Life in Ukraine

        Olena Ivanivna, 65, in front of her house in Marinka, eastern Ukraine [Emre Caylak/Al Jazeera]

Marinka, Ukraine – Valentina Gordeyeva realised something was coming when the tops of nearby fir trees started to shake but as she ran to shelter in a nearby shop, a shard of shrapnel pierced the soft flesh of her left hand.

“I was holding a bag and felt pain, and then I saw blood running down my bag,” the 65-year-old said, her thumb and wrist now bandaged after she became one of four civilians wounded in shelling by Russian-backed separatists since Thursday.

Pointing to the site where she was hit near a bus stop in Marinka, eastern Ukraine, she said a nearby school had also been damaged in the attack.

The city of 10,000 is right on the front line, with separatist territory just metres away. It lies just beyond the western edge of Donetsk, the self-proclaimed capital of one of two territories in the Donbas region controlled by pro-Russian separatists.

After eight years of a conflict that has killed more than 14,000 people, many here have gotten used to the threat of guns and artillery. Most of the city’s buildings are riddled with the scars of conflict, and intact roofs or windows are rare.

However, as tensions with Russia spiralled over the last few days, the attacks have become the most intense in years, hitting residential areas – even a kindergarten.

Artillery fire has intensified along the entire front line, the Ukrainian Ministry of Internal Affairs said on Saturday.

Soldiers on the front near Mariupol, a port city in the far east of the country, told Al Jazeera they experienced the heaviest shelling they can ever recall on Friday night, sharing chilling audio recordings of explosions.

On Saturday, two Ukrainian soldiers were killed and four others were injured.  When Al Jazeera visited Marinka on that afternoon, the booms of continued shelling could be heard nearby.  READ MORE...

Passing Deer

 

The AUKUS Deal

In early July, when the U.S. was fast-tracking the troop pullout from Afghanistan , President Joe Biden said, “America didn’t go to Afghanistan to nation-build”. He said the U.S. met its strategic objectives in Afghanistan — bringing Osama bin Laden to justice and disrupting al-Qaeda’s networks. On August 31, the last day of U.S. troops in Afghanistan , Mr. Biden gave another statement, defending the pullout that led to a quick Taliban victory. 

He argued that continuing American troops indefinitely in Afghanistan did not serve the U.S.’s national interest. According to Mr. Biden, the era of military operations to remake other countries is over.
Pragmatic realism

An establishment Democrat with decades of experience in foreign policy, Mr. Biden had been a supporter of the U.S.’s regime-change wars. As a Senator, he voted for the 2003 Iraq invasion. He was number 2 in the Obama administration that invaded Libya in 2011. But now, Mr. Biden is distancing his administration from the liberal internationalism of his predecessors and, in a way, following Donald Trump’s strategic reluctance. 

Mr. Trump was the first American President in decades who did not start a new war. It was Mr. Trump who imposed trade tariffs on China ratcheting up tensions and reached a withdrawal agreement with the Taliban. While Mr. Trump reined in America’s interventionist tendencies and turned the foreign policy focus towards China, his approach was largely transactional and with contradictions. Except on climate change, Mr. Biden hasn’t revoked any of Mr. Trump’s key foreign policy decisions. Rather, he appears to be offering a strategic framework based on pragmatic realism to what Mr. Trump began — the geopolitical contest with China.

In 2001, President George W. Bush launched the ‘global war on terror’. Mr. Obama continued it and Mr. Trump used it to target the Iranian power in West Asia. But Mr. Biden doesn’t believe that it’s the U.S.’s responsibility to defeat terrorism globally. What is America’s vital national interest in Afghanistan? he asked on August 30. “In my view, we only have one: to make sure Afghanistan can never be used again to launch an attack on our homeland.” 

In effect, Mr. Biden is re-interpreting the war on terror as a war focused on preventing more attacks on the American homeland. This approach would allow the U.S. to retreat from other conflict theatres, especially in the Muslim world, and refocus its resources on tackling China’s rise.

