Friday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Friday, June 23, 2023
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84 comments
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor of Political Science and a College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
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The headline of the day- U.S. customs seizes 83 pounds of beef jerky at MSP
The Florida headline of the day- Video: ‘Pink Vibrating Device’ Falls from Pants of Man who Stole Sex Aids
OK, I’m done with this timeline.
US navy detected an ‘anomaly’ that was likely the Titan’s implosion
The AP reports:
@Bill Jempty: My wife’s parents used to bring a Spanish ham and Mallorcan sausages whenever they visited. IIRC they only got caught once, but it hurt.
Yesterday I managed to lose my phone in Central Park. Still don’t know what happened, exactly — I was walking home from the gym when my airpods quit and I realized I no longer had my phone. Maybe it dropped out of my pocket. Anyway, I searched and didn’t find it, went back to the gym in case I’d left it there, nothing. And since my phone is also my wallet, all my id and credit cards were gone, too.
I ran home, opened “find my phone” on the iPad and watched it traveling down Fifth Avenue, stopping at Gucci and Tiffany and Harry Winston while I frantically cancelled all my cards. I was trying to figure out how to deal with my cell carrier — the gentleman in India was very polite, but his script did not bring him close to a useful answer — when my wife got a message on LinkedIn.
The message was from an Australian tourist, who had been bike riding through the park with her family, saw the phone, and then spent hours puzzling out how to reach me. I had watched the phone go a mile down Park Avenue — and didn’t realize it was heading to the address on my driver’s license where the doorman was able to give her my number (which of course did them no good) and my wife’s name. She then sent messages to her on every platform she could think of. (She also contacted me on Facebook, but I didn’t get a notification…)
And so we met up outside Niketown, where she, her husband and four teens were waiting patiently for us to arrive so they could hand me my phone. (We did give them a generous Starbucks gift card as a thank you and made them accept it!)
I tend to be cynical about people, but these wonderful Aussies gave up a chunk of their tourist day to help out a complete stranger. I am incredibly grateful, and wanted to share this story in their honor.
One quick, infuriating addendum to that story:
I was able to cancel most of my cards easily. But Bank of America would only give me access to my account if I could give them the access code they wanted to text to my phone. I told them over and over again that the whole reason I was calling was because my phone had been stolen — which is what I believed at the time — and that all they’d be doing is sending an access code to the person who had stolen the phone who was at that moment in Tiffany. But there was no way their theft prevention people could get around this, other than to tell me to go to a branch and report the theft there…
Insanity.
@Bill Jempty:
Well, at least he was faithful to his wife.
On lighter topics, I decided to make goulash as my launch recipe for the cast iron pot.
I’m making rice to mix with it, and thinking of what side I can pair with that. Possibly something I can pop in the oven.
@wr:
I have been saying for a long time that customer service outfits don’t know what to do when there is any deviation from their carefully written scripts.
Just recently my Office Depot business credit card was replaced. I called the CC company and was told one would be mailed to me. My office chair needed replacing and I was going to use the card.
It was mailed to me but to my old home address (Which I moved out of in 2019) not my business PO box. I called the company and didn’t get an answer when I asked why it had to go to my home and not the PO Box. The PO box is perfectly good for the IRS, the state of Florida, and lots of other very important mail. Nor did I get a answer to my query why I wasn’t told in my first call where it was being mailed to. Further infuriation occurred when I was told I would have to be transferred to another agent to change my address.
@CSK:
Vibrators have been mentioned at least twice in my stories (and once referred to as ‘Bob’) but their use never portrayed.
My straightlaced Roman Catholic Filipina wife often shakes her head at some of the stuff I write but two things. I don’t do erotica (A scene or two, mostly the former, of sexual content involving adults in a 200 or more page ebook hardly qualifies) and my writing pays bills.
@Bill Jempty:
I don’t think “know” enters into it. I’m pretty sure that the vast majority of chat interactions are with bots, and more of the phone interactions than we realize. If you do actually reach a person they literally have no authority or ability to deviate, by design.
Late in yesterday’s open forum I related my diagnosis of gallstones and Jax asked what the doctor recommended, which is (drum roll please): removal. So I have to get that scheduled.
The pain isn’t really unbearable, but the combination of the pain and the days of nausea I get from eating something fatty made me realize I needed medical attention. Last night it got really bad so to the ER I went.
