Day 1414
Black ice
Emerging from beneath a thick avalanche of shiny black-ice punditry and L'Unifolié-waving cockfighting in one's native land, one expects a certain sourness to follow—a hint of hauntedness, a kind of baggage clinging to one's heels. But bliss arrives in unexpected vessels: 120 seconds of tethered Ukrainian drones blowing invading Russian soldiers to smithereens.
The last thing you want during a war is to slip and break your hip. On days like today, traction is everything. Short, shuffling steps with your feet wider apart help with balance, and leaning slightly forward—counterintuitively—keeps you upright better than leaning back. But crampons are better.
The joker on the far right is ex-convict Charlie Kushner, who in 2005 was sentenced to two years in prison for tax evasion, illegal campaign contributions, and witness tampering—he hired a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law cooperating with federal investigators, arranged for the encounter to be recorded, and then sent the tape to his sister in an attempt to intimidate them and prevent their testimony against him. Charlie today is US ambassador to France. His as-yet-unconvicted son Jared and Z took part in a press conference following the Paris affair, along with Trump's idiot special envoy Steve Witkoff.
If you make the grave mistake of subjecting yourself to this 50-minute performance, within minutes your vagus nerve will stage a full revolt and your insula will light up, as if your brain’s disgust center is physically trying to reject what your ears are processing. It turns out there are two very different kinds of “coalitions of the willing”: one involves serious nations making legally binding commitments to defend sovereignty with multilateral forces, ceasefire monitoring mechanisms, and intelligence-sharing frameworks; the other involves whatever that was.
On the difference between ice and ice
There is the ice we navigate each morning on the downhill route to wherever we must go—treacherous, unforgiving, requiring careful attention and proper equipment. And then there is the ice we encounter in geopolitical theater: the slick surface of opportunism masquerading as diplomacy, the frozen moral landscape where grifters in expensive suits stand beside actual statesmen and pretend the temperature is the same. Our bodies, in their wisdom, recognize the difference before our conscious minds can fully articulate it. The crampons required for the latter do not yet exist, though we suspect a well-aimed tethered drone might serve a similar function. In the meantime, we shuffle forward, lean slightly into the wind, and take grim satisfaction where we can find it.