Month: June 2023

Lot’s of palm trees and sunshine in both states but that’s where the similarities end:

Florida Governor and floundering presidential candidate Ron DeSantis traveled to California’s Bay Area this past week to fundraise and to cut a new ad.

He stands on a San Francisco street corner and portrays the city as a lawless, drug-infested hellhole that people are fleeing, in favor of Florida, because of “leftist policies.”

But he offered no statistics to back up his claims.

Here’s one stat he should know, from the CDC:

Drug overdose mortality by state, per 100,000 residents, for 2021

Florida: 37.5 (18th worst state)

California: 26.6 (35th worst state)

It’s really galling to have most of the country subjected to this calumny about California every single day by assholes like DeSantis when their own states are actually much worse off. I really wish that Democrats would start fighting fire with fire on this stuff.

'I'm really f*cking angry … women have died' — Chelsea Clinton shared candid thoughts about the upcoming 1-year anniversary of SCOTUS' Dobbs decision while speaking at the Aspen Ideas: Health summit pic.twitter.com/OC3mRPsMWX

— NowThis Impact (@nowthisimpact) June 23, 2023

Well said.

It’s been a year and we are seeing the ramifications of the repeal of Roe v Wade. It’s as bad as we could have anticipated. As she says, women are dying, families are in crisis, lives are being ruined.

By the way, don’t rest on your laurals if you live in a blue state. Yesterday at the faith and Freedom convention, Mike Pence backed Lindsey Graham’s proposal for a 15 week national abortion ban. Graham was there and proclaimed, “we’ll be saving babies in California.”

“Fucking angry” doesn’t even begin to describe my reaction to that.

Could history repeat?

In his speech, Putin kept referencing 1917, which stuck many people as … bizarre. Here’s Anne Applebaum in the Atlantic on how apt it might be:

The hall of mirrors that Vladimir Putin has built around himself and within his country is so complex, and so multilayered, that on the eve of a genuine insurrection in Russia, I doubt very much if the Russian president himself believed it could be real.

Certainly the rest of us still can’t know, less than a day after this mutiny began, the true motives of the key players, and especially not of the central figure, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner mercenary group. Prigozhin, whose fighters have taken part in brutal conflicts all over Africa and the Middle East—in Syria, Sudan, Libya, the Central African Republic—claims to command 25,000 men in Ukraine. In a statement yesterday afternoon, he accused the Russian army of killing “an enormous amount” of his mercenaries in a bombing raid on his base. Then he called for an armed rebellion, vowing to topple Russian military leaders.

Prigozhin has been lobbing insults at Russia’s military leadership for many weeks, mocking Sergei Shoigu, the Russian minister of defense, as lazy, and describing the chief of the general staff as prone to “paranoid tantrums.” Yesterday, he broke with the official narrative and directly blamed them, and their oligarch friends, for launching the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Ukraine did not provoke Russia on February 24, he said: Instead, Russian elites had been pillaging the territories of the Donbas they’ve occupied since 2014, and became greedy for more. His message was clear: The Russian military launched a pointless war, ran it incompetently, and killed tens of thousands of Russian soldiers unnecessarily.

The “evil brought by the military leadership of the country must be stopped,” Prigozhin declared. He warned the Russian generals not to resist: “Everyone who will try to resist, we will consider them a danger and destroy them immediately, including any checkpoints on our way. And any aviation we see above our heads.” The snarling theatricality of Prigozhin’s statement, the baroque language, the very notion that 25,000 mercenaries were going to remove the commanders of the Russian army during an active war—all of that immediately led many to ask: Is this for real?

Up until the moment it started, when actual Wagner vehicles were spotted on the road from Ukraine to Rostov, a Russian city a couple of miles from the border (and actual Wagner soldiers were spotted buying coffee in a Rostov fast-food restaurant formerly known as McDonald’s), it seemed impossible. But once they appeared in the city—once Prigozhin posted a video of himself in the courtyard of the Southern Military District headquarters in Rostov—and once they seemed poised to take control of Voronezh, a city between Rostov and Moscow, theories began to multiply.

