Putin "survives" Prigozhin's version of the Beer Hall Putsch, but still leaving himself between a rock and a hard place

 

Here we see a family completely oblivious to the world of humankind, apparently used to visitations from a member of that tribe and carrying on as usual:

 

But then reality must intrude, as we see this “visitor” from another world on a Metro bus:

 

One may wonder why the city of Norfolk, Virginia, all the way on the other side of the country, is looking for mercenaries here to sign-up to serve on their police force. I mean, the guy on the poster sure looks like he’s ready for hardcore “action.” I did a little research and discovered that there has been discord between local police and (of course) the black community there. Frankly, I think that a community police force “approved” by the locals who only have authority within that community would be best suited to deal with crime within that jurisdiction, because then the people complaining the loudest about police behavior would have only themselves to blame.

Not all "mercenaries" for questionable causes are men of course:

 

But in general you have to be the kind who is “ready for war” and wants to do battle against the “barbarians” to respond to an advertisement like the one pictured, for the “thrill” of it and because there is no restriction on your choice of enemy as long as you don’t kill the people on the side that is paying you. That this one kind of “mercenary” for hire. Another kind is what you saw in the film The Dirty Dozen, soldiers convicted of crimes who are given a chance for “freedom” by “volunteering” for a dangerous mission.

And then there is the government “sanctioned” mercenary group, which basically says “OK, we’ll allow your ‘recruiters’ to enter prisons and offer inmates pardons in return for fighting in Syria, Africa and Ukraine,” presuming that they will be more “motivated” to fight and die than the typical unwilling recruit. Not that this kind of "recruiting" is really "new" in Russia; more than one million men in prison for various crimes were given a "choice" to fight the Germans in World War II.

Thus the Wagner Group’s various atrocities and war crimes committed under the cover of being a “private” military force not beholden to any country’s laws, let alone Russia's, was seen as a “necessary evil” to Putin to propagate a war that this his “regular” forces didn’t seem to have the necessary stomach for.

But Yevgeny Prigozhin, the “leader” of Wagner, seemed to believe "his" army was not receiving sufficient material and arms from the government, due mainly to his rivalries and shared insults with various government and military officials. This all culminated in Prigozhin’s “mutiny” in which he expected disaffected regular army generals and soldiers to abandon Putin and join him in what amounted to a “Beer Hall Putsch,” with the same result, with even his “allies” demanding that he stand down.

The fact that the most recent information reveals that Prigozhin’s mutineers got as close as 100 miles (the gray circle) from Moscow indicates that their march was mostly unimpeded for over 500 miles after advancing from Rostov…

 

 

…makes one wonder what would have happened if the mutineers had actually entered Moscow; maybe we would have seen scenes like we saw on January 6, this time in the Kremlin. We are hearing that the mutineers feel “betrayed” by Prigozhin’s agreement to stand down and exile himself to Belarus, suggesting they were itching for a fight after months of being told that they were being used as cannon fodder by Putin and his treacherous generals. The government needed to be “overthrown” and converted to what Prigozhin called a “North Korea-style” dictatorship where the death penalty would be freely handed out to anyone who looked the wrong way (in North Korea, young people have been publicly executed for watching or listening to South Korean television shows or music).

The activities of the Wagner Group didn’t start out this way. It’s real “founder” and defacto “commander,” Dmitry Utkin, decided to set-up his own warrior-for-hire after a less than honorable stint in the Slavonic Corps, whose “religion” was some pagan-oriented rites and borrowed from Nazi cult worship.

It was sent out to Syria to aid the Assad regime with the “blessing” of a Russian intelligence, but quickly became an embarrassment and the Russian government denied sanctioning their activities. In a 2013 report by Foreign Policy entitled “The Case of the Keystone Kossacks,” Oleg Krinitsyn, who was “the head of RSB Group, Russia’s largest private military company,” said the Slavonic Corps “was a shambles from the start”:

Among those guys, photographed against a backdrop of Syrian equipment, festooned with weapons, I noticed a few of our former employees who had been dismissed because of their poor moral character. I saw guys with criminal records amongst them. This once again confirms that the aim of the recruiters was not to attract high-quality professionals, but just to plug a ‘hole’ with cannon fodder, and fast. And the boys were sent on contracts that resembled contracts for suicide missions. Right away, people signed a contract that included a will to bury their remains in their homeland or, if that proved impossible, in the nation where they died, and then be reburied in Russia. Dreadful.

