfolds as the camera moves along a city street lined with apparent drug addicts to the soundtrack of Childish Gambino’s “This Is America.” A caption reads, “While American citizens live on the streets and take drugs not to feel the pain, the United States would rather finance a proxy war against Russia,” while a bar graph says the U.S. has sent $46.6 billion in military aid to Ukraine.
The video, on TikTok, is but one of the countlesspostsacross social media that convey the same underlying message: By helping Ukraine defend itself from bloody subjugation by Russia, the U.S. is depriving its own citizens of critical aid. This pernicious narrative has spread in part thanks to fringe yet popular media and political figures who already had a history of littering the discourse with Kremlinesque talking points, and who now have weaponized and monetized the perception that the U.S. has been too generous to Ukraine and too stingy to its own people.
This kind of hysteria mongering is familiar to those of us who were alive in the McCarthy era, and who eventually read American History, after that dark period. Of what The Republicans of the period called The New Deal as a ‘Generation of Treason’ ! This ‘News Magazine’ it’s editor Tomasky and it’s hireling DeArment are taking their strategy from those desperate Republicans: to defame, discredit and impugn Greenwald, Dore and Kennedy. The Reader need only look at the defamation of Jeremy Corbyn, for a similar exercise in political mendacity, carefully hidden by the whole of the Corporate Press of Britain.
For Propaganda to ‘work’ it must be repeated over and over again to be established as ‘truth’ in the readers thought.
The ‘Evidence’ against Greenwald
Among them is Glenn Greenwald, whose Substack has more than 300,000 subscribers and whose online talk show, System Update, draws hundreds of thousands of views. In December, on Tucker Carlson’s since-canceled Fox News show, Greenwald said, “I’ve been asking since February, in what conceivable way will the lives of American citizens be materially improved? How will you or your family’s lives be protected or fostered by sending tens of billions of dollars, now in excess of $100 billion, for the war in Ukraine?”
The ‘Evidence’ against Dore:
Jimmy Dore, whose YouTube show has more than 1.2 million followers, was a featured speaker at February’s Rage Against the War Machine rally in Washington. There, he criticized the “over $100 billion” sent to Kyiv, telling the crowd, “We could have spent that money saving lives with universal health care, but instead we spend that money taking lives overseas, which is our specialty.”
The ‘Evidence’ against Kennedy:
And then there’s Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the anti-vaxxer running a long-shot challenge to President Biden for the Democratic Party nomination. In his campaign announcement speech, Kennedy contrasted the “$113 billion committed to the Ukraine” with the “57 percent of Americans [who] can’t put their hand on $1,000 if they have an emergency,” “one-quarter of Americans [who] go to bed hungry,” and homeless veterans.
That all three use polemics, to not just sharpen their arguments is questionable? or simply just another persuasive strategy ?
All three figures are peddling a false dichotomy and perverting the traditional guns-versus-butter debate, but their message resonates with millions because it plays into genuine anger and frustration over economic inequality as well as concern and distaste for foreign entanglements, particularly in the wake of the Iraq War and misadventures in Libya, Syria, and Afghanistan. It’s especially salient in the context of polls indicating that Americans’ bipartisan support for aid to Ukraine, while still strong, has softened considerably, and amid a but their message resonates with millions because it plays into genuine anger and frustratiopresidential campaign whose outcome could play a pivotal role in Ukraine’s ability to procure aid from the U.S., its strongest backer by far.
How long has it been that American readers have confronted the ‘Guns & Butter’ argument? Since Lyndon Johnson’s escalation of the War in Vietnam, led by Technocrat Robert McNamara?
The Charges Against Greenwald, Dore, Kennedy:
All three figures are All three figures are peddling a false dichotomy and perverting the traditional guns-versus-butter debate, but their message resonates with millions because it plays into genuine anger and frustration over economic inequality as well as concern and distaste for foreign entanglements, particularly in the wake of the Iraq War and misadventures in Libya, Syria, and Afghanistan., but their message resonates with millions because it plays into genuine anger and frustration over economic inequality as well as concern and distaste for foreign entanglements, particularly in the wake of the Iraq War and misadventures in Libya, Syria, and Afghanistan.