One thing I have to do is praise the staff at the ER, which is a satellite ER from our local main hospital (INOVA). I was fortunate that it was not busy and I got immediate attention from multiple nurses and the physician, a CAT scan very shortly after arrival, and a quick diagnosis. Would you believe I was in an out of an ER in an hour and 15 minutes?
Someone mentioned yesterday that the Titan disaster was caused in part by the use of carbon fiber in the hull, another asked for more info. From a NYT article this AM; https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/22/science/james-cameron-titanic-submersible.html
Keir Starmer was caught as a student illegally selling ice-creams on French Riviera
First Boris was drummed out of the House because he lied and now this? The Brits just don’t have what it takes to keep up with the GOP in the corruption meets.
Who did you bribe and how much was it?
It’s always been hours for me. One relatively recent trip was 5-6 hrs. Just to be seen, never mind being sown back together. My all time championship time was 10+ hours and ended with me being admitted after emergency surgery.
@OzarkHillbilly: There are plenty of problems out there for bees, but the biggest killer in the US is moving the bees throughout the year to pollinate ag fields. I would bet that almost all of the high losses were from commercial beekeepers.
Completely anecdotal, but my Dad has actually doubled his hive count over the past 2 years just by collecting swarms. He had to give a couple away, because he didn’t have enough boxes to put them in.
@OzarkHillbilly:
It was my privilege of living in a wealthy suburb served by an extensive network of hospitals and clinics, where I could go into an ER and be literally the only patient for the first 15 minutes. I think the staff were just excited to have someone who needed attention.
Also, there wasn’t anything they could do once the diagnosis was made, I have to follow up with the surgeon. I got a prescription for Zofran for the nausea, but haven’t needed it this morning.
@Kathy:
Hungarian or American goulash?
@BugManDan: A buddy of mine lost all 3 of his hives a few years ago. After doing some extensive world travels with his family the past couple years, I’m not sure if he intends to start any more any time soon.
@wr: Glad for your happy ending. My Chase app and my bank app allow me to toggle the cards off and on. Of course, that requires a device to access the apps, but it is way easier than trying to cancel the cards.
@OzarkHillbilly:
No doubt JohnSF will be along with a few pungent observations.
@Stormy Dragon:
I’ve no idea.
After reading several recipes online, I came up with one using onions, garlic, beef, paprika, tomato puree, and beef broth.
For the side I’m thinking kasha with onions, bell pepper, soybean sprouts, and mushrooms.
@Kathy:
No sour cream?
@Kathy:
That’s Hungarian goulash. For some reason there is a dish in the US made mostly from ground beef, macaroni, and tomato soup that’s called goulash despite having almost no discernible connection to actual goulash.
Tons of toddler safety features, everywhere except where the firearm was stored.
Mikey- The satellite ER’s and surgicenters are quite popular. They tend to mostly see less sick people and move them through quickly. If it’s not attached to a hospital most ambulances wont take pts to one which helps cut down on complicated patients. Our inner city and rural ones tend to be busy but the suburban ones a bit slower.
Steve
The husband of a descendant of a couple who died on the Titanic in 1912 died in the implosion of the Titan. He was Stockton Rush.
http://www.abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/wife-pilot-fatal-implosion-descended-couple-died-titanic-100323731
@Sleeping Dog: It was Matt who raised the issue of carbon fiber yesterday and I asked for any further information. I very much appreciate the NTY link you provided.
I also commented yesterday that reporting on the Titan wasn’t very good. That reporters were just repeating stuff they only half understood. To make any sense of NYT’s interview with Cameron I have to make assumptions and guesses. Carbon fiber is routinely used in compression, the upper surfaces of airplane wings for instance, so there has to be more to the statement that it is inherently unusable in a bathysphere (“bathycylinder” in this case). And I have no idea from the article what those sensors he mentions might have been doing. I suspect something to do with creep in the epoxy matrix under load, but that’s just a wild ass guess.
Piling up WAGs, I wonder if they weren’t trying to go for inherent safety by having a buoyant “bathycylinder”. WIKI has a nice page “bathyscaphe” that explains why the first bathyscaphes looked like dirigibles. A small pressure sphere (much easier than a cylinder) under a large tank filled with gasoline. Gasoline because it a cheap, readily available, incompressible liquid lighter than water. It provided enough buoyancy to support the heavy sphere. If these guys were going for a buoyant chamber, it wouldn’t be the first case of an amateur inventor sticking to his brilliant concept in the face of mounting practical difficulties.
