The post Shakira nails Putin appeared first on Occasional Planet.
]]>What rhymes with Putin?
I don’t know Ukrainian, but I’m sure Ukrainians have their zingers.
In English, Zero clued in works.
Rasputin stand-in does the job.
This frivolous Putin query comes as we approach the anniversary of a madman’s attempt to rewrite world history. On February 24th, 2022, Putin let loose the power of the Russian military – with a destructive force not seen in Europe since World War 2 – on a peaceable neighbor, Ukraine. There was nothing frivolous about Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine.
What rhymes with madman?
Con man.
Convinced I can.
Bad man.
Putin thought he was invincible.
What rhymes with invincible?
Despicable.
Unpredictable.
Unthinkable.
This time last year, Putin was on top of the world, about to rewrite Russian history; he imagined himself emulating Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst, also known as Catherine the Great, once Empress of Russia, his long dead and gone heroine.
What rhymes with Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst?
I have no idea.
I do know what rhymes with Putin’s attempt to rewrite history.
Dark night.
Quenched light.
Instead of imposing his will on the populace of Ukraine, approximately 44 million souls, or about the populations of Florida and New York State combined, or even Ohio, Michigan, North Carolina, New Hampshire and Georgia combined, Putin became the first easily identifiable despot of our new century, shockingly pushed back to where he came from by the pure force of Ukrainian willpower.
What rhymes with despot?
Guess what?
Crackpot.
On February 24th, 2022, Putin lent his name to a mega invasion of a nonbelligerent neighbor on an international level never imagined. The consequences were disastrous.
In November, 2022, mere months ago and just months after Putin’s initial decision to ‘take’ Ukraine, the BBC reported that the most senior US general, Gen Mark Milley, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, estimated that 100,000 Russian and 100,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed or injured in the war in Ukraine so far. Gen Milley added that at least 40,000 civilians had died by November of last year.
Thanks to our zero clued in, Rasputin stand-in, demented man in Moscow, epicenter of Putin’s mythical former USSR, innocent lives are being lost on a daily basis in Ukraine in numbers that are nothing short of abominable.
What rhymes with abominable?
Dishonorable.
Unconscionable.
And what rhymes with demented?
Disoriented.
Unbefriended.
Dented – big time where it counts, in Putin’s internal psyche.
Lest we get suckered into a Putin-defined cesspit and bogged down in the mindset of an autocrat, I was inspired by one of the catchiest songs of 2023 so far, the brilliant Colombian Shakira’s take-down of her ex, to imagine how Putin might deserve his own rhyming put-down.
In a hugely publicized 2022 breakup, the former Barcelona football player Gerard Piqué left Shakira, his wife of 12 years and the mother of his 2 children, for a new paramour, a much younger woman called Clara Chía.
Shakira is resilient if anything. She is no push-over. On Jan 11th, she released a masterpiece, a blockbuster hit with the enigmatic title of SHAKIRA || BZRP Music Sessions #53.
Even though sung in Spanish, the title shot to the top of Apple’s iTunes charts in the U.S. on release. Many, so many of us it would seem, can resonate with revenge. The song’s video, with English subtitles, went viral. The song is not only catchy, bitching and biting, but cathartic. It broke YouTube records, registering more than 64 million views within 24 hours. Lord, does Ukraine need revenge!
Think about it for a minute. Millions upon millions of us can resonate with what is happening to Shakira. Millions more of us around the world identify with what is happening to Ukraine. Billions of us have reasons to get angry with Putin over Ukraine daily. The man seems unaccountable.
What rhymes with unaccountable?
Incomprehensible.
Unfathomable.
Shakira is a genius at rhyming. In her Spanish lyrics for SHAKIRA || BZRP Music Sessions #53, she found a way to connect her philandering ex, Piqué, to mortification, (te mortifique), chewing up (mastique), and a host of other rhymes and homonyms that might be enough reason for any year-abroad undergraduate or graduate student to want to learn Spanish. Shakira doesn’t let go. The video has already had 288,109,016 views on YouTube as of this writing. It’s averaging more than 5 million new views daily.
Imagine if Shakira took on Putin?
Imagine how she, stand-in for Ukraine, could destroy this pseudo Westerner, this false Russian prophet, this wannabe Catharine the Great, this Putin, with just a few rhymes and words.
