What Just Happened 25
Week in Review and Fine Weekend Reading
Welcome. Let’s see what’s going on in the world this week. Today is Saturday, August 26th, 2023.
It used to be said that, at least in the northeast, Labor Day marked the traditional end of summer. I’m not sure if folks think that way anymore up there, but down here in the southeast the heat can hang around for another month or more. True to form for late August, the temperature flirted with 100 degrees here in Atlanta all week. Congratulations to those for whom crisp fall morning are only a short time away.
So much Donald Trump news happened here in town this week that today’s CS&W feels partly like a local Atlanta edition. We also look at the state of the Russian government, we wrap up an unsatisfying political summer in Thailand, we consider what the BRICS are building, India’s moon shot, and we follow all that with your weekly selection of fine weekend reading.
RUSSIA: The leader and the founder of the Wagner group reportedly died in the air over Tver in Russia on Wednesday. The free reign granted Evgeny Pregozhin across the Russia Federation after his aborted coup attempt apparently, and unsurprisingly, wasn’t free at all. His apparent death came two months to the day after his coup attempt.
Also on the fatal flight’s passenger manifest, and said to be among the casualties, was Dmitry Utkin, who gave the Wagner Group its name. A CBS News story explains the origin of the Wagner name:
"A nationalist with Nazi sympathies, Utkin's callsign in the Russian services was said to have been 'Wagner' — a nod to Nazi leader Adolf Hitler's love for the 19th century German composer of the same name."
So now Wagner has been decapitated. What does it imply?
Does it suggest that Putin’s loyalists have been using these two months to somehow consolidate control of Wagner’s various mining concessions across the Sahel before killing Pregozhin? Will Wagner disarray mean the undoing of Central African Republic President Faustin-Archange Touadéra, whose regime has been propped up by Wagner? Does Lukashenka sleep more easily in Belarus with a trained and armed militia loyal to someone else no longer in residence? (There are reports that Wagner mercenaries were already leaving Belarus before the deaths of its leadership.) Those questions are speculative, but I think we can make one larger point with more certainty.
Brian Whitmore, now with the Atlantic Council, wrote Wednesday night that historically, political change has come to Russia when three factors have been present: “a divided elite (check), a dissatisfied public (check), and an absence of fear.” He contended that if Prigozhin had been left unpunished for his mutiny, the third condition would have been met and “the regime would have been in peril.”
Seems to me that a regime that finds it necessary to blow an airplane carrying its own officials out of the sky demonstrates not just a divided elite, but fright, at the very center of a hierarchy that fears it is losing its grip on power. That suggests that Mr. Putin fears he has already started down the slippery slope to peril.
BELARUS: Not directly related but intriguingly, the Belarusian state news agency BelTA published remarks by Alexandr Lukashenka on August 11th in which he sent a conciliatory message for the West:
“Now we make money primarily in the East: in Russia, China. But we must not discard contacts with the high-tech West. They are nearby, the European Union is our neighbor. And we should maintain contacts with them. We are ready for this, but there should be due consideration for our interests. Believe me, the time will come (using your professional terms, I would say that now we are going through the period of turbulence), and in 2024-2025 there will be serious changes in the world.”
“Lukashenko also said that Belarus needs to talk to the Poles and that he told the prime minister to contact them. “If they want, we can talk, patch up our relations,” he said. “We are neighbors, and this is something you cannot choose, neighbors are given by God.” Poland’s deputy foreign minister responded by saying that if Belarus wants to have good relations with Poland, it should stop attacks on their shared border and release Polish prisoners from Belarusian prisons.”
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THAILAND:
A political party that failed to win Thailand’s May election has conspired with the Thai military to install a businessman with no political experience as prime minister. The combined Thai parliament chose Srettha Thavisin, a 60 year old real estate tycoon and founder of Sansiri, one of Thailand’s biggest property companies, as prime minister on Tuesday by 482 combined votes in the House of Representatives and the military-appointed Senate, more than the 374 votes needed for a majority. #NotMyPM trended on X/Twitter:
First, Move Forward, the winner of the election, was blocked from forming a government by conservative legislators allied with the royalist military. Second, Pheu Thai made a pre-election pledge not to do precisely that. Thus Srettha must attempt to govern a country twice disillusioned this summer alone.
Reuters reports on a poll showing Thai voters don’t want a government led by a Pheu Thai/military coalition. The poll found that “about 64% of 1,310 respondents disagreed or totally disagreed with the idea of the Pheu Thai party forming a ‘special government’ with military-backed rivals.…”
Paetongtarn Shinawatra, one of three prime ministerial candidates of Pheu Thai, apologized for breaking its campaign promise but said they were going to do it anyway.
"We have to make adjustments to keep the country going," she told reporters. "Of course, Pheu Thai has the price to pay, that is the criticism of the people. We humbly accept and apologise for making many disappointed and sad,” she said.
On the same day, Paetongtarn Shinawatra’s father Thaksin Shinawatra, the billionaire founder of Pheu Thai and former prime minister who had self-exiled to avoid detention on corruption charges, returned to Thailand, was driven to jail and spent half a night there before being transferred to hospital. Reuters reported that:
The Corrections Department said Thaksin, 74, was transferred in the early hours of Wednesday after being unable to sleep and experiencing chest tightness and high blood pressure.
