timelets

Steve Witkoff, a billionaire real-estate developer and longtime golfing partner of Donald Trump, was just days into his job as the new president’s special envoy to the Middle East when he received a tantalizing message from the crown prince of Saudi Arabia.

Vladimir Putin was interested in meeting Witkoff—so interested that he might consider releasing an American prisoner to him. The invitation came from a Kremlin moneyman named Kirill Dmitriev, using the de facto Saudi ruler, Mohammed bin Salman, as an intermediary.

There was just one thing: Witkoff would be expected to come alone, without any CIA handlers, diplomats or even an interpreter, a person familiar with the outreach said.

This month, Witkoff concluded his sixth trip to Russia, talking with Putin for five hours through midnight. Not since the U.S. allied with Joseph Stalin during the Lend Lease Act has a White House official enjoyed such frequent, personal access to a Russian or Soviet leader. Witkoff has yet to visit Ukraine. Its leaders—and European capitals—complain he is urging them to give Russia territory in return for a peace deal they aren’t sure will hold. This weekend, Dmitriev is scheduled to visit Witkoff in Miami, for another round of talks.

The emergence of Witkoff as envoy to the Kremlin is partly a story of Putin maneuvering to nudge aside America’s diplomats and clasp hands with its billionaires.

A White House official said that the decision to appoint Witkoff was Trump’s decision alone. “Suggesting that foreign countries had any input on this is absurd*,” the official said.
https://www.wsj.com/world/putin-witkoff-russia-envoy-04da229d

*Хуйло создает условия для вербовки, шантажа и подкупа главного американского переговорщика, а наше американское хуйло ему в этом активно помогает.

A good article about how DEI policies in the culture industries (education, entertainment, journalism, law, medicine, etc.) ruined prospects for an entire generation of white men, e.g.

In 2016 and 2017, 27.5 percent of applicants to the screenwriters lab were white men, but they were just 14.7 percent of participants. That figure turned out to be relatively high. Since 2018, just 8 of 138 (5.8 percent) of the fellows selected have been white men. Notably, nearly all have either had some other defining characteristic (disabled, gay) or were partnered with a woman or a person of color. Today, just one in ten millennial programmers at Sundance is a straight white man.
...
In 2014, white men were 31 percent of American medical students. By 2025, they were just 20.5 percent—a ten-percentage-point drop in barely over a decade. “At every step there’s some form of selection,” a millennial oncologist told me. “Medical school admissions, residency programs, chief resident positions, fellowships—each stage tilts away from white men or white-adjacent men… The white guy is now the token.”

https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-lost-generation/

Пастухов пишет:

Сначала «линия дискуссии» сдвинулась с рубежа «Украина + Европа + Америка» против «России» на рубеж «Америка + Россия» с одной стороны против «Европа + Украина» - с другой, а теперь деградировала до противостояния Америки с Европой в формате «один на один».

Соответственно, все теперь упирается в (не)предательство Европы.

Предаст – война закончится (на этом этапе). Не предаст – продолжится. Ждем «момента истины», который, увы, по иронии истории очередной раз может оказаться «моментом предательства».

https://t.me/v_pastukhov/1733

Предательство США, т.е. переход Трампа на сторону России, воспринимается уже как факт; соответственно, люди симпатизирующие Трампу ищут способ обвинить в предательстве кого-то другого.

Witkoff and Dmitriev forged the plan during an October meeting in Miami that included Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, who worked with Witkoff on the Israel-Gaza peace deal, according to people familiar with the matter.

Rubio hadn’t been fully looped in until late. Trump also found out about it at the last minute, but he blessed it once he was briefed.

A deal would give him a win as he faces a domestic political slump, with Democrats shellacking his party in early November elections, raising the possibility of painful midterm election results next year.

For Trump, what matters is getting a deal, not the fine print.

Ukraine’s leadership has “EXPRESSED ZERO GRATITUDE FOR OUR EFFORTS,” he said in a social media post.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-11-23/secret-us-russia-talks-led-to-peace-plan-that-blindsided-ukraine

The fucking moron is selling out Ukraine to distract the public from the ugly domestic situation.

Словно граждане, независимо от политической ориентации, инстинктивно воспринимают Трампа как глупого вредного ребенка: не похвалишь Трампа за то, что он покакал — в следующий раз он обмажет говном всю комнату.

https://rsokolov.dreamwidth.org/56019.html

Trump threw the economic relationship with Canada into a tailspin late Thursday, saying he was terminating trade negotiations with America’s second-largest trading partner over a television advertisement by the Ontario government. The ad included audio of former Republican President Ronald Reagan criticizing tariffs.

