good morning! good morning!
it's a beautiful morning. last night horsemouth was doing a spot of child minding (of the go there, go to sleep, come back variety), later he is doing the child transportation racket (to the violin class). by early afternoon he will be free.
yesterday horsemouth dropped off some books at the book box by the park (everything excepting an ex-library rough guide to crete appears to have gone from the last lot). in imogen holst's bok he found a railway ticket to sutton from 2009(?).
first off news from the pestilence. he continues with his avoidance of the typhoid stricken sten (ok no he has just had the c-o-r-a-n-a-v.... fuck it it's too long, never mind, but he is on the mend). the major effect of the virus (as far as horsemouth can see) is to exacerbate sten's tendency not to tidy up after himself and to leave shit all over every surface in the kitchen.
with a bit of luck horsemouth will continue to avoid the plague (er. like the plague). horsemouth has been enjoying the excerpts from devi shridar's book on radio 4 on pandemics and health policy and revisited the talking politics lot discussing what the pandemic has taught us (not apparently nothing to quote the song but probably less than we think).
having done pestilence horsemouth now moves on to war and a lecture by chicago foreign policy wonk john mearsheimer on why ukraine is the west's fault. but john was not talking about the current war but about the seizure of crimea, the (proxy) civil war in the donbas etc. in 2015. like horsemouth he has the opinion that the west, in its mission to promote democracy round the globe, has the inverse midas touch, that all it leaves behind is a series of smoking ruins, that putin's war goal in the donbas was probably just to fuck ukraine over (if I can't have it you can't have it).
one of the interesting things about it is to see what mearsheimer has got right (and what he has got wrong).
and, to quote donovan, the war drags on. there's nothing very profound here but it's nice to see it all assembled in the same place. horsemouth knows there are plenty of people who would wish to see a more optimistic portrayal of the possibilities for ukraine and its people other than the next syria (but he doesn't see it). russia on the other hand is truly fucked. for all the talk of putin being too smart to start a war he has done the stupidest thing possible, and started a war. his presumable hope must be that he can surf that wave of revived russian patriotism. the point is, that in a very real sense, russia either has to win the war in the ukraine or, at the very least, putin will fall, if not russia itself.
the world is rolling back to its 19th century self (great (sic.) powers, the great game, national interests, zones of influence etc.) and away from its 21st century format (globalisation, neo-liberalism, trade rather than war, inter-connectedness). let us all worship at the defunct nordstream plants. let the tragedies commence. (except they have been going on for a while).
mearsheimer is a prophet of the coming conflict with china ('my people' he says ironically because as the coming power they get it wheras the washington foreign policy wonks, 21st century boys to a man, don't). the 2008 crisis, then the pandemic and then the ukraine war have all served to decouple the world economic system and make the west aware of its vulnerability if the productive area of the world (china together with its outsourced plants in the region) is closed off.
horsemouth (the evil old pike that he is) has a plan. it is to slide beneath the water and vanish from sight. today the violin run, but first some breakfast.
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