Ukraine, Putin Rally, War Crimes, Postage, Boycott, Fox, Both Sides

  • PZ Myers pays attention to the explicitly expressed, but under-reported, aims of Vladimir Putin quite aside from military invasion. He insists he will accomplish the purification of Russian society of non-traditional ideas. Those on America’s extreme right are loving the idea.
     
  • At The Moderate Voice, Mark Satta looks at Putin’s efforts to justify invasion through the extreme manipulation of language beyond its generally accepted meaning.
     
  • Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged tells us of a woman in Russia arrested for carrying a blank protest sign. The sign with nothing on it tells us something about freedom in Putin’s Russia.
     
  • There are strange goings on in Putin television. Russia being in Putkin-Control, it’s hard to get a straight story, which is one reason tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors becomes instantly valuable. He gathers the Twit-bits and News-pieces into a coherent narrative as the dictator tries to go all Trumper.
     
    Putin holds a massive rally with a crowd that Putin-folk insist numbers 200,000 screaming fans. The stadium only holds 81,000, so there’s that. Then, in mid-sentence, Putin’s mic goes out, the dictator disappears like a card from magician’s hand, and tengrain pieces together the mystery. Now for Putin’s next magical trick.
     
  • Want the Putin view of the pro-Putin rally of seemingly adoring fans crammed into a clown car of a stadium? M. Bouffant at Web of Evil runs to the nearest pro-Trump site to discover how charismatic, how effective, how popular a national leader Putin has turned out to be. Kind of a miracle.
     
  • In Letters from an American, noted historian Heather Cox Richardson has this to say: While Russia’s war on Ukraine continues in all its blistering horror, there are glimmerings that suggest Russia’s position in its assault on Ukraine is weakening.
     
  • Infidel753 points out that Putin’s invasion and his bullyboy targeted attacks on children’s facilities and hospitals for pregnant women is intended to be a show of strength. Instead he demonstrates profound national weakness. The creative title says it well.
     
  • I confess. At first I thought this was satire. Nojo tells us about Ukraine’s competition to design a new postage stamp, and the wonderfully profane winner.
     
  • I suppose any disaster will have grifters ready to take advantage. Scotties Playtime brings news of one of the worst possibilities operated by right-wing Americans right in Ukraine itself. Children are the targets.
     
  • Doing business with Russia sounds so antiseptic. Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger tells us a little about corporate complicity: Companies helping Putin murder Ukrainian citizens.
     
  • News Corpse reports on the public grateful praise Putin’s Foreign Minister expresses for the Fox Network.
     
  • As the Putin invasion of Ukraine continues, uniting the world, uniting most of the US, driftglass sees a new narrative in the both-sides-are-the same ideology: Putin has discredited his supporters on both extremes. The only fly in that ointment is that virtually all Putin support comes from the right.
     
    For myself, I’m okay with both-sides as a conclusion, backed by evidence or logic or both. A conclusion can be examined and debated.
     
    I reject it as a premise backed by nothing.
     
  • Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit points out that, in the US House of Reps, Vlad maintains his very own Putin Caucus.
     
  • It has been winding through the internet, and we can hope it somehow leaks into Russia. Hackwhackers relays from a Twitter feed the video of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s quietly impassioned message of love and admiration for the people of Russia, including a story of his boyhood hero, Yury Petrovich Vlasov, who later became his admired friend. The video is a plea and a challenge to reject Putin lies about the invasion of Ukraine. Hackwackers calls it a remarkable video: a fair description.
     
  • At Political Irony Vlad retaliates against worldwide actions with sanctions on several Americans. Hillary Clinton issues an ideal response.
     
  • Andy Borowitz has the details as Donald Trump offers his considerable experience and expertise in helping Russia file for bankruptcy.

  • The internet at large has been having a wonderful time with one prissy objection to Mr. Zelensky’s sartorial taste.

  • The Palmer Report suggests that China is picking Biden over Putin, for reasons having little to do with economic or military power and nothing to do with simple morality.
     
  • Green Eagle reinterprets the news of the world, deconstructing mainstream press accounts of pretty much everything.
     
  • The Propaganda Professor takes a look at what’s behind the conservative culture war against Minnie Mouse and M&Ms.
     