Maybe Prigozhin is collaborating with the Ukrainians, and this is all an elaborate plot to end the war. Maybe the Russian army really had been trying to put an end to Prigozhin’s operations, depriving his soldiers of weapons and ammunition. Maybe this is Prigozhin’s way of fighting not just for his job but for his life. Maybe Prigozhin, a convicted thief who lives by the moral code of Russia’s professional criminal caste, just feels dissed by the Russian military leadership and wants respect. And maybe, just maybe, he has good reason to believe that some Russian soldiers are willing to join him.

Because Russia no longer has anything resembling “mainstream media”—there is only state propaganda, plus some media in exile—we have no good sources of information right now. All of us now live in a world of information chaos, but this is a more profound sort of vacuum, because so many people are pretending to say things they don’t believe. To understand what is going on (or to guess at it), you have to follow a series of unreliable Russian Telegram accounts, or else read the Western and Ukrainian open-source intelligence bloggers who are reliable but farther from the action: @wartranslated, who captions Russian and Ukrainian video in English, for example; or Aric Toler (@arictoler), of Bellingcat, and Christo Grozev (@christogrozev), formerly of Bellingcat, the investigative group that pioneered the use of open-source intelligence. Grozev has enhanced credibility because he said the Wagner group was preparing a coup many months ago. (This morning, I spoke with him and told him he was vindicated. “Yes,” he said, “I am.”)

But the Kremlin may not have very good information either. Only a month ago, Putin was praising Prigozhin and Wagner for the “liberation” of Bakhmut, in eastern Ukraine, after one of the longest, most drawn-out battles in modern military history. Today’s insurrection was, by contrast, better planned and executed: Bakhmut took nearly 11 months, but Prigozihin got to Rostov and Voronezh in less than 11 hours, helped along by commanders and soldiers who appeared to be waiting for him to arrive.

Now military vehicles are moving around Moscow, apparently putting into force “Operation Fortress,” a plan to defend the headquarters of the security services. One Russian military blogger claimed that units of the military, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the FSB security service, and others had already been put on a counterterrorism alert in Moscow very early Thursday morning, supposedly in preparation for a Ukrainian terrorist attack. Perhaps that was what the Kremlin wanted its supporters to think—though the source of the blogger’s claim is not yet clear.

But the unavoidable clashes at play—Putin’s clash with reality, as well as Putin’s clash with Prigozhin—are now coming to a head. Prigozhin has demanded that Shoigu, the defense minister, come to see him in Rostov, which the Wagner boss must know is impossible. Putin has responded by denouncing Prigozhin, though not by name: “Exorbitant ambitions and personal interests have led to treason,” Putin said in an address to the nation this morning. A Telegram channel that is believed to represent Wagner has responded: “Soon we will have a new president.” Whether or not that account is really Wagner, some Russian security leaders are acting as if it is, and are declaring their loyalty to Putin. In a slow, unfocused sort of way, Russia is sliding into what can only be described as a civil war.

If you are surprised, maybe you shouldn’t be. For months—years, really—Putin has blamed all of his country’s troubles on outsiders: America, Europe, NATO. He concealed the weaknesses of his country and its army behind a facade of bluster, arrogance, and appeals to a phony “white Christian nationalism” for foreign audiences, and appeals to imperialist patriotism for domestic consumption. Now he is facing a movement that lives according to the true values of the modern Russian military, and indeed of modern Russia.

Prigozhin is cynical, brutal, and violent. He and his men are motivated by money and self-interest. They are angry at the corruption of the top brass, the bad equipment provided to them, the incredible number of lives wasted. They aren’t Christian, and they don’t care about Peter the Great. Prigozhin is offering them a psychologically comfortable explanation for their current predicament: They failed to defeat Ukraine because they were betrayed by their leaders.

