City authorities have decided to give cyclists the entire right lane of Lesy Ukrainki Boulevard from Pecherska metro to Bessarabska Market.
Decades ago I did a poster, aping Donald Rumsfeld: Generals! Where is Your Cortex? It was a lame attempt to dun military planners for flouting the practicalities of using and fighting in the things they make. At the time it felt like a question of usefulness, but in fact I was just pissed that hundreds of camoflauged contractors squiring dishy women to Tootsie Club made so much money doing such shoddy work.
Still the question of what is useful never quite goes away, hmmm?
Cool, modern Swedish combat aircraft
The unrelenting disenbowelment of Russia’s lines of defense in southern Ukraine during August along with promises to provide at least two squadrons of modern fighter jets bodes well for the future. And that’s how it should be, because our years-long Fortress Ukraine experiment has no expiration date.
“Now there is a breakthrough result on the Gripens, cool, modern Swedish combat aircraft. Our warriors are already beginning to test them. And step by step, negotiations by negotiations, we are getting closer to the Gripens appearing in our sky," Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in Copenhagen.
That’s good news.
“Counteroffensive1 has lost its lustre2 as a significant3 communication4 paradigm5...and has redefined itself6 as a IPSO7 strategy of callibrated coercion8.”
It’s large, this word: it holds much; it is flexible. The shapes of its letters – their arrangement into text – means more than design or linguistics or semantics. Indeed the term offers a broad arena for new ideas.
Easy to think of Propaganda 101 here: if you say counteroffensive long enough, significance will emerge.
Important.
Piar.
Not a means, you see, a conduit, a route, a method, or a tool. A paradigm.
I see this guy named counteroffensive in the shower one morning, the lightning bolt of epiphany striking as he rubs the suds from his eyes, That’s It! I’ll redefine myself – she’ll have to notice me!
One risks shooting fish in a barrel: callibrated. Yes. Having doffed the winded clothing of unmeaningful language and ideas, of those dusty thousands of years evolving nuance, striding the trenches between rows of Dragon’s teeth, borne along after carpet bombing, the squidgy half-healed shrapnel scars are a warning to deep thinkers from tarting up crap to make autohagiographies more sellable1.
Such longing to defend Ukraine’s territorial integrity! I wonder which is worse, the I Move Things Around in my Go Bag and Tweet a lot, or I Quote Clausewitz and Hegel and Can’t Form a Lucid Sentence and That is the Art of War school.
Western war planners! Where is your cortex?
Eighteen months later, Russia is in no condition to threaten anyone, that is, except Ukraine, more than it already has. This explains why European and U.S. admininistration officials are not seeking actively to crush Putin militarily or economically. Their modest goal is to help as many Ukrainians as possible survive the end of Stage 3, the culmination will necessarily coicide with the last laughs of the 2024 U.S. presidential campaign.
On Bullshit. Propounding nonsense (August 11, 2022)