The AUKUS alliance
The withdrawal from Afghanistan raised credibility questions on America’s power. There were criticisms that the U.S. abandoned its ally in Afghanistan — the Kabul government. But in Mr. Biden’s new realist world, supporting the Afghan government or fighting the Taliban endlessly doesn’t serve any national security purpose to America. But tackling China’s rise is vital to America’s interests because an increasingly powerful China could challenge the U.S.’s global pre-eminence. 

China has already established a domineering status in the Indo-Pacific. After completing the withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Biden administration did not waste any time to announce its most ambitious new alliance — the AUKUS .

Under the AUKUS deal , announced on September 15, Australia would get nuclear-powered submarines from the U.S. and the U.K. Australia will also host American bombers on its territory and get access to advanced missile technology. Mr. Biden, by convening the first Quad summit of leaders from India, Australia and Japan, in March had signalled where his focus would be on. But Quad, which has been around for some time, hasn’t acquired any security dimension yet. 

AUKUS, on the other side, is Washington’s most emphatic effort to rebalance to the Indo-Pacific, a move that would harden the belief in Beijing that the U.S. was seeking to contain China. While Mr. Biden ruled out a new Cold War in his UNGA address on September 21, six days after the AUKUS announcement and three days before the first Quad in-person leaders’ summit, he left no ambiguity on what the focus of his foreign policy would be. It’s not war on terror; it’s not Russia, America’s traditional foe. It’s going to be China, and the new great power contest would unfold in the Indo-Pacific.  READ MORE...

Light Burst

Ever Wondered???

WHO ARE WE?

WHY ARE WE HERE?

WHERE DID WE COME FROM?

WHAT IS OUR PURPOSE?

WHAT IS OUR FUTURE?

Many of us don't give a damn let alone a rat's ass about these questions as we go about living our lives in a state of relative oblivion, caring only about our families, our employment, our possessions, our faith, our vacations, and if we are going to get the COVID vaccines or not...  secondary issues might, and I use that term loosely, revolve around:  inflation, crime and violence, immigration, our children wearing facemasks in school, beinging taught CRT, and supply chain issues...

When I am not being philosophical and thinking about these questions my time is spent posting articles to my blog and opinion pieces (like this one) or writing a few pages on my next novel...  which makes 6, but I lost one, so this is 5.

Being retired and without a whole lot of hobbies, family, or friends, I have a lot of free time on my hands...  so, as anyone might do who is in their 70's, I spend a lot of time just thinking about all of it...  which brings me back to those questions above...

DO WE HAVE TO WAIT FOR DEATH TO GET THE ANSWERS?

The Tennessee Valley

 

Today in the valley, expect a high of 56 degrees...

Not bad...  for a little past the middle of February, especially when our neighbors in the North are experiencing temps much, much colder...  and, our neighbors in Canada are buried under snow and expecting more...  however, if you travel a few hours to the south of us, the temperatures increase 10 degrees or so and by the time you get the the Gulf of Mexico, the temps will be approaching 70 degrees today...

Many of us in the Valley today will be walking around in shorts spending time outdoors since the sun is out and there are no clouds in the sky at all and none are expected.  While it is a little to cool to work on one's suntan, it is still a nice enough day to spend the majority of it outside experiencing the beauty of nature that has been so freely given to us.

As the figure above demonstrates, the Tennessee Valley is nestled between a plateau on the west and a range of mountains on the east.  The state appears to be landlocked as it does not border any oceans like the Atlantic, Pacific, or Gulf of Mexico, yet it is blessed with an abundance of rivers that flow along its western border like the Mississippi River and a plethera of smaller rivers like the Buffalo River, Clinch River, Cumberland River, Duck River, Elk River, Hatchie River, Hiwassee River, Holston River, Obion River, Sequatchie River, Tennessee River and Wolf River.

Obviously, there are numerous places in Tennessee to camp, fish, hunt, look at the landscape, take photographs, or simply experience the beauty of nature as you walk along the many nature or manmade paths that meander through it wilderness.

Am I Where?

An Anti-James Bond

Best known for Peaky Blinders, rising star Joe Cole plays Harry Palmer in the new TV remake (Credit: ITV)

In 2006, an ordinary-looking pair of spectacles went on sale at Christie's, the London auction house. They were expected to fetch up to £3,000 ($4,088). In fact, they sold for £6,600 ($8,994), and the buyer had bought a little piece of movie history.

