Day 1219
It occurred to me early this morning looking due west from the 21st floor of my flophouse that it was in June 2004 when we met Kakha Bendukidze during Mikheil Saakashvili’s suprise visit to Kyiv. Legendary flak Ed Barnes was in tow on a fact-finding mission involving ballistic missiles and North Korea. But that’s another story.
Anyway, the flophouse is oriented so its main windows face perpendicular to the axis of Bendukidze Lane, which runs for a block north-to-south. The street name would not have existed but for the Rose (2004) and Orange (2005) revolutions. Kyiv City Council named it after Kakha in 2015 after the Revolution of Dignity and the building was erected two years later.
In the above photograph we are looking over the cushy Chorna Hora neighborhood, behind which are the capital’s Solomiansky and Shevchekivsky districts. Most of the Iranian designed Shahed kamikaze drones aimed at the capital piroet in from the lefthand side of the photo to the righthand side. Recent tactics involve diving the drone from altitudes over 2 kilometers to evade ground fire, maximizing the warhead’s impact precision, which is much less than exact.
Yesterday evening I watched attentively “daddy” Donald’s NATO summit presser.
Either Iran’s nuclear production facilities have been obliterated, or they have not been. Team USA’s hyperbole is besides the point. That the US Defense Intelligence Agency probably shared its initial damage assessment on the leaky JWICS (Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System) shows lessons unlearned since Jack spilled in the beans via Thug Shaker Central on Discord1.
Joe Kent and Nicholas Kass are now in charge of crafting Team USA’s new narrative on Ukraine2.
The European battleground was prepared over the past decade during which US corporate media, colluding with what are now widely understood in the US as elements of an unaccountable Deep State, pushed to undermine President Trump and remove him from office in part by running misinformation operations against him. While failing to forestall Trump’s return to office, these ops succeeded in severely damaging political discourse in America and European elite perceptions of the United States. — Nicholas Kass, new NIC director, citing his older brother John on X (March 23, 2025)
The tension between groupthink and individuality, between rational and emotional reactions and between morality and immorality come to mind.
On the running jacket, Kilian gives a pre-race Western States 100 interview.