Shakira can do that. She has that power. She is, after all, the reigning queen of World Cup Soccer anthems. Her Waka Waka video from the 2010 World Cup has had more than 3,472,939,423 (3 billion!) views.
Shakira knows how to garner world attention. Sorry Piqué. Maybe she’s right. Maybe you did choose a Twingo over a Ferrari, just as Putin fell into his own Twingo hell with his decision to try to absorb Urkaine into a mythical Russia.
Here’s how Shakira might put Putin – our present-day world pariah – in his place. And here, too, is how that very same Putin might feel, shamed, hearing himself belittled in a song where billions more than the billions that have watched Shakira’s Waka Waka see him as a wuss.
Just imagine Shakira’s singing these rhymes as she does on SHAKIRA || BZRP Music Sessions #53, but addressed to Putin, and here we go:
Putin?
Zero clued in
Rasputin stand-in
Madman?
Con man.
Convinced I can.
Bad man.
Invincible?
Despicable.
Unpredictable.
Unthinkable.
Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst?
History rewrite?
Dark night.
Quenched light.
Despot?
Guess what.
Crackpot.
Abominable.
Dishonorable.
Unconscionable.
Demented.
Disoriented.
Unbefriended.
Dented
Unaccountable?
Incomprehensible.
Unfathomable.
Despicable.
Unpredictable.
Unthinkable.
Abominable.
Dishonorable.
Unconscionable.
The post Shakira nails Putin appeared first on Occasional Planet.
]]>The post How Loose Lips from Obama Hurt America and the World appeared first on Occasional Planet.
]]>Barack Obama was clearly one of the most cerebral and well-spoken presidents that the United States has ever had. But as odd as it may seem, two slips of his tongue may have led to the rise of the two worst dictators so far in the 21st Century.
In 2011, Obama spoke at the White House Correspondents Dinner. One of the guests was Donald Trump. Obama showed little mercy when while looking at Trump, he said, “No one is happier, no one is prouder to put this birth certificate matter to rest than the Donald. And that’s because he can finally get back to focusing on the issues that matter, like: Did we fake the moon landing? What really happened in Roswell? And where are Biggie and Tupac?” Obama also included a fake video of his birth and an artist’s rendition of what the White House would look like if Trump was president, further embarrassing Trump.
You can see the five-minute video here:
As you might expect, Trump was not pleased by being the butt of the jokes. Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie said Trump was “pissed off like I’d never seen him before.”
Trump had played around with the idea of running fore president before the 2011 Correspondents Dinner. But the events that evening truly crystallized his hate towards Obama as well as any Democrat who held him in low regard. In June of 2015, Trump announced that he was running for president in 2016. He decimated the rest of the Republican field of candidates and then lost to Hillary Clinton by nearly three million popular votes, but won the outdated and undemocratic Electoral College.
The second faux pas by Obama came in 2014. In March of that year, shortly after Vladimir Putin and Russia had invaded Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine, Obama called Russia a “regional power.” Specifically, he said, “Russia is a regional power that is threatening some of its immediate neighbors, not out of strength but out of weakness.” Obama describes in in more detail in the following 50-second video:
Knowing what we know now about Putin, it is no surprise that he would be humiliated and outraged at the thought of Russia being called a regional power. After all, his dream as president of Russia was to re-establish the old Soviet Union, with all seventeen republics. He felt that Russia and the Soviet Union had a long and proud history of being a global power and he want to reassert what had been lost at the end of the twentieth century when Mikhail Gorbachev orchestrated to collapse of the Soviet Union in order to give more autonomy to each of the republics.
We cannot say that Obama’s demeaning remarks about Russia caused Putin to bully and ultimately further invade Ukraine in 2022, but it certainly did not help. Putin was also irritated by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who repeatedly criticized Putin and Russia for the lack of fair and democratic elections.
Generally, Barack Obama measures his words as well as anyone. You can see it, particularly in his press conferences, when he often pauses between phrases to make sure that the next thing that he says is precisely what he is thinking and not something that he will later regret.
Life is full of ironies, and the fact that Barack Obama may well have significantly contributed to the rise of dictators Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin can be considered unexpected and certainly unfortunate. It is further evidence that we all make mistakes, even when we try our best to avoid them.
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]]>The post Back in the USSR appeared first on Occasional Planet.