Tellingly, the above paragraph undercuts itself:
The resort
But are Greenwald and others merely interested in promoting anti-imperialism while advocating for America’s downtrodden, or are they bad-faith propagandizers for a psychopathic dictator? The evidence is unfavorable to them.
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But are Greenwald and others merely interested in promoting anti-imperialism while advocating for America’s downtrodden, or are they bad-faith propagandizers for a psychopathic dictator? The evidence is unfavorable to them.
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And RFK Jr., in a May interview with UnHerd, called the conflict “a U.S. war against Russia, to essentially sacrifice the flower of Ukrainian youth in an abattoir of death and destruction for the geopolitical ambition of the neocons, oft-stated, of regime change for Vladimir Putin and exhausting the Russian military so that they can’t fight anywhere else in the world.”
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Dore’s, Greenwald’s, and Kennedy’s willingness to parrot Kremlin disinformation designed to justify an unprovoked invasion exposes the disingenuousness of their appeals to economic populism.
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The further I read, the more apparent it is, that this essay is about the defamation of Dore, Greenwald, and Kennedy, by way a defence of the myth of the Post War Liberal Order , that was a central belief/faith of those long disappeared ‘Liberals’: who became obsolete with the rise of Neo-Liberalism, and it’s utter collapse. And the simultaneous rise of the Neo-Conservative’s destructive hegemonic ambitions, that shaped American Foreign Policy, and its War on Terror, that produced 37 million refugees. Not to forget that Tomasky and DeArment are part of The Biden Re-Election Campaign!
The constant stream of ‘Trumpology’ that Lowry has produced in how many weeks? has made way for a long and dismal apologetic for the ‘Roberts Court’. If only Lowry possessed a talent for polemic. But the energy with which he imbues his extended comments is surprising- perhaps he was as bored as his readers were? Although there is more ‘life’ here, than his vapid collection of reports on Republican political jousting, such as it was. Let me begin here:
All it has taken to bring the Supreme Court to the brink of destruction, we’re supposed to believe, is a critical mass of justices who try to hew to the U.S. Constitution.
The institution survived Dred Scott and Plessy v. Ferguson, but is now hanging by a thread thanks to the ravages of Justices Clarence Thomas and Amy Coney Barrett.
It is fashionable to say that the Supreme Court has “a crisis of legitimacy.” In this telling, the court has been buffeted by undisclosed luxury vacations paid for by wealthy associates of conservative justices and undermined by “stolen” seats. The court’s polling is terrible and it is now, as Democratic Senate hopeful Adam Schiff put it at a pro-court-packing news conference recently, “a political and partisan court with a reactionary social agenda.”
Of course, many of the people on the left who are lamenting a crisis of legitimacy of the court are hoping to create just such a crisis. It is understandable that they don’t like the composition or drift of the current court after largely having it on their side for decades, but their attacks are meritless.
This Reader wonders where Lowry’s ‘Left’ is/was? Is he speaking of New Democrat and political hysteric Adam Schiff ? My argument would be that the Republicans and New Democrats, indeed the whole of The American Political Class, the Supreme Court included, are not just in a crisis of legitimacy but are bankrupt: this is an unwelcome assertion to the would be Political Technocrat like Lowry. These next paragraphs are instructive about the evolution of the ‘Lowry Party Line’
No one “stole” any Supreme Court seats. The Senate decides whether and when to confirm a president’s nominee. The Senate majority under Minority Leader Mitch McConnell decided to keep the seat that came open after the death of Antonin Scalia vacant pending the 2016 election. If Hillary Clinton had won that election, the way most people expected, there would have been no “stolen” seat. The same applies if Democrats had won the Senate in 2018 — they would have been able to block former President Donald Trump’s appointment of Barrett after Ruth Bader Ginsburg died.
There’s a difference between losing and being done dirty. The fact is that there was precedent both for a Senate majority blocking the nominee of a president of the opposite party in an election year and for a Senate majority rapidly confirming the nominee of a president of the same party in an election year; Senate control matters.
