Russian submariners and Pence’s plane
Are these two news stories related?:
Vladimir Putin today called an urgent meeting with defence chiefs hours after 14 sailors died in a mystery submarine blast…
It came as US Vice President Mike Pence was called back to Washington for an “undisclosed emergency”.
The announcements came at exactly the same time but it is not clear if the two are linked.
The White House and the Kremlin would not say the reason for the change of plans.
They may be linked, but I don’t think any of this will turn out to be of geopolitical importance, although of course the blast is of great importance to the Russian Navy and to the families of the sailors who lost their lives.
And the news was originally that Pence’s plane was turned back. That turns out to have been incorrect; a trip of Pence’s was canceled, but the report now is that the trip plans were changed before the plane ever took off.
But in this case I don’t think press incompetence was the cause of the error; Pence’s office gave out two conflicting messages, one from Randy Gentry, “a representative from Pence’s office,” and the correction from Alyssa Farah, Mike Pence’s spokeswoman.
I may not like that Russia is attempting to claim the Arctic Ocean, but I have great sorrow and sympathy for the Russian bubbleheads and their families.
It takes a special kind of courage to be a submariner. They encase themselves in a cramped shell from which there is usually no chance of survival if anything goes wrong. Death may come instantaneously by structural failure or slowly by asphyxiation in the cold and dark.
As it seems highly unlikely that we have suddenly blown up a Russian submarine, this juxtaposition is just The Sun (UK) blowing smoke, probably.
All sympathies to the families of the lost submarine crew.
Although it is always possible, of course, that the Russian ship violated US territorial waters, acted aggressively or refused to respond to communications, and was destroyed. That’s about the only set of circumstances I can imagine which would make Pence returning to the White House and the loss of the sub connected.
In his “Fifty-third Calypso,” Bokonon invites us to sing along with him:
Oh, a sleeping drunkard
Up in Central Park,
And a lion-hunter
In the jungle dark,
And a Chinese dentist,
And a British queen—
All fit together
In the same machine.
Nice, nice, very nice;
Nice, nice, very nice;
Nice, nice, very nice—
So many different people
In the same device.
— Vonnegut, Cats Cradle
“Eisenstein argued that the new meaning that emerged from conflict is the same phenomenon found in the course of historical events of social and revolutionary change. He used intellectual montage in his feature films (such as Battleship Potemkin and October) to portray the political situation surrounding the Bolshevik Revolution.
He also believed that intellectual montage expresses how everyday thought processes happen. In this sense, the montage will in fact form thoughts in the minds of the viewer, and is therefore a powerful tool for propaganda.
Intellectual montage follows in the tradition of the ideological Russian Proletcult Theatre which was a tool of political agitation. In his film Strike, Eisenstein includes a sequence with cross-cut editing between the slaughter of a bull and police attacking workers. He thereby creates a film metaphor: assaulted workers = slaughtered bull. The effect that he wished to produce was not simply to show images of people’s lives in the film but more importantly to shock the viewer into understanding the reality of their own lives. Therefore, there is a revolutionary thrust to this kind of film making.” or
Editing headlines to create an indisputable “2+2=5”
“Vladimir Putin today called an urgent meeting with defence chiefs hours after 14 sailors died in a mystery submarine blast…”
As tragic as that loss is for them and their families, Putin did NOT call an urgent meeting with his defense chiefs over the deaths of 14 sailors. Putin has to at least suspect that something much larger is at play for that kind of reaction.
Einstein still failed to solve Newton’s 3 body problem in calculus. It remains unsolved to this day.
Then his equations were problematic enough to require another patch, called dark matter/energy. Then the speed of light he also got wrong.
I haven’t seen a report that a sub was lost…….
According to Fox News, the sub caught fire while submerged. This is a sub which has been used for deep sea mapping, and it was way down. The vessel was saved by “self-sacrificing” actions of the fourteen crew who died; I presume that means they sealed the area around the fire at the cost of their own lives.
At the Instapundit, there’s the suggestion that the damaged sub may be a serious nuclear hazard. No one is talking. Or, aliens. ?