"Physicians agreed that to prevent dangerous risks to his life, he be transferred to the police hospital," it said.
And thus Mr. Thaksin may end up not spending even a single full night in jail. One might be forgiven for suspecting this was all cooked up in advance by an anti-democratic/military alliance that brazenly clings to power, elections be damned.
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THE FORMER PRESIDENT: Sometimes it’s best just to pause and get regrounded. Let us consider for a moment the political content with which we’ve lately been absorbed. Mr. Trump is always absorbed by Mr. Trump, of course, like here, when he vented about Fox News on his social media channel: “Also, they purposely show the absolutely worst pictures of me, especially the big “orange” one with my chin pulled way back.”
Those of us not named Donald Trump, meanwhile, were drawn into the Great Trump/DeSantis Pork Tent Showdown. The terms Iowa State Fair and ‘high-drama’ are infrequently paired, but there it was a couple of weeks back, when the Washington Post gleefully published “Pork chops, protesters of the Florida governor and a swift visit by the former president were at the center of a high-drama day.”
“When Trump got to the pork tent midday — with DeSantis’s camp far away and resting in the shade — he didn’t partake in the actual grilling and brought an entourage of supportive lawmakers from DeSantis’s home state. They posed for selfies and passed out Make America Great Again hats to a crowd that clogged the fair’s grand concourse.”
Not to be outdone, The New York Times coverage mentioned Mr. Trump “petted a goat before being driven to the Steer N’ Stein building, where he gave brief remarks.”
If only we all could have been there!
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The high drama continued. This week’s action played out first at the would-be Trump challenger debate in Milwaukee Wednesday night, and then here locally in Atlanta, between the Rice Street jail, in an industrial area a couple of miles from downtown near Norfolk Southern’s rail yard and alongside a 95-acre data center, and the Lewis B. Slayton Courthouse in the government district near City Hall and the Georgia State Capitol, a few blocks south of the center of downtown.
“I don’t quite know how I feel yet except it’s surreal,” said CEO Charles Shaw of Foster Bail Bonds, LLC, who became the first person to bail a former president out of jail. Mr. Trump was booked amid endless media attention on Thursday night. Maggie Haberman reported that “Trump was allowed to report his own vitals, such as eye color, weight and height,” which accounts for the claim that the former president weighs 215 pounds.
Mr. Trump staged a preposterous thirty vehicle motorcade out of New Jersey, posing as if his every movement required many vehicles and yes, two ambulances. It’s fun to wonder what function the random person in car number seven, or nine, carried out in furtherance of Mr. Trump’s trip to Georgia.
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Can you just imagine the amount of time the former president spent in front of the mirror on Thursday perfecting his defiant/heroic/menacing look?
Several Democrats and local officials hoping to appear in national media, including our previous mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, hustled out to the jail on Thursday, where no human, lawyers and miscreants excepted, would otherwise go — ever — to register their putative sadness for our country rather than their actual partisan glee. We have a new young mayor named Andre Dickens who might have made a play to elevate his media profile but has kept resolutely quiet and conspicuously distant.
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Kudos and hazardous duty pay are in order to everybody involved in the production of the courthouse spectacle downtown — police, security, lawyers, media, drivers and such. It has been hot in Atlanta. I walked down one morning during the week and struggled to drag myself home without heatstroke. There are very few spots of shade, no trees and almost nothing besides concrete and asphalt down around the courthouse.
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Atlanta Journal Constitution reporter Bill Rankin reminds us that Lewis B. Slayton “was Fulton’s district attorney from 1965 to 1996. Slayton, who died in 2002, hired the office’s first Black prosecutor.” The courthouse “was built between 1911 and 1914 and is on the National Register of Historic Places.” The Fulton in Fulton County, incidentally, is said to honor Robert Fulton, inventor of the first commercially viable steamboat, although he was born in Pennsylvania and had no apparent connection to Georgia.
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It strikes me that Mr. Trump is pursuing a dual legal strategy of delay and doggedly tainting the jury pool. Perhaps that reflects fear in his heart of hearts (if any), and what he secretly thinks of his chances in the courtroom. Suppose Mr. Trump is elected president in 2024, assumes the office and pardons himself of any/all federal charges, ever. Whether he runs the federal trial gauntlet before or after the election, chances are those trials won’t be televised. The time will eventually come when the state charges against the President of the United States come to trial in Georgia, for which he won’t be pardonable. The trial, as things stand now, would be televised, and it would be the American criminal trial for the ages.
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BRICS: The grouping wrapped up its meeting in Jo’burg last week with membership invitations to Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Saudi Arabia. Early commentary seems to be that this is potentially significant, and it depends on how wieldy such a heterogenous organization can make itself. Let’s talk about that in weeks to come, but for our dog days CS&W edition, I’m wondering about a tricky rebranding. B R I C S A E E I U S doesn’t work out to much of a new acronym.
Plus or minus a few letters, how about SAUCIERS? Kind of European sounding, isn’t it? SUBRACES? We’ll have none of that. AIRBUSES? Too European by far. ABACUSES. Less bad. Rebranding BRICS is a work in progress.