The Ontario ad uses audio from a 1987 radio address delivered by Reagan, in which he explains that despite putting tariffs on Japanese semiconductors in that year, he was committed to free-trade policies. While tariffs can look patriotic, Reagan said, “over the long run such trade barriers hurt every American worker and consumer,” lead to “fierce trade wars” and result in lost jobs.

https://www.wsj.com/world/americas/how-one-ad-sent-u-s-canada-trade-talks-into-a-tailspin-15b10384

Susan Monarez, the director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who was fired Wednesday, declined to dismiss her leadership team and approve vaccine recommendations from a panel selected by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a former acting CDC director said.

Monarez, who was sworn into the role in July, had two lines she wouldn’t cross when she stepped into the position, Dr. Richard Besser, the chief executive officer of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, said Thursday. He said he spoke with her Wednesday afternoon.

Monarez said she wouldn’t do anything illegal or anything that defied science, Besser said. “She said she was asked to do both of those,” Besser, a former acting CDC director in the Obama administration, said.

Lawyers for Monarez said Wednesday that she declined to “rubber-stamp unscientific, reckless directors and fire dedicated health experts.”

“Science and integrity can never be compromised,” her lawyers Mark Zaid and Abbe Lowell said Wednesday evening.

https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/cdc-director-refused-to-fire-leaders-approve-vaccine-recommendations-c777704c

We are just eight months into this administration.

The ballyhooed Alaska summit seems to have come to nothing, except let Mr. Putin stave off further sanctions pressure. Mr. Trump now says he needs another two weeks to figure out what to do. He puts the onus on both sides. “I’ll see whose fault it is,” he said. “We’re going to see whether or not they have a meeting.”

The same error was captured in Mr. Vance’s interview on NBC this weekend. “We are trying to negotiate as much as we can with both the Russians and the Ukrainians to find a middle ground to stop the killing,” he said. “We’re effectively mediating.”

How much more evident can it be that Russia is the obstacle to peace? Mr. Putin’s intent is to wipe out a relatively free and Western neighbor whose existence threatens his vision of a Greater Russia. What is the compromise position for that project? It won’t be settled by choosing parcels of land to swap.

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/donald-trump-russia-ukraine-volodymyr-zelensky-vladimir-putin-sergei-lavrov-185b324d

“...from the eminent psychologist Jerome Bruner: “A good story and a well-formed argument are different natural kinds. Both can be used as means for convincing another. Yet what they convince of is fundamentally different: arguments convince one of their truth, stories of their lifelikeness. The one verifies by eventual appeal to procedures for establishing formal and empirical proof. The other establishes not truth but verisimilitude.”

“...from the American novelist and critic Ronald Sukenick: “All fiction can be profitably regarded as argument. When you define fiction by representation you end up confining it to realism at some level and arguing that fiction, as a form of make-believe, is a way of lying to get at the truth, which if not palpably stupid is certainly round-about and restrictive. My approach frees fiction from the obligations of mimesis, popularly, and most often critically, assumed to be its defining quality.”

An important qualification to this argument is that there is not necessarily any single privileged way of reading the conflict in a story, or sometimes even defining what or who it involves. This sounds extreme, but it can be especially true in longer and more complex narratives like the story of Oedipus.

--- Abbott, H. Porter. “The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (Cambridge Introductions to Literature).”

Хороший ТГ-канал с обзорами зетников: "На Zzzzzападном фронте без перемен." https://t.me/s/ve4niyvoy

Делает его Иван Филиппов, который в отличие от магавца часовщика, следит не за пропагандонами, а за теми, кто находится близко к ЛБС. Например:

Как пишет z-автор Максим Калашников, с «прорывом» у российской армии не вышло:

«Прорыв севернее Покровска начинают ликвидировать. О причинах писал ранее. В общем, ни в тыл Славянску не зашли, ни Покровск в котел не взяли. Ну, профи таки, профгенералы...

Пошли пятые сутки с момента прорыва севернее Покровска. Увы, развала фронта ВСУ тут не случилось, что было бы эффектно к началу встречи в Анкоридже. Оно и понятно: тут критическую роль играет скорость развития успеха, ввода в прорыв больших сил. Сего не сделали. Локальную воздушную операцию по изоляции района БД не провели. По ЦПР врага, чтобы его дезорганизовать, не ударили. И ВСУ локализовали прорыв, успели подтянуть резервы. Котёл в Покровске не создали, уйдя в сторону.