There are some precedents for this moment. In 1905, the Russian fleet’s disastrous performance in a war with Japan helped inspire a failed revolution. In 1917, angry soldiers came home from World War I and launched another, more famous revolution. Putin alluded to that moment in his brief television appearance this morning. At that moment, he said, “arguments behind the army’s back turned out to be the greatest catastrophe, [leading to] destruction of the army and the state, loss of huge territories, resulting in a tragedy and a civil war.” What he did not mention was that up until the moment he left power, Czar Nicholas II was having tea with his wife, writing banal notes in his diary, and imagining that the ordinary Russian peasants loved him and would always take his side. He was wrong.

Those twitter feeds mentioned in the article are well worth following. Sadly, twitter is not very useful generally for times like these since Elon Musk ruined it. Of course, Musk is a big Russia fan so I suppose that makes sense.

Update: It appears that Prigozhin has thrown in the towel?

“They were going to dismantle PMC Wagner. We came out on 23 June to the March of Justice. In a day, we walked to nearly 200km away from Moscow. In this time, we did not spill a single drop of blood of our fighters. Now, the moment has come when blood may spill. That’s why, understanding the responsibility for spilling Russian blood on one of the sides, we are turning back our convoys and going back to field camps according to the plan.”

It’s going to take a while to sort out what’s happening here or what’s going to happen now. Let’s just say the whole thing shows the situation in Russia is very unstable.

Both Prigozhin and Putin are nightmares

Quick reminder that in this case the enemy of our enemy is also our enemy.

— Brian Schatz (@brianschatz) June 24, 2023

This analysis from the Financial Times about Prigozhin is quite informative. They have been following the story of Putin and Prigozhin for some time and if you’d like to bone up on the various dynamics, I would suggest that’s a good place to start.

When they first appeared in 2014 to fight covertly in Ukraine, the masked militiamen of Russia’s Wagner group epitomised how Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin had mastered a new, underhand form of warfare. But after Wagner paramilitaries took control of at least one Russian city on Saturday and began a “march of justice” on Moscow, the blowback from nine years of war in Ukraine threatened the very foundations of Putin’s state — with a problem of his own making. After months of lurid public infighting, the conflict between Yevgeny Prigozhin’s paramilitaries and the Russian defence ministry has boiled over into the first coup attempt in Russia in three decades.

Although Putin appeared shocked by his former caterer Prigozhin’s “treason” during a stern five-minute address to the nation, the chaos indicated how years of covert warfare, poor governance and corruption had created the greatest threat to his rule in 24 years. “They never should have fought with a [private militia] during a war. It was a mistake to use anything except the army,” a former senior Kremlin official said. “It’s nice to have during peacetime, but now you just can’t do it. That’s what led to this story with Prigozhin — [Putin] brought it upon himself.”

The roots of Prigozhin’s revolt date back to 2014 when Prigozhin set up Wagner as a way for Russia to disguise its involvement in a slow-burning war in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region. The group helped keep eastern Ukraine under Russian proxy control and, as its mission expanded, gave Russia plausible deniability for sorties as far away as Syria and Mozambique.

But for all its ostensible independence — the Kremlin claimed to know nothing about it, while Prigozhin denied for years that the group even existed — Wagner was a big part of Russia’s official war machine. Initially run by GRU, Russian military intelligence, Wagner was lavishly funded from the national defence budget and often competed with the armed forces for lucrative contracts, according to people close to the Kremlin and security sources in the west. That nourished a rivalry that began years before Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, heated up during the bloody siege of the town of Bakhmut this winter and spilled out of control this week, the people said.

“The main reason Prigozhin happened at all is because Russia . . . couldn’t create an effective army. They had to create an ersatz army instead, and it was obvious from the start that creating a parallel army has huge risks,” said Ruslan Pukhov, director of the Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies, a Moscow-based defence think-tank. As it took an increasingly prominent role on the front lines and its feud with the army deepened, Wagner became a kind of Frankenstein’s monster that eventually turned on its creator, according to analysts and people close to the Kremlin.

Prigozhin, who has known Putin since the future president visited his restaurant in St Petersburg in the 1990s, criticised the army in blistering terms, which led many in Moscow to suspect he had Putin’s approval. Wagner’s forces were largely drawn from convicts after Putin personally signed tens of thousands of pardons.