]]>In 1959, Chuck Berry had a hit with a song called Back in the USA, a rock ‘n roll propelled love anthem to America. The lyrics went:
Oh well, oh well, I feel so good today
We touched ground on an international runway
… New York, Los Angeles, oh, how I yearned for you
Detroit, Chicago, Chattanooga, Baton Rouge
Let alone just to be at my home back in ol’ St. Lou
.… Well, I’m so glad I’m livin’ in the U.S.A.
Yes, I’m so glad I’m livin’ in the U.S.A.
Anything you want, we got right here in the U.S.A.
Just about a decade later, in November 1968, the Beatles led off their White Album with a tongue-in-cheek riff on the East-West divide going on at the time, a track called Back in the USSR, a shout-out to Chuck Berry.
The Beatles lyrics went:
… back in the USSR
You don’t know how lucky you are, boy
Back in the US
Back in the US
Back in the USSR
Then the Beatles segued into a spoof of the Beach Boys – California Girls:
… Well the Ukraine girls really knock me out
They leave the west behind
And Moscow girls make me sing and shout
And then back to:
… I’m back in the USSR
You don’t know how lucky you are, boys
Back in the USSR
The Beatles brought many new Russian fans on board with Back in the USSR, among them a certain Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, the very same thug now directing genocide against the people of Ukraine. But the Beatles were just messing around. Back in the USSR was not a love anthem to the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union had just invaded Czechoslovakia in August of that same year, 1968, and the Beatles were well aware of that. The song had its base in irony.
In a changed world, Paul McCartney later sang the song at a concert in Moscow’s Red Square in 2003, and Putin was in attendance. At that Red Square concert, everywhere you looked Moscovites were rockin’ and rollin,’ happy as hell that they were being acknowledged by McCartney. Putin was deadpan, perhaps already fixated on how he might recreate the empire that the Beatles had satirized and that McCartney was now flaunting right in front of him in Moscow. Putin was not amused by the irony.
All water under the bridge now that Comrade Vlad has directed his military might to invade and attempt to choke off life in Ukraine.
Despite the passage of time, inter-connected world economies, the acceptance of Russia as a partner, glasnost, the internet, Facebook, TikTok, Telegram and Twitter, here we are looking at an East-West divide, the likes of which we never imagined possible at the beginning of the third decade of the 21st century.
And what the fu .. why (expletive removed)?
Well, just maybe because Putin, going about his daily life as a dictator par excellence in Russia in 2022, has an ego even greater than Trump’s. Putin is mega-egotistical, eager for a mention in history equal to that of his heroine Catherine the Great, paranoiac in the extreme and, unfortunately for the rest of us, someone with a uniquely manhood-threatened view of civilization. He has his finger on a nuclear trigger, something that Stalin and Hitler never had. His mention in history, if the there ever is a history after this, is sure to be in the column of the latter.
Once, we might have imagined, in our innocence, that Paul McCartney knew what he was doing, penning a guitar-driven rock song that the world – Russia included – could twist-and-shout to.
Oh, how silly we were.
All the while, our real future was being decided in Comrade Putin’s mind.
Here in the USA, we were dutifully electing a new President every four years. Back in the USSR of his dreams, the de facto ruler of Russia since December 1999, according to Wikipedia, Putin was upending the last 22 years of history, consolidating power, readying his new Russia for the moment when he might recreate some semblance of his lost Soviet empire.
Soviet, you might just reasonably ask, What is that exactly?
Basically, Soviet is a synonym for Communist, an elected community council that makes decisions for a society, a country, no dissension allowed.
It’s a world vision that went out of favor in 1991 when the Soviet Union was dissolved, an empire that consisted of none other than Russia, but also Ukraine, Georgia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia.
In the world at large, we may have thought Soviet was forever gone from our reality, a thing of the past.
In 1991, the Soviet Union was replaced by something called the Commonwealth of Independent States. The Bush Administration at the time quickly recognized the independence of Ukraine and other former Soviet republics. And some of those newly independent states immediately understood their opportunity. Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, fast aligned themselves with Europe and the West, and over a relatively short period of time became NATO members.
And so Soviet was gone from the world stage, or so we wished ourselves into thinking.
Except, Soviet was not gone. Soviet had one major shareholder remaining.
That major USSR shareholder was not at all discouraged, put off or disheartened by past Soviet setbacks or failures, but in a cockeyed view of world politics, found himself not only the President of Russia, but capable of invading a previous ally to inflict unprecedented death, pain and destruction on Ukraine.
