Tuesday: Hili dialogue

May 16, 2023 • 6:15 am

Oy! It’s Tuesday (the Cruelest Day), May 16, 2023, and National Barbecue Day. Now THIS PHOTO BELOW is barbecue, Texas style, taken on my Pandemic Barbecue Jaunt in April, 2021. It’s at my favorite in the area: Black’s BBQ in Lockhart, Texas, a tiny town with three famous BBQ joints. Shown: a BBQ beef rib with pickles, raw onions, beans, potato salad, and a jalapeño corn muffin. (Sweet iced tea not shown.)

I’ve tried BBQ all over the US, and in my view Texas style brisket and smoked beef is the best.

It’s also Biographer’s Day,(but which biographer?), Dinosaur Day, Love a Tree Day, National Mimosa Day, and National Coquilles St. Jacques Day.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the May 16 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Turkey’s election this weekend was indecisive: Erdogan, unfortunately, beat the more liberal and democratic Kemal Kilicdaroglu by 4.6%, but neither got more than 50% of the vote. There will thus be a runoff.

Turkey’s nail-biter election will go to a runoff, election officials announced on Monday, extending a pivotal vote that has demonstrated that the incumbent, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is still a formidable political force, despite his failure to secure a first-round victory.

Turkey’s Supreme Election Council said the runoff would be held May 28 after official preliminary results showed that Mr. Erdogan had won 49.5 percent of votes and his main challenger, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, 44.9 percent, with nearly all ballots counted. Mr. Erdogan, who has led Turkey for 20 years, appeared to be in a strong position to emerge with another five-year term.

After a tumultuous night during which the rival camps each accused the other of rushing to declare results in advance of official tallies, both sides said early on Monday that they would accept a runoff — and predicted they would prevail.

Sunday’s voting was closely watched around the world for how it could shape the course of Turkey, an important NATO ally with a wide array of diplomatic and economic ties across continents. Of particular interest was the fate of Mr. Erdogan, who has often flummoxed and frustrated his Western partners, including the United States, and faced growing discontent amid high inflation and the destruction wrought by earthquakes in February that killed more than 50,000 in southern Turkey.

Before the vote, most polls suggested a slight lead for Mr. Kilicdaroglu, the joint candidate of a newly formed alliance of six opposition parties. But the results showed Mr. Erdogan’s enduring appeal and influence.

As the paper notes, this is the first runoff Presidential election in Turkey’s history, the turnout was about 90%, and, given the parliamentary elections, it looks as if Erdogan has the edge. The article adds that Erdogan “escalated his criticism of the United States, even claiming on the eve of the elections that President Biden was seeking to topple him.”  The man is a wannabe autocrat, and I’m very afraid he will win the runoff.

*From reader Ken:

In an effort to burnish his reputation as culture warrior numero uno, and to revive his flagging presidential ambitions, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has signed his fourth death warrant in less than four months. Last month, DeSantis signed two bills passed by his lackeys in the state legislature making Florida’s threshold for imposing the death penalty the lowest in the nation.

As a follow up, and by way of comparison, DeSantis signed just three death warrants during his entire first four-year term in office as Florida’s governor.

Republicans sure have a right-to-life view when it comes to fetuses, but not for felons.  I oppose all forms of capital punishment, and won’t vote for anyone who campaigns on it. Even Biden said he would do away with the federal death penalty in the last election, But he hasn’t done squat, and even now Justice Dept. attorneys are fighting to get people executed. That was a campaign promise I counted on.

*Uh oh: woke language is changing once again.  The NYT reports that “Diversity and Inclusion” is changing to “Diversity, Incllusion, and Belonging,” and that the tradition DEI, “Diversity, equity, and inclusion” will presumably become “Diversity, equity,, inclusion, and belonging.”

Interest in creating more inclusive workplaces exploded after George Floyd’s murder in 2020. Many corporations turned their attention to addressing systemic racism and power imbalances — the things that had kept boardrooms white and employees of color feeling excluded from office life.

Now, nearly three years since that moment, some companies are amending their approach to D.E.I., even renaming their departments to include “belonging.” It’s the age of D.E.I.-B.

A new initial, but, curiously, it’s not for the marginalized:

Some critics worry it’s about making white people comfortable rather than addressing systemic inequality, or that it simply allows companies to prioritize getting along over necessary change.

