This piece sounds about right on Putin and Russia

Beyond Putin's "tightening the screws," which we'll get to, first, per Kai Ryssdal (who's actually a neoliberal ass) "let's take a look at the numbers" in this piece from the New Yorker. 

It acknowledges that the Russian economy grew by 4 percent or so in both 2023 and 2024, but saw that rate contract in 2025, and that the economy is actually shrinking 2 percent so far this year. And, per the US definition of two consecutive quarters of contraction, yes, Russia is not quite two months away from officially being in recession.

Not a horrible one, but a recession. 

At the same time, inflation continues to rise. Russia's central bank has its prime rate at 14 percent, nearly double that of the pre-war era.

Ahh, that.

I call the invasion neither justified nor unjustified.

I do call it botched, though.

Contra people who, going beyond condemning NATO to being full apologists for Vlad the Impaler, his original plan was to capture Kiev, which Joshua Yaffa notes in this piece. And by not devoting enough men, machinery or materiel to the original effort, Putin blew it. Period. People like, at least halfway, the problematic Simplicius, who claim that was not the original plan, are lying. There's no way to — and no reason to — put it more politely. Indeed, after that initial January 2025 callout of him at the link in this paragraph, by last fall, I was wondering if he's a Russian disinformation agent. Speaking of, and ignoring what Yaffa rights, that Vlad the Impaler has downsized the regular Victory Day parade on Red Square because of the Ukrainian drone threat, Simplicius plays up Moscow's counterthreat if Kyiv tries something.

Here's the reality:

Earlier this month, the Kremlin announced that this year’s Victory Day parade, held every May 9th in Red Square to commemorate the Soviet victory in the Second World War, which is typically a show of Russian might, would be a modest, small-scale affair. The usual columns of tanks and missile launchers and marching soldiers will be absent—they present too inviting a target for Ukrainian drones. (Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesman, acknowledged the “terrorist threat.”)

Straight from Putin's horse's mouth. 

Followed by this related in the next paragraph:

Then, on May 4th, multiple news outlets published stories on a leaked report from an unnamed European intelligence agency which describes disorder in the Russian security services over their inability to protect the country from Ukrainian drone attacks and assassination attempts.

Well, there you go. 

I said last fall, at the end of the piece, that I was "snarking" on him being a Russian disinformation agent. Maybe I need to nuance that snark with a bit of seriousness. 

Related to the economy of Russia now being officially in reversal, Russia's attritional gains are slowing down. (Simplicius does handwaving and gaslighting over that.)

That said, while not knowing if asking for less than maximalist demands would actually have led to serious negotiations or not, we know that Putin asking for maximalist demands a year ago tanked that idea totally.

The future? Yeah, per Yaffa, with Prigozhin blown to bits, nobody else is coming after Putin's crown. But, the atherosclerosis of hardening Russian arteries will surely be accompanied by the same symptoms in him. 

Time to list a second round of Substack blocks

This is an update to a piece from last November, about many of my early blocks .

And was sparked by a February piece by The Dissident about the Washington Post claiming antisemitism is behind many Epstein files comments.

One guy posted this Josh Who nutter. I'm not sure if he's antisemitic as well as anti-Zionist, but Josh dude is a generally unhinged wingnut and conspiracy theorist, as his Shitter showed. (He's blocked there, too.) I didn't block the poster. 

One guy posted the already blocked Paolo Kirk. Looking at his feed, Paul Haeder reposts him WAY too much; other things he says has him approaching antisemitism, at least, even if not going as fully over the line as Kirk. That said, when I checked his reads and saw David Irving? That was it. (He also follows the laughable — and conspiracy theorizing — Rainer Shea, the tankie from The People's Republic of Humboldt County.) Ars longior, vita brevis, and bye.

Bill Shannon, spotted on a Dissident piece a few days later. Reads both Hanania and Rufo. And Sailer. Foams at the mouth over "Bolsheviks" and is also a possible COVID minimalist. Bye. 

Paul, a general nut. I would accept his libertarian reads, but Milkshake Andy Ngo and others? Pass.

Lynn2C, wingnut enough to call the ConservaDem who beat Joe Kent a "Leftist." 

Celina101, a Gen Z "commenter on culture" who doesn't publicly disclose being an "alt-white Gen Z commenter." 

Fi666, who liked a comment of mine on The Dissident? Antisemitic, not just anti-Zionist, and some sort of cultural Christianist/decline of the West type. I was suspicious with the "666." Reposting shit like "Vaclav Havel is owned by Big Jews" is a giveaway. They're British anti-immigrant alt-White types.

They're actually neo-Nazi with this:

Jews need to be burned alive. None of this Zyklon B tickbath disinfectant lie. Proper extermination this time. Otherwise we're all fucked.

