Showing posts with label Ukraine. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ukraine. Show all posts

Tuesday, May 09, 2023

9: Ukraine

Nice Guy Meets Iron Man in the First Novel by Tom Hanks Whimsically chronicling the creation of a Marvel-style movie, “The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece” sags under a deluge of detail. ........... Sidelined by the pandemic, some actors fired up ceramics or sang fragments of “Imagine.” Tom Hanks, one of the most prominent to contract an early case of Covid, bounced back by making a run at the Great American Novel. Alas, it is more Forrest Gump trotting from coast to coast than Sully landing on the Hudson. ......... the vast number of workers required to get stories onscreen: extras, editors, costume and lighting designers, makeup artists, caterers, drivers, gofers, key grips. ....... “Masterpiece” is a loving homage to those workers, a true insiderly ensemble piece in the vein of “The Player” (written by Michael Tolkin in 1988, directed by Robert Altman in 1992), or Quentin Tarantino’s eventually self-novelized “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood.” .......... Alternate titles: “Hollywood: Busy, Busy Town” or “What Do Movie People Do All Day?” ....... Eve Knight, the alter ego of Knightshade, a heroine who like many modern women has trouble sleeping. ......... “Sure, she wants to make her bed with a decent chap when the time is right, but the time is never right!” Lane tells Johnson’s assistant, Allicia Mac-Teer, anachronistically (Hanksishly). “Nor is the chap.” ......... after years of struggling in the gig economy, a salary that’s “a joke of abundance.” .......... Moviemaking, Hanks would remind us, can be a rising tide, not in the depressing new climate change way, but the old optimistic American lift-all-boats way. ........... The word “coffee” appears, by my count, on 85 pages ........ Highly specific smoothies are fetched; catering tables are lovingly inventoried. ........ Sometimes “Masterpiece” reads like the thank-you speech Hanks, consummate nice guy, would give if granted unlimited time at the Oscars. You might admire its rah-rah spirit, yet still want to press fast-forward. ........... After turning 50 pages more and finding a minor character selling “Royals, Underwoods, Remingtons, Hermes, Olivettis, all in working order,” as if in an Etsy shop, I had to fight a strong urge to close the book, fire up a triple espresso and see if anything was happening in the tiny palace of my iPhone. .

Things in Russia Aren’t as Bad as the Bad Old Soviet Days. ‘They’re Worse.’ In light of what their country is inflicting on Ukraine, it is difficult to speak of Russians as victims. That, in fact, may be one major reason many decent Russians feel that Mr. Putin’s Russia — their Russia — is worse than the Soviet state whose demise he laments. They had thought their nation free of the horrible tyranny of its past, and Mr. Putin is not only reviving that but also bringing shame and alienation to their nation. ......... a Soviet leader probably would not have survived a disastrous decision like the invasion of Ukraine. ......... “We make a distinction between ‘open’ and ‘closed’ societies, but there is also a distinction between ‘openings’ and ‘closings,’” Ivan Krastev, a Bulgarian political scientist and one of the foremost chroniclers of the collapse of the Soviet empire, told me. “The generation of Soviet people in the 1970s and 1980s lived in a closed society that was opening, discovering that things that had been impossible were becoming possible. Putin’s is a period of radical closings. People are losing things they felt had finally been granted them. Openings led to hope; this system leads to hopelessness.” .......... What he has done, at its heart, is create a system in which everything — the government, the political police, the legislature, the military — depends personally on him. ........ If the most common charge used to imprison dissidents in the last decades of Soviet rule was “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda,” an omnibus law that at least made clear that the crime was in opposing Soviet rule, Mr. Putin lashes back at his opponents with random weapons, whether it’s his government’s apparent poisoning of Alexei Navalny or the condemnation of Vladimir Kara-Murza to 25 years in prison for treason. Accusing Mr. Gershkovich of espionage may well have been motivated at least in part by fury that someone with a Russian background would dare report the truth about Russia. .......... Ten days into the invasion, the police arrested more than 4,600 demonstrators in Russia, and hundreds of thousands of Russian men have fled the country to avoid being shanghaied into the army. .......... Russian restaurants, including ones that reconceived their menus, struggle to stay open. Stolichnaya vodka has now been rebranded as Stoli. ......... Mr. Putin, in the name of an ephemeral Russian greatness, has done great and lasting harm to his people and their culture.



