Podcasts, videos, books and articles of the week 95

Things have stabilised in Ukraine. Our darkest predictions haven’t been proven true.

The situation however is worse than difficult. Russia has rebuilt its military and is turning its occupation of Ukraine into a permanent situation with ethnic cleansing and cultural elimination. Meanwhile Ukraine has no reserves of manpower except its youth and that means demographic disaster (total disaster) if they’re conscripted. The far right can only wait to take power if the war ends with a cease fire.

From the front, use autotranslate

Remember they’re tracking you

And with the covid vaccines!

Maybe not big enough if you want to have more planes than the rest of the world put together

Make Isreal Great Again

Is Lebanon Israeli settlers’ next frontier?

Even by Israeli standards, Uri Tzafon (Awaken North) is a far-right fringe group. Amid mounting tension with Lebanese Shiite political group and militia, Hezbollah, along the Lebanon-Israel border, Uri Tzafon is calling for Israeli settlement of southern Lebanon.

The Turbulent World with James M. Dorsey

‘Even by Israeli far right standards’, here means a lot because their far right is somewhere to the right of you know who when. Like this genocidal fuck and this one (the MP).

Mitzwah war

The Israeli military isn’t what it once was

Thank you for joining me today. No doubt, you will have noticed that The Turbulent World has no sponsors and no advertisers. This guarantees the column and podcast’s independence. Instead, The Turbulent World depends on the support of its readers and listeners to cover the cost of producing the column and podcast. You can contribute by clicking on Subst…

The Turbulent World with James M. Dorsey

Yes, it means kill them all.

Fascists here

President Macron did something truly unexpected when he called a snap election in the aftermath of the European parliamentary elections. It now looks very likely that France's next legislature will contain a plurality of hard right deputies from Marine Le Pen's National Rally. I spoke to Lord Peter Ricketts, former British Ambassador to France about this unexpected election and what it portends.

Fascists there

I was delighted to speak to Akanksha Narain, Indian political analyst and consultant about the unexpected election results in India where Modi's BJP party fell far short of their target of 400 seats in the 542-seat lower house of Parliament (Lok Sabha).

And in other news, make cocaine legal again

The Copernicus of Cocaine

Continued from this post on Espionage&. When Skip Latson and Bill Bruton proposed setting up a fake bank to their superiors, the targets they had in mind were Colombian, with Pablo Escobar at the top of the list. And as soon as it opens, RHM Trust Bank gets its first clients from among the Colombians thanks to introduct…

Espionage&

What I’m still reading

The Challenger disaster has no villains. There was no pressure to launch. No procedures were ignored, no rules broken.

The narrative you get from most books, and the new one, is bollocks.

In retelling how the decision unfolded through the eyes of the managers and the engineers, Vaughan uncovers an incremental descent into poor judgment, supported by a culture of high-risk technology. She reveals how and why NASA insiders, when repeatedly faced with evidence that something was wrong, normalized the deviance so that it became acceptable to them.

Read how a ‘redundant’ seal wasn’t. And there was no evil, no rules breaking and no pressure.

Our book is still out

Phil has a new book coming out soon