Moreover, as one of the few members of Russia’s elite not privately appalled by the war, Prigozhin’s belligerence helped him emerge as a hardline political figure. He urged Putin to adopt a state of “total war” modelled on North Korea, revelled in a murder Wagner militiamen appeared to commit with a sledgehammer and sent a replica of the weapon to a senior lawmaker so he could pose with it.

His rise horrified many of Moscow’s elites, who feared he would be used to beat them into backing the war effort or simply seize their assets with Putin’s support. That dependence appears to have lulled Putin into a false sense of security. It convinced him that he could allow Wagner to undermine the defence ministry while keeping it under control, according to Tatiana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center. “He thought Prigozhin was isolated. He doesn’t have a party, he doesn’t hold rallies, so he doesn’t exist.

Putin doesn’t understand what the internet is, so he didn’t know that Prigozhin was more dominant online than him or the war or anything else,” Stanovaya said. “He thought Prigozhin was totally dependent and [ . . .] could be routed in one second if needed.” The exact circumstances leading to the uprising remain unclear. One person close to the FSB said Russia’s security forces had spent the past several days preparing for some kind of assault, suggesting Prigozhin had learnt of the plan and had decided to go out all guns blazing. “This isn’t out of nowhere and it didn’t come as a surprise,” the person said.

Another former senior Kremlin official said the conflict with the army had driven Prigozhin — a former criminal who is said to revel in publicly executing deserters — to even further extremes. “He went nuts, flew into a rage and went too far. He added too much salt and pepper,” the former official said. “What else do you expect from a chef?”

An important trigger for Prigozhin’s uprising appears to have been Putin’s decision to back the defence ministry’s attempts to bring Wagner to heel. After Russia captured Bakhmut last month, Wagner’s forces left the front lines, prompting Prigozhin to muse about whether they would return at all. Then, Putin supported defence minister Sergei Shoigu’s attempt to bring the jumble of militias fighting in Ukraine under the army’s control. “He was pushed to this when he realised he was being driven into a corner, losing power and control over Wagner,” Pukhov said. “He didn’t just want to sink into obscurity.”

Prigozhin’s meteoric rise as a public figure appeared to have fostered a deep resentment at being told to take orders, as well as personal grievances against Shoigu and Valery Gerasimov, commander of Russia’s invasion force. Stanovaya said the war had brutalised Prigozhin, who had recorded several tirades where he posed in front of battlefield corpses and blamed Shoigu for their deaths, to the point where he lost sight of his place in Russia’s hierarchy. “This is a man who spent several months looking at torn-off arms and legs and severed heads while at war. He doesn’t think about red lines, how the [Kremlin] thinks of him and so on,” she said. “He thinks he deserves privileges and that even Putin can’t do anything about it.”

In his speech on Saturday, Putin appeared to have belatedly realised the threat Wagner posed to the state. He likened it to the collapse of the Russian empire in the 1917 revolution, which he said ended in “an enormous collapse, the destruction of the army and the fall of the state, the loss of huge territories, and in the end, the tragedy of civil war”.

As Wagner’s forces advanced northwards towards Moscow, Russia’s belief that it could outlast Ukraine and the west in a long war has proved a “dangerous illusion,” Pukhov said. “Dragging the war out has huge domestic risks for Russia. The first destabilising blow came even earlier than they thought. Now the risks are only going to grow.”

This is nerve-wracking. Prigozhin is a madman and Putin is an evil dictator. Not much of a choice. There are nuclear power plants and nuclear weapons all over the place.

Vlad’s buddy has this to say

Yeah.

There are too many moving parts to properly analyze the Russia situation at the moment. But let’s just say that Prigozhin is a monster and so in Putin and the only thing we can root for is destabilization of the Moscow regime without too much destabilization and some kind of resolution that results in withdrawal from Ukraine (not on the Prigozhin plan, BTW) and Russia gives peace a chance.

I will just put this up for now in case you forgot this part of Prigozhin story:

Kremlin-connected entrepreneur Yevgeny Prigozhin admitted Monday that he had interfered in U.S. elections and would continue to do so — confirming for the first time the accusations that he has rejected for years.

