Explaining the Russo-Ukrainian War.

Choose one:
“Destruction of Ukranian w:BMP-3 IFV by Russian troops in Mariupol” or
“A destroyed Russian BMP-3 near Mariupol, 7 March 2022”. [A]

You know the conventional wisdom about the Ukrainian war: it’s all entirely Putin’s fault. That story is easy to understand, isn’t it? Politicians and journos and pundits for hire never cease to drive home the message.

It has its weaknesses though. One of them is that it needs Putin – who on top of having Parkinson’s disease and at least two different flavours of terminal cancer – to be both bad and kooky … never mind that madness precludes responsibility. Depending on who you hear, the bloke is a Machiavellian master manipulator … or an inept tin pot dictator. Incidentally, the same applies to the Russian military, at times described as a serious and imminent threat to the security of Europe, at times lambasted as useless, clumsy, incompetent and corrupted – sometimes by the same people, at the same time.

Quotable Quotes.

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Say what you will about us Aussies, there’s something you can’t possibly say: that we collectively suffer from pathological doubts about ourselves and our place in the world.

Did you [Federal Treasurer Jim Chalmers] discuss the concessions that you expect from China on trade if there's to be a visit to China by you and the Prime Minister?

So, we are in a position to extract concessions from arguably the largest economy in the world, armed with ICBMs that can hit every major Australian city – including Hobart! – before we even talk, just in exchange for the privilege of setting one foot on their land.

Russian Embassy Farce (II). Updated

The New Russian Embassy is still making headlines. The Australian – the broadsheet among the many other Murdoch tabloids – broke the news in exclusivity on Friday 23rd:

Presumably the day before – according to The Oz, remember that – its reporting team found a Russian diplomat on the Yarralumla block of land in dispute. (Was that man quietly enjoying the land – in the terms of the Federal Court’s decision – or squatting, as The Oz prefers? That’s for you to decide.)

The Australian Federal Police, the report added, is present at the site, but cannot arrest the man because everybody says he has diplomatic immunity.

The Interview: not Sarah Ferguson’s Finest Hour.

Sarah Ferguson (L), Alexey Pavlovsky (R).

I don’t know about you, but I think Sarah Ferguson’s interview on March 20th with Alexey Pavlovsky, Russian Ambassador to Australia, is not her proudest moment. Mind you, I’d be surprised she (and maybe even most Australians) agreed with me on this right now. But, who knows.

After welcoming her guest (a gesture which in its context is blatantly insincere) and barely seconds into the interview, Ferguson shot point blank:

“Ambassador, you’re here in Australia enjoying the benefits of a free and open society. How do you live with yourself representing the repressive, dictatorial Putin regime?”

Read that again. I’m not making this up.

Not a Russian Missile.

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Last Monday, the ABC’s Media Watch did something surprising. Its presenter, Paul Barry, cast a critical eye on Aussie media coverage of the Ukrainian war. The event catching Barry’s attention was the missile that hit a Polish town, killing two farmers.

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Unless you were comatose, you must have seen the veritable procession of “experts” coming out of the woodwork to pontificate on the latest Russian outrage.

It’s hard to pick a winner, but after much thought my vote for the most idiotic comment must go to Greg Sheridan, The Australian’s chief agenda-pusher foreign editor.

“It’s hard to imagine that anyone else fired the missile except the Russians”, said Sheridan. “Joe Biden said it didn’t seem to come from Russia, so presumably it was fired from Donbas or Crimea or perhaps from the sea. Russia fired 100 missiles on Ukraine in a day. No one else was firing missiles on Ukraine”.

Peddling Fake News.

Last week SBS journos – self-appointed guardians of journalistic truth – were wondering:

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Alas, it was fake news. In fairness, they were not alone, and – as a matter of fact – did not fully commit to the rumours, as other news outlets did. A number of talking heads, accepted worldwide as experts on the matter, were much more sure that something was going on:

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There’s a lot of Western experts and journos who lost the plot, which means the Western media is suffering from Putin-Xi Derangement Syndrome.

Quotable Quotes.

“I don’t know how they want to get undressed, above or below the waist, but I think it would be a disgusting sight in any case”, Volodya Pew-teen, as quoted by AP.

I’m just a low-income, sort-of white, ageing, male, semi-educated Aussie worker: a pleb. To rub shoulders with such VIPs is not one of my many privileges, so I have no direct, personal knowledge on those matters and it’s impossible for me to say either way.

Productivity.

The Tailor of Folk Suits. [A]

Productivity isn’t everything, but in the long run it is almost everything. A country’s ability to improve its standard of living over time depends almost entirely on its ability to raise its output per worker. – Paul Krugman.

It’s an election campaign and pollies are not debating productivity. Imagine that.

Well, they aren’t debating many things. For example, last year, by this time, all the talk was COVID. Today? Not a peep. More importantly, climate change is at best an afterthought.

 

But it’s productivity that the economically-minded Very Serious People, like Laura Tingle, have in mind as the most important thing ever:

The good news is that growth and employment are strong. The bad news is inflation and interest rates are rising and are going to keep rising and wages are only just starting to pick up. That brings us back to one of those issues we just aren’t talking about in this election.

Which is? Cut to Danielle Wood, CEO of the Grattan Institute:

If we’re serious about getting real wages growth for the longer term, we really need to be talking about productivity and that is actually something that’s been missing from this election campaign.

Doublethink (Updated).

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You want to understand why people don’t trust western mainstream media and instead turn to Twitter and Facebook for news?

There’s no mystery. No need for long explanations. It’s actually easy to explain and to understand.

BREAKING: Australia has Chemical Weapons!