How convenient that the National Review article is behind a Pay Wall?
As for ethics, even if you think that Thomas and Justice Samuel Alito were imprudent in accepting free flights and nice trips, even if you think they should have disclosed these trips (they didn’t have to under the rules), it’s preposterous to believe that a lifetime of thought and jurisprudence that has been rigorously consistent for decades has been changed or influenced by a couple of vacations.
Should I resort to the notion that Supreme Court Judges should be above suspicion, as a matter of personal ethics? Here Lowry acts as a defence attorney? As for the question of Paul Singer :
Headline: Hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer’s ruthless strategies include bullying CEOs, suing governments and seizing their navy’s ships
Hedge fund managers are rarely the quiet, retiring type, but few are as boldly bare-knuckled as Paul Singer, the founder of Elliott Management.
Singer, who took home $400 million last year, makes his fortune through activist investing. While other investors are content to buy shares or bonds, and wait for them to accumulate value, Elliott Management, which oversees almost $33 billion, specializes in taking stakes in companies or institutions where it can shape the outcome. That can include agitating for changes in leadership, or spending years and million of dollars in court pursuing its interests.
Elliott Management is perhaps most notorious for its 15-year battle with the government of Argentina, whose bonds were owned by the hedge fund. When Argentine president Cristina Kirchner attempted to restructure the debt, Elliott—unlike most of the bonds’ owners—refused to accept a large loss on its investment. It successfully sued in US courts, and in pursuit of Argentine assets, convinced a court in Ghana to detain an Argentine naval training vessel, then docked outside Accra with a crew of 22o. After a change of its government, Argentina eventually settled and Singer’s fund received $2.4 billion, almost four times its initial investment. Kirchner, meanwhile, has been indicted for corruption.
Originalism, too, isn’t flawless. There are different versions of it, and it’s a function of the difficulty of some of the questions that reach the court that originalists can come down in different places. But originalism is an internally consistent, intuitively appealing theory of how the court should work that hasn’t been matched by any alternate theory of interpretation by the other side, which is why even the progressive justices will sound, at times, like originalists.
Is originalism just a smoke screen for a political agenda? No.
For instance, originalist justices have tended to vindicate what used to be core liberal priorities, from trial by jury to free speech.
The example of the late Antonin Scalia, originalism’s most influential apostle, is instructive. Scalia wasn’t always happy with where his jurisprudence took him. He hated flag burning, yet found, along with the liberal William Brennan, that it was protected speech. He was a law-and-order conservative, yet often ruled in favor of the rights of defendants. If it had been his druthers as a policy matter, he might have been happy to search homes for signs of marijuana cultivation with heat detectors, but he ruled against it. It was with an eye to these matters that David M. Dorsen wrote his book, “The Unexpected Scalia: A Conservative Justice’s Liberal Opinions.”
For another see view of Scalia’s practice of jurisprudence see:
For this reason it is all the more important to stress that Scalia’s opposition to the use of legislative history rests on exceedingly shaky theoretical foundations. Scalia readily acknowledges that if the meaning of a text is unclear, “the principal determinant of meaning is context.” In ordinary life the intentions of a speaker are central to the process by which we determine his meaning. If someone casually observes that “Casey has thrown a disc,” I would want to know something about the speaker’s intention in order to understand whether the comment refers to the state of Casey’s back or to the integrity of his CD collection.
Scalia does not dispute this, and he even concedes that there may be extreme cases where legislative history may be consulted in order to determine whether there has been a “‘scrivener’s error,’ where on the very face of the statute it is clear to the reader that a mistake of expression…has been made.” In his commentary, Ronald Dworkin cannily seizes upon this concession and brings out its implications.
Purporting to save Scalia from the inconsistency of allowing “intention to trump literal text,” he reconstructs Scalia’s position as resting on the distinction between what Congress “intended to say in enacting the language [it] used,” which Dworkin calls “semantic intention,” and what Congress hoped to achieve by using that language. Dworkin notes that “any reader of anything must attend to semantic intention, because the same sounds or even words can be used with the intention of saying different things.”