“Gentlemen, we have interfered, are interfering and will interfere. Carefully, precisely, surgically and in our own way, as we know how to do,” Prigozhin boasted in remarks posted on social media.

The statement, from the press service of his catering company that earned him the nickname “Putin’s chef,” came on the eve of the U.S. midterm elections.

It was the second major admission in recent months by the 61-year-old businessman, who has ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Prigozhin has previously sought to keep his activities under the radar and now appears increasingly interested in gaining political clout — although his goal in doing so was not immediately clear.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Monday that Prigozhin’s comments “do not tell us anything new or surprising.”

“It’s well known and well documented in the public domain that entities associated with Yevgeny Prigozhin have sought to influence elections around the world, including the United States. The U.S. has worked to expose and counter Russia’s malign influence efforts as we discover them,” she said, noting that Yevgeny has been sanctioned by the United States, the U.K. and the European Union.

“Part of Russia’s efforts includes promoting narratives aimed at undermining democracy and sowing division and discord. It’s not surprising that Russia would be highlighting their attempted efforts and fabricating a story about their successes on the eve of an election,” she added.

In September, Prigozhin also publicly stated that he was behind the Wagner Group mercenary force — something he also had previously denied — and talked openly about its involvement in Russia’s 8-month-old war in Ukraine. The military contractor also has sent its forces to places like Syria and sub-Saharan Africa.

Video also has emerged recently of a man resembling Prigozhin visiting Russian penal colonies to recruit prisoners to fight in Ukraine.

In 2018, Prigozhin and a dozen other Russian nationals and three Russian companies were charged in the U.S. with operating a covert social media campaign aimed at fomenting discord and dividing American public opinion ahead of the 2016 presidential election won by Republican Donald Trump. They were indicted as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian election interference.

The Justice Department in 2020 moved to dismiss charges against two of the indicted firms, Concord Management and Consulting LLC and Concord Catering, saying they had concluded that a trial against a corporate defendant with no presence in the U.S. and no prospect of meaningful punishment even if convicted would likely expose sensitive law enforcement tools and techniques.

In July, the State Department offered a reward of up to $10 million for information about Russian interference in U.S. elections, including on Prigozhin and the Internet Research Agency, the troll farm in St. Petersburg that his companies were accused of funding. Prigozhin also has been sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department for election interference.

Until now, Prigozhin had denied Russian involvement in election interference.
Russian media, prisoner’s rights groups and relatives of prisoners this year reported an extensive effort by Wagner — and sometimes Prigozhin personally — to recruit convicts to fight in Ukraine. Prigozhin hasn’t directly confirmed it, but said in one statement that “either (the Wagner private military company) and convicts, or your children” will be fighting on the front lines.

Last week, Wagner opened a business center in St. Petersburg, which Prigozhin has described as a platform for “increasing the defense capabilities” of Russia.
On Sunday, he also announced through Concord the creation of training centers for militias in Russia’s Belgorod and Kursk regions that border Ukraine.

“A local resident, like no one else, knows his territories, is able to fight against sabotage and reconnaissance groups and take the first blow if necessary,” he said.

A one-time hot dog stand owner, Prigozhin opened a swanky restaurant in St. Petersburg that drew interest from Putin. During his first term in office, Putin took then-French President Jacques Chirac to dine at one of Prigozhin’s restaurants.

“Vladimir Putin saw how I built a business out of a kiosk, he saw that I don’t mind serving to the esteemed guests because they were my guests,” Prigozhin recalled in an interview published in 2011.

His businesses expanded significantly. In 2010, Putin attended the opening of Prigozhin’s factory making school lunches that was built on generous loans by a state bank. In Moscow alone, his company Concord won millions of dollars in contracts to provide meals at public schools. Prigozhin has also organized catering for Kremlin events for several years and has provided catering and utility services to the Russian military.

When fighting broke out in eastern Ukraine between Russian-backed separatists and Kyiv’s forces in 2014, Prigozhin said through his spokespeople that he was seeking to “put together a group (of fighters) that would go (there) and defend the Russians.”