Yes, that’s right, people: Australia has chemical weapons! Run for the hills. In fact, anyone in Sydney can buy such weapons.

Don’t believe me? Look at this screen capture:

I got it today just by googling the search string “cheapest nitric acid in sydney”. You can try a similar search for your own hometown: just replace “sydney” for whatever the name of the place where you live.

But, but, but … Sure, nitric acid (HNO3), like many other chemicals, can be dangerous. Bleach is dangerous, so is carbon monoxide, petrol (or gasoline), or methylated spirits or … for example. But, whoever said nitric acid (HNO3) is a weapon???

War Crimes.

To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole – Judgement of the International Military Tribunal, September 30th, 1946.

Defendants in the dock at the International Military Tribunal
trial of war criminals in Nuremberg. November 1945. [A]

The Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal (more precisely, the International Military Tribunal) defined three broad categories of crimes:

1. crimes against peace,
2. war crimes proper and
3. crimes against humanity.

Where is that Building?

The New York Times’ Visual Investigation team released a comparison of a video recently filmed by a local councilman showing bodies scattered along Yablonska Street, Bucha, of what looks like civilians and corresponding but older satellite imagery provided by Maxar Technologies, to argue that those bodies have laid there since at least mid-March.

This would contradict official Russian claims that no civilian had been harmed during the Russian occupation, which ended in March 31.

The photo below shows the whole area studied. It comes from France24. I must highlight that that image is not supposed to show the location of the bodies.

To that photo, I added where the video starts (red oval, near the lower border of the photo) and the general direction the councilman travelled on Yablonska Street (red arrow pointing upwards).

Why Joe Biden’s Remarks are a Dangerous Big Deal.

… And why commentators left them unexamined.

The perspective of a few days affords time for understanding. 

Let’s rewind. I suppose by now you must be aware that US President Joe Biden, during a speech delivered at Warsaw a week ago, let this allegedly unscripted pearl slip:

 

To avoid misunderstandings, this is what he said in black and white: “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power”.

Ukraine: Quotable Quotes.

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In this war battlefield reports often come directly from social media — actually, from apparently pro-Ukrainian users of social media. How reliable that report is? Frankly, I wouldn’t have a clue. 

At the time I didn't get a screencapture, but I saw an earlier version of that tweet with a slightly more explicit language:

He Said, She Said.

Good morning. It is Saturday, 12. I’m Fauziah Ibrahim.
And I’m Johanna Nicholson. You’re watching Weekend Breakfast. There are fears Russia is creating a pretext for a chemical attack on Ukraine after claiming it [the Russian military] found US-backed biological weapons operations in the besieged nation.

That’s how the ABC News24 Weekend Breakfast crew introduced their broadcast at 0800 AEDT. But how on earth Russia’s alleged discovery of a Ukrainian biological weapons development program morphed into fears of a Russian chemical weapons attack on the Ukraine?

This is how.

Bits and Pieces.

One of the key predictions of climate science is that as the atmosphere warms up, the likelihood of extreme weather events increases.

But, how would you tell when one weather event is extreme?

You can tell when something like this happens:

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They are good graphical representations, but to interpret them may be a bit tricky for those unaccustomed. The good folks of The Guardian (Oz) seem to believe otherwise. I’m not so sure. So, if it doesn’t speak to you, let me know and I’ll do my best to explain it. I’ll just advance here that the idea is not unlike a box (aka box-and-whisker) plot I explained here.

Dramatic, isn’t it? Well, now look at this:

The Ghost of Wars Past.

 

Australian media are doing a remarkable effort to cover the war in the Ukraine.

The ABC, for example, has at least two correspondents reporting directly from within the Ukraine (Isabella Higgins and Nick Dole). Steve Cannane – ABC Europe bureau chief – and Linton Besser seem to be covering the war from London, while Jade Macmillan – Washington bureau chief – and Barbara Miller follow the reaction in the US.

At home,  Stan Grant – International Affairs Analyst – contributes both written pieces and TV segments. At least two veteran former foreign correspondents with experience in Russia, Philip Williams and Norman Hermant, joined him, providing comment to ABC News24. As I started writing this on Saturday, James Maasdorp was hosting a live blog (a new development in Aussie online journalism) on the war. On top, other journalists are chipping in as required in areas they cover regularly: Andrew Greene (defence correspondent) and David Chau (financial markets) and Matthew Doran (national politics), for example.

COP26: The Curtain Falls (2X Updated).

“The difference between 1.5 and 2 degrees is a death
sentence for us.” If all the pledges are fulfilled,
the world is heading to 2.4ºC. (source)

One doesn’t need to be environmentally conscious or a proud Commie worker – like yours truly – to empathise with the Maldivian Environment Minister Aminath Shauna.

As COP26 was drawing to a close early this Sunday morning (AEDT), Shauna said:

Follow the Experts’ Advice, David Lipson.

What is it we’ve been told endlessly before reporting sensational news? Why, that we need to make sure we get the facts straight, before reporting them.

David Lipson and a team of ABC journos have been reporting from the US. So far, I’m satisfied – as I’m sure the wider Australian public is – they’ve done a good job, under difficult circumstances. ABC journos have a well-earned reputation for that.

Having said that, Lipson’s latest op-ed/analysis (“Donald Trump’s Current Strategy isn’t About Winning in Court. It’s about Disrupting the Process in the Hope of Winning the US Election by Default”, November 20) contained this bit:

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First as Tragedy, Then as Farce?

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November 2008, Barack H. Obama II was elected POTUS, amidst enormous popular good will. The first black American elected to that office, Obama inherited the top job as the United States was experiencing the first stages of the Great Recession (or Second Great Depression, depending on your perspective).