I walk along the Moscow streets you used to walk along with me
And every step I take reminds me of just how we used to be
Well, how can I forget, Vlad?
When there is always someone there to remind me
Always someone there to remind me
As Kherson falls I pass the refugees around me in the night
And I can’t help recalling how it felt to kiss and hold you tight
Well, how can I forget, Vlad?
When there is always someone there to remind me
Some Polish asshole there to remind me
I was born to love you and I will never be free
You’ll always be a part of me
If you should find you miss the sweet and tender love we used to share
Just come back to the places where we used to go like our beloved Red Square
Well, how can I forget, Vlad?
When there is always someone there to remind me
Always someone there to remind me
“It was like a moment of humanity because you’re there and you just were holding your heart to them, and they would come up to you. It was a human moment.”
This is exactly what Richard Rorty would have written if he were still alive. Read Achieving Our Country, Rorty’s urgent, late in life, defense of liberalism. As people have noted, he saw Trump coming way before the rest of us did. He warned us about Trump/Putin.
“Have you captured a Russian tank or armoured personnel carrier and are worried about how to declare it? Keep calm and continue to defend the motherland!” Ukraine’s National Agency for the Protection against Corruption (NAPC) said, according to the Ukraine arm of the Interfax news service.
The agency went on to explain there was “no need to declare the captured Russian tanks and other equipment, because the cost of this … does not exceed 100 living wages (UAH248,100) ($8,298).”
In stark contrast to the response Zelensky received from EU lawmakers, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov was met with a cold shoulder at the United Nations.
Scores of diplomats walked out of two meetings at the UN in Geneva in which Lavrov was beamed in for a video statement.
Lavrov spoke by video to the Conference on Disarmament and the Human Rights Council, which he had planned to attend before the closure of airspace to Russian planes by several European countries prevented his travel to the Swiss city.
‘Former Amb. Michael McFaul absolutely destroyed a BBC anchor on air for interviewing a Russian official who he said spewed “ridiculous” propaganda about the invasion of Ukraine — and asked if the BBC would have given Nazis airtime during World War II.
‘AMB. MCFAUL: I want to ask a question. The BBC, if it was September 1st, 1939, would you put on the air a member of the Nazi Party to try to explain this ridiculous, absolute falsification of history and information that we just heard from Mr. Milonov? Because this is complete, utter nonsense what he just said, and I’m wondering if we’re doing a service to the world by giving him a voice on the BBC?
‘JAMES MENENDEZ: Do we need to hear, though…? And I don’t speak for the BBC, of course, but do we need to hear what the justification is in those elite circles, in the Kremlin and among parliamentarians, even if it’s not true? Put some of what he said to rest then.
‘AMB. MCFAUL: Well, it’s utter nonsense, and I really want to ask the question, let’s go back and find out was the BBC putting on Nazis on September 1st, 1939? Because I think it’s an ethical question for those that are in the business. You put him on and then you put me on. It’s here’s one view. Here’s another view, and I don’t like that. There are not flowers being thrown in front of tanks riding in Ukraine, the people of Ukraine voted, including in the Donbas, except for the occupied territories where there were no votes. They voted overwhelmingly for President Zelensky. So the gentleman you just had on was speaking under false facts.’
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Between this, and their choosing Alan Dershowitz for objective commentary on the Epstein sex trafficking story, the BBC’s looking really really shitty.
Russians around the country, at huge risk to themselves, are in the streets protesting the war. Many are being dragged off in police vans.
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10159080991771656&id=678231655
In yesterday’s New York Times:
The Kurdish authorities, with the blessing and financial support of the United States and its coalition partners, should remove the children from the prison camps. That’s the only way to give them a better shot at life and eventually making it back home.
This might sound harsh — removing children from their mothers, who would ostensibly not have a say in the decision. Some argue it’s a violation of rights. But the status quo — leaving them in miserable conditions to grow up radicalized — is worse for the children and the rest of us…
While some countries, as mentioned, have taken in women and children, most of these mothers are doomed, unlikely ever to be repatriated. The children need not share their fate — most are still too young to have been indoctrinated…
Forced separation in some cases “layers trauma on top of acute trauma,” according to the United Nations. While a few mothers may welcome the idea of their children having the opportunity to live a life outside of prison, most would undoubtedly resist losing them.
And this would certainly be cruel and painful for the children. But I believe it is even more cruel to condemn a child to a life in prison because a parent made the decision to go to Syria to join a terrorist organization…
This is not an argument I make lightly. There are sure to be objections from human rights and humanitarian organizations who condemn separations as harmful and insist that the solution is for governments to repatriate all their citizens — but we know that this largely will not happen.
The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child states that a child shall not be separated from his or her parents against their will — unless separation is deemed to be in the best interest of the child.
It’s clearly not in any child’s best interest to be surrounded by terrorist ideology or face a lifetime in prison, having committed no crime.
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On Holocaust Remembrance Day, I think of my in-laws.
Jerzy Soltan, “spindly and peppery ex-cavalry officer who … spent the war as a [Polish prisoner of the] Germans,” and his wife Hanka, who, with her parents, in their apartment near the Warsaw ghetto, hid a little Jewish boy until the war was over.
(“Borucinski, Michal and his wife Zofia and their daughter Hanna Soltan“)
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It was George Patton’s 3rd Army that liberated Jerzy’s camp, Murnau.
And indeed I have covered some of the most obnoxious; but let us consider more pleasant things. Curtis Institute, the school that educated the unearthly Yuja Wang, just got an anonymous $20 million donation.
Anonymous: How about that? And given so that the world can be more musical. How about that.