Once in Syria, the recruits discovered that their “mission” was not in the service of official Russian policy or even the Syrian government, but in fact they were in the “pay” of local “warlords” fighting their own private war; according to one:

When they spoke to us in Russia, they explained that we were going on a contract with the Syrian government; they convinced us that everything was legal and in order. Like, our government and the FSB were on board and involved in the project. When we arrived there, it turned out that we were sent as gladiators, under a contract with some Syrian or other, who may or may not have a relationship with the government.… That meant that we were the private army of a local kingpin. But there was no turning back. As they said, a return ticket costs money, and we’ll work it off, whether we like it or not.

These “soldiers” principle occupation was to stay alive, which many failed to do, and when the survivors escaped back to Russia they found that they were regarded as little more than criminals breaking a law which had targeted jihadists in Muslim-majority parts of the Russian Federation. Utkin then decided to form his own mercenary organization; although some have expressed “confusion” about the origin of the naming of his new outfit, it has been asserted that Utkin had an “interest” in Nazi history, and Utkin named his group “Wagner” in honor of the German composer.

Utkin, as the defacto military commander, led the Wagner Group to fight as Russian proxies in the Donbas region in the years before the invasion of Ukraine, as well as in Africa and Syria, where Wagner’s activities put on them on the U.S. terrorist list (and those paying them as sponsors of terrorism). According to a 2016 Sky News report

For the equivalent of £3,000 a month, they say they were thrown into pitch battles and firefights with rebel factions - including Islamic State. Two of the group, Alexander and Dmitry, told Sky News they felt lucky to be alive. "It's 50-50," said Alexander (not his real name). "Most people who go there for the money end up dead. Those who fight for ideals, to fight against the Americans, American special-forces, some ideology - they have a better chance of survival. Approximately 500 to 600 people have died there," claimed Dmitry. "No one will ever find out about them…. that's the scariest thing. No one will ever know."  

(Russia’s) Prime Minister, Dmitry Medvedev, warned in February that the deployment of ground troops by foreign powers could result in a "world war".He seems to have excluded the use of Russian mercenaries from that calculation, however - although analysts are not surprised. The deployment of military contractors is consistent with the Russian take on 'hybrid-war', according to military analyst Pavel Felgenhauer. He said: "Obviously (Wagner) does exist. These kind of 'volunteers' do appear in different war zones, where the Russian government wants them to appear. So first in Crimea, then in Donbass, now in Syria. But they have not been legalized up till now."

Alright, you say, but what about this other character, Prigozhin? A recent story in The New Yorker provides a “revised” explanation about how the Wagner Group came into being:

The precise origin of Wagner remains little more than a myth—a tale with more innuendo than hard facts—but it appears that Prigozhin offered himself as the moneyman and C.E.O. of a new mercenary outfit. Its military commander would be Dmitry Utkin, a former lieutenant colonel in the G.R.U., the Russian military-intelligence agency. Utkin’s alleged proclivities for Nazi ideology and cultural ephemera gave the group its name: “Wagner” was once Utkin’s call sign, apparently in a nod to Hitler’s favorite composer. (Wagner members and supporters often refer to the group as the “orchestra” and its fighters as “musicians.”)

In fact Prigozhin’s name only came up as a “co-founder” of the group after years of denying that he had any connection to Wagner until late last year. Prigozhin spent his whole life as a man on the make, spending nearly a decade in prison as a young man for committing robberies in high-rent neighborhoods. The New Yorker tells us that

He turned his past as a small-time bandit into a successful restaurant and catering business—in the early two-thousands, he hosted Putin and high-profile guests at his St. Petersburg establishments—which grew into a business empire that earned millions on contracts to provide meals to the Russian military and public schools. He was clever, nasty, boorish, with a shade more personality and spunk than most operators who nurtured their fiefdoms in the shadows of the Putin system. In 2013, he launched the Internet Research Agency otherwise known as the St. Petersburg troll farm, which came to employ hundreds of young people who spread propaganda, engaged in influence operations, and otherwise caused mischief on social networks, including in the run-up to the 2016 Presidential election in the U.S.