  • SCOTUS, for now, is a lost cause. Legal expert Imani Gandy explains how the Constitutional rights of pregnant women will now depend on state courts.
     
  • SilverAppleQueen contemplates Florida’s Don’t Say Gay legislation and comes up with a new approach.
     
  • The Onion brings good news as Americans celebrate the 4th consecutive victory over COVID.
     
  • Nan’s Notebook says most Americans would like to bury at sea, deep deep beneath the waves, semi-annual clock changes. Trouble is we’re divided about which direction to go: Permanent Spring forward or permanent Fall back?
     
    I did enjoy one letter to the editor of an Australian newspaper. It floated about the internet a few years back. The writer liked moving clocks back once a year because plant life benefits from that extra hour of sunlight.
     
    My preference would be to have clocks go back one hour every month forever. That would give us, each year, 24 more hours of sleep, or whatever we do instead of sleep. And AM/PM times would be back every couple of years to what we’re now used to. Okay, not all fantasies are practical.
     
  • Cato Institute’s Julian Sanchez goes podcast guesting, discussing a widely circulating right wing tale, largely Fox generated. Special prosecutor John Durham is charging that Hillary Clinton paid people to hack in to Donald Trump’s home and office computers in order to plant evidence of Russian collusion.. Julian explains that literally no part of that sentence is correct.
     
  • Let’s see. President Biden nominates the first Black woman to the Supreme Court. Conservatives are outraged. Not because of gender. And no, no, no, not because of race. But for much more legitimate reasons.
     
    Tommy Christopher explores one such legitimate reason.
     
    Ketanji Brown Jackson has shared a story from childhood. She was impressed with a book that her parents kept on a coffee table. The happy faces on the cover offered a jarring contrast with the depressing title of the book:
    Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism
     
    A conservative pundit reads up on the book. One of the chapters inside has a Twilight-Zone-like story of White people being sold to space aliens by Black people.
     
    This presents an issue. If she grew up seeing the book as a child, she must have read the book.
    If she read the book, she must have read each of the stories.
    If she liked the cover, she must have liked the book.
    If she liked the book, she must have loved each of the stories. The stories she must have read. As a child.
    If she liked the stories, the stories she must have read, then she must have liked the story about Whites being treated horribly.
     
    So she must harbor an irreducible bias against White litigants.
     
    A casual observer might get the impression that this legitimate objection reveals less about the nominee than it does about the current state of contemporary conservatism.
     
  • Libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara looks at Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson and says we should regard her as a role model. He wouldn’t be a good libertarian or even a legitimate rightist if he didn’t throw in the obligatory snipe at those who think racism still exists, but he is quite right in the admiration.
     
  • Frances Langum watches the acrobatics as Idaho’s Lt Governor first travels around the rhetorical universe to avoid acknowledging that she knowingly spoke in association with a White supremacist at a White supremacy conference then flips in an interview on a minor site saying Yes, I did know who I was talking to.
     
  • Wisconsin conservative James Wigderson has an opinion about a famous mugging that wasn’t.

  • North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz explains the exhaustion good people feel at the continuous public assaults on simple morality by pretend patriots and the phony faithful.
     
  • In The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser, it is a relief of sorts to read questions to atheist Bruce from a Baptist pastor that are not mean-spirited, often petty, challenges. They seem like good faith questions.
    eg: How do you explain historical accounts of Jesus? Just a good man? An outright fraud?
     
    Bruce, as I would expect, provides fair and open answers.
     
  • CalicoJack in The Psy of Life has missed a couple weeks of blogging, but has a damn good reason. He doesn’t need a reason, but he is perpetually a gentleman. Good to have him back in the saddle.
     
  • We all need to develop what some call a soft skill set. Reductress helps, offering ways to explain to a friend your lack of enthusiasm for holding her pet snake.
     
  • Ant Farmer’s Almanac has an idea for the inevitable next sequel of Jurassic Park.
     
  • @whiskeywhistle98 does hilarious facial substitution, morphing into — well look and see.
    @whiskeywhistle98 #friends #tiktokmom #fyp #trend #VenmoSpringBreak #macysownyourstyle ♬ Monkeys Spinning Monkeys – Kevin MacLeod & Kevin The Monkey

A few tweets I thought worthy:

And I’m allowed a few of my own:

– Podcasts –