And this:

I'm glad there's no censorship on here. Except several stacks I follow/ subscribe to were coming up with only a restricted message for a while and won't even load now. So far I've noticed NatSocToday, White Rabbit, and most recently Ava Wolfe. I see a theme here

Shit. Gee, what is "NatSocToday"?

The person posting the Vaclav Havel bullshit? Gemma O'Doherty. Irish traditionalist Catholic, probably of Opus Dei type if not further right. Talks about "Holohoax" so antisemitic. And, yes, Tim O'Neill, that's still in many conservative Catholics' roots. On their personal website and an alleged newspaper, talk about the "Great Reset." 

SF Bay Area Local is a generic Trumptard, but also a MAHA, a generic antivaxxer and other such things. They're also Zionist and Islamophobe. Reposts many name Zionists.

A lesser-name Zionist, but also hard-right, if not full Trumptard? Roy Ben-Tzvi. 

Richard Jaffee? Garden-variety Zionist liar. 

John B? General fucking "anti-woke" idiot. Drinks MAGAts Kool-Aid,

CG? Generic antivaxxer and generic genocidalist wingnut. 

Now, that all said? Substack's blocking system ain't that good.

One person claimed that the person blocked can still see you. Taint so, looking at people who have blocked me.

That said, the biggest problem is, contra both Shitter and Fuckbook, it's one-way. If someone has blocked me, I can't block them back. 

Update about "OK Doomer," aka "Jessica Wildfire""

I've written before about the "OK Doomer" nutter and my guess on her background, here in Part 1 and a follow-up here in Part 2.

Curiosity led me to teh Google, about what she might be up to recently. 

She's off Medium and now at a new place called "The Sentinel Intelligence." Her "about" pretty much confirmed old sleuthing. PhD college English prof. To update my pieces above, she got the tenure she was chasing. (She still has her Substack, where I'm blocked, after an interaction that came after I wrote the two pieces above.)

She's also still grifting, getting some non-profit fund founded in 2021 on her side.

The details of the financial relationship aren't mentioned at either site but there you are. She has a 2.0 version of her survivor prepping guide as part of that:

Her current project, Project C, is an illustrated survival manual — a practical guide to homesteading, preparedness, and self-sufficiency for a world where the systems we take for granted may not hold. AKET provides sustained support for Jessica's work because a voice this clear, this honest, and this useful should not have to fight for survival in the economics of independent writing.

OK now.

That confirms my part 2 above, that she's grifting off the prepper world, offering a more librul version of that than you usually find. One of the five coauthors at her Substack explicitly identifies as a prepper.

As for the couple behind that Alfred Kobacker and Elizabeth Trimble Fund? His father started a shoe store in Ohio that he eventually sold to Payless, per his obit. (There's NO "about" on the fund's website.)

She also occasionally admits she's wrong, or more likely, doesn't like getting called out; she deleted the "we're running out of food" piece that I linked to in both part 1 and part 2.

She doesn't care a lot about one big geopolitical event. She wrote in early November 2023 to claim that the start of Israel's genocide in Gaza was about oil and gas. Wrong. And, she also apparently is, or was, sympathetic to Zionism:

Let's start with a couple of chilling facts. The war in Gaza has nothing to do with democracy or human rights. It also has nothing to do with Israel's right to defend itself. Until yesterday, that's what I thought.

Ouch. Yet more reason not to like her. (A search finds "Zionism" nowhere on her site, and this is the last piece she wrote about Gaza.)  Two of the other five "contributors" there wrote before that, in more detail, but not that much more.

She did get tenure, per this piece, but says "she gave it up." Contra several items? You got paid in summer; it's part of your contract. You just don't get paid EXTRA in summer. And colleges, unlike high schools, have LONG had summer sessions.

The pay? It's about what I would have guessed for someone at either assistant professor or associate professor rank at a second-tier state university in a Southern state. As for the drop in enrollment? Happening at K-12 everywhere, including first-ring suburbs of the Metromess here in Tex-ass. It's a second "baby bust," following with about expected timing after a dropoff from the original Baby Boom hit colleges in the middle 1980s.

That said, this doesn't tell the full story.

She doesn't work the entire summer. She may work parts of it, but not the entire summer. And, "writing books and articles"? After you have tenure and don't have to worry about publish or perish, that's not part of your job anyway. It's something chosen.

Then, she actually BITCHES about students taking independent studies. I guess you long ago stopped being very idealistic as a prof.

She also, at a state university, was in the state employees' pension system. Not a lot of people have on-the-job pensions any more, and of those that do, a lot of them aren't a defined-benefit pension, which I am guessing hers is. She also probably has better health insurance than the typical private-sector employee. 