Prigozhin apparently hoped to use his private army in much the same that U.S. Marine Gen. Smedley Butler claimed he was used for in a 1933 speech:

I spent most of my time being a high class muscle- man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism… I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912 (where have I heard that name before?). I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916.

According to Fortune, Prigozhin also sees deploying the Wagner Group as a money-making operation, most notably in Africa:

Overall, Wagner has done nearly nothing to make life better for Africans: its activities have served to entrench dictators and undermine democracies; to extend and deepen civil conflicts; to murder innocent civilians; to exploit natural resources for Russia’s gain; and to vilify the only alternative that Africans have to China for investment… Everywhere it goes, Wagner has been indifferent to human life, indiscriminately killing civilians as well as Islamic militants and other insurgents… Aside from the government payments it receives, Wagner has negotiated agreements for exclusive access to gold, diamonds and uranium resources in several places it operates in. These include the CAR, Mali and Sudan.

Why was Prigozhin so keen on sending his troops into the meat-grinder that was the battle for Bahhmut? Because he saw an opportunity to gain control of the salt and gypsum mines near the city as “payment” for his “services.”

Here we see a man who “rose” from common, ordinary thief to “Putin’s Chef” to operator of an armed gangster outfit to nearly untouchable status in a country for whom similar activities would lead to imprisonment or “mysterious” death. Prigozhin is still acting as if he is “untouchable” and boasting of “plans” to overthrow the Russian military leadership. Putin can make speeches denouncing threats to his own control, but he clearly is losing control of the “information war” that Prigozhin was “winning” insofar as his criticisms of the Russian war effort is concerned.

Unfortunately for Prigozhin, his time may be running out. One apparent ally, General Sergei Surovikin who knew of his plans and remained silent, has been arrested. Wagner forces have been “advised” to either be absorbed into the Russian regular military, go to Belarus and join their “leader” to be penned-up like cattle, or go home, where there are reports that former prison inmate recruits have re-offended with crimes like murder and rape. Many in Belarus have criticized its dictator and Putin puppet, Alexander Lukashenko, for allowing “criminals” safe haven in their country. 

Meanwhile, a "high-ranking" Russian politician has called for the formation of a 7 million-man professional army to avoid relying on "private" armies, more than the combined number in the West, and indicative of how far Russia has removed itself from civilized society. Why would it need such an army against a West that only wants peaceful relations with a peaceful Russia? The only people "benefiting" from the war in Ukraine are those who like playing "war games" and seeing how Western arms stand-up to the "enemy's" military technology.

And now Putin—who has admitted that Prigozhin has been paid by the Russian government to deploy the Wagner Group, as well as his Concord “catering service” receiving government contracts to supply food to Russian forces—announced that there will be an investigation into Prigozhin's handling of the funds and if he pocketed more than his share of the money. He no doubt did, but Putin and the rest of his oligarch friends are also corrupt to the bone, and Putin was willing to overlook this “fault” until Prigozhin's mutiny. 

As we have seen in the past, oligarchs accused of corruption or criticizing Putin have died under those “mysterious” circumstances, and many have wondered why Prigozhin was allowed to survive this long. If he is not "punished" in the "usual" way, then Putin's position will likely be seen as weakening even more. He's put himself between a rock and a hard place: he permitted a mercenary army to be a threat to his regime, but if he antagonizes it with threats or punishment, it may yet turn against him, and if there is a "war" going on inside the country, it will certainly cause people to wonder who the real "enemy" is.

So males supposedly don't read novels anymore? Maybe the ones to blame are those controlling what gets published

 

While the left-wing British publication The Guardian usually stays the course when it when it comes to politics, it unfortunately frequently indulges in oppressive gender politics, at least from the point of view of anyone who is aware of little things like hypocrisy, self-indulgence and self-obsession. I mean, people who "write" are in general among the most full of shit people there are, especially those with a “personal agenda.” If you are a male, would you prefer to read a detective or adventure novel, or some feminist fiction where male characters are defecated on, and the female characters don’t take any responsibility for their own actions?