“Belonging is a way to help people who aren’t marginalized feel like they’re part of the conversation,” said Stephanie Creary, assistant professor of management at the Wharton School of Business who studies corporate strategies for diversity and inclusion.

She believes an abstract focus on belonging allows companies to avoid the tough conversations about power — and the resistance those conversations often generate. “The concern is that we are just creating new terms like belonging as a way to manage that resistance,” Ms. Creary said.

Ms. Foster contends that as a practical matter, there will be no equity if the people in power — “the straight white male”— feel excluded from the conversation. The people traditional D.E.I. practitioners “most want to enroll are the people they’re isolating and honestly ostracizing,” she said.

This seems to me palpably ridiculous. Am I going to feel more “included” if they slap the word “belonging” onto “DEI”? Do they think I’m stupid? This is just a semantic embellishment to make those who are easily gulled suddenly get with the program. But the program won’t change.

*From yet another of the Discord leaks, we find out that the head of Russia’s paramilitary and merecenary Wagner group offered, on a condition, to give Russian troop locations to Ukraine!

In late January, with his mercenary forces dying by the thousands in a fight for the ruined city of Bakhmut, Wagner Group owner Yevgeniy Prigozhin made Ukraine an extraordinary offer.

Prigozhin said that if Ukraine’s commanders withdrew their soldiers from the area around Bakhmut, he would give Kyiv information on Russian troop positions, which Ukraine could use to attack them. Prigozhin conveyed the proposal to his contacts in Ukraine’s military intelligence directorate, with whom he has maintained secret communications during the course of the war, according to previously unreported U.S. intelligence documents leaked on the group-chat platform Discord.

. . .Prigozhin has publicly feuded with Russian military commanders, who he furiously claims have failed to equip and resupply his forces, which have provided vital support to Moscow’s war effort. But he is also an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who might well regard Prigozhin’s offer to trade the lives of Wagner fighters for Russian soldiers as a treasonous betrayal.

The leaked document does not make clear which Russian troop positions Prigozhin offered to disclose.

Not being stupid, Zelensky isn’t going to accept this proposal:

Two Ukrainian officials confirmed that Prigozhin has spoken several times to the Ukrainian intelligence directorate, known as HUR. One official said that Prigozhin extended the offer regarding Bakhmut more than once, but that Kyiv rejected it because officials don’t trust Prigozhin and thought his proposals could have been disingenuous.

This is not, however, going to make Putin happy. Besides, Ukrainian forces in Bakhmut are hanging in there, exhausting Russian troops while preparing for their own Spring offensive. Still, I don’t see a viable end to this conflict, not as long as Putin is in power.

*By god, this is too damn much. THE GOVERNMENT IS THINKING OF BANNING CHOCOLATE MILK FROM SCHOOLS!  As a child, I simply couldn’t STAND regular milk, and so I dutifully paid my 2¢ every day in school for my half pint of the brown stuff. But of course the Leisure Fascists are always busy. The problem, of course, is sugar:

Chocolate milk, long a school-cafeteria mainstay, could be coming off the menu.

Concerned about the amount of added sugars children are consuming, the U.S. Department of Agriculture is considering a ban on flavored milk— including chocolate, strawberry and other varieties—in elementary and middle schools when it adopts new standards for school meals.

The issue has divided parents, child-nutrition specialists, school-meal officials and others. Supporters of restricting flavored milk say it has added sugars that contribute to childhood obesity and establish preferences for overly sweet drinks. But opponents, including the dairy industry and many school districts, say removing it will lead to children drinking less milk.

“We want to take a product that most kids like and that has nine essential nutrients in it and say, ‘You can’t drink this, you have to drink plain’?” asked Katie Wilson, executive director of the Urban School Food Alliance, which represents 18 of the largest school districts in the country. “What are we trying to prove?”

I tell you, I would not have drunk any milk in school if they didn’t have chocolate milk, and I’m not obese. If they’re worried about sugar, can’t they put Splenda in the milk instead?  The next thing you know, they’ll be saying that ketchup isn’t a vegetable.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili’s being dramatic:

Hili: Every day we cross some boundaries without even noticing it.
A: That’s true but not every stream is the Rubicon.
In Polish:
Hili: Codziennie przekraczamy jakieś granice, nawet tego nie zauważając.
Ja: To prawda, ale nie każdy strumyk jest Rubikonem.

And a photo of the affectionate Szaron:

********************

From Jean, an Amy Hwang cartoon:

 

From the Not Another Science Cat Page on FB:

From Nicole:

From Masih, a very sad scenario:

From Malcolm, a nuclear reactor starts up:

From Dom, a great bird photo:

From Barry, who says, “Fisherman rescues monkey from a fishing net. There’s going to be some serious imprinting!”

From the Auschwitz Memorial, a 13-year-old girl gassed upon arrival:

Tweets from Dr. Cobb, who’s digging through the Crick archives in La Jolla. First, an Irish Virgin Mary (watch the second one):

Dude, the working cat, could stand to lose some weight. Sound up:

A funny tweet acting out a real situation. Elsevier is the biggest leech in the scientific publishing biz:

 

38 thoughts on “Tuesday: Hili dialogue”

  1. “Belonging is a way to help people who aren’t marginalized feel like they’re part of the conversation,” said Stephanie Creary,

    In other words: to make them feel like they are not marginalised. I wonder if she realised what she was saying.

    —

    the head of Russia’s paramilitary and merecenary Wagner group offered, on a condition, to give Russian troop locations to Ukraine!

    Given that Ukraine has access to US intelligence, they probably have a better idea where Russian forces are than Prigozhin.

    Reply

    2. That almost sounds like a old Mission Impossible TV show episode where the team would work out some elaborate operation to make an official of the bad-guy country or crime syndicate look like a traitor who would then be killed by his own side.

      Reply

    3. I conjecture that U.S. intelligence similarly reasonably knows who caused the Nord Stream pipeline sabotage explosion.

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  2. On this day:
    1770 – The 14-year-old Marie Antoinette marries 15-year-old Louis-Auguste, who later becomes king of France.

    1842 – The first major wagon train heading for the Pacific Northwest sets out on the Oregon Trail from Elm Grove, Missouri, with 100 pioneers.

    1866 – The United States Congress establishes the nickel.

    1868 – The United States Senate fails to convict President Andrew Johnson by one vote.

    1888 – Nikola Tesla delivers a lecture describing the equipment which will allow efficient generation and use of alternating currents to transmit electric power over long distances.

    1891 – The International Electrotechnical Exhibition opened in Frankfurt, Germany, featuring the world’s first long-distance transmission of high-power, three-phase electric current (the most common form today).

    1916 – The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and the French Third Republic sign the secret wartime Sykes-Picot Agreement partitioning former Ottoman territories such as Iraq and Syria. [As Sykes notoriously proposed, “I should like to draw a line from the ‘e’ in Acre to the second ‘k’ in Kirkuk”.]

    1918 – The Sedition Act of 1918 is passed by the U.S. Congress, making criticism of the government during wartime an imprisonable offense. It will be repealed less than two years later.

    1929 – In Hollywood, the first Academy Awards ceremony takes place.

    1943 – The Holocaust: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising ends.

    1943 – Operation Chastise is undertaken by RAF Bomber Command with specially equipped Avro Lancasters to destroy the Mohne, Sorpe, and Eder dams in the Ruhr valley.

    1951 – The first regularly scheduled transatlantic flights begin between Idlewild Airport (now John F Kennedy International Airport) in New York City and Heathrow Airport in London, operated by El Al Israel Airlines.

    1960 – Theodore Maiman operates the first optical laser (a ruby laser), at Hughes Research Laboratories in Malibu, California.

    1966 – The Chinese Communist Party issues the “May 16 Notice”, marking the beginning of the Cultural Revolution.

    1975 – Junko Tabei from Japan becomes the first woman to reach the summit of Mount Everest.

    Births:
    1718 – Maria Gaetana Agnesi, Italian mathematician and philosopher (d. 1799). [The first woman to write a mathematics handbook and the first woman appointed as a mathematics professor at a university.]

    1804 – Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, American educator who founded the first U.S. kindergarten (d. 1894).

    1831 – David Edward Hughes, Welsh-American physicist, co-invented the microphone (d. 1900).

    1862 – Margaret Fountaine, English lepidopterist and diarist (d.1940).

    1905 – Henry Fonda, American actor (d. 1982).

    1909 – Margaret Sullavan, American actress and singer (d. 1960).

    1913 – Woody Herman, American singer, saxophonist, and clarinet player (d. 1987).

    1919 – Liberace, American pianist and entertainer (d. 1987).

    1944 – Billy Cobham, Panamanian-American drummer, composer, and bandleader.

    1946 – Robert Fripp, English guitarist, songwriter and producer.

    1953 – Pierce Brosnan, Irish-American actor and producer.

    1955 – Olga Korbut, Soviet gymnast.

    1964 – Milton Jones, English comedian, actor, and screenwriter.

    1965 – Krist Novoselic, American bass player, songwriter, author, and activist.

    Death is not grievous to me, for I shall lay aside my pains by death:
    1938 – Joseph Strauss, American engineer, co designed The Golden Gate Bridge (b. 1870).

    1953 – Django Reinhardt, Belgian guitarist and composer (b. 1910).

    1956 – H. B. Reese, American candy-maker and businessman, created Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups (b. 1876).

    1957 – Eliot Ness, American federal agent (b. 1903).

    1990 – Sammy Davis Jr., American singer, dancer, and actor (b. 1925).

    1990 – Jim Henson, American puppeteer, director, producer, and screenwriter, created The Muppets (b. 1936).

    2010 – Ronnie James Dio, American singer-songwriter and producer (b. 1942).

    Reply

    1. Died:
      2010 – Ronnie James Dio, best hard rock singer ever.

      (Sorry, had to fix that.)

      Reply

      1. He’s at least in the running with Glenn Danzig for best hard rock singer per inch of height.

        Reply

      2. Holy Diver is one of those rare albums where pretty much every song is worth listening to. From me that’s about the highest praise I can think of. Many nights rocking out to that album.

        I just glanced at the track listing and I can still sing along to every song except Invisible.

        Killswitch Engage does an excellent cover / tribute of the song Holy Diver. The video is hilarious too. My kids used to make me play the video, and Sabotage by the Beastie Boys, over and over again when they were 8-10.

        Killswitch Engage – Holy Diver

        Beastie Boys Perform “Sabotage” | Letterman (Great Live Performance)

        Reply

        1. C’mon Dave, you weren’t scared! You were lovin’ it! Can never get enough of “Sabotage” though my favorite BB album is “Check Your Head.” In 2020 Mike D and Horovitz put out a great “live” documentary directed by Spike Jonze. I think it’s on most streaming services by now.

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  3. First, an Irish Virgin Mary (watch the second one):

    It looks as if someone (God? Someone with a thin skin and no self confidence.) has labelled those video messages as “sensitive content”. But they don’t seem in the slightest pornographic to me. Just offensive to people who purport to believe their religion.

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  4. That info about Prigozhin is spicy. He’s not on good terms with the regular forces anyway… I wonder how his men’s ammo supply will develop when the Army learns that he was quite literally willing to throw them under the tank? Or is he going to fall to his death from some basement window?

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  5. I think the biographer recognized by Biographer’s Day must be James Boswell.

    I never even thought about what a nuclear reactor sounded like when it starts.

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  6. Please may we have Diversity, Inclusion And Belonging? The responsible VPs could work in the DIABolical Dept.

    Reply

    1. Shouldn’t the key words be Diversity, Equity, Belonging, and Inclusion to become the more pronounceable acronym DEBI? Imagine the headlines when this gets invoked in Dallas…

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  7. “If they’re worried about sugar, can’t they put Splenda in the milk instead?”

    Actually, the World Health Organization is recommending against artificial sweeteners, except for people that have diabetes. They can actually make development of type 2 diabetes more likely. Article here:

    https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/05/diet-sodas-are-not-actually-good-for-your-diet-who-guidance-suggests/

    I do share your concern about pushing so hard on healthy food that people will react negatively and avoid it. It reminds me of a required health course at the University decades ago where even then they promoted food choices that were so tasteless and unrealistic that it made me angry, like toast with no butter and just a tiny dollop of jam in the center. Why would you even bother with something like that?

    Reply

    1. In the USA & in other lands, it is the poor who consume the worst foods often laden with sugar & salt, low on vegetables. Health inequalities are surely the issue. Any responsible government should do all it can to protect public health, I would say. Ill health costs nations a huge amount. (The UK woke up to this when they discovered the poor health of recruits in the Boer War, but we are going backwards now.) Just look at the CDC web pages to see what they say. Also I suppose Jerry is thinking of 60 years ago – childhood obesity in the USA was “5% in 1963 to 1965, rates of obesity had more than tripled to 19% by 2017 to 2019. Early data suggest childhood obesity rates continued climbing during the pandemic. If these trends continue, 57% of children currently ages 2 to 19 will have obesity as adults in 2050.” https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/new-pediatric-guidelines-on-obesity-in-children-and-teens-202301242880
      Obviously banning chocolate milk is not going to solve this, & I must suppose that there are plenty of vested interests that will ensure America retains its sugar dependency.

      Reply

    2. I bet they could reduce the amount of sugar in the chocolate milk by half and it would still be fine. At least for the consumers that survived withdrawal. But that could just be me. Nearly all sweetened drinks on the market in the US, whether real sugar or artificial sweeteners, are way, way too sweet for me. About the only ones I drink are some of the energy drinks and I cut them by at least 50% with water.

      Reply

      1. We have chocolate milk in Canada that is milk with 1% butterfat (“1% milk”) spiked with dark chocolate syrup. It doesn’t seem too sweet — has a nice bitter chocolate taste. It is great after a long bike ride in hot weather but we still cut it half-and-half with regular 1%. Even 1:2 is still chocolatey-satisfying. I wouldn’t drink it as a staple in preference to regular white 1%, though, and I don’t know if kids like it.

        What I’ve started doing is drinking a large glass of regular 1% white milk and a couple of bites of good dark chocolate with hazelnuts after a 2-3 hour ride. Saves an extra grocery item that might go bad in the fridge.

        As you say above, high-fructose corn syrup is evil. Even if the stuff itself is not intrinsically bad for you, the need to sell large quantities of it to support the corn industry perverts both the market and people’s diets. One (conspiracy?) theory is that the salt in a lot of these drinks (to make you thirsty enough to drink more) has to be camouflaged with sugar. I do know that Gatorade is salt-poor–useless for treating diarrhea–, so that can’t be the whole explanation.

        On the subject of energy drinks, it is still controversial as to whether carbohydrate ingested during long aerobic exercise improves stamina and delays fatigue. The first study I believe that looked at this, back in 1982* by a guy named Philip Felig who went on to be a big-time diabetes researcher, found it didn’t work. What he was actually looking at was whether it reduced the mild hypoglycemia often seen in the new mass sport of marathon running as the liver glycogen ran out late in the race. It did that but didn’t make any difference to athletic performance or perception of fatigue or well-being. That didn’t stop energy drink manufacturers from selling the idea that citizen 5-k runners should drink hundreds of calories of sugar during an activity that burns only 100 calories per mile, and can be met just fine by stored body fat.

        This remains one of those “settled science” topics that is less controversial than it should be but out of scope here. Still, the belief that all fluids for rehydrative or recreational drinking should contain calories even in a sedentary population is I think one of the drivers of the obesity epidemic. Black coffee gives me all the energy I need. 🙂
        ——————
        *https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM198204153061503
        (Note Felig studied ordinary healthy volunteers, some of whom were able to exercise for only 15 minutes on an ergometer before pooping out. None went longer than 70 minutes. I’m sure he didn’t recruit real marathoners or endurance cyclists (as I was at the time) because the research team would have been in the lab a loooong time waiting for them to admit to exhaustion. Most of us who participated in studies like this got either bored or overheated, not exhausted in the athletic sense.)

        Reply

        2. I’ve never taken the time to actually look into it, but I’m fairly convinced that all the ingredients in all energy drinks, with one exception, are useless, insignificant, or worse. The one exception I’m pretty sure is effective is caffeine. Especially a 300 mg dose. I drink energy drinks for the caffeine because something in coffee other than the caffeine really disturbs my guts.

          Many years ago I remember drinking a bottle of the original formula Redline energy drink for the first time. After about 5 minutes I wondered if I ought to head to the ER. Heat flush, sweating, raised heartbeat, general feeling of alarm, like a fight / flight response. Not sure if it helped my exercise performance though. Sometime later they changed their formula in response to a lawsuit of some sort. The new formula had no noticeable effect on me.

          Reply

          1. Taurine is a vasodilator, among other effects. It tends to cause a flushing reponse, which I think is more immediately noticeable than the effects of caffeine.
            I am not big on energy drinks in particular, but I drink a lot of Powerade Zero Strawberry. Besides working all the time, my allergies force me to take a lot of antihistamines, so I need to drink almost constantly to avoid dehydration.
            Water by itself does not seem enough.
            When I am somewhere that sports drinks are unavailable, I sometimes mix 50% water and 50% apple juice.

        3. Yeah, I remember that as a young athlete I was taken in hook line and sinker by ostensibly scientific claims regarding sugar and / or protein taken after/during a workout. I was the type of credulous idiot Richard Feynman referred to when he said that the easiest person to fool is oneself.

          I was trained in pharmacology and biochemistry, so I knew the reality of this stuff inside out. But, I remained very gullible on scientific aspects of athletic performance because I wanted to believe I could just tweak this or that and improve significantly.

          Deep down, I knew the scientific basis of the claims was dodgy, saying to myself: “nah…. you know that blood glucose can’t drop so sharply, the runners would fall over, there are hormones that look after this Jeff”. The claims about protein intake tricked me even more. What a fool I was, I’m embarrassed when I think about it now! I came round after a couple of years though.

          I was too gullible, but the slapdash way exercise and nutrition science was conducted and communicated 30 years ago was largely to blame. I don’t much keep up with the field these days, but the standard of research was usually pretty poor. It was almost always performed on small sample groups, with poor (or no) controls, and often funded by commercial entities (often undeclared) that had an interest in the outcome.

          To top it all off, the ‘studies’ were usually wildly misreported in the popular fitness/nutrition press. I was educated in this stuff and I usually didn’t bother to read the studies themselves as I didn’t have the time. You can certainly bet that the vast majority of other interested people didn’t too. We’re all suckers to marketing, at least to some degree, especially when we’re young and eager, and especially when there’s something to be sold!

          My take is that most of the fitness/health food supplement business is based on practically no science whatsoever. It’s just all bollocks. The more we learn about human health and performance, the more we discover that a good diet – with maybe a couple of tiny tweaks – is by far your best bet.

          Reply

          1. Another thing is that even if there is any benefit to be had, it is S M all. To get really fit you simply have to do the hard work of eating right and lots of strenuous exercise.

            The only real magic bullet is steroids. Those do really have a significant impact, but I never had any interest in using them.

  8. The added value of the word “Belonging” in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is that it contributes to the increasing infantalization of the marginalized. Apparently the word “inclusion” doesn’t subliminally evoke images of abused orphans finally finding a family who loves them, a place where they truly belong . All will be well if the workplace attempts to capture this heartwarming model of true acceptance.

    This is baby talk. Next up is Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Belonging, Reassurance, Comfort, and Sympathy.

    Reply

  9. I was just down in the Austin area a few weeks ago, and will second Black’s as one of the top BBQ joints I’ve been to. Next time you’re in Lockhart, be sure to swing by The Culinary Room for the absolute best banana pudding you’ll ever eat. And if you’re into music, check out Sunflower and Friends nearby.

    Reply

  10. Belonging? Oh, a new word is here, a new word is here. . . . I’m somebody! . . . Things are going to start happening now!

    A new word, quickly adopted and unthinkingly used to signal in-group status. I’m waiting for the academic paper that outlines the multiple points of overlap between Woke culture and that of American teenagers.

    Reply

    1. I just watched that and you’re right, the COVID vaccine sketch is as brilliant as the Elsevier one. Very funny!

      Reply

  12. I would not trust Prigozhin for a second. He’s playing games (I would not be surprised if he’s in partial cahoots with Putin*) now, and talks some truth to the Russian army, but his PMC gang is composed of murderers, rapists and genociders, as they already showed in Africa. I would shun Prigozhin’s offers like Anthrax. The only valid reason to talk with him would be about POW exchange.

    *A dictator like Putin needs to play his closest associates against each other, lest one -or a coalition- of them might be overthrowing him. Shoigu and Gerasimov need to be kept in their place. As Prigozhin needs to be.

    Reply

  13. Can I recommend the Podcast “In Moscow’s Shadow” Ep.98 Dog’s of War (and Racoons ).
    Mark Galeotti. Extract from it’s blurb:
    ” explores the complex ecosystem of Russian private military companies and mercenaries.” Prigozhin should be very careful…

    Reply

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