She's right that universities generally aren't librul. They're certainly not leftist.

Oh, as of a year ago, she was still being a Doomer on COVID. And, she claims to be a quasi-clairvoyant "disaster whisperer"; that's where the phrase "sentinel intelligence" for her website comes from.

OK, the other co-contributors at her Substack? One thinks the Democratic Party invented the "Green New Deal." Green Party nowhere mentioned. 

Where IS Farris Wilks?

The Monthly wonders what happened to Farris Wilks.  Reportedly, there's been some sort of break with fellow bazillionaire nutbar Tim Dunn, but it doesn't say what that might be about?

Maybe a gay relationship on the down low imploded? "Just asking questions," wingnuts. Deal with it.

Semi-seriously, or more than that, the piece says that the two started shorting out over the Nick Fuentes' brouhaha in late 2023, a meeting with Wilks and Dunn operatives that also included Matt Rinaldi and Former Fetus Forever Fuckwad Jonathan Stickland. (Ahh, who can forget him? The Texas GOP pretty much has.)

Apparently this got deeper in June 2024 when Wilks may have been the unnamed Daddy Warbucks to cut funding to the True Texas Project. Amarillo's not-totally-wingnut bazillionaire Alex Fairly notes that it was about this time that Tim Dunn first recruited him. Surely no coincidence. 

Maybe, per the end of the story, there was a gay threesome involving the Forever Fuckwad? Did I just make you throw up in your mouth with that scenario? Per Stickland's own language, and my sense of alliteration, that would then make him Former Fetus Future Faggot Forever Fuckwad. If only this could be true. (I can throw Fuentes in for a foursome if you want.)

Texas Progressives talk polls and nukes

Off the Kuff brings you two more polls showing James Taalrico leading the race for US Senate in Texas. 

SocraticGadfly loves him some James Hansen, agrees that we're in a climate crisis, not just climate change, that will lead to 5°C of temperature increase in a century without strong action soon, knows that WAY too many people still don't get this, and hates that the likes of Michael Mann have attacked him as alarmist, BUT explains in great detail why he is far more skeptical than Hansen about nuclear energy being a major part of the solution.

Inside Climate News notes the great number of commercial lithium mining claims that are on American Indian tribal land. 

The Observer warns even wingnut landowners on the border to read the fine print on Team Trump's requests to survey their land. 

Too bad, in its runoff overview, the Observer won't tell you to vote for neither Colin Allred nor Julie Johnson and to undervote this in the general. 

Camp Mystic will not reopen this summer. Next question: Will it next summer? 

Is Havana / Cancun Ted Cruz running for president again in 2028? He's clearly working on the Trump Toady angle.

Contra Kalshi's claims, and riffing off the Trib, wondering why both Dannie Goeb and Kenny Boy have been slow to act or react, I think predictions markets are gaming, not a commodities-like futures market. Pro sports sub-reddits very much agree. 

ICE may have deported a US citizen. 

UNT has a massive budget shortfall, mainly cuz Trumpism has led to a big drop in international students. Faculty buyouts are a partial solution; per the Trib, a number of humanities profs are gladly accepting, saying UNT has gone well beyond the state-mandated minimum in anti-diversity. 

More Pete Hegseth brilliance — wanting to build a data center in the aridity of Fort Bliss. 

Chris Hooks extends his John Cornyn bromance to Shrub Bush and isn't worth further effort on addressing. 

Neil at the Houston Democracy Project spoke about empowering ourselves at a May Day event at a Unitarian Church in The Woodlands. As always-The next action is when you organize it.

Steve Vladeck and Law Dork critique the SCOTUS "ruling" in the lawsuit over Texas' Congressional re-redistricting.

Space City Weather answers your questions about El Nino, why it always rains on weekends, and more.

The Texas Signal talks to some drag performers about what they feel they can legally do now.

Texas Rural Reporter uses the example of a kid from Spearman being drafted by the NFL to show how important public schools are in rural communities and why the voucher program is a threat to them.

City of Yes talks about making space for the things we don't like but still need.

Contra Barbed Wire on Whataburger

Contra Barbed Wire, Whataburger, or as I call it, What? A Burger? has never been all that, other than being one of Tex-ass' three retail cults along with HEB and Fuck You the Beaver.

THAT said, re my own comparison of it with In and Out, yeah, we don't go there any more for exactly the reason BW says it should be beloved by Texans. I don't need a fucking burgers version of Chick fil A. That said, What? A Burger? likes to push the bible hard itself, or a least it does on the walls of the location nearest me.

Beyond all that, What? A Burger? is overpriced. I definitely will take Jack in the Crack over it.