The spectacles were worn by Michael Caine when he played Harry Palmer in the 1965 espionage thriller The Ipcress File. Palmer, a former soldier, is introduced in a scene in which he is woken by his alarm clock, and reaches for his glasses before he gets out of bed. He's as blind as a bat without them – just one way in which he was not your typical action hero, certainly not back in the 60s.

In a nod to the movie, the very first shot of the new television adaptation of The Ipcress File shows Palmer's thick-rimmed spectacles. This time, Joe Cole (perhaps best known for his role in Peaky Blinders) plays the chippy working-class spy who loves culture, cooking and women but who doesn't have a lot of time for the posh public school boys who run British intelligence.

Like the film before it, the ITV series is based on the 1962 bestseller by the great spy novelist Len Deighton, which was published shortly after the cinema release of Dr No, the first instalment in the James Bond film franchise. Deighton's hero – unnamed in the novel but christened Harry Palmer for the screen – was quickly identified by critics and fans as being the anti-Bond.

James Watkins, director of the six-part adaptation, explains the differences between Ian Fleming's creation and Deighton's agent. "Bond is a superhero," he tells BBC Culture. "He kills without thinking or caring. He is establishment. He went to Eton. He uses his fists and his weapons more than his brain; gadgets, rather than real life.

"Harry is short sighted. Working class. Haunted by killing in Korea. A reluctant spy. Blackmailed into working for the establishment, insolent Harry is a constant thorn in their side. Trying to make his way in a world that is stacked against him. Always facing a class barrier. He's so much more relatable than the dinosaur Bond."      READ MORE...

Classic Sunday Morning Newspaper Cartoons

Healing Birds of Prey

For 20 years, two brothers living in the squalid neighbourhood of Wazirabad in India's capital, Delhi, have been treating wounded black kites that fall from the city's leaden skies.


Mohammad Saud and Nadeem Shehzad rescue birds of prey - mostly injured by paper kite strings coated with crushed glass - and carry them in cardboard boxes to a claustrophobic basement garage at home. Here, they begin nursing them to health: cleaning and bandaging wounds, fixing slashed wings and broken bones.


"You don't care for things because they share the same country, religion or politics," intone the brothers in All That Breathes, an award-winning documentary film on their work.


"Life itself is kinship. That's why we can't abandon the birds."


All That Breathes - the recent winner of the World Cinema Documentary Competition at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival - is not a film that is eager to startle or preach.


Shaunak Sen's 91-minute documentary is, at once, a meditative tribute to the brothers, a rumination on climate change, and an unsparing look at life in Delhi's dystopian underbelly. The Hollywood Reporter calls it a "tiny marvel of a documentary, it's a little and a lot all at once".   READ MORE...

Drinking Milk

 

Women Who Refuse to be Silenced

It was just a snowman. But as winter descended on a starving Afghan population, the heavy snow brought joy to a small corner of Kabul.

A group of young women had stopped next to the snowman to take selfies. As they giggled and looked at their phones, they could have been anywhere.

Then three Taliban fighters spotted them. They came closer - the women fled. With a smile, one stepped towards the snowman - which perhaps he thought was un-Islamic. He tore off the stick arms, carefully removed the stone eyes, the nose too. Finally, a swift beheading.

I had just arrived back in Kabul after 10 years away and had already been lectured by a member of the Taliban about my lack of understanding of Afghan culture. He claimed to know what was best for Afghan women. "Blue-eyed devils" (Westerners) had corrupted the country, he appeared to suggest.

Rather than take his word for it, I wanted to hear from women themselves. Many are in hiding, all fear for their future and some for their lives. There are still women on the streets of Kabul, some still in Western clothes and headscarves, but their freedom is under attack - the freedom to work, study, move freely and to lead independent lives.

I met women who had been forced into the shadows of a new Afghanistan, who took great risks to express their views freely. They could only do so anonymously - except for Fatima, who uinsisted on showing her face.

The Taliban have stolen Fatima’s future twice. The last time they ruled Afghanistan, she was forced into marriage at the age of 14 and her education came to an abrupt end.

