42 Comments

1. I loved Masha Gessen’s book The Future is History about the rape of Russia. Highly recommend.

   1. ordered

2. The problem in Ukraine, is the Russians not only know that things are going badly in the West for in Ukraine itself, but they are going badly in Yemen.

   The Russians have a lot of respect for strength, but they know the difference between strength and theater. If you speak to the Russians, they believe all of Ukraine is rightfully theirs.

   All of Ukraine is going back to Russia. Any pause, truce, peace deal is only temporary if there even is one. What reason is there for Russia to stop. Especially when there is no respectable adversary.

   1. Doesn’t it depend on the running (defence…) costs? Presumably more territory isn’t an intrinsically attractive proposition if you already have plenty. Perhaps naively I have rather bought the line that the Russian imperative is about creating a shock absorbing buffer zone and reaching some kind of stasis.

      1. Up until 2014, Russia was essentially running Ukraine. The narrative that Ukraine is a separate nation is misleading to most of the history of the area. There are some regional differences between Ukraine and Russia, but there are likely more differences between Texas and New York than say Russia and Ukraine. It was all one country prior to 1990. And everything still pretty much operated like it was a single economy up until 2014. Mainly, what is likely to happen is a return to something more akin to the pre-2014 status quo, with the main difference of a far more limited Western presence, a more occupying Russian military, and that much of Ukraine will now just be called Russia.

3. I also should add that I have people calling my engineering businesses wanting to hook me up to coinbase payment systems. Also, with the engineering stuff there are general sales people – but others that sound different, like they are working for some government program. These guys sound like the later – something in the demeanor, they are more savvy about business than a standard telephone salesperson.

4. Kristi Noem has distinguished herself by saying – nay, insisting – that the term Habeas Corpus means that the President can arrest whoever he wants. Yes indeed. Our highest officials who have sworn to uphold the Constitution have not actually read the Constitution.

   1. Hard to imagine this is the Kristi Noem that became Governor of South Dakota. She has become a cartoon character.

5. Great update, but challenging to stay amused.
   FYI My daughter is a manager in a large UK supermarket, but one that has “IT problems”. We had a discussion about IT security and I was shocked to discover that in terms of physical security, this was non-existent.
   Memes get posted online about getting from a store into the warehouse and swapping cables on the servers, plus other less risky adventures.
   People seems to have great difficulty in comprehending that once a criminal has hands on physical access to the hardware, nothing can be done to preserve the systems.
   Even now, I doubt the scale of the problem has crossed her barriers.

6. Re Singapore? The Department of Health (Northern Ireland) has similar, possibly more draconian) legislation in progress, currently stalled somewhere in the bureaucracy. Speaking of which, when I asked about the “team”, I got only one name.
   Interesting.

7. Possible technical issue. Does any one else find the volume a little low. My computer’s maxed out but I sometimes struggle to hear what is being said.

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