At least J.K. Rowling understood that if you are a female author and you want to attract male readers, you have to “compromise” with a world in which males also have to survive in, and not alienate them. Female authors who complain that they are not taken “seriously” enough should realize that it is one thing to have a personal “perspective,” but if you are not “objective” then you shouldn’t expect the male consumer to take you seriously. Fiction written by men simply tell a story, and possible with a “message” that is intertwined with the narrative—not something that front and center is banged on one’s head to gaslight them. Nobody is “perfect”—and that includes women and minorities.

Female authors understood this up until the 1970s, when feminist ideology, “victimization” and self-service became the popular mode of “serious” expression. I recall when Alice Walker won the Pulitzer Prize for The Color Purple; it was made into a movie by Steven Spielberg and picked-up a record-tying 11 Oscar nominations—and won exactly zero awards. 

Why was that? Did it have something to do with making a “political statement” before admitting that the film and the book it was based on was misandrist and promoted racism against black men? Or just too “alienating”? Or really wasn't that "great"? Walker was for a time married to a white man, and her daughter admitted that they were not on the best of terms because she didn’t “hate” black men as much as her mother did.

But back to The Guardian, which had posted a story by a feminist opinionator (who was recently found guilty of defaming a male New Orleans journalist) named Moira Donegan who decried the Johnny Depp U.S. trial as an “orgy of misogyny.” I discovered an older post “of interest” that was apparently tied to some more recent Guardian story, entitled “Kamila Shamsie: let’s have a year of publishing only women—a provocation,” originally published in 2015, but “modified” in 2018. Shamsie opined that

It is clear that there is a gender bias in publishing houses and the world of books. Well, enough. Why not try something radical? Make 2018 the Year of Publishing Women, in which no new titles should be by men.

We don’t really need to examine Shamsie’s subsequent self-serving musings, because they have little to do with the reality—that books by female authors were even then more heavily promoted than books by male authors, and alienating male readers. Hell, that is what we read between the lines in this story by Johanna Thomas-Corr, who wrote the following in The Guardian from 2019:

Women are fiction’s life support system – buying 80% of all novels. But as a major new book argues, their love of an emotional truth has been used to trivialize the genre.

Again, “emotional truth” for women typically means self-serving, sob-sister polemics; maybe that is an over-generalization, but when someone uses a term like “emotional truth,” that’s what it is, and it used to both gaslight people (mainly males) and as personal psychological "therapy." The post goes on:

Damian Barr, author and founder of the Literary Salon in London, thinks that reading can still be a “rebellious and dangerous activity” for women. “There are men who still find it threatening and dangerous when a woman picks up a book,” he says. When he interviewed Nicola Sturgeon the first minister of Scotland, for his salon, he was appalled at the abuse she had received for talking about novels. “People would say that reading fiction is not important, she should be running the country. Why is reading less valuable to a leader than, say, playing golf?”

I mean honestly, who cares if anyone reads a book except book publishers? I suppose that if a woman is reading a book from a known radical feminist author, or if a government minister seems more interested in reading trash novels than fixing the problems of her constituency, then you might expect one or two people to question where their priorities are.  But this all sounds phony to me, since the person making the claim, Damian Barr, is only telling us what Nicola Sturgeon told him, and her claims of “abuse” may only be just the “emotional truth” that she reads in those books.

It goes on:

The idea that fiction is a female domain is taken for granted by most people involved in books. According to Nielsen Book Research women out-buy men in all categories of novel except fantasy, science fiction and horror. And when men do read fiction, they don’t tend to read fiction by women, while Taylor claims that women read and admire male novelists, rarely making value judgments.

OK, so let’s start at the top again: terms like “brotherhood” and “mankind” had “universal” connotations before they became passé; terms like “sisterhood” and “womankind” have deliberately discriminatory connotations. That is the simple explanation if the above statement is correct. I remember serious female writers like Carson McCullers or Harper Lee were making “statements” about the societies they lived in, in which no one was really “innocent” or “guilty,” but whose actions were framed by their motivations and environment—not their “emotions.” 

