Day 996
A gigantic ancient olive tree
The last graph from an op-ed by Rose Gottemoeller, titled Trump needs concessions from Putin — they may be forthcoming. The Russian president wants to save face on Ukraine but this doesn’t mean he won’t give anything away, caught my eye. It appeared in The Financial Times yesterday.
It should be impossible “to save face” if you are responsible for killing and wounding hundreds of thousands of soldiers and innocent civilians, displacing millions and making life miserable for tens of millions more.
Should we have offered Adolf Hitler an escape? Pol Pot? Slobodan Milošević?
So, we ask ourselves: Who is Rose? What the fuck is wrong with her?
Ohio, Georgetown, RAND, Carnegie Endowment, State Department, Stanford University. Never served in the military. And no, she doesn’t speak fluent Russian. Looking on the supernatural side, she is prayerful.
I have argued for, er, 11 years, ok maybe 16 years, that, instead of giving Putin an off-ramp, we should punch him in the face.
On the Ukraine jacket, a gigantic ancient olive tree being moved into a anonymous military compound in downtown Kyiv.
I blurred the photo to protect the innocent. There is a story behind this conspicuous relocation of greenery, but I don’t feel like telling it now.
As of this writing, 0835, Friday, November 15, I have been informed that five Russian long-range bombers flying over the Caspian Sea have disgorged a bunch of Kh-101 cruise missiles, which, if aimed at Kyiv, are scheduled to arrive in 45 minutes or so. Whatever.
This nut graph from Andriy’s lament that just popped up on my screen1.
Yuck.
Regular expression syntax: all other language lies weeping in its wake.
All five senses get serviced inside the wire. You tell me which is worse: the dry brittle snapping thin ice covering dirty puddles, or the fumes of diesel generators, the sight of overflowing rubbish bins, the super-concentrated unpleasant taste of op-eds published across the lake2?
It’s the latter, hands down.
Ukraine is running out of optimists (The New York Times, November 15, 2024)
People that get paid to write shouldn't write shit, leave that to us amateurs. 'Nobody needs to emerge from this war having suffered a crushing defeat'. That ranks as the dumbest sentence I have read this year and I spend time on X so just about everything I read is dumb. War is not a 'everyone gets a prize' activity. It is binary. When you lose you need to get fucking crushed so it never occurs to you to try that shit again. Let's apply the above sentence to WW2. Hitler doesn't need to suffer a crushing defeat, we'll just let him keep the bits he has conquered and we'll hang on to the bits we've defended. Nazism as a political system is not dismantled, extermination camps continue to operate, hundreds of thousands of people continue to be occupied in a frozen conflict Europe. How does that sound? So, why the fuck should Ukraine accept that, Rose Gottemoeller? You fucking moron.
hi, vaughn! the desire to fellate vova is strong! in rose's head, in the ft and prob at stanford, too