В общем, принципиально прорывного ничего не случилось. Война продолжается в режиме кровавой «волынки».
https://t.me/ve4niyvoy/4758

Fun Getaway With Murderous Dictator Just What Exhausted Trump Been Needing

“It’s been a pretty busy year, so it’ll be great to take a little summer trip where I can kick back and relax with a fellow killer,” said Trump, who added that he’s looking forward to enjoying Alaska’s majestic scenery and wildlife alongside another leader with an incalculable quantity of blood on his hands. “We can just be ourselves and have a nice talk, homicidal tyrant to homicidal tyrant."

https://theonion.com/fun-getaway-with-murderous-dictator-just-what-exhausted-trump-been-needing/

“under US law, the heavier narrative task is placed on the prosecution, who must not simply tell a story, but tell one that is complete. It must have a central figure, fully equipped “beyond a reasonable doubt” with the motivation, opportunity, means and capability to commit the crime – that is, to engage in a complete action with a beginning, a middle, and an end. ”

-- Abbott, H. Porter. “The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (Cambridge Introductions to Literature).”

Finally, on Friday, European officials demanded a third call with Witkoff to clarify the growing confusion about what Putin actually proposed. In that call, Witkoff clearly stated that the only offer on the table was for Ukraine to withdraw unilaterally from Donetsk in exchange for a cease-fire.

Vance, Rubio and Kellogg attended some of the calls.

“The proposal is much worse than Trump said on the call,” a European official said.

“It’s just giving Putin everything he wants in exchange for nothing,” said another.
...
The European proposal includes demands that a cease-fire must take place before any other steps are taken. It also says that territory can be exchanged only in a reciprocal manner—meaning that if Ukraine pulls out of some regions, Russia must withdraw from others. “You can’t start a process by ceding territory in the middle of fighting,” one European negotiator said.

https://www.wsj.com/world/ukraine-and-europe-counter-putins-cease-fire-proposal-6a16133c

“Books also had a “shelf life.” In a seventeenth-century bookseller’s shop, they could wait patiently for readers to come and purchase them. But staged plays were big events that happened at set times. They required an immense investment of both funds and labor: a paid company of actors and a theater, which must be built, purchased, or rented. They also needed to bring in the broadest cross-section of society if they were going to meet expenses. This difference in the technology and marketing of these two narrative media has only grown with time. ”

-- Abbott, H. Porter. “The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (Cambridge Introductions to Literature).”

I wonder whether AI could close this gap.

p.s. a little bit later:

“...once revealed, the action of the story of the murder of Councilman Stubbs can be described in “terms of a linear chain: A->B->C->D (where D is the Death of Stubbs).
...
Characters are, usually, harder to understand than actions. They are themselves some of narrative’s most challenging gaps.
...
..we have to move from a horizontal to a vertical analysis, descending into the character to construct a plausible sense of her complexity.”

“The model, then, for the construct“tion of character in fictional narrative might look something like this:

reader/viewer + narrative -> reader/viewer’s construction of a character

In this view, a narrative can be represented by a product of Action and Character.

“...the issue of closure. Probably the most difficult thing about reading narratives is to remain in a state of uncertainty. If a narrative won’t close by itself, one often tries to close it, even if it means shutting one’s eyes to some of the details and imagining others that aren’t there, underreading and overreading.

It is true, in fact, of our response to all but the shortest and simplest narrative texts.”

-- Abbott, H. Porter. “The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (Cambridge Introductions to Literature).”

How is it that half of America looks at Donald Trump and doesn’t find him morally repellent? He lies, cheats, steals, betrays, and behaves cruelly and corruptly, and more than 70 million Americans find him, at the very least, morally acceptable. Some even see him as heroic, admirable, and wonderful. What has brought us to this state of moral numbness?
...
the thinking of Alasdair MacIntyre, the great moral philosopher
...
As MacIntyre put it, “The choice between the ethical and the aesthetic is not the choice between good and evil, it is the choice whether or not to choose in terms of good and evil.”
...
How do people make decisions about the right thing to do if they are not embedded in a permanent moral order? They do whatever feels right to them at the moment. MacIntyre called this “emotivism,” the idea that “all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling.” Emotivism feels natural within capitalist societies, because capitalism is an economic system built around individual consumer preferences.

One of the problems with living in a society with no shared moral order is that we have no way to settle arguments. We have no objective standard by which to determine that one view is right and another view is wrong. So public arguments just go on indefinitely, at greater levels of indignation and polarization. People use self-righteous words to try to get their way, but instead of engaging in moral argument, what they’re really doing is using the language of morality to enforce their own preferences.

