#Washington Sunder

[livenews24x7hindi]

IND vs SL: भारतीय ऑलराउंडर ने कहा, तीसरा वनडे चैंपियंस ट्रॉफी से पहले जवाब तलाशने का शानदार मौका

टीम इंडिया की खराब बल्लेबाजी के कारण भारत को दूसरा मैच 32 रनों से गंवाना पड़ा, जिसके कारण भारत पर 27 साल में श्रीलंका के खिलाफ पहली द्विपक्षीय वनडे सीरीज हारने का खतरा मंडरा रहा है। भारतीय ऑलराउंडर वॉशिंगटन सुंदर का मानना ​​है कि श्रीलंका के खिलाफ तीसरा और अंतिम वनडे जीतना टीम इंडिया के लिए चुनौतीपूर्ण परिस्थितियों में स्पिन के खतरे का सामना करने का एक शानदार मौका होगा। अगले साल होने वाली…

[dostoyevsky-official]

Europe should hijack Trump’s revolutionary plans for the world

The Trumpian revolution has already changed the nature of European politics. Less than two months into the new White House administration’s term, the European political scene has been transformed into a clash between Trump-allied revolutionaries and Trump-resisting “do not bully us” liberal nationalists. Now it is for the far right to justify Trump’s anticipated tariffs on Europe, threatened this week at 25 per cent, and to ask Europeans to follow Washington’s leadership in foreign policy. By contrast, mainstream parties are acting as defenders of national sovereignty who hope to mobilise support by appealing to national interest and national dignity. The Munich conference also put an end to the heated debate about whether Trump should be taken seriously (meaning, not literally) or literally (meaning, not seriously). Now we know that he should be taken both seriously and literally. As Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, has aptly observed, Trump “does not simply say what he thinks, but he says what he wants”. His comments about taking control of Greenland or the Panama Canal represent not signalling, but intention. The US president is convinced that America’s strategic interest lies in making Canada the 51st US state. He strongly believes that he can split Russia from China, and he blames America’s “deep state” for preventing him from achieving this in his first term. In this context, Europeans are wasting precious time pondering what will be Trump’s plan for Ukraine and complaining about not being at the negotiating table. Getting Trump right necessitates first and foremost recognising that it is a revolutionary government in power in Washington, albeit one organised as an imperial court. Revolutions never have detailed plans. They run by timetables: meet the moment; don’t project steps ahead. It is unclear what exactly Trump wants to achieve in his negotiations with Putin, but he wants to achieve something very big, and he wants to achieve it fast, very fast. What Trump offers Putin is not simply the prospect of ending the war in Ukraine on terms broadly favourable to Moscow, but a grand bargain to reorder the world. This includes America’s presence in Europe, and also in the Middle East and the Arctic. Trump promises Putin that Russia will be rapidly reintegrated into the global economy and that Moscow will regain the status of a great power that it lost in the humiliating 1990s. Trump hopes that this will convince Russia to sunder its alliance with China. The US refusal in a UN vote to condemn Russia’s aggression in Ukraine shocked even some of the president’s most devoted admirers. But it was meant to persuade the Kremlin that the American leader is ready to do the unthinkable — and reconfigure the world as shaped by Ronald Reagan and Gorbachev in the late 1980s. [...] George Orwell once observed that “all revolutions are failures, but they are not all the same failure”. What kind of failure the Trumpian revolution will be, we do not know. But what history teaches us is that the best strategy is not to resist the revolutionaries but to hijack their revolution. In doing this, Europe’s success will mostly depend not on its ability to resist but on displaying a talent to surprise. Could Europe find a way to benefit from not being at the US-Russian negotiating table? Should Trump be left to own his great peace plan for Ukraine and its implementation? In a moment of existential crisis like the present one, there is one valuable resource for the weaker party that stands out: political imagination.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Democrats and grassroots activists gain traction

February 5, 2025

Robert B. Hubbell

Democrats and grassroots activists worked for a second day to oppose the unfolding coup against the Constitution by Musk and Trump. Activists held protests across the nation. Legal advocacy organizations partnered with aggrieved federal workers to file lawsuits, and federal judges issued orders halting unconstitutional executive orders signed by Trump. Democrats in Congress claimed they had placed a hold on all Trump nominees (although 22 Democrats voted for VA Secretary Doug Collins, and Senator John Fetterman voted to confirm Pam Bondi).

In short, there were positive signs that should inspire confidence among those who care about democracy and our Constitution.

Even so, the Musk / Trump efforts to overthrow the Constitution and destroy the federal government continued to creep across the land like a deadly virus.

We cannot relent. We cannot ease up. We cannot normalize or minimize what is happening by describing the unconstitutional efforts as “controversial,” “disruptive,” or ���illegal.” Two men—one elected and one unelected—have arrogated to themselves the power to override Congress and ignore the Constitution. If that scenario took place in any other country in the world, we would call it a coup. Our reluctant legacy media continues to bow and scrape before Trump and Musk, hiding behind euphemisms and restraint in the face of a national emergency.

Three notable exceptions are Will Bunch in the Philadelphia Inquirer, The Musk/Trump coup will not be televised and Mark Joseph Stern and Dahlia Lithwick in Slate, Elon Musk’s Power Grab Is Lawless, Dangerous, and—Yes—a Coup.

