The best and the worst

 Project Dynamo was founded by current and former military members to help Americans get out of Afghanistan after it fell to the Taliban.  Now one of its founders, Bryan Stern, is driving around Ukraine in a bus evacuating Americans and their Ukrainian spouses and families.  He has been shelled by the Russians and has seen their work.  "The Russian army is frustrated and they're shooting up ambulances and civilian cars, so a green [humanitarian] corridor sounds like a target opportunity."  Stern says it's worse than Afghanistan -- no opportunity to charter planes, and "as bad as the Taliban is, it's different.  There were no missiles coming."  A number of Ukrainian women are carrying surrogate fetuses for Americans, who are particularly frantic about their newborns.  Stern is trying to get the babies out as they are born.  Inevitably, there's an echo of World War II -- Project Dynamo is named for Operation Dynamo, better known as the Dunkirk evacuation of 1940.

For the sake of balance this war has churned up its own Child-Catcher.  Matt Shea, a former Washington state representative who was investigated for domestic terrorism, is in Poland with sixty Ukrainian children being very cagey about what he plans to do with/to them.  Shea told a Polish TV interviewer he works for a Texas outfit called Loving Families and Homes for Orphans, or Loving Homes and Families for Orphans, whatever.  It's not a registered Texas adoption agency but it registered a month ago as a Florida non-profit.  Why do I think those Loving Families are evangelical Christians?  And that this bunch knows what happened to the missing kids who were separated at the border on orders from Trump?  Maybe because Shea runs a church called On Fire Ministries and wants to create a fundamentalist state out of eastern Washington.  Child soldiers in Africa are bad enough without importing the practice to the Pacific northwest.

After President Zelensky finished speaking to a joint session of Congress, Empty Greene, possibly confusing it with a State of the Union address, decided rebuttal was in order.  If you like your Russian propaganda in a Georgia accent, you're in luck:  She covered everything from how the Obama administration set up the current Ukraine government to lies about Nancy Pelosi and Mitt Romney having "business interests" in Ukraine to "both sides" violating cease-fires.  She stopped just short of singing the Russian national anthem.  Someone should tell her Russia can no longer afford to finance Republican political campaigns.

I know New York is experiencing a crime epidemic but this is really low.  Someone stole 400 bulletproof vests meant for Ukraine from the headquarters of the Ukrainian Congress Committee on Second Avenue.  They were donated by the Suffolk County Sheriff's Department.  

Bryan Stern is not alone.  Ismail Hacioglu of the Sultan Suleiman Mosque in Mariupol has several busloads of Turkish citizens and non-Turks he is unable to move past Russian troops.  The Turkish foreign minister paid a visit to Sergei Lavrov in Moscow, who says it's the Ukrainians' fault.  So it goes.

Most American companies have left Russia but Guardian Industries, which employs several hundred people in glass-making, is staying put.  It's a subsidiary of Koch Industries, bankrolling fascism since 1940.  Why stop now?

All the Republican members of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce signed a letter to a number of environmental groups a week ago, demanding to know if they were funded by a Russian front called Sea Change "designed to undermine American energy production."  See?  Environmentalism is a Russian plot!  Shill, baby, shill.

I don't follow ballet closely but I imagine that Olga Smirnova, late of the Bolshoi, is the highest-profile Russian dance defector since Mikhail Baryshnikov in 1974.  "I never thought I would be ashamed of Russia," she wrote last week before leaving for Amsterdam.  Russia is hemorrhaging dancers to the benefit of western companies.  The Dutch National Ballet Academy has accepted a number of Ukrainian students and housed them with Dutch families.  

These and other emigrations are having a serious effect on the already fragile mentality of Vladimir Putin.  In a speech yesterday he called pro-western Russians "scum and traitors" who are betraying their country as it fights for its "sovereignty."  (I had to read that twice.)  The west is also trying to "cancel" Russian culture and replace it with "foie gras, oysters and so-called gender freedoms."  More fake populism from someone who built himself a dacha-state on the Black Sea.  But what about sabotage?  Under Stalin someone was always guilty of sabotage when the stores were empty or the harvest failed, or the Red Army got clobbered by the Poles or Finns.  Could that be what he means by the "fifth column" with their villas in Miami?  I thought those were his people.

In other news, Russia has blocked access to the BBC News website.  I remember when Germans could be arrested for listening to the BBC.  Damn!  Get out of my head, World War II!