AE on Telly News (NEW CONCEPTS)

[Mick Harper]

And these 'reporters'! I keep expecting one of them to turn up with 'Press' in the hatband of their fedora rather than on their hi-vis flak jacket. For a start why are all Our Chief Correspondents in Lviv? What can you find out in Lviv that you can't find out better in London? You are supposed to be in harm's way, that's why you've got the flak jacket, not skulking in the furthest Ukrainian city from the action you can find. And then have the cheek to wear your flak jacket for pieces-to-camera.

And what are they reporting? Nothing. This is a war for chrissake. Yet we haven't had a frame of actual warfare. No, apparently it's a humanitarian crisis. Thanks very much but we get them every week. We are glued to Ukraine, The War Years not Ukraine, Land of a Million Refugees. But while we're on the subject, you tell us every ten minutes how frightful the Russians are, bombarding everything that doesn't move, hence the million (now millions) of refugees, so how come it's always the same bomb ravaged townscape? Pan camera. Oh look, it's bomb ravaged as far as the eye can see. Which is the next corner. Can't we have a butcher's round the corner. Just the once. Pretty please.

Stop the presses. The Russians have just targeted a children's hospital. No they didn't. It's collateral damage. And by the way, please don't start talking about combing the ruins for little kiddies buried with their teddy bears. It was patently obvious there wasn't a single casualty. Good grief, the whole of Ukraine after a fortnight of massive bombardment is reporting total casualties in three figures. Me, I'd take my statistical chances at home rather than queue up for days catching your death on an icy Polish border.
More later.

[Wile E. Coyote]

[Wile E. Coyote]

We have now had remarkably low casualties but two Russian Generals killed. That seems strange. Leading from the front eh?

[Wile E. Coyote]

The Russian POWs are apparently bemused.

[Wile E. Coyote]

The Ukrainians were not expecting an invasion of Kiev, at worst a limited incursion. In fact the Ukrainians prior to the invasion were warning that Biden was causing unnecessary panic by predicting an invasion.

[Wile E. Coyote]

The Dumas had sanctioned recognition of two territories.....

[Mick Harper]

[Mick Harper]

The optics are rarely good. It is very difficult reporting on 'Russians closing down refugee corridors' from the roadside with family saloons zipping past in fair numbers and in both directions. 'War-torn Ukraine' is difficult to sustain against a backdrop of the citizenry going about their lawful occasions. Yes, there are always carefully placed ruined houses as a backdrop, but looking for all the world like Middlesborough. It's no use asking fat babushkas about Ukraine running out of provisions. I was half expecting, after a catalogue of complaints, to hear. "Really? There's a war going on as well?"

The nadir was reached on Newsnight when the reporter at, I think, Kiev's main station said, "Imagine this is King's Cross in London" when I had been thinking just seconds before, "Strewth, it looks just like King's Cross."

[Wile E. Coyote]

[Mick Harper]

Soldiers don't frag generals, people might notice.

We are of course in the AE realm of 'the tyranny of large (or small) numbers'. I had just posted up on medium.com that the Russians couldn't be guilty of too much by way of war crimes when the Ukrainians were reporting total civilian casualties in the hundreds. Only to turn on the box to hear that in Mariupol the civilian dead were in 'the thousands'.

Cue footage of people burying body bags. "They are coming so fast ordinary townsfolk have had to take on the work themselves." Cue interview with big gormless bloke saying a plague on both their houses or words to that effect. Embedded Russian spetsnaz by the sound of it. There are a lot of them about. Those that aren't earning pin money working as grave diggers. Or pretending to.

[Wile E. Coyote]

They have just lost another General. For frag sake what is going on. Last time it was this bad for "General losses' Stalin was in charge.

[Wile E. Coyote]

They have now lost three times as many Generals as they have gained cities. Reports that Putin has purged 8 more Generals and additional intelligence officers.(They were not welcomed with girls waving flowers but crones with curses?). Of course this could be Ukrainian propaganda, but it is not good news for Russia that they are now shifting in soldiers from Syria. Almost certainly Ukrainians are now receiving Western weapons en masse, so taking Kiev is going to be additionally difficult. The more the Russians pause/stall, the more the likelihood of a long insurgency increases.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/world/uk-news/2022/03/11/russian-general-killed-and-clutch-of-spy-chiefs-arrested/

[Mick Harper]

In light of my worry that Putin would make hay with Ukraine's International Brigade, just imagine the steam coming out of the Kremlin if Ukraine started recruiting Muslims from Syria. Or, as featured on Newsnight, some bleck Efricans saying how glad they are to be able to reciprocate Russian help with, um, peace-keeping in the Sahel. Thank God my own days as a soldier of fortune are well over. I'd be spoilt for choice.

Mind you, being a bounty hunter for the International Court of Human Rights is no sinecure either. I fell for the old, "This is the big one, Mick, and you're the only one who's got a prayer getting into Moscow and getting him out. Just one more field job and you can put your feet up in the Hague." What choice did I have? Have you been to the Hague?

[Mick Harper]

Power Play Talking Pictures

Watching this, to me, quite unknown but starring all the right sort -- Peter O'Toole, Donald Pleasance, David Hemmings -- 1978 film, I was reminded that no matter how bad things are, doing anything revolutionary about it is always worse. You either get arrested during the planning of the revolution, dying in the carrying out of it, or shot by the Big Shot after it (whether it is successful or not). So why do people do it?

Given the above, it must be because they're fruitcakes of one sort or another. That is vital to the understanding of revolutionaries. The people who are in favour but do nothing much about it, on the other hand, are always sensible people though normally a bit limited intellectually, i.e. everyone.

[Wile E. Coyote]

I haven't seen the film or read the Coup D'Etat book, but in general terms you have the conflicted, vulnerable, mortal man of action and sitting above the amoral analyst strategist gods. In Wile's opinion, the story function is always not a don't try this it will fail.... but an educational fictional "how not to guide" so the man of action can then actually suceed.