TGIF!
U.S. government vs journalists, DW out of Russia, Belarus weapons, sad Olympics, Russia's population decline, covid-denier doctor online vaccine exemption scheme, Austria's sort of mandate.
I took this photo five years ago on a snowy early February day in a busy Georgian restaurant near Kiev Station in Moscow after a book presentation. Feels like about 50 years ago. The sign says “washed”. It felt fitting to use today because a lot of what I am thinking about right now is who one can actually believe. If you are paying attention closely, you start to get the feeling you can’t trust anyone anymore.
The U.S. government is under a microscope after two incidents yesterday when journalists pushed for more detail, more evidence if you will — and were told by government spokespeople something like (I paraphrase) “who are you going to believe, us or ISIS? us, or (mega cringe) ‘the Russians’?”. Funny thing is, it’s not 1985 anymore. We have the internet. We don’t have to trust “government sources” referring to “classified information” or “a trusted source”. It still amazes me how much of the American public takes anything printed in the Washington Post or New York Times at face value.
In brief, the State Department, without showing the actual video they claim exists, says Russia has plans to fabricate an attack in Ukraine in order to have an excuse to intervene. To me, this entire story, just like the blood shipments story I wrote about last week, smells like the same kind of disinformation Russia loves to produce in mass quantities. Cannot understand why the U.S. is lowering its standards to play the same stupid fake news escalate tensions game.
In fact, regarding that strange reported-in-DC-by-Reuters story about Russia sending blood supplies to near the Ukrainian border, a Ukrainian official dismissed the entire thing as nonsense in an interview with The Guardian yesterday.
It took me decades to get over what I was taught in the 1990s in my home (which was a very biased one!), that media take sides and help governments out. Recent reporting on so-called rumours which the Ukrainian government says it has no evidence of reminds me a lot of reporting on the Bosnian wars in the 1990s. I don’t want to go down that rabbit hole because there is certain personal trauma I’m not ready to deal with here, but suffice to say sometimes government officials feed journalists information on purpose with intention and the best in class journalists, as we saw yesterday in the U.S., push back and call bullshit if more evidence cannot be produced. Read this entire thread for the full play by play:
Another example of mixed messaging coming out of the U.S. government is the ongoing public debate about whether or not Havana Syndrome actually exists. Just a few weeks ago, they tried to say it doesn’t. Now, a new report “by a panel of expert scientists” has come out saying Havana Syndrome could be caused by pulsed energy devices. I’m no psychologist but I have a very hard time believing diplomats and their families stationed in many cities all over the world would all come up with the same symptoms at the same time and all be psychosomatic. No way.
In order not to get lost in the noise, I prefer to follow the actual news. So what happened yesterday? As I predicted in my note yesterday morning, Russia kicked out a big German media outlet: Deutsche Welle. Not unexpected nor surprising.
Russia’s population fell by 1 million in 2021. This Novaya Gazeta article in Russian has an interactive video map which shows the changes in population by region since 2000. You see how especially central Russia lost people en masse. And as some pointed out, this is not just covid or shorter life expectancy — young people who can are leaving Russia.
Another report in Russian says Lukashenko will have to buy “almost all” the equipment that’s now arrived in Belarus for the joint military exercises between Russia and Belarus between February 10-20, 2022. Keep the date February 20 in your heads, as that was also the rumour on the ground near the DNR about when, if an attack were to happen, it would take place. Not before then, the rumour was.
The Olympics are opening today, and Xi is hosting Putin. This thread from journalist Amy Qin, who was expelled from China two years prior, is really depressing. It seems like China has managed to such the entire Olympic spirit out of the Olympics.
On the Austrian front, covid madness continues. Good news: the covid child had a Ct of over 30 and was therefore able to return to school this morning to collect her report card. I told her not to cry. These are conversations one has on report card day in Austria. I ran into a mom friend yesterday in a BIPA in downtown Vienna. She had just been refused entry to H&M because she only has two vaccine shots and hasn’t yet been boosted. Which, if you think about it, is pretty insane.
A covid-denier doctor who has since been kicked out of the University of Vienna has a new entrepreneurial project selling online for €20 a pop a survey you take and it then helps you bypass the vaccine mandate, via a false allergic reaction claim. The ORF report from a few nights ago outlines the whole scheme:
Austria’s government passed the vaccine mandate yesterday. It’s a complete mess and they should have just given up. However, as people smarter than me pointed out, that would not be the Austrian way to admit one’s collective failure!
I wish you all a nice weekend and a covid-free holiday if you are taking one next week! TGIF.
“covid-denier doctor?” Really? It’s possible to know that covid exists and still believe that the tyrannical methods used to “control” it are unnecessary and counterproductive.