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INDIA: India landed its Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft on the moon's south pole Wednesday, just days after a Russian attempt ended in a crash. It was the first soft landing ever in the polar region. There is evidence that water ice is present there, trapped in permanently shadowed craters, which explains the interest in going there.
Future explorers could use water for drinking, which would help sustain a long term moon mission, or in making rocket fuel through electrolysis, which could then be used in exploration beyond the moon.
First though, they’d have to extract it from beneath the soil, not a straightforward task in a forbidding environment. Images of American astronauts bouncing around in Michelin man spacesuits on the moon through the 1970s don’t summon a lot of confidence about how that would be done, but a few technologies have been proposed.
In microwave-assisted extraction, microwaves would heat the surface causing water molecules to vaporize. That water vapor would then be collected and condensed into liquid water. Solar energy could be used, in a process called pyrolysis, to break down water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen, which could then be collected. There are proposals for heat probes that melt the ice and vacuum pumps that suck in the water. Or astronauts could just use heavy equipment to dig into the lunar soil.
Pictures from the mission control center in India showed a whole lot of pride and unrestrained joy – and a whole lot of mission control employees, as these screen shots from live coverage show. One problem you don’t run into in India, I guess, is a shortage of labor.
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An interesting chart from the Migration Policy Institute – the most commonly spoken languages other than English and Spanish by State:
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CHINA: Part of being a party secretary in China is proceeding your communication with adverbs of intent like ‘resolutely’ and ‘steadfastly.’
Party Secretary of Hebei, Ni Yuefeng (倪岳峰) was heavily criticized on social media during the recent floods around Beijing for saying that he would do everything to reduce “the pressure on Beijing’s flood control and [to] resolutely build a ‘moat’ for the capital.
This is the special, light touch you develop as a provincial pol when your constituency is upward in the pecking order and not down with the people.
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FUN: If you haven’t yet been chased off X/Twitter quite yet, you might try a couple of funny parody accounts: @baerbockpress lampoons the German foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, who turns out to be imminently lampoonable, and @Trump_History45, documents the startlingly extensive history of the 45th president.
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WEEKEND READING
Every weekend I suggest worthwhile reading that’s guaranteed to improve your posture, your online dating prospects, and make you an all around better person. Read a dozen articles, lose five pounds. Here we go:
The desert city of Amman is running out of water. Meanwhile, officials fixate on gleaming visions of growth, perpetuating the fantasy that urban dysfunctions can be escaped rather than addressed. Lost Water
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This is no routine village. Each house owns at least one black Indian cobra, but most actually own several snakes, including cobras, kraits and vipers, locally known as Lundi Bala. None of the serpents are defanged but children play with them as if they were toys.
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Very rarely can we see an entire system reflected in one person. The creator and executive producer of “Saturday Night Live” is such a person. Who’s Afraid of Lorne Michaels?
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A little after midnight on a cold winter night. I’m in someone else’s van, driving down a highway I’ve never seen before. I’m on my way to pick up a load of marijuana and transport it across state lines.
What could go wrong?
The trip was organized at the last minute. In situations like these, you don’t ask questions. But when a friend of a friend calls to ask if you can drive to Oklahoma for a quick drug deal, it’s hard to say no.
How I Became A Modern Bootlegger
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When hundreds of my fellow Uyghurs started disappearing into ‘re-education camps’ every day, it became clear that it was only a matter of time before I would be detained. So my wife and I got ready to run. ‘If I left, I’d have to go without a word’:
How I escaped China’s mass arrests.
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How airplane legroom got so tight
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Here is Donald Trump explaining to Georgia’s head election official, “we had vast I mean the state is in turmoil over this.” The whole phone call, when written down, is a fun read. For example, President Trump:
“But Brad, if you took the minimum numbers where many, many times above the 11,779 and many of those numbers are certified, or they will be certified but they are certified.”
Read the full transcript of Trump’s phone call with Georgia secretary of state
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The wacky world of university endowments. UCLA, for instance, posts its price sheet online:
$5 million for an endowed chair that creates a new position
$2 million for an endowed chair that supplements an existing position
$3 million for a chair in the (David Geffen) School of Medicine.
$1 million for a postdoc (but how much virtue is that, really?)
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Jesse Dean Bogdonoff has been many things – proponent of orthopaedic magnetism, star financier, solar installation salesman, spiritual explorer, alleged fraudster, Buddhist devotee and saxophonist. But the peak of his fame came in 1999, when he was appointed to the Tongan royal court – as its jester. An interview.
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Attending the beating retreat ceremony at the India Pakistan border.
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Ted Gioia has ten ‘cherished touchstones’ (by that he means books) on whether you really prepare for death, or even understand it. Here they are. Death: A Literary Guide
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On leisure time. Everyone is too busy. How would we spend our time if we weren’t? What is Time For?
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Good weekend. For Tuesday’s travel tale we’ll still be in the middle of the south Atlantic Ocean, some 1800 miles east of Brazil and 1200 miles west of Angola, as we sail on to Ascension Island. See you then.