That is what is demanded from a “serious” male author, for whom the “value judgment” of their work involves the quality of the writing; on the other hand, I don't think most female authors these days actually write to be "inclusive," not thinking of male readers save to kick them in teeth if they dare to read their books. And now that the people who control the publishing  industry have accomplished their "mission," there is no need to publish novels that appeal to either male readers or those who just like books that speak to the world as most of us know it because those people "don't read books anymore."

In a 2021 Guardian post, Thomas-Corr returns to tell us how much the publishing industry has twisted the industry to service female authors and female readers:

How women conquered the world of fiction. From Sally Rooney to Raven Leilani, female novelists have captured the literary zeitgeist, with more buzz, prizes and bestsellers than men. But is this cultural shift something to celebrate or rectify? All five of them are women. But you could be forgiven for not noticing it, so commonplace are female-dominated lists in 2021. Over the past 12 months, almost all of the buzz in fiction has been around young women.

So is the media coverage. Over the past five years, the Observer’s annual debut novelist feature has showcased 44 writers, 33 of whom were female. You will find similar ratios on prize shortlists. Men were missing among the recent names of nominees for the Costa first novel award. Here, too, the shortlisted authors over the past five years have been 75% female. This year’s Rathbones prize featured only one man on a shortlist of eight. The Dylan Thomas prize shortlist found room for one man (as well as a non-binary author), and so too did the Author’s Club best first novel award, which prompted the chair of judges, Lucy Popescu, to remark: “It’s lovely to see women dominating the shortlist.”

Was this a “reaction” to views such as Shamsie’s—or was she simply whining about herself and not reflective of the reality? I mean, things don’t just “change” overnight. If women write for women, and publishers increasingly only publish female authors, then why should this "domination" be a surprise? Then Thomas-Corr goes on to point out that not everyone thinks this is “great”:

But not everyone in publishing sees it in such benign terms. “Why is that ‘lovely to see’?” a male publisher emailed me shortly after the list was announced. “Can you imagine the opposite, a shortlist of five men and one woman, about which the chair says, ‘It’s lovely to see men dominating the shortlist’?”

This has changed, and while it is almost universally accepted with publishing that the current era of female dominance is positive – not to mention overdue and necessary, considering the previous 6,000 or so years of male cultural hegemony – there are, increasingly, dissenting voices among publishers, agents and writers. They feel that men – and especially young men – are being shut out of an industry that is blind to its own prejudices.

Women who were complaining about alleged “discrimination” in the publishing industry against them—or to be more “honest”—literary awards—are acting hardly less discriminatory:

Many women may instinctively take a dim view of men saying they need better representation. There were similar worries voiced when girls started to do better in their GCSEs than boys; there are whenever women are able to compete on equal terms to men. And certainly, when you raise this issue with anyone in publishing, you tend to receive an eye-roll – perhaps followed by a “Hang on! Wasn’t last year’s Booker prize-winner a man?” Those who don’t believe there is a problem will pounce on Douglas Stuart, author of Shuggie Bain as evidence of male supremacy. But they will often struggle to name younger men making their way on to awards lists or bestseller charts.

Many people point out that in U.S. colleges and universities, most of the people making the decisions about who is accepted into them are female, and this may “explain” why most schools have 60 percent or higher female student admissions, and math SAT scores are less “valued” than the “evidence-based reading and writing” scores. This kind of discrimination is also evident in the publishing business, where it was pointed out the probable reason that book publishing house Vintage promotes almost wholly female authors:

…all the editors in that (promotion) division are female. (Of 19 editors commissioning fiction at Vintage, only four are men.) And this isn’t just one team in one company, he argues – it’s a gender balance replicated across the industry. (A diversity survey released in February by the UK Publishers Association, had 64% of the publishing workforce as female with women making up 78% of editorial, 83% of marketing and 92% of publicity.)

“Whenever I send out a novel to editors, the list [of names] is nearly all female,” a male agent says. Like the publisher – who fears being seen as “some kind of men’s rights activist” – he will only speak on condition of anonymity. The subject is such a hornet’s nest that almost every man in the books industry who I approached refused to speak on the record for fear of the backlash.