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Unsurprisingly Mr. Lowry underestimates his readership’s knowledge. Like a Neo-Conservative, he drowns The Readers critical faculties in ‘data’, which appears to be a cognate of expertise.
Of course, the court is coming down differently on a range of issues than it did in past decades. If faithfulness to the original meaning of the Constitution and statue is your lodestar, that’s not a bug — or a crisis — but a feature.
Ukrainians watched with glee as Russia flirted with civil war on June 24th. They had hoped that Yevgeny Prigozhin’s march on Moscow would tie up Russian troops and destabilise Vladimir Putin’s regime. Alas, the insurrection proved short-lived. In recent days, Ukraine’s army has made modest advances in the east. But a counter-offensive that began on June 4th shows little sign of breaking through Russian lines in force any time soon, making some Western officials nervous.
Still, Ukraine has made some hay with the disarray next door. Its army made significant progress in the eastern town of Bakhmut, which Mr Prigozhin’s forces had captured only last month after almost a year of fighting. Ukrainian forces now threaten to encircle Russian defenders from the north and south. Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, hailed a “happy day” after visiting front lines on June 26th. Russia responded with a dinnertime missile strike on a popular restaurant in Kramatorsk on June 27th, 30km from the front line. It killed at least eight people, including three children.
The composed Headline, that reads in part ‘Party like it’s 1917’ the maladroit framing, expresses a dull-witted attempt to shanghai Prince’s 1999 best selling Pop Record? call it at best pathetic. Or an attempt to reach a generation of readers, that used to think that The Economist was the reading of choice of Economics Majors? Or for those Oxbridgers or the Pretenders who were aiming for lucrative employment opportunities? The reader has 1, 052 words of propaganda to ingest, digest or just regurgitate, to demonstrate a pastiche of highfalutin Econo-Speak?
Selective quotation of the remainder of the essay reads like more Front Line descriptions, from those ever-present ‘stringers’ who provide the near graphic costs of War?
The aim of the offensive towards Bakhmut appears less to enter the city than to surround it.
The front-lines shifted elsewhere, too. Ukraine’s capture of territory in the western suburbs of Donetsk city was especially important: troops crossed into territory which Russia had held since 2015, during its first invasion of Ukraine.
Some officials suggest that Ukraine may be able to conduct a more significant crossing of the rapidly desiccating Kakhovka reservoir in the weeks to come.
The question is whether the convulsions in Russia will have longer-lasting effects on the battlefield. One issue is the future of the Wagner Group.
Some fighters have indeed gone back to Ukraine, where Mr Putin says they will be absorbed into the Russian forces. Others, including the 2,500 to 5,000 troops who played a role in the mutiny, may join Mr Prigozhin in Belarus.
The second issue is the impact on morale. A spokesperson for the 56th Motorised Brigade, now fighting on the outskirts of the city, says her colleagues had observed new levels of “confusion” among their Russian counterparts since June 23rd. Their befuddlement is understandable.
In angry remarks on June 24th Mr Putin himself drew an indelicate comparison to 1917, a year in which revolution at home contributed to the mutiny of Russian armies in France. Anthony King, a military sociologist at Warwick University, warns against over-egging the effect of Mr Prigozhin’s subversive messaging.
Mr King says he is sceptical that “political shenanigans” will have much of an effect on platoons and companies at the tactical level.
The impact on Russia’s high command, the third question raised by the insurrection, could be more severe.
Sources : The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Both reports cited American intelligence, Mr. King.
On June 28th the New York Times reported that General Sergei Surovikin, the commander of Russian forces in Ukraine between October and January, had prior knowledge of the rebellion. The same day, the Wall Street Journal said that Mr Prigozhin had intended to kidnap Sergei Shoigu, Russia’s defence minister, and General Valery Gerasimov, the country’s chief of general staff, during their visit to a region near Ukraine’s border. Both reports cited American intelligence. “Fractures at that command level could have a longer-term effect on the unity of the campaign,” says Mr King.