That shareholder’s name is Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.
His goal?
To drag us all back to a pre-McCartney, pre-Beatles era, to a psuedo-utopia, a ghost empire that he has convinced himself he can regroup called the USSR?
What a blockhead, what a fu..-up (expletive again removed.)
Pardon my French.
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]]>The post Venezuela: Ukraine comes home to roost appeared first on Occasional Planet.
]]>Ukraine, for many Americans is way out there – somewhere in the nowhere land of Uzbekistan or North Korea. Ukraine is very far away from our daily lives.
And yet, it may be worth our while paying a little attention to what’s going on in Ukraine right now. It might just have consequences for all of us down the line.
A friend went home to spend Christmas with family in Venezuela – a much closer geography. He tells me that the dollarization of the Venezuelan economy is to all extents and purposes done. Motorcycle delivery guys can now make change for a $20 US bill with 20 US $1 bills. The bolivar is history. The surprise was that, in addition to paying for goods and services in dollars, in Venezuela my friend could now also pay with Russian rubles.
It’s a small, but pertinent, detail.
Venezuela, along with the rest of Caribbean, Central and South America, were once unequivocally considered to be under the umbrella of US purview. Let’s not forget the Cuban Missile Crisis as an earlier attempt to disrupt that way of the world. And yet, quietly, and somewhat menacingly to a distracted US, Russia has in recent years again begun to spread its tentacles into the economic heart of one of our neighbors immediately to our south.
How many rubles go about their daily lives in Venezuela? Nobody knows.
Food is once again abundant in Caracas, at least and perhaps not only, in its better neighborhoods. There are whispers of hope in the air. The dollar is now king. If you have dollars, you can not only just get by, but also even live well. The caveat, of course, is that you have dollars. Those millions of Venezuelans who had, out of necessity, to flee Venezuela in recent years are not in that column. After you force the poor, the needy and the undesirable out, you can aspire to a thriving society, apparently. Regrettably, we’ve seen attempts at that scenario before in our history. When you muscle any segment of your population out, you are veering far away from accepted norms of decency.
Almost suddenly, after years of waste, destruction and damage to the lives of its citizens and the infrastructure of the country, Venezuela is now signaling an economic shift. By the end of December 2021, the country had doubled its petroleum output from just a year before – not back to when Venezuela was a major force in petroleum production worldwide, but a long way toward a surprising and flag-waving celebratory candle cake for the Maduro regime.
Money is once again flowing, if not into Venezuela – at least not from the known Western world, then definitively round and about within its borders. What kind of money, again we don’t entirely know. So many Venezuelans have been sanctioned by the United States that now those very same Venezuelan citizens may just have decided to keep their enormous wealth home and plow it back into their country’s economy. Sanctions are flawed, and in this case, perhaps, counter-productive to US interests. Money needs a sanctuary. And just maybe, Venezuela is now a sanctuary for its own and odd money in general.
And in this repositioning of Venezuela, the ground has shifted.
Russia and China are now firmly ensconced, along with Iran, as Venezuela’s allies, protectors and supporters.
Why is that important?
Because this is happening in the Americas, just a little less than 2,000 miles south of Key West. This is not some distant Ukraine, Belarus or Uzbekistan.
For better or worse, for decades after WW2, it was taken as a given that the Americas were within the United States general sphere of interest and influence. We had sometimes benign and at times harmful relationships with nations within that domain.
Russia, on the other hand, had all of Eastern Europe, and not coincidentally, Ukraine and the Stan countries at its southern borders, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan et al to do with whatever it wished.
East was East, and West was West.
Except that many of the countries under Russian overview weren’t happy with that division. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, those nations grabbed at the chance of change. Ukraine wanted autonomy from its overseer, Russia. Ukraine wanted to shift its essential values westward. As did Poland, the Czech Republic, Lithuania, Estonia and many of the former Russian affiliates.
And Europe opened its bosom.
Europe said, Come on in!
Ukraine was a big fan of the EU, and Ukraine said, Let’s do it.
And all was good, for a while.
Then came Putin, a Russian ultranationalist, a man obsessed with Russian power and superiority, a man with an exaggerated ego rarely seen in history – Thump not withstanding, a man focused on a Soviet-style view of the world as a greater Russia reinvigorated, a man who feels Ukraine’s aspirations as somehow a threat to his nationalistic manhood.