Russian laws prohibit the operation of private military contractors, but state media in recent months have openly reported on Wagner’s involvement in Ukraine.

Prigozhin is a truly amazing character. I’m sure Donald Trump will declare him “very smart” and “right out of central casting” any minute now.

And it shows

Mediaite:

Former President Donald Trump told attendees at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, on Thursday night that he rejected some of the biggest law firms and lawyers in the country because he doesn’t “need any help.”

Earlier this month, two of the former president’s top lawyers resigned from his defense team after the DOJ announced it would charge Trump with 37 counts related to his handling of classified material at his Mar-a-Lago estate. Jim Trusty and John Rowley, who previously led Trump’s legal team in Washington, D.C., indicated they would no longer represent him in the Jack Smith probe and his $475 million defamation suit against CNN.

Some of the biggest lawyers from the biggest law firms Huge. They came to me with tears in their eyes, crying and pleading and they said "Sir, we want to defend you. We will work for free."

This all definitely happened. https://t.co/sWCrxFQBNS

— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) June 23, 2023

However, despite difficulties retaining new legal representation, Trump bragged to a group of supporters at a fundraiser at Bedminster that some of the “biggest” firms and lawyers have called him asking to represent him in the upcoming federal trial.

“I tell all these people, they all come in — they want to help,” Trump said speaking about the upcoming 2024 election. “The biggest, some of the biggest people, the biggest law firms, the biggest lawyers, I say listen, “I don’t need any help. I don’t want any help in campaigns.”

He should just hire himself for his defense and keep all the money he’s raising for it. (He’ll keep most anyway.) With his “beautiful mind,” he absolutely could do it. Better than anyone.

They keep Hitler quotes handy why, exactly?

Jezebel:

An Indiana chapter of the rightwing Moms For Liberty organization apologized on Thursday for printing a quotation from Adolf Hitler—yes, the genocidal leader of Nazi Germany—in its newsletter. “We condemn Adolf Hitler’s actions and his dark place in human history. We should not have quoted him in our newsletter and we express our deepest apology,” chapter chair Paige Miller said in a truly dystopian statement posted to Facebook.

In the June newsletter for the Hamilton County, Indiana, chapter of Moms for Liberty, Hitler’s short quote from a Nazi rally in 1935 is printed the front page of the issue. “He alone, who OWNS the youth, GAINS the future” (emphasis theirs).

There’s a long history of American rightwingers’ admiration of Hitler’s educational approach. As far back as 1942, Abraham Vereide, founder of the National Prayer Breakfast, wrote to his congressional disciples in praise of Hitler’s “youth work.” https://t.co/Sx7dvQtue6

— Jeff Sharlet (@JeffSharlet) June 23, 2023

They hope to (informally, anyway) return a wannabe dictator to the White House and stomp out the LGBTQ community, one presumes, when they are not banning books or hanging out with terrorist groups like the Proud Boys.

Everyone knows it’s ok for a Christian white nationalist group to quote hitler in their newsletter, as long as they condemn him at the same time pic.twitter.com/w3lT9mSrVw

— Lauren Rinaldi 🧚‍♀️ (@LRinaldiArt) June 23, 2023

Don’t you still want to know why they keep Hitler quotes handy?

“Because they couldn’t find any other quote by anyone in the entirety of history about the importance of raising children properly? Only Hitler?” asks Blue Gal.

Southern Poverty Law Center:

Moms for Liberty and its nationwide chapters combat what they consider the “woke indoctrination” of children by advocating for book bans in school libraries and endorsing candidates for public office that align with the group’s views. They also use their multiple social media platforms to target teachers and school officials, advocate for the abolition of the Department of Education, advance a conspiracy propaganda, and spread hateful imagery and rhetoric against the LGBTQ community.

Because a day without hate is like a day without Anita Bryant.

Sand kittens!

The North Carolina Zoo is excited to announce yet another recent birth: three sand cat kittens (sexes unknown at this time) were born on May 11. Small enough to fit into the palm of your hand, the kittens were born to first-time mother Sahara, 3, and father Cosmo, 9.