Sources:
“It is still too early to tell how successful the ongoing counteroffensive will be,” acknowledged General Sir Patrick Sanders, Britain’s army chief, on June 26th, adding “Russia has been a country of comebacks.”
Sources:
A Ukrainian military-intelligence source complains that the country is moving as fast as it can, given the tools at its disposal. “Let me put this as diplomatically as I can,” he says. “Certain partners are telling us to go forward and fight violently, but they also take their time delivering the hardware and weapons we need.”
Here is Joan Walsh’s essay from 2002 on Nader’s book “Crashing the Party” that gets lost in her logorrhea.
Headline: The (non-)confessions of St. Ralph
Sub-headline: Ralph Nader’s new book makes it painfully clear that he has no idea how to build a left-wing alternative to the Democrats. But when you’re pure of heart and unsullied by politics, who cares? By Joan Walsh of January 17, 2002
It’s official: Green Party spoiler Ralph Nader gave the presidency to George W. Bush in 2000 by stealing votes from Al Gore. “The Simpsons” tells us so: The Jan. 6 episode featured Homer’s boss Mr. Burns at a meeting of Springfield Republicans, asking what new “unspeakable evil” the party can come up with. One rumpled fellow is waving his hand, ooh-ooh-oohing for attention like a schoolboy, but Burns dismisses him: “You’ve already done enough, Nader.”
Ouch! Sucks to be Nader! The nation’s foremost anti-corporate crusader lampooned by its foremost anti-corporate sitcom? It isn’t fair. But the notion that Nader is to blame for Bush’s presidency had hardened into fact for bitter Democrats even before Simpsons creator Matt Groening made it funny. In his new book, “Crashing the Party: How to Tell the Truth and Still Run for President,” Nader carps about it nonstop; an appendix features the full text of a self-righteous Nation essay by lefty actor, Nader backer (and husband of Susan Sarandon) Tim Robbins, who complains about being attacked at parties by Gore voters who snarl at him: “We hope you’re happy now!” — meaning now that he helped elect (is that the right word?) President Bush. They even harass his and Susan’s children!
These are just the first two paragraphs of Walsh’s 4,175 word meandering screed against Nader. Given the ever present sense of betrayal, the reader might imagine this ‘essay’ as the vivid complaints of Mrs. Portnoy, to her analysts, about her son’s waywardness? Or the toxic effects of Pop Stylist Tom Wolfe? Walsh political shaming of Cornel West is a bit more compact. Yet both are steeped in an utter vulgarized PoliticalJournalism of the present.
Walsh diagnoses West, and his unseemly brush with Anti-Semitism?
This is a downhill spiral even for West, who also spiraled downward after Obama’s victory. He trashed the president he’d endorsed on multiple platforms. Some called it personal: The bellhop at West’s hotel on Inauguration weekend wound up with tickets to the event when West didn’t. Obama stopped returning his calls. I don’t know. But a weird animus seemed to drive his attacks on our first Black president.
West tried to frame his opposition as a universalist defense of poor and working-class people. They didn’t get enough help from Obama’s Wall Street–adjacent administration, I admit. But calling the president “a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats” was awful. West went on to claim that Obama was afraid of “free black men” thanks to his white ancestry and Ivy League education. (West was at Princeton then, after stints at Harvard and Yale.)
“[Obama] feels most comfortable with upper middle-class white and Jewish men who consider themselves very smart, very savvy and very effective in getting what they want,” West went on.
Asked about that by The New York Times, West replied:
It’s in no way an attempt to devalue white or Jewish brothers. It’s an objective fact. In his administration, he’s got a significant number of very smart white brothers and very smart Jewish brothers. You think that’s unimportant?
West told Obama, outright, that he would he would be his most ruthless critic. Party Apparatchiks like Walsh can’t abide a Deviationist.
No more time wasted on Joan, Michael Tomasky opines/denounces the Slackers, Deviationist, And Putin Apologists/Fellow Travelers.
Headline: Democrats, Wake the Hell Up!