If no one can persuade anybody about right and wrong, then there are only two ways to settle our differences: coercion or manipulation.
...
Trump speaks the languages we moderns can understand. The language of preference: I want. The language of power: I have the leverage. The languages of self, of gain, of acquisition. He treats even the presidency itself as a piece of personal property he can use to get what he wants. As the political theorist Yuval Levin has observed, there are a lot of people, and Trump is one of them, who don’t seek to be formed by the institutions they enter. They seek instead to use those institutions as a stage to perform on, to display their wonderful selves.

-- David Brooks, 7/8/2025, the Atlantic.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/07/trump-administration-supporters-good/683441/

Works well with Turchin's metaphor of musical chairs in politics/power.

“Shakespeare surprised his audience with his version of the story in a way that we now cannot be surprised since we are so familiar with the tragic version. Later, in 1681, Nahum Tate rewrote the conclusion of King Lear, not only saving Cordelia’s life but also marrying her off to Edgar (who may not have been a prince but was certainly well born, unlike his wicked sibling). That version held the English stage for the next 160 years. Purists may object that this ruined the tragedy, but then Shakespeare could be said to have “ruined” Geoffrey of Monmouth’s King Leir when he decided to kill both Lear and Cordelia.”

--- Abbott, H. Porter. “The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (Cambridge Introductions to Literature).”

“..if change is inevitable, so too is recurrence. ”

--- Abbott, H. Porter. “The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (Cambridge Introductions to Literature).”

“The difference between events and their representation is the difference between story (the event or sequence of events) and narrative discourse (how the story is conveyed). The distinction is immensely important.

...when we read a narrative, we are aware of, on the one hand, the time of reading and the order in which things are read, and, on the other hand, the time the story events are supposed to take and the order in which they are supposed to occur.
...
We can squeeze a day’s worth of events into one sentence:

When I woke up, I packed two loaded guns and a ski mask, drove to the bank, robbed it, and was back in time for dinner.

Perhaps even more interestingly we can tell the same story backwards and still convey both the timing and the chronological sequence of events:

I was back in time for dinner, having robbed the bank to which I had driven with a ski mask and two loaded guns just after my nap.

We can also make many other changes in the narrative discourse and still deal with the same story. We can, for example, change the point of view (from first to third person) and expand the narrative discourse to dwell on a moment in the middle of this series of actions and still communicate with fidelity the same order of events:

He loved that old familiar, yet always strangely new, sensation of being someone else inside his ski mask, a pistol in each hand, watching the frightened teller count out a cool million. Nothing like it to wake a guy up. Nothing like it to give him a good appetite.

“The story can take a day, a minute, a lifetime, or eons. It can be true or false, historical or fictional. But insofar as it is a story, it has its own length of time and an order of events that proceeds chronologically from the earliest to the latest. The order of events and the length of time they are understood to take in the story are often quite different from the “time and order of events in the narrative discourse.”

...we take narrative to mean all modes of conveying stories.
...
So far we have established three distinctions: narrative is the representation of events, consisting of story and narrative discourse; story is an event or sequence of events (the action); and narrative discourse is those events as represented.

...storyworld should be considered a third defining feature of narrative along with story and narrative discourse.

Abbott, H. Porter. “The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (Cambridge Introductions to Literature).”

The princes of the Catholic Church listened intently as Pope Leo XIV laid out his priorities for the first time, revealing that he had chosen his papal name because of the tech revolution. As he explained, his namesake Leo XIII stood up for the rights of factory workers during the Gilded Age, when industrial robber barons presided over rapid change and extreme inequality.

“Today, the church offers its trove of social teaching to respond to another industrial revolution and to innovations in the field of artificial intelligence that pose challenges to human dignity, justice and labor,” Leo XIV told the College of Cardinals, who stood and cheered for their new pontiff and his unlikely cause.

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/pope-leo-ai-tech-771cca48

This is quite unexpected, although it seems quite logical in the context of Harari's Nexus

Meanwhile, the enrichment site at Fordow, which is buried deep under a mountain, has barely been touched. The enriched uranium at Fordow is believed to be enough to produce several bombs.
...
Israel lacks the deep penetrating bombs, and the heavy bombers to deliver them, that could do more damage to buried sites. The U.S. has both, and Israel would like U.S. help in taking out those nuclear sites.

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/the-fordow-imperative-for-trump-and-israel-nuclear-enrichment-site-iran-7981fbc0

Obviously, Israeli war planners had to know that before the operation; therefore, they had to count on Trump to approve the use of the bunker-busting bombs and B2 bombers. For some reason, he did not provide the approval.

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