Will Bunch writes,

A hostile takeover of the government by folks who weren’t elected . . . is the classic definition of a coup.

Stern and Lithwick write,

An elected leader who illegally entrenches his own power, as Trump did four years ago, is engaged in a self-coup. . . . What do we call it when the president is too lazy to gut the government himself, giving away power to a zealous and unaccountable friend? Call it a double-self-coup . . . .

We are facing a constitutional crisis like no other in living memory. The first step is to recognize the threat for what it is: A coup designed to sunder the Constitution by installing the president as the unbounded ruler of America.

The Founders fought a revolutionary war to overthrow a monarch. Trump and Musk are seeking to undo the outcome of the American Revolution. That should alarm every American.

There is much to cover from Tuesday. I will endeavor to make sense of the many developments by grouping them into the following broad categories:

Protests

Lawsuits

Additional unconstitutional actions by Musk / Trump

Trump's comments on Gaza

Protests

Treasury Department

For the second day, protesters gathered outside the US Treasury Building in Washington D.C. The Tuesday event was coordinated by MoveOn and Indivisible. See MSN, Protesters Hold 'Nobody Elected Elon' Rally Outside Treasury Building.

Dozens of members of Congress showed up at the event—a sign that Democrats in Congress are paying attention to their constituents. A delegation of Democratic representatives and senators were denied entrance to the Treasury Building. See Axios, Congressional Democrats denied entry to Treasury Department

Dozens of readers sent photos of the protest. (Thanks to everyone who sent photos and video—I received hundreds!)

A smaller group of concerned citizens attempted to visit Senator Schuck Schumer’s office but were turned away. They then held an impromptu demonstration in front of his office building. See photos below.

An organic, national protest is planned for February 5 with the goal of holding protests in every state capitol building. See Newsweek, What Is the '50 States' Anti-Trump Protest Movement? What to Know About 50501. The short notice is a challenge. The planned protest times are included in the Newsweek article.

If you are within driving distance of your state capitol, please make an effort to show up! Protests must start somewhere, so don’t fret if the initial demonstrations are small(ish). The point is that people are finding their voices, which is good!

The National Women’s March is organizing a weekly Moment of Silence at 12:53 pm to mark the time when January 6 insurrectionists broke through the barricades at the US Capitol. See Not the Bee, Women's March announces "weekly minute of silence" on Wednesdays at 12:53, "the moment January 6th rioters first crossed the barricades".

If you would like to promote other protests, please post the details in the Comment section or “reply” to this email with the details. Change the subject line to “Protest Details.”

Lawsuits

FBI lawsuits.

Legal advocacy groups continued to file suits against the Trump administration, seeking to obtain injunctions against illegal executive orders.

Two suits on behalf of FBI agents were filed on Tuesday. NBC News, FBI agents sue Justice Department, alleging 'retribution' over their work on Jan. 6 cases.

Per NBC, in one suit, nine FBI agents argue that the specific purpose of an internal FBI survey "is to identify agents and other FBI personnel to be terminated as a form of politically motivated retribution.”

The suit seeks to represent a class of 6,000 current and former FBI agents who are on the list that has been provided by the FBI to the DOJ identifying those agents.

Per NBC, the second suit requests

“protection” from the Justice Department’s “anticipated retaliatory decision to expose their personal information for opprobrium and potential vigilante action by those who they were investigating.”

Federal employees sue over alleged “buyout offer.”

See The Hill, Union sues over Trump buyout offer. (“The largest federal government employee union is suing the Trump administration to block its buyouts for workers, calling the offer “an arbitrary, unlawful, short-fused ultimatum which workers may not be able to enforce.”)

Order prohibiting the transfer of transgender inmates to men’s prison

A federal judge issued an order enjoining the transfer of three transgender inmates from women’s prison facilities to men’s prisons. See CNN, Judge blocks federal prison system from moving three transgender women to men’s prisons

Additional unconstitutional acts

The coup by Trump and Musk continued at full steam despite court orders and assurances by administration officials claiming that “There is nothing to see here, move along.”

Musk’s hacking into Treasury payments system.

Secretary of Treasury Bessent told lawmakers in a private meeting that Musk has not gained access to payments by the Treasury—despite Musk’s boasts to the contrary on Twitter. As Josh Marshall explains, there is strong reason to doubt Bessent’s denials. See Talking Points Memo, Musk Cronies Dive Into Treasury Dept Payments Code Base.

Marshall writes,

I’m told that . . . DOGE operatives received full admin-level access on Friday, January 31st. The claim of “read only” access was either false from the start or later fell through. The DOGE team . . . . has already made extensive changes to the code base for the payment system.

If you can’t trust assurances from the Secretary of the Treasury, who can you trust? Not Secretary of State Rubio! Read on!

USAID effectively shut down

Despite Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s claim that the Trump administration plans to reorganize USAID, Trump has effectively shuttered the agency by placing nearly every employee on administrative leave. See NBC News, USAID announces nearly all direct hires will be placed on administrative leave.

Trump cannot legally terminate the USAID as an agency or impound funds appropriated by Congress to USAID programs. He is attempting to circumvent those legal and constitutional prohibitions by effectively firing the entire workforce.