Sub-headline: President Biden has amassed a historic record in his first term. Why aren’t he and his party bragging about it?
Biden has been a terrific president. The big legislation. The way he played Kevin McCarthy on the debt deal. The global leadership against Putin. The plain human decency restored to the White House after four years of self-obsessed thuggery. Oh—the 13 million jobs created since he took office, which is more jobs in 28 months than created under any other president, in all of our history, in a full four-year term.
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A nincompoop conspiracy theorist is facing Biden in the Democratic primary. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a right-wing loon who spoke last week at a Moms for Liberty summit.
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Its impossible for Tomasky to grasp, that the Collapse of the Neo-Liberal Swindle, has rendered the Two Party State into an Age Of Fracture.
And it will probably do the same, to a lesser extent, with Cornel West, who has thrown in with Putin sympathizer Jill Stein (West has denounced Putin’s war in Ukraine, but his campaign website also calls for disbanding NATO, which would effectively free Putin to behave with impunity in his “near abroad”).
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And yet he’s under attack from four sides (Kennedy, West, No Labels, and the GOP). His age is his age (I’ll have more to say about that in a future column). But he is what stands between us and fascism, and he’s gotten far more done than anyone would have dared imagine. Democrats, get it together.
Vladimir Putin appears to have survived the greatest threat to his rule. But for how much longer?
he threat of armed insurrection against Vladimir Putin abated on June 24th as suddenly and dramatically as it had erupted. In the morning Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the Wagner mercenary group, sent his armoured columns on a 1,000km race to Moscow, claiming to come within 200km and causing alarm in the Kremlin. But by evening he ordered his war-hardened veterans to turn back, saying he did not want to spill Russian blood. Social-media reports suggest his fighters were starting to pull back. A Kremlin spokesman said Mr Prigozhin would leave for Belarus.
Precisely what Mr Prigozhin hoped to achieve through his insurrection, and what he might actually have obtained, remains unclear. On one telling, Mr Prigozhin bowed before the might of the Russian state and is lucky to be alive. On another, given the extraordinary ease with which he rolled towards Moscow, he may have extracted some as-yet-unspecified deal on, say, military leadership. Either way, Mr Putin has shown he can no longer maintain order among his warlords. He has been greatly weakened by the challenge—and in his world weakness tends to lead to further instability.
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In a hastily arranged address to the nation the rattled president had accused Wagner of planting “a knife in the back” of troops fighting in Ukraine and vowed a “harsh” response. Mr Prigozhin retorted that his men were “patriots” fighting for Russia’s future. In Moscow, Red Square was closed as the mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, announced “counter-terrorist operations”. The Kremlin denied speculation that Mr Putin had left Moscow, after plane-tracking data suggested the presidential aircraft had flown north before switching off its transponder and going dark.
The Front Page of the New York Times of June 25, 2023:
Mark Galeotti in The Times of June 24, 2023:
Headline: Is this the end for Putin?
Sub-headline: When history records the downfall of the Russian president, it will say the endgame started here, writes Mark Galeotti
With armoured vehicles on the streets of Moscow, two Russian cities in the hands of rebel mercenaries and questions about the loyalty of his security forces, President Putin is facing the most serious challenge of his 23 years in power.
Even if the immediate crisis may be defused thanks to the intervention of Belarusian president Lukashenko, the damage is done. When history records his downfall, it will say the endgame began here.
Galeotti engages in hyperbole first, aided by his habit of using subtitles in his essay, it is a reduction that mimic’s the Chapters of a book… it imparts a certain resonance.
Leader the Kremlin created
A problem with numbers
No mercy for traitors
1917 all over again?
Absent leader now in firing line
The reader can make her own determination of the value of Galeotti’s Historical pastiche.
Here is a portion of a Galeotti essay of February 18, 2023:
Headline: Isolated, out of touch, but clinging on: how Russians see Putin
Sub-headline: A year on from the disastrous invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin could be just one crisis away from collapse
Vladimir Putin is notorious for asking Russian historians how he will be judged a hundred years hence. With his invasion of Ukraine, he has ensured that he will be assessed a failure, an example of the way hubris can devour any initial successes.