Cuba means nothing to Putin. He has done nothing to alleviate Cuba’s pain. Venezuela, on the other hand, sitting atop the world’s largest oil reserves -greater even than Saudi Arabia’s, means a lot.
And if Ukraine can be European, maybe Venezuela can be Russian, if you will.
Welcome to Putin’s worldview.
In Venezuela, Putin gets to mess with America like never before.
Almost overnight in the Ukraine crisis now upon us, all bets are off.
On Jan 14th, the BBC reported that …
Russia is not excluding a presence in Cuba or Venezuela; quite the opposite, in fact. Russia is positioning itself for a major confrontation that may just include the Americas.
Putin’s focus is far beyond Ukraine.
So we might just think about projecting ourselves a little bit (or a lot) into our near future.
Russia invades Ukraine.
The US imposes unprecedented sanctions on Russia’s banks and ways of doing business with the rest of the world.
Russia reacts. Russia sends military equipment and/or troops to Venezuela and Cuba.
Then what?
The US sends troops to Colombia?
A young Colombian friend of mine was already thinking about that possibility in a conversation with his friends at lunchtime here in Bogotá today.
Those with upcoming military service are worried, he told me.
And so, Ukraine has come home to roost.
Ukraine is not so far away at all, as it turns out. In fact, perhaps Ukraine is already here.
So now what?
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]]>The post Putin wins Round One in Iowa appeared first on Occasional Planet.
]]>Yes, there is no evidence that the cause of the tabulation fiasco in Iowa was because of Russian hacking. But the elephant in the room (besides Donald Trump) has to be Vladimir Putin, who put the fear of disruption in the hearts and minds of all “woke” Americans.
Putin did not need to do anything in Iowa except let his reputation precede him. The powers-that-be in the Iowa Democratic Party, organizers of the caucuses, wanted to try a streamlined method reporting results from each of the 1,681 caucus sites to the central tabulation center in the state capital of Des Moines. They chose to use a new app on smartphones that would immediately communicate results from each of the venues to headquarters.
If this was as recent as the Iowa caucuses four years ago, months before the public learned of Russian efforts to destabilize American democracy by probing and poking into our system of digital communication, there would not have been a problem. The app would have been thoroughly tested and coding errors or other glitches would have been resolved well before the actual caucuses began.
However, in the world of 2020 electronic reporting, we know that Vladimir Putin in Russia and cyber-stalkers in other countries are looking for ways to penetrate American vulnerabilities. When they actually hit a home run, they are able to steal or manipulate data and use if for their disreputable purposes. But they can also be very effective with a “doubles offense” in which the only impact that they have on the United States is to reinforce the fear that exists about the possibility of hacking.
The “doubles offense” is what happened in Iowa this past Monday night. The Democratic caucus organizers did not want to engage in beta testing of their new app in advance of the gatherings for fear that Russia, or some other country or groups of cyber-hackers would engage in nefarious conduct and try to disrupt the system. By not testing the system, they went to a default assumption that it would work fine.
Had it worked as anticipated, everything would have gone smoothly in Iowa. However, there was some sort of an error in the app, perhaps in coding, perhaps in compatibility with the outside world, that brought chaos to reporting the results from around the state to the site of central data tabulation.
The apparent work-arounds did not work. Phoning results in from the field to the central office did not work because there was not a high capacity phone bank at Des Moines headquarters to handle calls from over 1,500 remote sites. In some cases, representatives of nearby caucuses chose to jump in their cars and literally drive their results to the Des Moines headquarters. That did not work because the officials were not allowing outsiders to enter the building.
It’s easy to mock what happened in Iowa and the individuals who designed and implemented the strategy for the evening. But they were in a place in which many of us currently find ourselves; overwhelmed by the complexities of modern computing power. This time it was the Democrats of Iowa who made the seemingly avoidable mistakes; next time it will be someone else.
Two quick lessons that can be learned: (a) we cannot be vigilant enough, and (b) KISS [Keep It Simple, Stupid]; i.e. a straight-up popular vote elections makes counting and recording much simpler than the likes of caucuses or even the Electoral College. Let’s be smart out there!
This article is cross-posted in the POLITICAL INTROVERTS web site.
The post Putin wins Round One in Iowa appeared first on Occasional Planet.
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