Consumer Finance Protection Board ordered to cease work

The CFPB is a congressionally created agency that cannot be terminated by Trump. So, Trump appointed Treasury Secretary Bessent as the new CFPB head, who immediately ordered the CFPB to cease work. See NPR, New CFPB head, Scott Bessent, orders staff to halt work.

Scott Bessent, Treasury Secretary, is a hedge fund manager who is no friend to consumers. Not surprisingly, major banks cheered Bessent’s appointment to the consumer protection bureau and urged the immediate repeal of pesky regulations that protect the banking industry’s customers from unscrupulous practices. (See NPR article, above.)

Trump moves to shut down Department of Education

The Trump administration is preparing an executive order that appears to pave the way to shutter the Department of Education. Although the executive order recognizes that Trump cannot eliminate an agency created by Congress, he will likely use the same tactic deployed against USAID and the CFPB—order the workforce to take administrative leave, thereby suspending all work. See Newsweek, Trump Moves To Dismantle Department of Education With New Order.

Again, Trump has no authority to prevent the disbursement of funds allocated by Congress to assist local educational programs and students with disabilities. If Trump places the DOE into suspended animation, millions of families with disabled children will be thrown into ruinous financial hardship and chaos.

Trump targets the CIA.

Trump has sent a “buyout” offer to the entire CIA workforce. See CNN, CIA sends ‘buyout’ offers to entire workforce.

To state the obvious, a mass departure from the CIA would inflict grievous harm on US national security. Other deferred resignation letters have suggested that mass layoffs are imminent. If the same applies to the CIA, Putin must be popping Champagne in the Kremlin.

Trump moves to reclassify chief technology officers in agencies

Until now, the chief information officers in charge of technology at federal agencies have been civil service employees who are selected on technical merit, not political persuasion.

Trump will change that rule on February 14. After that date, chief information officers will be political appointees because, you know, what really matters in creating a stable computer network is where your political loyalties lie, not what education, experience, and skills you possess. See NBC News, Trump admin moves to make tech officials appointees amid DOGE clashes

Trump's comments regarding Gaza

During a press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump made comments regarding Gaza that were simultaneously bizarre, offensive, and destabilizing. Trump suggested that:

Two million Palestinians in Gaza should be forced to emigrate to Arab countries (Trump said, “I don’t think they are going to tell me no.”)

The US would take control of Gaza

The US would develop Gaza as “the Riviera of the Middle East.”

The context and details of Trump's remarks are here: NYTimes, Trump Proposes U.S. Takeover of Gaza and Says All Palestinians Should Leave. (Accessible to all.)

Saudi Arabia and representatives of Palestinians in Gaza issued statements condemning the proposals. As noted in the NYTimes article, Trump's proposals may imperil the second stage of hostage releases in the current cease fire. Trump's recklessness may have condemned the remaining hostages to additional time in captivity.

Concluding Thoughts

Okay, that was a lot to digest. But keep this in mind: Not everything that Trump and Musk have announced will actually occur or will be easy to implement. And we will have time to resist, fight back, slow walk, and seek injunctive relief from the courts. We can blunt some of the damage but cannot prevent it all. Still, we must do our best to protect as many people and programs as possible.

Despite the challenging outlook, we must push back forcefully. Trump and Musk have overreached; the damage will soon appear on national news and local newspapers. Tales of hardship and unfairness will be shared in church basements and grocery stores. The damage will be felt on farms and in small businesses, at colleges and primary schools, in hospitals and police stations.

Sadly and inevitably, Trump's mass firings and politicization of the federal government's information technology infrastructure will lead to technical disasters. Per the Talking Points Memo, above, Musk’s engineers are placing “backdoors” into federal agency computer systems, weakening their defenses against cyber-attacks from foreign adversaries.

All of this will backfire sooner or later. Just like Trump's ridiculous comments about Gaza. His ignorance and impulsiveness will be his undoing—and that of the GOP. It will be painful for us, so we must be prepared. There is a reason that Democrats are holding town hall meetings with constituents, but Republicans are not. Republicans fear the growing public concern about Trump's slash-and-burn approach that will hurt millions of Americans without regard to political party.

We must be tough, steeling ourselves for rough times ahead. But we must also be proactive in planning to leverage Trump's mistakes to our advantage.

Don’t give up. Don’t look away. Endure. Abide. Keep the faith. If we can do that, we will prevail. It is only a matter for time.

[Robert B. Hubbell Newsletter]

[nothing-but-paisley]

Ooh what's Bad Bones?

It's a short story I'm kicking around. This baby's got it all:

generational trauma

nature-as-gothic

heavily symbolic dead steel mills

a shit ton of rivers

just rust belt things

goth lesbians

a murder mystery

home remodeling (i learned it from you, anne)

Thank you for the ask! Sorry it's not vc related ����

Excerpt:

These Appalachian foothills are older than the Atlantic Ocean, which sundered them from what are now the Scottish Highlands. Older than the moon, maybe. They might have been taller than the Himalayas once, worn down over unthinkable eons, and the fossils inside them are ancient and strange. I used to go hunting for them in the shale, a serious and lonely child, splitting rocks to find the ghosts of ferns. Seeing the skeletal ridges of land again after months or years away, I can always feel their age.