Had Putin chosen to step down at the end of his second presidential term, in 2008, it is likely he would be remembered as someone who dragged Russia back from the brink of collapse, even if often by brutal methods.
He then spent four years running the country behind his proxy-president Dmitry Medvedev before returning to the Kremlin. Had he retired after his third term in 2018, he would have left a Russia in dispute with Ukraine and the West, but in possession of Crimea. As it was, though, he was not content, and let his desperation to leave his mark on history drive him to fatal overreach.
All of the above lacks empirical evidence, because it is based on Galeotti’s Mastery of Putinology After the introductory paragraphs Prof. Galeotti provides subject headings to frame his arguments: Yet The Critical Reader might wonder at Prof. Galeotti as a ‘Senior Associate Fellow’ at RUSI:
‘ABOUT RUSI‘
The Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) is the world’s oldest and the UK’s leading defence and security think tank. Our mission is to inform, influence and enhance public debate to help build a safer and more stable world.
Prof. Galeotti is a Government Employee, in a not very roundabout way. So this explanation of Prof. Galeotti‘s political standing provided by The Times is incomplete, in the most self-serving way.
Government employee @MarkGaleotti’s Putinology, @thetimes.
Political Observer looks at The Economist’s Past, to predict its…
The Reader of The Economist confronts the not so underlying tone of political moralizing.
Ukraine’s war is raging on two fronts. On the 1,000km battlefront its armies are attacking the Russians’ deep defences. At the same time, on the home front Ukraine is defining what sort of country it will be when the fighting stops. Both matter, and both will pose a severe test for Ukraine and its backers.
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The home front is less dramatic, but everything depends on it.
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Ukraine’s nation-builders face formidable obstacles. The greatest is that, while Mr Putin is in power, this war is unlikely to end with a solid peace treaty.
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The other obstacles are almost as formidable, though at least it is in the power of Ukraine and its allies to overcome them.
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The World Bank has estimated that repairing the damage from the first year of war will cost more than $400bn—and that was before the collapse of the dam at Nova Kakhovka, most likely because of Russian sabotage.
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To succeed, Ukraine must work on many dimensions at the same time. To attract workers and private capital, it needs to rebuild itself. To unleash the creativity and enterprise of its citizens, it must live by the rule of law.
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Progress will help lock in Western support, which may ebb—especially if Donald Trump is elected in 2024. It will also signal to Mr Putin and his cronies that their war is futile.
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The effort starts with money for rebuilding on a vast scale. Ukraine’s economy has stabilised at about two-thirds of its former size. Ultimately, its future rests on private investment, but government money will be needed first.
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Many countries have a vital interest in Ukraine succeeding and Russian aggression being seen to have failed, but these are straitened times.
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Instead they should find a legal process that allows them to treat the $330bn or so of Russian state money they have frozen as a fund for paying out compensation to Ukraine.
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Next comes good government. The war has shunted aside many of the oligarchs who held Ukraine back. Their place has been taken by a cohort of entrepreneurs and activists, many of them with a background in technology.
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However, Western officials warn that, for all his strengths, Mr Zelensky is bored by the detail that dogged reform entails. When Ukraine finally holds elections it risks lapsing back into the old, corrupt politics.
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Eventually, Ukraine needs to join nato. That would offer permanent security at the lowest cost, because nato’s Article 5 guarantee would signal to Mr Putin and his successors that an attack on Ukraine was an attack on the entire alliance—a battle Russia could not win.
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However, Ukraine gains little from joining while battle rages—because that would require suspending Article 5 and any doubt about when it applies would weaken nato. Instead Ukraine needs bilateral security guarantees and an accelerated path to nato membership.
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This is a fearsome agenda. If Ukraine struggles on the battlefront, a greater burden will fall on the home front and the higher will be the obstacles to success. All the more reason for Ukraine and its allies to press ahead.
The Reader need only look at the ‘evolution’ of The Economist’s position on the Iraq War, as predictive of the how and why of Joe Biden’s Proxy War in Ukraine!