As Putin Bides His Time, Ukraine Faces a Ticking Clock Ukraine is feeling short-term pressure from its Western backers for success in a looming counteroffensive. Vladimir Putin seems to be operating on a longer timeline. .......... Ukraine is feeling immense short-term pressures from its Western backers, as the United States and its allies treat the counteroffensive as a critical test of whether the weapons, training and ammunition they have rushed to the country in recent months can translate into significant gains. .......... Putin faces his own challenges but is showing signs of operating on a much longer timeline, encumbered by economic and military limitations but free from the domestic political pressures that make continuing Western support for Ukraine so uncertain. ......... Having already mobilized some 300,000 recruits last September, Mr. Putin is laying the groundwork for a possible new round of conscription, having changed the law so Russian authorities can draft men by serving them with a “digital summons” online. .......... and emphasizing that Russia is capable of conscripting as many as 25 million fighting-age men ........... On Friday, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner mercenary group, castigated Russian military leadership over a lack of ammunition and threatened to pull his forces from the fighting in the embattled city of Bakhmut within days. ........“Certainly I think there is a calculation in the Kremlin that Russia is more resilient than the West” ............ If they appear too ambitious, they could stir fears that Russia could respond with a tactical nuclear strike. Appear too modest, in contrast, and criticism arises that billions of dollars in military aid to Ukraine has been spent in vain. ........... Ukrainian officials point to the considerable successes they have already achieved: forcing the Russian military to retreat from Kyiv last year; sinking the flagship of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, the Moskva; and recapturing thousands of square miles of territory in two counterattacks last fall. ........... “We have a lot of supporters of Ukraine cheering for us,” he said. “That is why they are waiting for the next match. But for us, it’s not a sports game. For us, it’s a serious challenge. For us, it’s the lives of our soldiers.” .......... Military analysts have pointed to a likely period of probing assaults, feints and long-range strikes in the opening phase of the attack. Degrading the Russian military’s combat abilities will be as important as liberating territory ............... The Ukrainians see their enemy as having expended its offensive ability and as eager for a pause in fighting that could buy time to rearm and attack again. ........... Mr. Trump has criticized Mr. Biden’s support for Ukrainian forces, saying in an interview this year with Fox News that “ultimately,” Mr. Putin “is going to take over all of Ukraine.” ......... “Russia’s hope right now is that the peak of Western military support is going to be around the summer,” and then will dissipate ........... Once wars have gone on for more than a year, they tend to last for more than a decade on average ............. Putin has little incentive to end the war now, unless his hand is forced, because its continuation helps him retain power .......... Any negotiations after a military defeat would look like capitulation and make him more vulnerable at home ........... Only 7 percent of authoritarian leaders with governments like Russia’s have found themselves unseated during a conflict that began on their watch ......... “In polls, the only thing the Russian public was not willing to negotiate over was the status of Crimea” .......... “If Crimea is being bombarded, then it’s a failure. I think that would change things, potentially.” .......... Putin is also likely facing pressures that remain opaque to the outside world. In an authoritarian system, threats to the stability of a government often prove unpredictable. ........ Putin has security, business and political elites he still must keep on his side, noting that “it’s wrong to assume that Putin can just do anything he wants to at this point.” ....... “There are institutions of power and centers of power,” he added, “that you have to manage, control and dominate in some way if you’re going to stay in the game.”