Again, feminist activists say one thing, when the truth is quite another:

Hannah Westland, publisher of the literary imprint Serpent’s Tail, says she’s not always confident that there’s a market for fiction written by young men. “If a really good novel by a male writer lands on my desk, I do genuinely say to myself, this will be more difficult to publish.” She believes that the “paths to success” are narrower because there are fewer prizes open to men, fewer magazines that will cover male authors, and fewer media figures willing to champion them – in the way that, for example, Dolly Alderton and Pandora Sykes have championed female authors on their podcasts.

It gets worse, because then there is the issue of what female writers actually write about that men are comfortable reading and not alienated by it:

Sharmaine Lovegrove is the founder of Dialogue Books…argues that publishing has become a monoculture, dominated by “white, middle-class, cis-gendered, heteronormative women” who feel that they are themselves victims. “Because it’s all about dismantling the patriarchy, men don’t get a look-in.”

New male fiction writers, in fact, are expected to “answer” for a “past that isn’t ours” according to Northern Irish author Darran Anderson. No, you have to write novels like one of “a 20-something woman in a controlling relationship with a man, (which) has been praised for its honest and visceral portrait of female desire.” 

And yet it is noted that male authors are “cautious” about writing about “sex" because they fear “backlash.” Some have claimed that this is evidence of “malformed, self-centered boy” authors, but this is pure hypocrisy given today’s MeToo and cancel culture society. Male writers can’t be honest about gender relations without offending a female who decides if they have a right to have their work published.

Then we hear from an agent who is one of the “deciders”: Karolina Sutton, who is “surprised that men are feeling excluded from fiction. She stresses that it has taken women centuries to find their voice and be confident within publishing: “Why wasn’t there uproar in the media when women were excluded?' she asks.” 

Well, like all the mendaciously self-serving, she apparently was asleep when that “media uproar” was occurring. There are “plenty” of young male writers, she says, but they are not writing from the “dominant” perspective or “with the self-assurance that Roth and Amis had in the 80s or 90s.” I wonder why; maybe the ones who do are the ones Westland admits have a hard time getting published.

But Sutton admits that for male debut novelists, the bar is now much higher than it is for female writers because “the expectations of male debut novelists are greater than they used to be: ‘For a young man to get a quarter of a million pound advance, the bar is really high. They have to deliver something really spectacular. It’s easier for women to get higher advances.’” And it isn’t any different in the U.S. Every time I see some promotional material, almost all the book titles are written by women. 

If I read anything these days, it is historical works, current politics and society, or if fiction the “classics”; I still enjoy reading Voltaire’s Candide, Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe and Ambrose Bierce, stuff like that. More “recent” novels like the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Confederacy of Dunces, which I discovered while sitting in a dentist office or some place, thumbed through it and thought to myself, this is really good. The "irony" is that Dunces sat for a decade looking for a publisher after the author committed suicide; in today's publishing environment, it likely would never have seen the light of day.

Very different from these novels are those written by women with characters either “strong” or “victims”—I mean make up your minds what you are, and of course the evil characters are always men. That kind of "narrative" doesn't do a thing for me, it doesn't help me understand the world I live in, and that is why I don’t read any new “serious” fiction, because your "choice" these days is that--or that.

In the end, literary works that stand the test of time do so because have a universal quality, and don't purposely alienate a particular demographic; unfortunately, today’s “serious literary” works only speak to a very limited audience of the self-obsessed whose lack of objectivity will likely be seen in a hundred years as no more relevant than being in the “anti-romance” genre. Perhaps Thomas-Corr was realizing that promoting the insular world of what a female clique thinks "sells" today is actually killing serious literature.

No escape from rude, nasty reality even for billionaires on "tours" to places where no man was meant to go

 

Former Watergate prosecutor Jill Wine-Banks call Jim Jordan’s government “weaponization” hearings “lackluster…because there is no there there” and Republicans should “start focusing on solving problems that Americans face and not trying to settle scores or create false narratives about the fake election, or anything else that has nothing to do with what is going on in government.” 