Anna looks over at me from the driver’s seat and grins at the song that’s just come on the radio (Tom Petty's "American Girl"), her black hair caught in the hot green-smelling wind. Soon we’ll be poking around the hundred-year-old rooms of all the little houses we can maybe afford in the city, old frame constructions of the kind realtors call good bones.

As we crawl up the winding tree-lined way to Mt. Washington for a showing, Anna points out a derelict red brick house crawling with weeds and honeysuckle, the rotting front porch sagging like skin, a blue tarp hanging from the upper window like the tattered sail of a ghost ship.

“Good bones,” she drawls in a vampire voice and bites at my shoulder through dark denim, making me laugh.

“Mm, yeah.” The weather is unusually sunny, and the scent of grass and hot pavement is making me crave a cigarette, an old adolescent vice. “Meat’s a little stringy though.”

Just past this neighborhood, at the western peak of the ridge across the river from the lean dark skyscrapers of downtown, is an area called Duquesne Heights, once known as Coal Hill. Its houses are notorious for foundation issues caused by mine subsidence. My grandmother’s house was built in a similarly precarious place, on top of abandoned coal pits that could swallow a house without warning. Once after a lightning storm, the old strip mines caught fire underground and coal smoke rose up from unseen holes in the ground like the mouth of hell was open. I remember being terrified of falling through the sweet grassy earth and into the burning coal. It was a fear that never really went away.

My dad always avoided the basement of his childhood home—bad bones down there.

[salmonthecat]

Liberty's kids and amrev ship dynamics

Ray of sunshine x not afraid to fight a grown man (James x Sarah)

A tired war veteran that's forced to be a leader of their nation x a politician secretly in love with them (George Washington x Charles Thomson)

Feminist man worshipping their wife x their wife (John Adams x Abigail Adams)

Yandere monarch x sundere President (king George iii x George Washington)

[mariacallous]

Before the war, Ivan Grek would take the train to the provinces bordering Russia and Ukraine. Researching Russia’s remembrance of its past wars, he would stop in small towns to visit friends of colleagues from the United States. The climate of cultural and academic exchange was a “fun time,” recalled Grek, who was educated in St. Petersburg, Russia, and completed his Ph.D. at American University in Washington.

Those borderlands are now a minefield, thousands of miles away from the muggy parks of Foggy Bottom, where Grek currently works as the director of George Washington University’s Russia program. But out of sight is not out of mind. “Russia will still be there,” he said. Despite mounting challenges to studying Russia, including the war, university boycotts, and broken-down academic exchanges, it is still the same riddle wrapped inside a mystery.

The first year and a half of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has sundered bonds between Russian and U.S. institutions, and academia is no exception. U.S. universities have canceled study abroad programs and ended research partnerships with their Russian counterparts even as they offered protection to Russian students and scholars—threading the needle between moral and logistical challenges against a backdrop of tension. Today’s environment is reminiscent of the Soviet era, Grek said. “Everything has been broken.”

As academics adapt to a new reality, specialists in topics from economics to cultural history are concerned that the taps are closing on one of the United States’ most important fountains of understanding Russia, past and present.

The United States’ foreknowledge that Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the mercenary Wagner Group, would launch an abortive mutiny against Russian President Vladimir Putin shows that, when push comes to shove, Washington still has a read on Russia. But U.S. academics’ ability to understand the culture that gives birth to these kinds of events has taken a pounding from which it will struggle to bounce back. For those working on—and in—the field, this profound loss of knowledge has strained decades-long friendships and relationships with colleagues to a breaking point.

When Putin launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, U.S. academics had grown used to 30 years of open access to Russia’s archives and universities, reaping the returns of what the fall of the Soviet Union meant for research.

The opening of the Soviet archives was “exhilarating,” Cold War historian Melvyn P. Leffler wrote in 1996, ringing in a new era of access to information with the potential to change the West’s understanding of Soviet society. The Soviets were, like the tsars before them, first and foremost pragmatic, not ideological crusaders. “Realpolitik held sway in the Kremlin. Ideology played an important role in shaping their perceptions, but Soviet leaders were not focused on promoting worldwide revolution,” Leffler concluded.

Archive peeping could show that, in fact, Soviet leaders thought “communism fit Poland like a saddle fits a cow” and were more concerned with preserving hegemony in Russia’s backyard than they were with expanding Marxism-Leninism. Access to new information, it seemed, had the potential to change strategic understanding.

What else could it do? Regardless of the direct impact of the opening of the Soviet archives on U.S. policymakers’ knowledge of Soviet priorities, academics shared Leffler’s enthusiasm over the access boom itself. Open archives came with an exponential increase in open discussions, cultural exchanges, study abroad programs, and professional cooperation with Russian counterparts, all of which improved not just Kremlinology but the quality of U.S. academic knowledge of the region, from Leo Tolstoy to tea drinking. While some of those opportunities already existed during Soviet times as a calculated game of U.S.-USSR cultural diplomacy, after the 1990s studying Russia became much like studying any other country.

For social science, the past three decades have been a “golden age,” said Timothy Frye, a professor of post-Soviet foreign policy at Columbia University. Despite being an autocracy, post-Soviet Russia was unusual in that “you could do high-quality research there” in a way that is not possible in China or Saudi Arabia. Russia has an exhaustive public polling infrastructure; with relative ease, social scientists could tally reliable information about public opinion and socioeconomic trends.