It marks the third birth at the Zoo in less than two weeks. On May 20, a giraffe calf (male) was born, and a chimpanzee infant (male) was born on May 21.

This marks the first litter for the sand cat pair. Cosmo previously fathered daughter Layla, now living at the Greensboro Science Center. The Zoo plans to offer a public naming poll for the kittens. Details will be announced soon on the Zoo’s social media channels and website.

The mom and triplets are doing well. The trio are beginning to explore their surroundings in the Desert Habitat. Lucky guests may be able to catch a glimpse of them in the coming days.

Though they appear adorable with big ears, eyes, and petite frame, looks can be deceiving. Zookeepers are quick to tell you they are wild, ferocious animals that should never be kept as pets.

These small and mighty hunters kill venomous snakes in the desert. They are the only cats to live exclusively in desert environments.

Cosmo and Sahara were paired as a part of the Sand Cat Species Survival Plan and the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA), which aims to maintain a healthy and genetically diverse population of sand cats to increase their numbers. More than 50 sand cats live at over 20 AZA institutions.

Sand cats are native to the deserts of North Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, and Asia. Nocturnal in nature, they quickly adapt to the extreme climate of desert environments with very hot and cold temperatures.

Sand cats are rarely sighted in the wild because they live in remote landscapes, hunt at night to avoid the desert heat, and are secretive in nature, which makes it challenging to study them. The size of the population and lifespan in the wild is unknown.

The sand cat is one of the world’s smallest feline species, weighing from four to eight pounds and measuring, on average, 20 inches long. The gestation period is around 60 days. Under human care, a sand cat can live to be 13 years old.

The cats have an exceptionally keen sense of hearing, which they use to detect animals under the sand and use their excellent digging skills to capture their prey quickly.

Video and Photo credit: North Carolina Zoo.

This is the closest Russia has been to a coup since the early 1990s. Evgeny Prigozhin has effectively declared war on the Defense Ministry after what he says was a Russian missile attack against his men. pic.twitter.com/8wgcRCNgJ9

— Kevin Rothrock (@KevinRothrock) June 23, 2023

I don’t know what to make of this but it’s fascinating:

Russia did not face an imminent security threat to justify its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of Russia’s Wagner mercenary outfit, said in a bombshell video posted on social media Friday.

“The Armed Forces of Ukraine were not going to attack Russia with the NATO bloc,” Prigozhin explained in the half-hour tirade released by his press service.

“The Russian Defense Ministry is deceiving the public and the president,” he added.

Prigozhin’s comments were at odds with the casus belli given by President Vladimir Putin when he ordered troops into Ukraine last February, although the private army chief avoided personally attacking the Russian leader.

Putin has cited NATO expansion near Russia’s borders as one of the main justifications for invading neighboring Ukraine.NEWSWagner Chief Accuses Moscow of ‘Misleading Russians’ Over Ukraine OffensiveREAD MORE

Meanwhile, Prigozhin escalated his criticism of Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu by claiming that Russia went to war “for the self-promotion of a bunch of bastards.”

He blamed Russia’s military leadership for “poorly planning” the invasion and “embarrassing” the military after a series of setbacks on the battlefield last year.

“Shoigu killed thousands of the most combat-ready Russian soldiers in the first days of the war,” he charged.

“The mentally ill scumbags decided ‘It’s okay, we’ll throw in a few thousand more Russian men as ‘cannon fodder.’ ‘They’ll die under artillery fire, but we’ll get what we want’,” Prigozhin continued.

“That’s why it has become a protracted war.”

Prigozhin also accused Kremlin-linked oligarchs of seeking to plunder Ukraine’s resources after its military capture and appointment of a puppet regime in Kyiv.

“The task was to divide material assets in Ukraine. There was widespread theft in the [industrial eastern Ukrainian territory of the] Donbas, but they wanted more.” 

Some analysts have interpreted Prigozhin’s latest comments as a sign of his growing political ambitions.