This time around, the 44-year-old midwife may still have a job, but like many women I spoke to, every-day life has diminished.

Fatima’s education and employment were hard won. After getting married, she didn’t resume her studies until she was 32. By then, the Taliban had long gone from power. But it still wasn’t easy - even under the new democratic Afghan republic.

She says she did a number of fast-track courses within a short space of time - but there were times when she wasn’t allowed to study. “They would take one look at my ID card and say, ‘You are too old to sit in classes with other students.’”

She finally completed her degree two years ago - but again she faced another hurdle.

“It was hard enough for a girl to get educated in Afghanistan, imagine how difficult it was for an old married wife to get hired.” But Fatima succeeded and has since delivered thousands of babies.

“I wanted to work in an area where I would be able to train women,” she says. “When a woman is educated, she raises healthy and fruitful children. By doing so, she can present a meaningful child to society - one that will bring about change.”

Fatima appears to accept that Taliban control is likely to be permanent, but hopes this time around, they can govern differently.  READ MORE...

Orchestra

America is NASCAR

NASCAR (National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing), sanctioning body for stock-car racing in North America, founded in 1948 in Daytona Beach, Fla., and responsible for making stock-car racing a widely popular sport in the United States by the turn of the 21st century.

Integral to NASCAR’s founding in the late 1940s was Bill France, an auto mechanic and sometime race-car driver. France had organized stock-car races in Florida throughout the 1930s and ’40s, and, after several unsuccessful attempts to create a series of races that would determine a national champion, in 1947 he created the National Championship Stock Car Circuit (NCSCC), a yearlong series of 40 races held across the southeastern United States. 

France was responsible for establishing and enforcing the technical regulations that governed the cars; creating a scoring system that would award drivers points used to determine a series champion; organizing and promoting each race; and awarding cash prizes to the winners of races and to the series champion. These would become NASCAR’s primary tasks as a sanctioning body.

Although the NCSCC was successful, France had greater ambitions. He convened a series of meetings in December 1947 in Daytona Beach attended by racetrack owners and race-car owners and drivers and intended to establish a still-larger stock-car-racing series. What emerged from those meetings was NASCAR, which replaced the NCSCC. France was its first president. The first race sanctioned by NASCAR was held on Jan. 4, 1948, at Pompano Beach, Fla. In February of that year NASCAR was incorporated, with France the primary stockholder.

In 1949 NASCAR changed the rules governing the cars: whereas in 1948 “modifieds”—cars varying in age and in the mechanical modifications made to them for the purpose of racing—were allowed to compete, from June 1949 only late-model (recently manufactured) stock cars were permitted. Races that year were called Strictly Stock races, and Red Byron became the series champion.

France changed the name of the series to Grand National in 1950, a name used until 1971, when the tobacco company R.J. Reynolds bought sponsorship rights to the series and renamed it the Winston Cup Series (it was also known as the Cup Series or NASCAR Cup Series). By then, stock cars had become purpose-built race cars; NASCAR’s rules required cars to resemble their stock counterparts in their dimensions and appearance, but car owners, drivers, and mechanics increasingly exploited those rules in their attempts to gain a competitive advantage. NASCAR was also responsible for mandating safety equipment in cars that, by 1970, had reached over 200 miles (320 km) per hour in nonrace conditions.      READ MORE...

Lovers

 

Greece-Italy Passenger Ferry Fire

A ferry carrying tourists and truck drivers burst into flames on the Adriatic Sea early Friday morning, hours before it was expected to make landfall in southern Italy.

Local media reported that some undocumented passengers who may have been in vehicles on the car deck are still missing. 

The incident is reminiscent of a 2017 ferry disaster in the Adriatic in which 31 people who were hiding in cars on the Norman Atlantic ferry burned to death after rough seas caused friction between tall semi trucks and the car deck ceiling, sparking a similar fire.

Friday’s fire engulfed the Euroferry Olimpia, run by Grimaldi Lines, which was carrying 288 known passengers and crew members when a fire started in the lower car deck as it passed about 10 miles from the Greek island of Corfu.