In the early 2000s and through the 2010s, it was normal for Russian scholars to publish high-quality research in international, peer-reviewed journals; Frye himself co-wrote pieces with Russian counterparts. In 2011, he became a co-director of the International Center for the Study of Institutions and Development in Moscow, which for a time he led with a Russian economist, Andrei Yakovlev.

Things started to change in the wake of Russia’s illegal 2014 annexation of Crimea. The Russian government began cracking down on dissident voices, whether in parliament or within universities. “People really started to notice that working conditions were getting much more difficult,” Frye said. Among Russian social scientists, there was a growing concern that surveys were becoming less reliable and government officials were “unwilling to speak up.” The increasingly repressive environment was hurting their ability to do their job as well as the quality of their findings.

Then came last year’s invasion and with it an impossible dilemma. First, the Kremlin put pressure on researchers and officials at Russian universities to support the war, even as some resisted it, and banned Russian researchers from international outreach and publication. Then, many U.S. institutions cut ties with Russian academic institutions and former partners who openly expressed their support for the invasion. Russian scholars seeking refuge in the West often get the cold shoulder.

Russian academics with working ties to the United States, many of which spanned decades and provided Americans with insight into the Russian policymaking process, have been damned if they take a stand on the war, damned if they don’t, and damned if they try to avoid it. The heightened tension has strained personal ties as much as it has strained the pipeline of knowledge of Russian policymaking to the United States.

“People are uncomfortable,” said Frye, adding that “institutional ties with Russian institutes of higher education have been severed because of the war. But the personal ties still remain.” Formal ties are cut. There are furtive Zoom calls and WhatsApp chats and the odd email. There is a “very awkward, chaotic situation out there,” said Grek, adding that academics now “have to build their own networks with Russian scholars in Russia to revive and to conduct studies and just move on.” The United States’ knowledge of the region, in some respects, is hinging on those bonds.

Rupture and upheaval in academia are damaging the ability of today’s Russia experts to make sense of the country’s unraveling. As the Cold War ramped up, the United States had people such as George Kennan to act as sherpas. These days, it’s not so clear.

Academics do the spade work that helps U.S. government officials make sense of Putin’s game. A functioning field of Russia studies is needed now more than ever to understand the fallout of the Prigozhin mutiny and unanswered questions about his whereabouts and abject surrender. And whether Russia will go nuclear if the war goes worse for Moscow. And what comes after Putin. And how this all ends.

Unfortunately for Washington, “both the U.S. government and the Russian government know less about Russian society than they did before the war,” Frye said. “I would love to know what’s going on in Russian politics right now. Do I have a great way to study it? Not really.”

For Grek, academic breakdown breeds bad policymaking. “If you misunderstand and misinterpret what’s going on in Russia and push the wrong buttons, we can get closer to the third world war.”

The next generation of Russianists is stepping into a volatile field. Across Rock Creek from Grek’s office, undergraduates at Georgetown University continue to sign up for Russian-language classes; there has been little drop since the start of the war. Part of that, said Lioudmila Fedorova, the chair of Georgetown’s Slavic languages department, is because it’s Washington, and Georgetown is the home of the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service—a feeder school to the State Department.

Outside the Beltway as well as inside, Slavic studies departments are reassessing how to teach the region’s languages and cultures. “Historically, bad relations with Russia have been good for business,” Frye said.

This time, those entering the business will face a new set of questions. For regional experts working in the humanities, emphasizing Russia’s character as an empire whose history of conquest cuts to its cultural core is hardly a new approach—though it may become more widespread in light of the war. “We study and teach [Russian culture] as a counterculture, where many writers resisted the pressure of the state,” said Fedorova, pointing to courses such as “Exile and Prison in Russian Literature/Film.” This fall, the school will add a course called “Ukraine and the Russian Empire.”

The theme of the upcoming 2023 conference of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies is “decolonization.” The call for papers, which extends to scholars studying the region from universities around the world, notes that “Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has led to widespread calls for the reassessment and transformation of Russo-centric relationships of power and hierarchy both in the region and in how we study it.”

How to teach Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet history—and how to discuss empire in the context of the ongoing invasion—is also at top of mind for U.S. graduate students, as well as how to study it.

Jenny Lhamo Tsundu, a Ph.D. student in Brown University’s history department, spent nine months between 2014 and 2015 living with a host family in Bratsk, Siberia, as part of a Russian-language program organized by Middlebury Language Schools. During Tsundu’s stay there, talk of Putin’s then-recent invasion of Crimea reached the faraway city. “Crimea is ours,” people would say in an “ironic” and “half-joking manner,” she said. Living there, and listening to people there, was as important as hitting the books. Her field studies were interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic and then ended by the war.

Younger graduate students may not be able to follow in her footsteps and visit the region they study. That bodes poorly: Expertise in regional areas is key, and ignorance leads to missteps.

At GW’s Russia program, Grek and his colleagues are looking for workarounds. Online databases and social media offer a stand-in for talking to actual Russians. It’s not ideal.