@Jen:
Tragedy, the kid should be tried as an adult… 🙁
@Jen: In the 70s I went to a party in TX. The host, father of small children in the house, showed off the loaded 9mm he had under a couch cushion. Left me slack jawed. No one else seemed the least bit surprised. He said he sometimes went through the house at night, in the dark, practicing shooting stances behind various door frames and furniture in case of an intruder. Pointing out they have paranoid fantasies is a waste of time.
@Sleeping Dog: She was pregnant. Double homicide. That seems to be where OH has gone since I left only a few years ago. What will really happen is nothing, as the father, presumably responsible for the gun, “has suffered enough”.
It has come at last, our first undeniably age-related surgery. My wife had a posterior hip replacement three days ago. We now own a walker. Currently sitting in an AirBnB in LA because although we’ve moved to Vegas, she seemed to think Cedars of Sinai might be better than the Vegas equivalent, Cacti of Circus Circus.
How do you do to find a good surgeon in Vegas? Head to the airport.
On day 3 when the pain is supposed to peak and she hasn’t even touched a tramadol or an oxy so far. But the depressing if not unexpected start of the replacement period of life, has begun. That’s a hip. I’ve got a knee joining the queue.
@gVOR10: There’s a reddit thread about this question.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEngineers/comments/14gbb2q/why_is_titanium_and_carbon_fiber_not_allowed_when/
It seems informative, but that’s coming from someone who is generally uninformed on such matters.
MR- Knees hurt a lot more. Good luck. (We do a lot of hips as outpatients, especially the anterior hips since there is so much less pain.)
Steve
@gVOR10: Once when returning my sons to my ex I found a loaded 9mm on the kitchen table. While unloading it I gave her a thorough dressing down about gun safety and watched as she put it up where the boys couldn’t get to it.
Years later, her husband went after her and my eldest got involved, the upshot of which was he almost got run over by her husband. My son called and I went to pick them up. She argued they should stay and when my son made clear he was done with the shit, she finally gave up. While packing his stuff, he pointed to his shotgun at the foot of his bed and said, “It’s loaded if you need it.” and she nodded with this look on her face that said, “He really loves me.”
How does one allow their children to live in an environment where they think they need to keep a loaded gun handy? Sometimes I think I should get a Nobel Peace Prize for all the times I didn’t kill her.
@CSK:
None. I know it’s common in eastern European cooking, but I never warmed up to it.
@Stormy Dragon:
Does it at least have oodles of paprika?
@Michael Reynolds:
Here’s hoping for a speedy recovery.
My mom had knee replacement surgery a few months ago. It takes weeks to recover, but she’s better able to walk now.
As to Vegas, there was Rita Rudner’s joke about how the heart surgeon wasn’t available, but they had a heart surgeon impersonator.
@Mikey: Two summers ago I had two instances of what I thought were really bad cases of indigestion. Second time I decided to head over to the acute care clinic, started feeling a bit better but thought “no, I better have them check this out”–they whisked me under the ultrasound and immediately diagnosed gallstones and inflammation. They kept me around one day for observation and MRI testing, then popped me into surgery that evening. I spent another half-day recovering, then they let me go home.
The main pain recovering from surgery was discovering how much I use my core for everything because now I had quite a few holes poked in it. You can’t lift much and will be exhausted holding your arms up for anything–even making pot-stickers. Took about two weeks to get back to near-normal.
@Sleeping Dog:
I may be wrong, but it doesn’t strike me that this particular factoid is all that useful in a real-world setting. But being as cynical as I am, I would have been likely to equate “hull health monitoring” and “the hull is about to implode” to begin with. Either way, the theory upon which the vessel was designed seems like (in the lyrics of a country song) “a heartache looking for a place to happen.” It’s too bad that the company believed in itself that much.
@Stormy Dragon: Nonsense. “Goulash” simply means stew made in the style of herdsmen. Other than herdsman being unlikely to have carried macaroni* around with them, the recipe that Americans use is as “authentic” as any other.
*And tomato soup for that matter, but did Dark Ages herdsmen have tomatoes to begin with? The Aztecs eating tomatoes only goes back to 700 CE.