Russian Unease Over Ukraine War Grows Amid Attacks and Leadership Rifts With a Ukrainian offensive looming, explosions in Crimea and inside Russia have rattled Moscow, sparking bureaucratic infighting among military commanders....... With Ukraine stepping up attacks deep inside Russian-controlled territory, there were new signs on Friday of disarray and unease among Russia’s military and political leadership as they brace for a looming Ukrainian offensive, for which their forces may be ill-prepared. ......... Not for the first time, he threatened to pull his fighters out of the long-embattled Ukrainian city of Bakhmut if the Ministry of Defense did not provide more ammunition............. Two explosions rocked the Kremlin in the middle of the night on Wednesday, in what the Russians claimed was a failed drone attack by Ukraine. Denying the accusation, Ukraine said Russia might have done it to try to muster domestic support for a faltering war effort. No matter the culprit, symbolically it seemed to many to signal Kremlin weakness. .......... That came in tandem with attacks on a number of oil storage facilities, igniting huge fires, and train derailments both near the border and well away from the battlefields, all attributed to Ukrainian drones or sabotage. ........ Adding to the building sense of anxiety, the head of Russia’s Security Council, Nikolai Patrushev, bizarrely accused the United States in an interview of having started the war to seize territory ahead of a supposed cataclysmic explosion of a volcano at Yellowstone National Park, which he said would wipe out life in North America. ........... Ramzan Kadyrov, the pugnacious leader of the Republic of Chechnya inside Russia, chastised Mr. Prigozhin for displaying the corpses of his men to create a public outcry, and offered to deploy his men in place of the Wagner mercenaries to finish the job in Bakhmut. He also chastised the Defense Ministry for logistical and supply issues.

at No comments:
Labels:

Friday, May 05, 2023

5: Ukraine

at No comments:
Labels:

Wednesday, May 03, 2023

3: Ukraine

THE COUNTEROFFENSIVE The future of the democratic world will be determined by whether the Ukrainian military can break a stalemate with Russia and drive the country backwards—perhaps even out of Crimea for good. ....... In march 1774, Prince Grigory Potemkin, the favorite general and sometime lover of Catherine the Great, took control of the anarchic southern frontier of her empire, a region previously ruled by the Mongol Khans, the Cossack hosts, and the Ottoman Turks, among others. As viceroy, Potemkin waged war and founded cities, among them Kherson, the first home of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. In 1783, he annexed Crimea and became an avatar of imperial glory. To Vladimir Putin in particular, Potemkin is the Russian nationalist who subdued territory now impudently and illegitimately claimed by Ukraine, a nation that Putin believes does not exist. ......... The rest of the world remembers Potemkin differently, for something that we would now call a disinformation campaign. In 1787, Catherine paid a six-month visit to Crimea and the land then known as New Russia. The story goes that Potemkin built fake villages along her route, populated with fake villagers exuding fake prosperity. These villages probably never existed, but the story has endured for a reason: The sycophantic courtier, creating false images for the empress, is a figure we know from other times and other places. The tale also evokes something we recognize to be true, not just of imperial Russia but of Putin’s Russia, where mind-boggling efforts are made to please the leader—efforts that these days include telling him he is winning a war that he is most definitely not winning. ........ In a bid to restore Potemkin’s cities to Russian suzerainty, Russia occupied Kherson in early March of 2022, at the outset of a campaign to annihilate both Ukraine and the idea of Ukraine. Russian soldiers kidnapped the mayor, tortured city employees, murdered civilians, and stole children. In September, Putin held a ceremony in the Kremlin declaring Kherson and other occupied territories to be part of Russia. But Kherson did not become Russia. Partisans fought back inside the city, with car bombs and sabotage. Even as the occupiers held a ludicrous referendum, designed to show that Ukrainians had chosen Russia, the Russian army was quietly preparing to flee. By October, this new Potemkin village was collapsing, and the resurgent Ukrainian army was approaching the outskirts of Kherson. It was then that the Russians did something particularly strange: They kidnapped the bones of Grigory Potemkin. .

at No comments:
Labels:

Friday, March 10, 2023

10: News Bulletin

Rewriting the Rules of Audience Targeting
Scientists Just Revealed the Most Detailed Geological Model of Earth’s Past 100 Million Years
Biocomputing With Mini-Brains as Processors Could Be More Powerful Than Silicon-Based AI
Apple and Foxconn win labour reforms to advance Indian production plans Lobbying in Karnataka leads to landmark legislation that anticipates iPhone production in southern state
Meta is building a decentralized, text-based social network Is this the Twitter replacement we've been waiting for?