“I have a small dream,” Grek said. “I hope that one day there will be a world where we can reengage with Western scholars, Russian scholars, and Ukrainian scholars as we did before.”

[grigorikarpin]

Dr. Dan Goes to Washington - a new Vanguard tale featuring Dr. Dan from SCP-096 giving a presentation to the United Nations General Assembly announcing the existence of Vanguard, Anomalies, and the sundering of the Veil to the world

[toobwaysider]

THE CANTERVILLE LEXICON 5

More verbiage from Canterville:

ABBISTOCK – Slang term, used mostly in Pooticuck County, the Flatlands, where the Scottish heritage is still pronounced, but it is used on occasion in Canterville (although they have a Hays Code word with a similar definition.)  It is a corruption of the Scottish Gaelic word “àbhaisteach” which means “Ordinary, Habitual, Normal, Usual”.  Usually it is used to describe the ordinary people back on Earth, but it has come into general, derisive, use to describe anyone with no powers or “bents”.  (Other terms of a similar nature – the “Ordinaires” and the “Mundayns”.)

BENT – A talent, a knack, usually of a magical nature, and sometimes unique to one particular person  (Timjimmy Auxberon’s bent is that he can see and speak to the Nearly Departed in Canterville who are trapped and prevented from moving on to the next plane in their spiritual journeys.  See ENDIES.)

BLEMMYES – (Plural: BLEMMYAE) Blemmyes are humanoids lacking a head, with their facial features embedded on their chest. They are still remembered (barely) in folklore, but all of them were whiskaways captured by the Toddler Godling.  (Astiph wanted them as his playthings on his flat planet.  This happened at some point before the middle of the 17th Century.)  The Blemmyae live for the most part in the stolen country of Dudenya, where they are renowned for their skills in technology.  They are the creators and manufacturers of all the vehicles in the Flatlands, which all run on faesmic energy as there are no fossil fuels.

ENDIES – This is a slang term for the ghosts which have been trapped in Canterville since the Great Vanishment of 1678, when the walls between worlds was realigned to the Flatlands dimension and is no longer a conduit to the spirit world.  (It is derived from the acronym for “Nearly Departed.”)

REPTOIDS – There has long been a belief that reptilian humanoids live among us on Earth.  This is not true… anymore.  There used to be a great underground empire of the Reptoids beneath Los Angeles, and the city government actually financed a search for the access to that realm.  However, by then, the Toddler Godling had whisked them away to the Flatlands, where they now are ensconced in a hot, mountainous region on the Eastern shores of the Sundering Seas.  The majority of the countries in the Flatlands consider their country of Nisssiruu a rogue terrorist state, with their only allies being the Albiyun Empire.

I should point out that the rumor that they still walk among us on Earth is actually true.  Those who were not in the subterranean chambers at the time of the Whiskaway, those who were above ground, escaped detection.  This was because they are shape-shifters, able to perfectly mimic the human form.  Their one tell is the nictating eyelids.  Gives them away every time.  The other rumor about them is also true – those Reptoids still on Earth are in the United States.  They are most numerous in Hollywood and Washington D.C. where they control the entertainment business and the federal government.

SAITOPSI – The first “peoples” who were disappeared from Earth were several species of ceratops dinosaurs, the herbivores who would eventually develop horns and protective shields on their heads.  (The triceratops were the first of those types of dinosaurs to capture the attention of the Toddler Godling.  He grabbed up many from Earth while the basic foundation of his flat planet was still being stitched together from stolen chunks of Gondwanaland and Pangaea which had broken off.  He placed them in a jungle/savannah terrain on the Southern shores of the Sundering Seas where their nearest neighbors would be the Bruces and Sheilas of the Grand Speewah… but not for millions of years.  With no predators like T-Rex to impede their development, those “tribes” of the various ceratops species were able to evolve into sentient, anthropomorphic beings, who identify themselves as “Saitopsi”.  (Because the skeletal structure of their mouths do not lend themselves to human speech, “Saitopsi” is the best they can do in saying “Ceratopsi”.)

WERE-BEARS – Men who can take on the shape and nature of bears, usually black bears, also known as ursathropes.  There are actually two species of the were-bears, one in Canterville, and the others are to be found in Pooticuck County.  Those in Canterville are originally from the Allansburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, where they were members of a Jewish synagogue, B’Nai Esau. The others were to be found in the town of Wampaug, eponymously named after the tribe which had been whisked away to the Flatlands along with most of the Fort Kathlyn settlement.

The main difference between the two groups is the nature of their ursathropy.  The Jewish were-bears, who call themselves “Bermensch”, is that it is part of their cellular structure and is passed down through their genetics.  For those of the Wampaug, who are known as “Wasoosin” (a portmanteau of the words “Awohs” for bear, and “In”, the suffix denoting “Man”), it confers the ability to magically transform from one bodily form and nature to the other due to a highly ritualized ceremony, very religious in nature.  For the most part, the two species of ursathrope are kept separate from each other, but it has been deemed vital for the gene pool that unions between the two groups of ursathropes should be encouraged but never forced.