Even Steven Bannon (why is he not in jail yet?) complained that John Durham is being made out to be a “saint” and that  Jordan—despite his juvenile antics and the dirty exhaust emissions from his mouth of broken-down “logic”—has failed to make his "case" disastrously; but this isn’t just because of his incompetence, because even he can't be that stupid not to realize that there is nothing "there" and this is all just a waste of time. But he persists, becoming an updated version of Joe McCarthy, waiting to be discredited for all time.

Meanwhile, that other McCarthy, Kevin, and the rest of the House Republicans continue to prove they are incapable of governing and are only interested in ludicrous partisan exercises by censoring Adam Schiff for holding hearings on Trump’s connections with Russia (which are real), and yet is incapable of controlling the catfighting between Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert; Greene, angry that Boebert “stole” her articles of impeachment of Joe Biden, called her a “little bitch”—which says enough about the level of maturity we can expect not only from House Republicans, but the people who voted for them.

Foresight and common sense also seems in short supply in the endless “war” in Palestine, and there has merely been an “uptick” in the violence on the historical graph in the past few months. Attacks on the ever-growing Jewish settler population on the West Bank has led to incidents of violence by Palestinians (why should we be surprised?), followed by rampages by settlers and then incursions by Israeli armed forces. Benjamin Netanyahu is still running things, so no one should expect “negotiations,” since the plan "eventually" is to incorporate all of the West Bank.

But on the other hand, this whole thing is a waste since if the Palestinians and their Arab supporters had accepted the 1948 partition plan or subsequent offers of the West Bank, they would have had a “homeland” long ago.  But foresight and common sense was in short supply there as well.

Of course we can let out our frustrations about the world we live in like this woman:

 

Or if we are billionaires we can buy tickets to places far, far away from the masses howling around the Prince Prospero hideaways and take a trip into “space”—or at least suborbital—for a few minutes, or head into the deepest depths of the ocean, like film director James Cameron did:

 

We assume such missions are “safer” than some city streets. After all, submarine “accidents” are rare, and that of submersibles even more so. The last fatalities aboard a submersible had been in 1974 in a Japanese craft, which occurred when it was only 33 feet beneath the surface. The deep sea tourism company Oceangate has been sponsoring “tours” in deep sea for years without “accidents,” in particular to the Titanic, which apparently remains of interest since it is apparently decaying at a rapid pace and may disappear completely by 2030.   

However, it appears that its ”luck” has not only run out, as reported by Reuters…

The five people aboard a missing submersible died in what appears to have been a "catastrophic implosion," a U.S. Coast Guard official said on Thursday, bringing a grim end to the massive international search for the vessel that was lost during a voyage to the Titanic.

An unmanned deep-sea robot deployed from a Canadian ship discovered the wreckage of the Titan on Thursday morning about 1,600 feet (488 meters) from the bow of the century-old wreck, 2-1/2 miles (4 km) below the surface, U.S. Coast Guard Rear Admiral John Mauger said at a press conference.

…but information disclosed prior to the discovery seems to set-up the company to a massive lawsuit; although the Titan...

 

 

...had made numerous trips to the Titanic without apparent incident since 2021, a former employee had warned that the hull with a new carbon-fiber design had been insufficiently tested, that a new hull breach “warning system” would be too little and too late, and a new view window was designed to withstand pressure only at one-third the depth of where the Titanic lay.

Apparently it had been pure “luck” that previous “tours” hadn’t ended in tragedy, and the “tourists” this time—including the CEO of Oceangate—thought that whatever the danger, they were “indestructible.” I guess most rich people believe this. But as Barry McGuire sang in "Eve of Destruction"

 

You may leave here for four days in space

But when you return, it's the same old place

 

The rest of us have to live in a rude, nasty world where some people just have to make life even worse because they have no sense to control themselves (like Republican lawmakers or that woman in the above image). Would existence be more tolerable (and safer) if we just put on some AI goggles and live the life of our fantasies, or just shut ourselves off from the world and become an urban hermit? 

Only in dreams, because one way or another we have to find a way to "live" with each other.