Artificial Intelligence Is Booming—So Is Its Carbon Footprint
ChatGPT is now available in Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI service
Reddit is shutting down its Clubhouse clone Reddit Talk
India Impressions (2023)
The VC's Customer

at No comments:
Labels: , ,

Thursday, February 23, 2023

23: Tesla

Cutting Out Just a Muffin a Day Can Make You Age More Slowly, Study Finds cutting calories by 25 percent for two years slowed the pace of aging ...... cutting calories without sacrificing nutrients promotes healthy longevity. ....... the diet rewired multiple metabolic and immune responses to promote health. ........ We all know people who look and behave younger—or older—than their age. ...... peoples’ biological age is more predictive of their chances of getting age-related diseases, such as hypertension, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and dementia.

This Box Wing eVTOL Will Run on Hydrogen and Have a Range of 620 Miles
This 3D Printed Community Is Printing One House per Week for a Year

at No comments:
Labels: ,

Thursday, September 15, 2022

Putin



Life Is an Accident of Space and Time
Why the U.S. Is Being Ominously Compared to Hungary and Turkey A conversation with Max Fisher, who covers the decline of democracy around the world.

Opinion: Putin is fooling no one -- certainly not Xi In Samarkand, Putin will undoubtedly keep up his triumphant, self-assured demeanor -- but that will fool no one, certainly not Xi, who must be deeply worried about the astonishing collapse of Russia's forces in northeast Ukraine....... Not only is Russia humiliated, Ukraine exuberant, and the West united, but even China, which still expresses support for the Kremlin, is making statements that embarrass Russia. ........ Russia confirmed Xi and Putin would meet on the sidelines of the summit for "very important" talks. China has confirmed Xi's trip, but its foreign minister on Tuesday declined to confirm a meeting with the Russian president. ........ The relationship between Xi and Putin was never one of equals, but now Putin is encountering Xi during one of the most disastrous moments of his unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. He will likely seek more support from Xi, who has been generous with words but much less with deeds. ......... China has been reluctant to break the sanctions, or step in to provide a major boost to Russia's dwindling military supplies. If it had, Putin could have avoided the awkward spectacle of seeking weapons from Iran and North Korea, minor, if aggressive powers. .......... Putin needs Xi much more than Xi needs Putin, and that imbalance has grown far greater since their last meeting. ........ he Russian president's suppression of all criticism about the war has taken an expected turn. Those who opposed the "special military operation," have gone to prison, exile or have mostly fallen silent. But now some of the war's most vocal supporters are fuming, enraged by the military's poor performance. (They even call it a "war" -- a word that could not previously be uttered without some consequence.) ........... A strongman cannot afford to be weak, and Putin knows it. ........ For now, there's no chance that Beijing will discard its unofficial alliance with Moscow, even if Russia is a greatly diminished power. Xi wants to be the leader of a global front opposing the US-led liberal democratic order. To do that, he needs to line up support from nations large and small. And Russia remains an important, nuclear-armed nation. ........... Next month, China's Communist Pary will hold its twice-a-decade party congress. Xi, China's most powerful figure since Mao, is expected to secure an unprecedented third term amid a sharp economic slowdown, made worse by his extreme zero-Covid policy. The possibility of a global recession, heightened by Russia's gas wars against Europe, would hit export-reliant China very hard.



Why the U.S. Is Being Ominously Compared to Hungary and Turkey A conversation with Max Fisher, who covers the decline of democracy around the world. ....... That democracy is declining more or less everywhere now. Not necessarily in every country but in every region, in rich and poor countries, old and new democracies. And the decline is incremental but steady, which means that the scale of the change isn’t necessarily obvious until you start looking at the data. ......... What happens is more like what has occurred in Venezuela, say, or Turkey or Hungary. Elected leaders rise within a democracy promising to defeat some threat within, and in the process end up slowly tearing that democracy down. ......... more democracies are in decline today than at any other point in the last century. .......... The United States fits pretty cleanly into what is now a well-established global pattern of democratic backsliding.

at No comments:
Labels: , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)