The assassination of Prigozhin yesterday pushed out of the news cycle a stunningly successful operation of the Ukrainian intelligence services.

Six months ago Ukrainian intelligence made contact with a Russian military helicopter fighter and started persuading him to defect. The pilot was understandably worried about his family. Ukrainians helped him quietly and unobtrusively to move the family out of Russia.

Finally, yesterday the pilot got into his helicopter and flew to Ukraine. His crew members weren’t happy when they heard that plan, so he had to eliminate them.

This is not the first time that Ukrainian intelligence brings over a valuable target who’s in possession of desirable equipment this way. These are all long-term operations that require a lot of patience, a great psychological insight and an ability to focus on the goal. We don’t find out about most of these operations but yesterday, our chief spy guy Kyrylo Budanov shared the details of this one as a present for today’s Independence Day.

Just to think, at this very moment Prigozhin could easily be the president of Russia and the leading candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize. He gave all that up in return for promises from a weaselly, nervous Putin and ended up dead.

Some people are extremely stupid.

Putin murdered Prigozhin almost immediately after guaranteeing him life in exchange for peace.

It’s a total mystery why Ukrainians aren’t interested in holding peace talks with such reliable, honest individuals.

3 minutes before I have to enter the classroom, I hear that Prigozhin is dead in a plane crash. Or “plane crash”, rather.

This is very unfair. Not to Prigozhin who’s a right bastard and deserves that and more but to me who now doesn’t feel very interested in teaching because it distracts from obsessively scrolling the news.

Reagan and other early neoliberals wanted people to free themselves from the government. The message landed well because the evidence of the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century was right there for everyone to see. Going in the opposite direction from the complete governmental control of those regimes seemed like a decidedly excellent idea.

Neoliberalism, though, is as changeable as it wants us to be. Since Reagan’s time, it evolved from freeing the people from the government to freeing the government from the people. The government doesn’t give a flying hoot about what the people want anymore. Whatever Walmart or Pfizer want, they’ll get, and people can stuff it.

To distract us from how completely unnecessary we are to the post-national political process, we get soap opera plots involving politicians. They do no politics (in the sense of actions that impact the life of the polis) but they perform entertaining antics.

This was different only a few years ago but things evolve fast. From seeking to be legitimized by the consent of the voters, the actor-politicians moved to pretending to seek legitimation, and now finally to not even bothering to pretend.

I’ve mentioned the plan to dedicate the next issue of our professional journal to George Floyd to a few people, and they tend to respond in a polemical tone, “Well, why didn’t you say something?”

Obviously, I said something. Is it humanly possible to know me and suspect that I didn’t? There won’t be a George Floyd issue precisely because I said something and got enough people to support my position.

I don’t respect the approach of bitching about things and never doing anything to oppose them. I’ve been speaking out for as long as I’ve seen stuff to speak out about. Lack of speaking out has never been my problem.

Like many adult men, N hasn’t read any fiction for years. He reads a lot but not fiction.

Finally, my raptures over Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead convinced him to pick up this novel. Now he’s glued to it and says it restored his love of fiction.

It’s real art, people. American literature at its best. I’m feeling envious of my husband because he’s just now reading this novel for the first time.

Oh, God.

I recommend the whole thread. This doctor tells how emotional outbursts over severe cases of RSV are deployed to shut down the discussion about the risks of this vaccine.

Using emotional arguments to shut down discussion… Hmm, where have we seen this before?

https://twitter.com/ZacBissonnette/status/1694086510713110690?t=OSrKjqDbswvzdhghVp5gCA&s=19

And even more than the doctors, the patients who consumed this junk in industrial quantities to avoid finding ways to deal with pain without drugging themselves into a stupor. Curiously, people in other countries managed to find such ways.

It’s either genetic or structural racism. That’s always the explanation, isn’t it? It couldn’t possibly be that Americans simply think they are more entitled not to be inconvenienced with objective reality.

I came to the department in the morning and saw posters announcing a conversation club a new colleague decided to start. She never talked to me about it, never sought permission or approval. She decided this by herself, created the posters, printed them out and hung them up, and I never knew about any of it.

I’m so happy.

I don’t want to hurt the posters or I’d be pressing them to my chest and crying tears of joy.

This is what I want colleagues at all levels – from Full Professors to lab workers – to do. Take charge, be in control of your own professional lives, and stop treating me like your mommy. My job is to organize the working conditions. I make sure you have a job and that your working conditions are as good as I can make them. Beyond that, it’s all up to you.

I spend the first month of each new academic year, repeating on a loop, “I don’t know how you should teach this topic / structure your course / respond to student concerns / organize the syllabus / conduct the proficiency test, etc. I trust your judgment completely and will defend your decisions at any point if it becomes necessary.” Eventually, people clock on to the fact that I’m serious and stop asking permission to breathe. But then over the summer they forget about it and I have to retrain everybody.