@gVOR10:
The upper skin of airplane wings isn’t what’s taking the load, it’s the wing spar.
Perhaps a good demonstration of why carbon fiber (fiberglass) is not real swift for compression. Go nine minutes in.
Additionally, there’s this dish that my Italian grandmother used to make when we’d come for dinner sometimes. She’d leave out the beef, paprika (didn’t care for the flavor) and basil (she substituted oregano).
I’m a gonna have to disagree to some extant. If they really truly believed in themselves they wouldn’t have had their customers sign liability waivers.
@Sleeping Dog: Try a two-year-old as an adult? Mind you, I’m open to considering what function the act would serve.
@OzarkHillbilly:
This was a scoop.
🙂
@OzarkHillbilly: Nah. Even if you believe, you make people sign liability waivers. It’s just business as usual. ETA: Fiduciary responsibility, yada yada.
Last night I discovered Amazon Prime is the Barnaby Jones television series. Being a fan of the original Hawaii Five-0 and Columbo, I have decided to give it a try. Before last night I had only seen parts* of a couple of episodes.
Why do I watch so little current or recent police dramas? Most of them are littered with Days of our lives subplots. Law & Order** SVU and the Hawaii Five-0 reboot being just two examples.
I watched the first two seasons of the latter. The stuff about Danno and his ex-wife drove me up the wall. THe rest of the show’s writing wasn’t any good either. Somebody hides beneath their house in a hidden compartment but how did a rug get on top of its trap door?
The show was fantasy superhero in its plots too. People running around pursuing a suspect after being shot in the abdomen like a day before. No to mention McGarret skydiving to save some Seal who’s been dumped out of an airplane.
Finally, the giant claw that picked up the van with Wo Fat in it that was the Season 3 opener. I decided not to watch the last eight years of this nonsense.
Star Trek Picard was an abomination IMHO for some of the same reasons. I won’t give a long rundown of them. Was Dr. Soong a scientist or a warlord? He of the army of mercenaries. Oh and the show’s writers seemed to forgot how season 2 ended with the Borg when Season 3 began.
Back to Barnaby. The first episode didn’t impress me. A killer has a gun pointed at him but doesn’t react when BJ pulls a gun out of a bag. Bradford Dillman meekly surrenders too.
Lee Meriweather is easy on the eyes. Will I make it through the whole series? Time will tell. I have made it through Picard, Benson, The Flying Nun, Perry Mason and Murder She Wrote.
*- While I was at Naval Lakes Great Lakes for my schooling, there was another student who was a BJ fan and would turn the lone television set to the show if he had the chance.
**- The original L&O for the most part, has stayed away from soap opera plots (Long ago there was Lenny’s daughter who died, Detective Curtis wife having MS, Van Buren challenging her being passed over for a promotion) but the latest season showed signs of sinking to the Days of Lives stuff and I stopped watching.
@JohnSF: Ouch.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: In my caving years I signed a lot of liability waivers, it made land owners breath a little easier.
@Mike in Arlington: @dazedandconfused: Thanks for the additional info. The failure mode for carbon fiber, or glass, in the weird East European guys press is different than steel or aluminum. Carbon fiber is brittle. But he conclude that pound for pound the carbon fiber was stronger than steel in his test. But I had a business acquaintance who put the last six inches of a carbon fiber arrow shaft through his left hand when it shattered on release. Race cars used a lot of carbon fiber. Originally they went to the aerospace people for advice. Now I understand the aerospace people come to them. I had a business acquaintance who put the last six inches of a carbon fiber arrow shaft through his left hand when it shattered on release. On modern airplanes they talk of the “wing box”. The box is the spars, often multiple, and skins. The whole box is stressed, including the skins. Given a choice, I take a seat over the wing box. At the fuselage the box is a big, heavy thing and t’s more likely to survive a crash, along with the seats near it.
Racers, I believe, largely stopped using carbon, going to other fibers, because of the failure mode. A break generates tiny, airborne, carcinogenic fibers. Think asbestos. And the broken edges were scalpel sharp, big hazard to any following cars tire. But those considerations would be irrelevant on a submersible.
The sound effects on the weird guys video make me wonder if the sensors on the sub were looking for the ping of fiber breakage. One wonders why they thought there would be time to surface after the first break.
