Left Jabs

  T he Ukrainian P-1 Sun interceptor is a small drone that hunts bigger drones. It seeks and destroys the Shahed drones currently being used to such devastating effect by Russia against Ukraine, and by Iran against the entire Middle East region. Shooting one down is no small thing. Just a month ago, the conventional wisdom was that the only way to neutralize a $50,000 Shahed was with a $3 million Patriot missile, which the U.S. has been using up at a rate that has Putin and Xi cackling with glee. Now Ukraine has turned that math on its head. The P-1 Sun can be mass-produced for $1,000 apiece. It’s built from 3-D printed parts and off-the-shelf components. It’s modular, so you can swap out the camera, battery, radio module, and explosive payload, using tools from Home Depot. Every part except the camera is made in Ukraine, and they’re working hard to develop their own camera. They can build up to 50,000 P-1s per month. The P-1 is impressive on a lot of levels...

  Back in the days when there was still a filter, sort of, on Trump’s brain, Nancy Pelosi tried to explain his inexplicable behavior on the world stage, famously concluding that “All roads lead to Putin.” Nothing has changed. The same questions about Trump and Putin that we’ve had since 2015 remain unresolved, which doesn’t mean they haven’t been answered. They have indeed been answered, and in painstaking detail. It’s just that they’ve been neither acknowledged in the legacy media, nor pursued by law enforcement. Trump is, has been, and always will be doing Putin’s bidding. It’s hard to think of any move made by Trump and his toadies that hasn’t in some way been helpful to Putin and harmful to us. Almost as if Putin planned it that way. The list of these betrayals is endless, and most of us know the obvious ones, though it will take decades to unravel the less obvious ones. Still, everything Trump has done fits the basic pattern: bad for us, good for Putin....

  “Peace talks” are usually plural — I can’t remember any war where there was just one, singular peace talk. Until now. One peace talk, one failure. The Vance delegation — is that an oxymoron? — picked up its toys and went home. They came back with nothing. Which is no more than what we deserve. I’m uncomfortable writing “we” in the context of some Trump-caused calamity, so please do not construe it as an endorsement of any word or deed being carried out in my country’s name. Take it to mean merely the “American side” of some international embarrassment. “We” is not me. I have no say in what “we” do. And the people who do have a say are idiots. At least I get to watch. We’ve arrived at the bargaining stage of the stupidest war in the nation’s history. How we got here is disgraceful. Whatever we come away with, however humiliating, serves us right. But whatever happens, it’s clear that we’re negotiating from weakness. We’re weak because we’ve been weakened ...

  He thought it would be over in three days. Swoop in, decapitate the government, install a new one, piece of cake. Instead it’s turned into an extended exercise in barbarity, targeting civilian populations, destroying infrastructure, and ruining multiple economies, with no apparent strategy or purpose beyond stroking a sociopath’s ego. Are we talking about Trump or Putin here? Iran or Ukraine? Hard to tell from just that paragraph. The similarities are as striking as the differences, the big difference being that Iran is just getting started, while Ukraine is a more mature catastrophe, four years in the making. Another difference is that Ukraine’s impact on the world economy after four years will prove to be a mere fraction of Iran’s after a few months. But Ukraine has been the harbinger of a new kind of war, which is now ready for prime time. Asymmetric war. Goliath-versus-David war. Total offense versus shrewd defense. Fertile ground for atrocities and war ...

  It’s hard to say what constitutes an emergency these days. We can look in any direction and see one coming. We constantly blink in disbelief that one deranged individual seems bent on bringing down the whole planet, for no discernible reason other than it looks like fun. Yes, for a certain kind of sociopath, blowing shit up does look like fun. The same sort of fun a delinquent middle schooler might have setting off illegal cherry bombs in the boys’ room. Same mentality, a billion times more dangerous. There’s a race against time going on. For reasons that have the whole world baffled, the only chance of stopping this monster is waiting for the midterms and hoping for the best. That’s, um, eight months away. As infuriating as that is to us, imagine what it’s like for people in other countries, none of whom have any control over the cataclysmic disruptions, born of sheer whimsy, that now threaten their lives. Living inside the economic blast radius of this ...

  I n 1937, Nikolai Yezhov was the second most powerful man in the Soviet Union. He was head of Stalin’s secret police, the dreaded NKVD, which was rebranded years later as the KGB. Most important, he was, at least for the moment, in Stalin’s good graces, a precarious place to be. As he well knew. Yezhov was everything Stephen Miller wants to be. He was the guy responsible for carrying out what became known as the Great Terror. His job was the systematic and ruthless elimination, often through summary execution, of anyone Stalin suspected might be an “enemy of the people.” This was a lengthy list, numbering in the many thousands, and from all reports Yezhov made a substantial dent in it. That year, there was an official photo taken of Stalin, Yezhov, and two others  walking along a canal in Moscow.  (One of the others was Vyacheslav Molotov, whose notorious cocktails had not yet been introduced).  A mere three years later, Yezhov was out of the ...