Day 628
Barbed wire of bullshit
After stamping my feet about the dearth of Kyiv-based foreign flaks suited to producing reality-based Ukraine-related copy, I’ve dreamed up a suite of scripts that approximate some of what I was yammering about: simplifying the task of identifying the use of anonymous official sources for dubious reasons. The holy grail remains an application that can switch transparently between styled prose and wire news, matching regular expressions, such as “People familiar with his role,” "People familiar with his assignments," "People familiar with how the operation was carried out,” et cetera.
With the advent of Substack et al., and the rise of narrative-driven content management systems, journalists are doing a lot less research and a lot more copy/paste. But preparing valuable, accurate final copy for the public is cumbersome at best: flagging and tagging is counterintuitive. Typographic standards, consistent formatting and browser compatibility all suffer. Scripts can take care of some formatting, but only some.
On the other hand, writing and revising copy entwined in the barbed wire of bullshit is murder, and skimming is too much of a snag for shitposting X morons. So the goal here is to afford would-be Ukraine experts with simple tools that function within a familiar new environment, and which ensure that analphabetics such as dashes and quotation marks are properly formatted. These scripts are designed to work with grep, though anyone with a bit of chutzpah can tweak them for use with any established author. Er, no. They don’t work on Windows 11 Home.
Isabelle and Shane’s article about Chervinsky orchestrating the explosion of a $16 billion undersea gas pipeline1 should be read while keeping in mind all the mistakes Isabelle and Greg made in their 4,000-word masterpiece about CIA fuckery with Ukraine, titled “Ukrainian spies with deep ties to CIA wage shadow war against Russia,” which we picked apart on Day 6082 and thoroughly debunked on Day 6113 .
The article, “based on on interviews with more than two dozen current and former Ukrainian, U.S. and Western intelligence and security officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity citing security concerns as well as the sensitivity of the subject,” is, er, full of errors. At least that’s what Valeriy Kondratiuk says. He headed the counterintelligence department at Ukraine’s State Secuirty Service in 2014 and later the Defense Intelligency Agency (2015-2016) and Foreign Intelligence Service (2020).
The moral of this story is that we should deeply suspicious all articles The Washington Post publishes about intelligence, or lack thereof, related to Ukraine during wartime.
Ukrainian military officer coordinated Nord Stream pipeline attack. Roman Chervinsky, a colonel in Ukraine’s special operations forces, was integral to the brazen sabotage operation, say people familiar with planning (The Washington Post, November 11, 2023)