The upshot seems to be that carbon fiber is great stuff in many applications. I’ve never worked with it. Wanted to once, but we had neither the time or the money to hire the necessary expertise, and aluminum was sufficient, albeit heavier. Carbon fiber is way less forgiving, in many ways, than steel (which we have centuries of experience with) or aluminum (which we have a century with). It requires specific expertise, not only in design and analysis, but in fabrication, inspection, and testing. One doesn’t get the impression these guys necessarily had the expertise and the discipline.
I’ve still got way more questions than answers.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
And yet, there it sits in blasphemous defiance of both history and logic:
American goulash
@OzarkHillbilly: …..now the question is what the ABA of the State of New York is going to say about these idiots, which is a totally different arena. (They’ve managed to break quite a few professional responsibility rules and I suspect the reason the judge didn’t come down harder on them is that he realises the ABA is likely to come down on them like a ton of rectangular building things.)
Heads up, looks like some internal shit may be going down in Russia.
Breaking.
@Michael Reynolds:
If you have a knee done, do the physical therapy, regardless of how painful. I’ve known a couple of guys that had knees done and didn’t, they had trouble climbing stairs afterward. Not mention riding bikes and even throwing their leg over a motorcycle.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
sarcasm is difficult on the internet
We don’t do much royal news here, but this is hilarious. Prince Harry wanted to interview for Spotify–I swear I’m telling you true–Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, and Elon Musk about any childhood trauma they suffered.
He also wanted to interview…the pope. About religion.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/06/23/fire-chief-teens-gun-lawsuit/
I have to admit, I kind of like the “I did everything I am accused of” defense. It should make prosecutor’s lives easier.
Oh, all the facts. I assume this means the kids are Black. Maybe Latino. Was it MS-13? Black Panthers? Maybe they looked trans.
So many white people (the lunatic is definitely white, there are pictures) are so fucked up and acting out of fear of everything. And they feel completely justified in doing it. Another consequence of all-fear-all-the-time right-wing media.
Can we just start putting MDMA in the water supply?
I wonder what happened to their balls. They. are. afraid. of. everything.
@OzarkHillbilly: I don’t know, but I think the lunatic Fire Chief and his son should be charged as adults.
@OzarkHillbilly: Ok, I think I do know…
They are fed a media diet of fear, resentment and an imminent need to “fight back.” It rots the brain
@Stormy Dragon: It good to have you to tell us what we can eat and what we can call it. Personally, I think “slumgullion” is a better name, but I don’t eat it at all. Sometimes I make zucchini goulash per my grandmother’s recipe, but not often. Cooking for one does things to what one chooses to eat.
@Sleeping Dog: Twice in one day for me. 🙁
ETA: @Gustopher: It seems that sarcasm is difficult to do in real life, too. 🙁
@Gustopher: I am writing a letter to my congress critters about what pansy snowflake afraid of everything people they are in the next few days/weeks. When it is done (assuming I actually follow thru) I’ll post it here.
Is anybody watching what’s happening I. Russia right now?
Wagner is preparing to mobilize against Putin?
Is that right?
@Stormy Dragon:
Grandma was born and raised in Modra (1890) now a town in Slovakia. Many the times she made goulash for us. Never, never had any form of tomato in it. Beside the spices, she insisted that flouring the beef and sautéed, before adding other ingredients was key.
She died in 1970, but the flavor of her goulash remains with me today.
@JohnSF: I’ve been following this all afternoon. Prigozhin is seriously off the reservation and Putin is letting him have center stage. Doesn’t come off as 9 dimensional chess on Vlad’s part. I’m not saying he’s going down yet, but he is definitely wounded.
@JohnSF:
I’m so reminded of the many times some Roman general would march his legions to Rome and stage a coup.
Prigozhin’s advantage is there aren’t a plethora of other Russian generals who control armies loyal to them. So a Year of Four Dictators might be averted.
@Mike in Arlington: All I want for Christmas is Putin’s head on a pike. But Prigozhin’s will do in a pinch.
In the Russian military civil war, may both these scumbags win. Or lose.
@Mike in Arlington: Prigozhin is making lots of threats and accusations. He is threatening war with the Russian Defense Ministry. The “elites” all lied to Putin so they could plunder the rest of Ukraine after wringing Crimea and all occupied areas dry. Denazification and ethnic Russian genocide were just made-up covers for their greed. Some truth, some bullish!t, all crazy AF.