WENDIGO – This is the accepted general term for the most terrifying monster in folklore, at least in my opinion.  Wendigo are men cursed to become these horrors because they committed a most serious sin – eating human flesh.  Other names for them in languages with Algonkian roots are Windgo, Windiga, Wetiko, Wijigo, and Wintsigo.  For the Wampaug, they are known as “Wundiqo”, with the plural being “Wundikoag”.  But during the 1930s, during the Great Depression, they were being hunted down by what turned out to be not only a Wendigo, but an anti-Semitic one at that.  (When he was finally captured, they learned that he had barely survived World War I, where he was trapped in a No-Man’s-Land.  There he ate a corpse and was cursed to become a Wendigo.)  A team of Monitaurs were dispatched back to Earth, not only agents from Canterville, but also adepts from their main base in Pooticuck County.  They tracked down that Wendigo and learned that in his human form he had been a fervent member in the early development of the German-American Bund.  The Monitaurs from the other side of the dimensional barrier took full control of the situation and forced the Wendigo through the vortal back to Pooticuck County where it is believed that he was eliminated with extreme prejudice.

[bhaskarlive]

3rd T20I: Rinku, Surya help India script dramatic comeback win over SL in Super Over

Rinku Singh and Suryakumar Yadav’s late bowling efforts combined with Washington Sunder’s Super Over show helped India beat Sri Lanka in the third T20I at the Pallekele International Cricket Stadium here to sweep the series 3-0 on Tuesday.

Source: bhaskarlive.in

[x-mencomics]

The Uncanny X-Men #176 - Decisions

South Pacific Ocean.

Honeymoon time! Scott and Madelyne fly a plane to an island to celebrate their wedding (last issue). Madelyne asks if Scott has made a decision about leaving earth with his father (last issue again). Scott says he has not. Suddenly, the weather turns violent and there's wind, rain, lightning, and a lot of turbulence. Lightning strikes the plane and the electrical systems shut down. The plane starts falling towards the ocean, but being the excellent pilots they are, Scott and Madelyne land safely on the water. They climb out of the cockpit to examine the damage, and discuss getting the engines back in working order. And then a shark jumps up and tries to bite Scott! Scott blasts it with his powers. The shark swims away, but gets caught in some HUGE purple tentacles...

Japan.

Wolverine returns to Mariko's ancestral seat. He says now that Mastermind has been beaten, his influence over Mariko should be ended, and they can be together again. But Mariko disagrees. Because of Mastermind's manipulations, her family is now tied to a criminal underworld, something she wants to UNtie her family from. And she wants to do it alone. Wolverine says he understands. He leaves her again.

Washington, D.C.

Henry Peter Gyrich (see issue #142) arrives at the US Capitol for a meeting with the National Security Advisor, Judge Petrie. Gyrich assumes the meeting will be about "Project Wideawake," but he isn't sure - Petrie didn't say. At the meeting, Petrie explains that Magneto destroyed Varykino, a city in Russia, after the Soviets failed to disarm their nuclear weapons as ordered by Magneto (see X-Men #150 where the X-Men stopped Magneto from destroying anything OTHER than the Russian city). A woman at the meeting, Dr. Valerie Cooper, explains how mutants like Magneto and the X-Men have been appearing in many countries around the world, and that some governments want to use mutants' abilities for their own hostile interests - as assassins, spies, etc. She says the US must use its own mutant population to strike back against this. Gyrich worries that the government using mutants in this way may cause mutants to believe Magneto's argument - that humanity will use and eventually enslave mutants. Dr. Cooper says that mutants are a danger and must be dealt with at once.

New York City.

Callisto, the former leader of the Morlocks, visits Caliban. She's joined by Masque and Sunder. They discuss Caliban's obsession with Kitty and how foolish Caliban must feel since Kitty left the tunnels with the rest of the X-Men. Callisto says she intends to bring Kitty back to Caliban. Caliban seems very pleased about this.

South Pacific Ocean.

Scott and Madelyne get the engines of the plane working. Madelyne goes to pull up the plane's anchor and TENTACLES! The huge purple tentacles wrap around her and pull her underwater. Scott jumps in after her and gives the gigantic octopus a few optic blasts before finally unleashing a full power blast which explodes the octopus. They scramble back on the plane, start the engines and take off. Scott tells Madelyne he has decided not to go to space with his father after all. Instead, he wants to stay with Madelyne on earth and start a family.

[livenews24x7hindi]

रोहित शर्मा ने खोया आपा, खिलाड़ी को मारने दौड़े, क्या था पूरा मामला?

रोहित शर्मा श्रीलंका के खिलाफ खेले जा रहे सीरीज के दूसरे मैच के दौरान मजाक-मजाक में एक खिलाड़ी को मारने के लिए दौड़े। इसका वीडियो सोशल मीडिया पर खूब वायरल हो रहा है। भारत और श्रीलंका के बीच तीन मैचों की सीरीज का दूसरा वनडे कोलंबो के आर प्रेमदासा स्टेडियम में खेला गया। इस मैच में टीम इंडिया को 32 रनों से हार का सामना करना पड़ा। जबकि, सीरीज का पहला मैच टाई रहा था। ऐसे में अब टीम इंडिया इस सीरीज में…

[writer59january13]

Strong suspicion a 2024 presidential win...

