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mountainrunner.us
Former Gov w BBG, finishing PhD @ King’s College London on US reax to Ru political warfare ‘45-‘65; gravel rider, trail runner, frmr IM junkie; in Boston 🇺🇸after 10yrs in 🇨🇭&🇬🇧. Sanctioned by Russia. Mountainrunner.substack.com
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Across East Central Europe, Russia "found many long-standing national disputes and a patchwork of conflicting national claims in being; it did not invent them… it has manipulated them ruthlessly to enhance its own monolithic control and to strengthen its chosen instrument of local rule.” — 1951

submitted 1 day ago • 1 comment

Laid-off IRS employee said he had voted for Trump: "I thought that someone with his business acumen would have come in with a fine-tooth comb and actually found it instead of coming in with a wrecking ball and destroying people’s lives for no reason." www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/local/p...

submitted 2 days ago • 2595 comments

DOGE cuts 9/11-related cancer research funding, which FDNY commissioner calls "a tragedy for all Americans." www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news...

submitted 2 days ago • 178 comments

This would be completely illegal. But you wouldn’t know that from reading this post, the headline, or the lede. Unbelievably bad.

submitted 2 days ago • 985 comments

As of noon on Thursday, Trump was president for 31 full days. He spent all or part of 16 of those days at four Trump Organization properties. from @pbump.com: www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...

submitted 2 days ago • 109 comments

Want to go visit the national parks this year? Sorry. The reservation system is shut down, EMT personnel are gone, so don't get hurt or lost. No one can clean the bathrooms or cabins, so they'll be closed. Rangers are fired. www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/arti...

submitted 5 days ago • 845 comments

Hey, sorry but no more Yosemite. It’s getting more efficient.

submitted 4 days ago • 76 comments

Who knows how much this will matter but this is one the most comical failures of researching your brief I’ve ever seen.

submitted 4 days ago • 52 comments

There is no fucking reason at all for Musk to have access to personal financial data.

submitted 5 days ago • 23 comments

Elon Musk's DOGE team of misfits have fired everybody at the Federal Aviation Administration ✈️ who is a probationary employee Thinking they have got rid of all the new hires It turns out many of these were experienced technicians, recently promoted and were on probation for their new senior role

submitted 6 days ago • 90 comments

No, they're perfectly fine with firing experienced technicians.

submitted 4 days ago • 0 comments

NEW non-clarifying clarifications about Elon Musk's employee status filed just now in a NM-led lawsuit: —Musk, as a presidential senior adviser, "has no actual or formal authority to make government decisions himself." He is also not DOGE's administrator. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

submitted 5 days ago • 48 comments

There’s gonna be so many variations on this theme over the next three years and eleven months. www.wsj.com/politics/pol...

submitted 5 days ago • 485 comments

In December, NYT revealed that Elon Musk and SpaceX were failing to meet govt reporting protocol designed to protect state secrets while they haul in billions in Pentagon contracts. This triggered three reviews, according to the NYT. One was from the Defense Department inspector general. 1/

submitted 14 days ago • 86 comments

I'm resharing this because I know many people don't understand why Voice of America (VOA) and its sister networks at the US Agency for Global Media exist.

submitted 18 days ago • 0 comments

If you take down a Confederate memorial that was literally dedicated to promote white supremacy, that’s “erasing history.” But if you hide pictures of accomplished women, that’s just fighting wokeness.

submitted 20 days ago • 82 comments

1950: "It is my own conviction that Americans too often give this ‘organizational problem’ a priority which it does not deserve. Americans are prone to believe that if they can find an apt name and draw up an imposing organizational chart, then matters will more or less take care of themselves."

submitted 23 days ago • 0 comments

Ukraine owl took out a drone? Nice. In 2007, Iran claimed to capture 14 "spy squirrels" with GPS units, cameras, and listening devices. In 2008, Iran claimed to apprehend "spy pigeons" near nuclear processing plants. Behold Project ACORN:

submitted 41 days ago • 0 comments

Happy New Year! My wife keeps saying, "I can't believe it's 2025," and I keep replying, "Just call it January." (Pic is from 2yrs ago today whilst we still lived in Switzerland. No, the winter wasn't very wintery.)

submitted 52 days ago • 0 comments

The strategic plan that never was... a proposed strategy for US international broadcasting from 2014 that didn't misspell the word tactics as s-t-r-a-t-e-g-y.

submitted 72 days ago • 0 comments

There are good reasons why the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, and the rest still operate. Can the whole thing be reorganized for the better, yes, but that's for another post.

submitted 72 days ago • 0 comments

That squirrel may be watching you.

submitted 463 days ago • 0 comments

There are too many anachronistic takes on information’s role in international affairs. This is my response to one of these.

submitted 481 days ago • 0 comments

Back from hiatus, sort of, some personal updates and comments on the nomination of Elliot Abrams to the US Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy.

submitted 534 days ago • 0 comments