Passengers onboard said the entire ship was engulfed in flames within minutes as semi trucks carrying fuel and flammable goods ignited one by one. 

“There were very high flames, there was panic on board,” a spokesperson for Italy’s Coast Guard, which responded to the disaster said.         READ MORE...

Traveling by Train

 

Russian Nuclear Drills

Fighter jets of the Russian and Belarusian air forces fly in a joint mission during the Union Courage-2022 Russia-Belarus military drills in Belarus, Thursday, Feb. 17, 2022. Russia has deployed troops to its ally Belarus for sweeping joint military drills that run through Sunday, fueling Western concerns that Moscow could use the exercise to attack Ukraine from the north. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko Jr)

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russia announced massive nuclear drills while Western leaders grasped Friday for ways to avert a new war in Europe amid soaring East-West tensions, after unusually dire U.S. warnings that Moscow could order an invasion of Ukraine any day.

Immediate worries focused on the volatile front lines of eastern Ukraine, where an upsurge of recent shelling tore through the walls of a kindergarten and basic communication was disrupted. Western officials, focused on an estimated 150,000 Russian troops posted around Ukraine’s borders, fear the long-simmering conflict could provide the spark for a broader war.

The drumbeat of warnings that a larger conflict could start at any moment continued Friday after U.S. President Joe Biden warned that Washington saw no signs of a promised Russian withdrawal — but instead saw more troops moving toward the border with Ukraine.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said the U.S. believes Russia could launch an attack “any time” and also said he still had seen no sign of the promised Russian pullback. He will hold a call Friday with Russia’s Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu.

Even as Russia claimed to be pulling back troops from extensive military exercises that had sparked fears of invasion, the Kremlin sent a reminder to the world that it has one of the world’s biggest nuclear arsenals, by announcing drills of its nuclear forces for the weekend. The muscle-flexing overshadowed Russian offers this week of continued diplomacy to defuse the Ukraine crisis.

NATO allies are also flexing their might, beefing up military forces around eastern Europe, but insist the actions are purely defensive and to show unity in the face of Russian threats.

The U.S. announced the $6 billion sale of 250 tanks to Poland, a NATO member that has been occupied or attacked by Russia over past centuries. Announcing the deal, Austin said Russia’s military buildup had only reinvigorated NATO instead of cowing it, as Moscow had hoped.

Meanwhile, world leaders meeting at the Munich Security Conference warned that Europe’s security balance is under threat. Germany’s Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said that the situation is “calling into question the basic principles of the European peace order.”

“Even steps, millimeters toward peace are better than a big step toward war,” she said.  READ MORE...

Catterpillar

 

Greenwashing Scam

A Chevron drilling site near Midland, Texas. It’s unlikely PR firms will be able to serve the fossil-fuel industry as they have in the past. Photograph: Jessica Lutz/Reuters


This week a peer-reviewed study confirmed what many have suspected for years: major oil companies are not fully backing up their clean energy talk with action. Now the PR and advertising firms that have been creating the industry’s greenwashing strategies for decades face a reckoning over whether they will continue serving big oil.

The study compared the rhetoric and actions on climate and clean energy from 2009 to 2020 from the world’s four largest oil companies – ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, and BP. Writing in the journal Plos One, researchers from Tohoku University and Kyoto University in Japan conclude that the companies are not, in fact, transitioning their business models to clean energy.

“The magnitude of investments and actions does not match discourse,” they write. “Until actions and investment behavior are brought into alignment with discourse, accusations of greenwashing appear well-founded.”

Although this isn’t the first time that oil companies have been accused of overstating their climate bona fides, it has never been set out quite so comprehensively, according to environmental sociologist Dr Robert Brulle at Brown University. “This is the first robust, empirical, peer-reviewed analysis of the activities–of the speech, business plans, and the actual investment patterns of the major oil companies regarding their support or opposition to the transition to a sustainable society,” he says.

Brulle says PR firms and advertising agencies that have created campaigns around the oil firms’ net-zero claims are now on notice. “There’s no plausible deniability that they are unaware of the activities of these companies after this paper has been published,” he says. “This paper clearly shows that these companies aren’t walking the talk.”  READ MORE...