for the trumpeting don spells loss for democracy after inauguration day witnesses his swearing-in nepotism will run rampant lawlessness the name of the game of thrones breaking apart ramparts of inalienable rightful freedoms rent sunder, whereby nothin can stop formidable has-been former forty fifth commander in chief to wreak havoc giving boogeymen run for his money. I cannot vote for that coiffed ogre - tough luck such as imprisonment doled out to "losers" - dragging them by scruff of their neck delegating his henchmen charged analogous to applying assault, battery and rape ever ready and rough each likened as assigned kapo spewing ala blow torch dragon

puffing out following remaining poetic lines dashed off in a huff - based on the scary political fracas - that a looming presidential nightmare doth not become reality show - apprenticing "Three Billy Goats Gruff" (Norwegian: De tre bukkene Bruse), a Norwegian fairy tale collected by Peter Christen Asbjørnsen

and J��rgen Moe in their Norske Folkeeventyr, first published between 1841 and 1844 requiring dye hard adherents to fluff up their orange hair and douse body courtesy sunlamps or other tanning equipment to affect getting more than enough emitted rays of ultraviolet (UV) radiation (courtesy booth installed

in every congressional seat) sycophants forever believing unhealthy glow (viz Rudolph) never enough while spending taxpayers money sitting on her/his respective duff meanwhile United States in general, and Washington District of Columbia in particular (the epitome western civilization) exemplifying City on a Hill,

a phrase derived from the teaching of salt and light in Jesus's Sermon on the Mount incorporated in political rhetoric in United States politics that of a declaration of American exceptionalism to refer to America acting as a "beacon of hope" for the world, when suddenly such grandeur precariously perched atop figurative bluff. Airing thoughts - no matter aye ham juiced one twenty first century piddling, noodling, and muddling ape poetic license serves as genuine esse cape to fly (during pitch black hours of night) on his witch a ma call it... to escape temporarily the cares and concerns of an uncertain world, where as an outlier

from the madding crowd I gape at forecasting sheer insanity, where vetted trumpeting drag queens dolled up as pansexual strumpets while they seductively eat crumpets soulfully bellow chilling hate innate prejudice and senselessness purr blind faith toward self avowed demigod – seize whore viz Cesar wind blown kickstarting mobs stir twittering paypal purchased

Monty Python's Flying Circus pretenders smelling of musk crowdsourcing Amazon sized nasty and brutish bodyguards to evict ruckus-causing murmur oh...how the controlling fiends will let this country go to hell in handbasket, and rack up stratospheric global debt cause zing at least one measly mortal male to fret

totalitarian rule will force every man, woman and child to march....het two...three...four, while the billionaire turns a third blind eye speeds away in his foo fighter jet argh...heavens to Betsy, how did fickle finger of fate let pompous ass vacuum up majority votes across world wide net to finagle vox populi,

and groom hooligan nasty ruffian thugs delivering smashed face upon those deemed peevish pet Long story short -

pondering my rental circumstance will be upended if this ret chad, evil, googly-eyed, gastronomic,

narcissistic bullish don will set the spark for world war three - unless....Katrina and the Waves, superman or the Sabrina can oust him yet.

[all-about-news24x7]

Mukesh Ambani, Google CEO Sunder Pichai Among Guests At State Dinner Hosted For PM Modi - Jammu Kashmir Latest News | Tourism

Washington, Jun 23: Big names in the tech world and billionaire industrialists such as Mukesh Ambani, Google CEO Sunder Pichai and Apple CEO Tim Cook were among those invited to the State Dinner hosted in honour of Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the White House on Thursday.The menu, comprising mostly vegetarian dishes, taking note of the dietary restrictions of the visiting prime minister,…

[anuragsinghs-blog]

Ravi Shastri dubbed it the best performance of IPL 2020 so far, tweeting name of player

Ravi Shastri dubbed it the best performance of IPL 2020 so far, tweeting name of player

[ad_1]

Image Source: GETTY IMAGES Ravi Shastri dubbed it the best performance of IPL 2020 so far, tweeting the namea of ​​the player

Everyone had their eyes on the match between Royal Challengers Bangalore and Mumbai Indians on Monday night. Ho, why not at the present time, the teams of the two legendary batsmen of the world, Virat…

[newsyatra]

Ravi Shastri dubbed it the best performance of IPL 2020 so far, tweeting the name of the player - रवि शास्त्री ने इसे करार दिया अभी तक के आईपीएल 2020 का बेस्ट परफॉर्मेंस, ट्वीट कर बताया खिलाड़ी का नाम

Ravi Shastri dubbed it the best performance of IPL 2020 so far, tweeting the name of the player – रवि शास्त्री ने इसे करार दिया अभी तक के आईपीएल 2020 का बेस्ट परफॉर्मेंस, ट्वीट कर बताया खिलाड़ी का नाम

[ad_1]

Image Source : GETTY IMAGES Ravi Shastri dubbed it the best performance of IPL 2020 so far, tweeting the namea of the player

सोमवार रात रॉयल चैलेंजर्स बैंगलोर और मुंबई इंडियंस के बीच हुए मुकाबले पर हर किसी की निगाहें थी। हो भी क्यों ना मौजूदा समय में दुनिया के दो दिग्गज बल्लेबाज विराट कोहली और रोहित शर्मा की टीमें जो आपस में भिड़ रही थी। हर किसी को इस मैच से जिस तरह…