@becca: I told a friend of mine about a month ago that Putin wanted to be the next Peter the Great but he may end up as tsar Nicholas II after the failures in the Russian-Japanese war and then WWI.
@DK: what concerns me is that while they both deserve that (and worse), the breakdown of central control of Russia should fill us all with dread. That will bring misery to so many people and may not stop at the boarders of Russia.
@Mike in Arlington:
Looks like it.
Caveat: These guys have been subject to Soviet WW2 era discipline. You obey orders or get shot on the spot, so they will likely march to whatever place they are ordered to. However, such discipline does not produce a great deal of affection and loyalty for their leadership, so the Wagner troops obeying an order to open fire on other Russians is anything but assured.
If I had to bet, it would be they will go someplace but ultimately balk at firing. Most of them, anyway.
@CSK:
Maybe should have scheduled Putin for an early interview?
On events in Russia, Max Seddon makes a good point on the problem of information sources:
@Mike in Arlington: There’s all sorts of things going on in the world that should fill us with dread. A Russian empire has disintegrated before in my lifetime, and I’m a millennial.
We’ll see what happens (this could all be some grand KGB-style psych ops, for example). But the unknown devils will not stop me from hoping Putin dies the slow, painful death he so richly deserves.
@Kathy:
Unless Prigozhin has allies in the army officer corps in command of key units, I suspect he’s going to get stomped.
And then there’s the FSB and other “security troops” in the Moscow area, who Putin will presumably have made very sure are loyalists.
But this is not going to look good for Putin as a pillar of internal stability and security, and the arbiter of elite disputes.
@JohnSF:
I have no idea how this will turn out, but the sure loser regardless, is Putin. Can the intelligence arm arrest Prigozhin? Do they have the muscle? And will they be loyal if they decide they’ve sensed a change in the wind? Who might back this play if it is an attempted coup? And above all, if Prigozhin takes over, will Trump kiss his ass, too?
Pretty sure this is real.
Not as sure about this, but it appears it’s in the fan at Rostov.
@DK: the thing about the fall of the Soviet’s union is that there was a continuity of centralized control from Gorbachev to Yeltsin to Putin.
If Putin dies and Prigozhin takes control, I can’t see him lasting for too long. Putin is evil scum, but he was able to maintain control over what must be a difficult place to control. He has put together a structure to keep his allies and enemies in line. Prigozhin will have a small window to establish control and if he doesn’t the proverbial feces will hit the fan. And when that happens every oligarch will vie for power.
Can’t picture what Prigo is thinking. He recruited his boys with a load of strident Russian nationalistical BS and now he expects them to go to war against Russia? I hear he had about a week left before he was bound to turn control of Wagner over to the MOD. Maybe he thought it was now or never.
Over at LGM Adam Silverman has applied all his expertise and considerable experience to events in Ukraine and Russia and decided he trusts nothing he’s seeing, none of it makes any sense, and he has no idea what’s actually going on. Seems sensible to me. His “da fuck they doin over der” cat graphic seems apt.
@dazedandconfused:
@Michael Reynolds:
That looks very likely to be the trigger.
Prigozhin was likely trying to get his patronage network to overrule the General Staff clipping his wings, failed, and decided to roll the dice.
OTOH, interesting that the Kadyrovites went silent about a hour before the faecal intersection began.
So they may be waiting on results before shouting loudly they were behind the winner all along.
What Putin has to worry about is that if the army stomp Wagner, what’s to stop them stomping the FSB, and making him their puppet?
OTOH, if the FSB do in Prig.does that put them on top of the dunghill, after reports Putin made them the scapegoats for the failure to decapitate Kyiv last February.
The old problem of “coup proofed” security systems: they are not optimal for military operations, nor are they stable arrangements under stress.
So long as the sucessor feeds the Christian nationalists the same bullshit about Russia as a the bulwark of “traditional values” and an ankle-showing tease about how they might be available as an ally re. China: most likely.
Claremont Institute (et al): a bigger bunch of delusional wishful thinkers have seldom staggered about without a carer on hand.
Caveated re lack of confirmation, but some indication that Wagner forces have taken control of the city of Rostov, and fighting is occurring between Wagner formations and either Russian Army or FSB units (unclear) on the Rostov to Moscow highway.
(That’s a rather long highway, bear in mind)
Well now.
Popcorn?