He addressed the Ukrainian forces’ ongoing counteroffensive in similarly critical terms, saying the Russian army is retreating from the partially occupied Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions.

“We are washing ourselves in blood. No one is bringing reserves. What they tell us is the deepest deception,” Prigozhin said, referring to Putin and Shoigu’s claims that Russia is successfully pushing back Ukrainian counterattacks.

If this is a coup that’s unfolding I wouldn’t celebrate. Prigozhin is a monster too.

What a mess… stay tuned.

This would be funny if it didn’t mean that Marge Greene could end up being a “mainstream” Republican politician once the smoke has cleared:

Tensions inside the conservative House Freedom Caucus have reached the point that some members are floating the idea of purging colleagues from the group.

At least two hardliners have discussed — and proposed to Freedom Caucus Chair Scott Perry (R-Pa.) — trying to boot members who no longer meet the group’s standards, according to three Republicans with knowledge of the talks who spoke on condition of anonymity. The lawmakers declined to name who’s behind the ouster calls, underscoring the sensitivity of the situation.

While the members suggesting a purge did not specify the people they want to remove, they are signaling that one target of any ejection push is Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.). Some in the Freedom Caucus have focused on Greene, who’s become a close ally of Speaker Kevin McCarthy, to illustrate their fears that certain group members are too aligned with GOP leaders and too outwardly critical of the group when it splits on certain issues.

The risk of an outside-the-tent conservative becoming too friendly with the establishment isn’t the only problem that Freedom Caucus purists have identified, though. Internal Freedom Caucus critics are talking about targeting a handful of members beyond Greene, too, whom they see as violating group standards by being inactive.

Perry told POLITICO that he denied the removal requests. Yet the fact that he had to illustrates how the group continues to struggle with its identity since former President Donald Trump left office, not to mention the acrimony caused in the lead-up to the handshake deals McCarthy made to win conservative votes during January’s grueling speakership battle.

“The speaker’s race, there was some difference in opinion. The debt ceiling, there were differences of opinion. And we had to get 80 percent on any major issue that we take positions on,” said Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.), a Freedom Caucus member, referring to the threshold needed for the group to take a unified stance. “On some big issues, we have not been able to get there.”

“We’re at a critical point right now,” he added.

As for internal concerns about Greene, Norman said he wasn’t suggesting pushing her out but replied: “She’s been critical of us for a long time.”

Compounding that sentiment: an ugly floor fight this week between Greene and Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) over their competing resolutions to impeach President Joe Biden. Greene confirmed a Daily Beast report that she called her Freedom Caucus colleague “a little bitch” on the House floor, telling reporters that the story was “impressively correct.”

In an interview following the spat, Boebert demurred when asked where she stands on the Freedom Caucus purge pitch: “If something comes up,” she said, “then we’ll address it.”

“It’s really unfortunate that somebody communicated the conversation that took place on the floor” between herself and Greene, Boebert added, “because I was willing to walk away [from] people wanting to stir up unnecessary drama.”

She criticized reporters for focusing on “pettiness” rather than her impeachment proposal: “I didn’t leave my four kids and now my grandson to come up here and have cat fights and just to get in squabbles.”

Boebert isn’t the only fellow Freedom Caucus member Greene has challenged. The Georgian has hit back at conservative colleagues who suggested a possible forced vote to oust McCarthy from the speakership after his debt deal with Biden.

Anyone who would consider that option in response to the bipartisan debt vote “need[s] to really get down into a more realistic level of thinking,” Greene said this month, alluding to the necessity of compromise under divided government. “I’m just as conservative as they are. … There’s conservative fantasies and there’s reality — that’s the best way to say it.”

As prized as party unity is in the House, some in the Freedom Caucus see the group’s issues as matters of trust — not disagreements over one vote or another. Two of the three group members who confirmed the ouster discussions said certain lawmakers hold back during weekly Freedom Caucus meetings, fearing that other conservatives in attendance will tell McCarthy and his allies about any talk that GOP leadership won’t like.

That leeriness has created cliques within the group itself.

“There are frustrations,” said Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.), a Freedom Caucus member.

I can’t help it: