Violent spasms are never a healthy symptom

That’s what we’re seeing in Ukraine — senseless, vicious attacks on civilian centers to pointlessly satisfy Russian honor.

Tragic and terrible. Also tragic and terrible: take a moment to pity the Russian mothers whose children are dying and rotting in Ukrainian fields. No one wins. It’s all a stupid waste of life.

They’re all liars

Last week, Elon Musk tweeted (you know, the usual forum for high-level diplomacy) a “peace plan” for Ukraine that was simply total surrender and concession to all of Putin’s demands and then some. Then it was revealed that Musk had had a recent phone call with Putin, which I could believe — he’s not a very bright guy, and simply parrots whatever the last person who spoke to him said. Now he denies the phone call, and I can believe that, too. Musk is the kind of ego-driven guy who would claim to have inside info on the plans of powerful people.

Elon Musk has denied the claim he spoke to Vladimir Putin before tweeting a peace plan for the war in Ukraine.

The Tesla CEO’s peace suggestion included Ukrainian territory being handed over to Russia.

Eurasia Group subscribers were sent a report in which Ian Bremmer wrote that Mr Musk told him that the Russian president was “prepared to negotiate” if the Crimean peninsula remained in Russian hands, Vice reported.

Other conditions included that Ukraine retains permanent neutrality and that Ukraine recognises the Russian annexation of Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia.

Mr Bremmer reports that Mr Musk said that Mr Putin told him that these targets would be reached “no matter what”.

Basically, I can shrug and believe he said things that have little basis in reality, because he is a glad-handing liar. Once you accept that, you can understand the motivation behind all the noise that comes out of his mouth.

I’ll also easily believe that Putin is a liar. The people who have the most experience with Russian neighborliness will tell you that.

Baltic leaders have long argued that Western sanctions adopted in 2014 after Putin illegally annexed Crimea showed the West’s lack of resolve in confronting the Russian president over his land grab. European leaders seemed to think the Baltics were so traumatized by Soviet occupation that they could not be objective.

“Jokingly, you know, we call this ‘West-splaining,’” Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis said. The West’s message, he said, was that “after 50 years of occupation, it’s understandable that you would have trust issues with a country that occupied you.”

“For us in the Baltics, it all boils down to this notion of appeasement: that basically we can appease Russia,” Landsbergis continued. “For us, it was always very clear, black and white. If a country is eager to cross another country’s border, they’re an aggressor and they will do that again, if they’re not stopped. And they have not been stopped.”

“That notion is quite pervasive, this notion of peaceful settlement with an aggressor,” he added. “I’m really hopeful that it’s now waning.”

Don’t trust imperialist countries. It’s that simple.

I think Central and South America are all clear on that, too.

The prize for coolness under pressure goes to…

Ariel Elias, a comedian who was doing a comedy set in front of a few MAGA rednecks who didn’t like what she was saying and threw a whole can of beer with great force at her. She scooped it up and drank it while mocking them. I was impressed.

It’s got to be tough to be doing comedy in a bar attended by deplorables. I did notice, though, that when she called for support, the overwhelming majority of the crowd cheered in her favor — the few MAGAts must be feeling isolated and alone, which is good.

Also good: the beer-flinger is being prosecuted for his actions.

Conservatives really hate education

Let’s start calling students names.

“College doesn’t look like it’s fun anymore. I mean, have you seen how miserable and how miserable-looking a lot of the students are?

“They’re deliberately like ugly-fying themselves. You see them on TikTok. They’re out of shape, they’re asexual. They’re rejecting the truth in beauty.

“They all look like rejects from a loony bin. I’d steer clear of college, too.”

I’ll have you know that all of my students are brilliant, beautiful, and sane. (Near as I can tell — some of them are just black squares on Zoom.)

Keep in mind that the guy talking about students being ugly-fied is Greg Gutfeld.

None of my students look that awful.

Another Crimean war

No good comes of war, and now the Ukraine war is expanding to the south. Ukrainians blew up a significant transport route between Russia and Crimea.

A giant explosion ripped across the Crimean Bridge, a strategic link between mainland Russia and Crimea, in what appeared to be a stunning blow early Saturday morning to a symbol of President Vladimir Putin’s ambitions to control Ukraine.

The damage to the bridge, which provided a road and rail connection from Russia to the Ukrainian peninsula the Kremlin illegally annexed in 2014, marks another serious setback to Russia’s war effort in Ukraine by disrupting a crucial supply route.

I had to look up the Kerch Bridge to see where it was.

No matter how this war ends up, Putin has to regret having picked a fight there. That’s a lesson for every country — no matter how big and tough you are, and how confident you are in attacking a smaller country, you might end up paying a greater cost than you expected. We should have figured that out in Vietnam (I doubt that we did), and Putin’s imperial ambitions are getting a serious reality check.

Imagine a Senator Herschel Walker…

If this were a soap opera, I’d call it unbelievable. Herschel Walker, senatorial candidate from Georgia, has been accused of paying for a woman’s abortion. He denies it.

“This is a flat-out lie – and I deny this in the strongest possible terms,” Walker said in a statement posted on his verified Twitter account in which he called the report a “repugnant hatchet job” and criticized what he described as the Daily Beast’s reporting tactics.

“Now, they’re using an anonymous source to further slander me,” Walker said. “They will do anything to hold onto power. It’s disgusting, gutter politics.”

How dare they. HE DOESN’T KNOW HER, he shrieks.

And now a new revelation:

A woman who said Herschel Walker paid for her 2009 abortion is the mother of one of his children, according to a new report Wednesday, undercutting the Georgia Republican Senate candidate’s claims that he didn’t know who she was.

The Daily Beast, which first reported Monday on the abortion, said it had agreed not to reveal details of the woman’s identity to protect her privacy. But Walker, who has expressed support for a national abortion ban without exceptions, vehemently denied the story, calling the abortion allegation a “flat-out lie,” threatening a lawsuit against the outlet he has yet to file and saying he had no idea who the woman might be.

So on Wednesday night, The Daily Beast revealed that the woman – who was not named – was so well known to Walker that, according to her, they conceived another child years after the abortion. She decided to continue on with the later pregnancy, though she noted that Walker, as he had during the earlier pregnancy, expressed that it wasn’t a convenient time for him, the outlet reported.

To be fair, it’s entirely possible that he has completely forgotten who the mothers of his children are — there are so many of them, and it’s not as if he has invested much time with his families, even his own children seem to dislike him, and he seems to be a remarkably stupid person. Which all makes him the perfect Republican candidate!

For all that, it’s more than conceivable that Walker wins his race against Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock. That remains Republicans’ hope — with faith placed in Walker to run the same game-plan that got him to this point.

Right. He’s a good representative for the party of conservative values and personal responsibility, which has somehow morphed into the theocratic party that loves a guy who, after every scandal, defends himself with the assertion that he’s a Christian.

It isn’t hypocrisy at all

And it probably won’t cost him any votes. It has been discovered that Herschel Walker paid for a girlfriend to get an abortion, in spite of the fact that, on the campaign trail, he has been loudly opposed to abortion for any reason.

A woman who asked not to be identified out of privacy concerns told The Daily Beast that after she and Walker conceived a child while they were dating in 2009 he urged her to get an abortion. The woman said she had the procedure and that Walker reimbursed her for it.

She supported these claims with a $575 receipt from the abortion clinic, a “get well” card from Walker, and a bank deposit receipt that included an image of a signed $700 personal check from Walker.

The woman said there was a $125 difference because she “ball-parked” the cost of an abortion after Googling the procedure and added on expenses such as travel and recovery costs.

Additionally, The Daily Beast independently corroborated details of the woman’s claims with a close friend she told at the time and who, according to the woman and the friend, took care of her in the days after the procedure.

The woman said Walker, who was not married at the time, told her it would be more convenient to terminate the pregnancy, saying it was “not the right time” for him to have a child. It was a feeling she shared, but what she didn’t know was that Walker had an out-of-wedlock child with another woman earlier that same year.

This won’t even cause a hiccup in his campaign. The thing to realize is that anti-abortion advocates aren’t actually so much anti-abortion as they are anti-women’s autonomy. This abortion was OK because a man blessed it. What would get them outraged is if a woman aborted a man’s unborn child without his permission. Permission granted by a man? Stomp that fetus!

His potential Republican colleagues are probably ready to high-five him and call him a moral exemplar. Even his record of domestic violence doesn’t trouble the Republican base, because that’s simply a man exhibiting his dominion over his wife. Perfectly fine.

Grim business

It looks like the Ukrainians are currently winning, although who knows what will happen when the Russians throw 300,000 conscripts into the meat grinder. What I’m getting out of the news, though, is how bloody and brutal the war is in reality. It’s not shifting lines on a map, it’s dead people. Every gain costs lives.

The Ukrainian soldiers waved, hooted and raised their fists in triumph as they drove out of the strategic eastern city of Lyman on Monday, riding M113 armored personnel vehicles provided by Western countries. They passed eight corpses of enemy Russian soldiers who died trying to run from a Ukrainian counteroffensive that swept through the area and is still going, putting the lie to President Vladimir Putin’s annexation claims.

What I find shocking in that Washington Post story is that it goes on to describe the bloated corpses. I did not expect that. I guess there’s a fine line to be drawn here — you don’t want to sanitize a violent war.

Along the same lines, here’s a blog that consists of transcribed text messages from a volunteer fighting in Ukraine. The volunteer is an American veteran who went off to war (my thought: what the heck is wrong with him? Going to fight, just because fighting is what he does.) It’s all about making people dead.

This has got to end sometime, but I don’t see an end in sight.

The gods themselves oppose the bosses

We must unionize to defeat the evil giants.

From the 1970s, huh? At a time when I would sometimes read comic books to my staunchly pro-union father. No wonder I got no pushback from my parents when I was avidly reading that trashy stuff — it was fundamentally righteous.

What “myth of the tech genius”?

Was there ever such a myth? I guess it’s been shattered now, since Musk’s battles with Twitter have forced him to reveal the contents of his cell phone. It’s a mess of banality and unwarranted confidence and egotism.

What is so illuminating about the Musk messages is just how unimpressive, unimaginative, and sycophantic the powerful men in Musk’s contacts appear to be. Whoever said there are no bad ideas in brainstorming never had access to Elon Musk’s phone.

In no time, the texts were the central subject of discussion among tech workers and watchers. “The dominant reaction from all the threads I’m in is Everyone looks fucking dumb,” one former social-media executive, whom I’ve granted anonymity because they have relationships with many of the people in Musk’s texts, told me. “It’s been a general Is this really how business is done? There’s no real strategic thought or analysis. It’s just emotional and done without any real care for consequence.”

You might be wondering who has the privilege of chatting to Elon Musk. It’s a gang of rich idiots.

Appearing in the document is, I suppose, a perverse kind of status symbol (some people I spoke with in tech and media circles copped to searching through it for their own names). And what is immediately apparent upon reading the messages is that many of the same people the media couldn’t stop talking about this year were also the ones inserting themselves into Musk’s texts. There’s Joe Rogan; William MacAskill, the effective altruist, getting in touch on behalf of the crypto billionaire and Democratic donor Sam Bankman-Fried; Mathias Döpfner, the CEO of Axel Springer (and the subject of a recent, unflattering profile); Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist, NIMBY, and prolific blocker on Twitter; Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, who was recently revealed to have joined a November 2020 call about contesting Donald Trump’s election loss; and, of course, Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s co-founder and former CEO. Musk, arguably the most covered and exhausting of them all, has an inbox that doubles as a power ranking of semi- to fully polarizing people who have been in the news the past year.

Few of the men in Musk’s phone consider themselves his equal. Many of the messages come off as fawning, although they’re possibly more opportunistic than earnest. Whatever the case, the intentions are unmistakable: Musk is perceived to have power, and these pillars of the tech industry want to be close to it. “I love your ‘Twitter algorithms should be open source’ tweet,” Joe Lonsdale, a co-founder of Palantir, said, before suggesting that he was going to mention the idea to members of Congress at an upcoming GOP policy retreat. Antonio Gracias, the CEO of Valor Partners, cheered on the same tweet, telling the billionaire, “I am 100% with you Elon. To the mattresses no matter what.”

Lonsdale is also one of the money men behind the University of Austin. Don’t you just love his casual assumption that he gets to talk to members of Congress, and they’ll listen? I don’t have that privilege. You probably don’t, either. Money is the only factor that gives you access.