After this collection of David Cameron’s successors: Teresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, Adrian Wooldridge, in the role of ‘Bagehot’ announces:
‘Bagehot’s’ ire at Johnson seems a bit overdrawn, given Boris past shenanigans! Cameron, Teresa May, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak are really about a completely disconnected Tory Party, from the realties of British life. And the whole of the British Media’s lies, confected about Jeremy Corbyn as public/political menace:
None the less, Bagehot takes off at a gallop!
The death certificate for Boris Johnson’s career in politics read June 12th. A government statement appeared that evening appointing Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson as “Steward and Bailiff of the Three Hundreds of Chiltern”, the title mps accept, according to Britain’s absurd constitution, in order to resign. He went because an inquiry into whether Mr Johnson deliberately misled Parliament found that he had. Not only that, he’d also impugned the investigating committee and joined a campaign of abuse and intimidation against it. Mr Johnson faced suspension as an mp for a remarkable 90 days. Given forewarning of the report, the former prime minister quit.
A funeral for Mr Johnson’s career had taken place some days before in a stuffy conference centre in Doncaster. The annual meeting of the Northern Research Group (nrg), a cartel of northern Conservative mps who owe their careers to Mr Johnson, was supposed to be a celebration. Instead it was a premature wake.
The miserable gathering was the best place to survey his political legacy. The nrg, rather than Britain’s departure from the European Union, represented the apogee of Mr Johnson’s political career. It emerged after the 2019 general election, when the party won an 87-seat majority under Mr Johnson as voters across northern England backed the Conservatives for the first time in living memory. In 2005, the Conservatives had 19 northern mps. Then in 2019, they managed 68, with voters enticed by Mr Johnson’s promise of nothing less than a realignment of British politics.
Bagehot wants to bury Boris deep, to expunge him from Political Memory: Bagehot in this regard is a Stalinist. And the ‘Brexit Vote’ was a political self- expulsion from the utterly un-governable E. U. Paradise?
The Reader approaches the remaining 745 words, of the Wooldridge/Bagehot meditation on British Politics, is about the toxic remainder of Boris, he’s its vital political actor in absentia? To engage in the high-toned rhetoric of a highly self-conscious Oxbridger: Caesars assassins cannot withdraw to work of their knives?
Out of self-defense, let this Reader engage in some careful pruning of this essay, while retaining its argumentative integrity, or at the least an attempt at such.
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Now, however, the realignment has reversed. Conservatives are losing everywhere. But support is falling fastest in the northern constituencies the party was so proud of winning.
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Four years on, northern voters who backed the Tories have little to show for it. Conservative mps were happy to give excuses.
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Problems were more fundamental than mere faulty execution. Not for the first time in his life, Mr Johnson had made impossible promises.
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Brexit has weighed on growth. This meant a government committed to cutting immigration instead had to boost it, to give the economy a hand.
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Instead, mps offered bromides that would be best left in an airport self-help book. “It’s about being a victor, not a victim,” said Nick Fletcher, the mp for Don Valley, a post-industrial constituency on the outskirts of Doncaster.
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“Hands in the air if you think the north is awesome,” pleaded one chairwoman at a fringe event, channelling a children’s television presenter.
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Any cause for optimism came, in the self-help vernacular, from a negative place. Voting Conservative for the first time was a big deal.
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Labour will have to lose because the Conservatives are not trying to win. The party is on defensive manoeuvres. That means placating voters in the south-east. In the latest budget, the government promised more money for child care, which is most unaffordable in the south-east.
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The Conservatives need to win voters in the north of England to hold power. The party needs to maintain voters in the south to exist.
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I know it’s over and it never really began
Rishi Sunak, Mr Johnson’s successor, talks a good game when it comes to the north. He wears the fact he represents a northern seat rather heavily, labelling himself a “prime minister for the north”.
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Instead, Mr Sunak’s speech to the delegates in Doncaster became an accidental eulogy for the form of Conservativism that Mr Johnson personified in 2019 but which is dead today.
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